What I learned as a student of James Cone's
Cone was a profoundly biblical thinker. His Christology captured my imagination.
I would surely not be the first to come to mind when thinking of theologians who have been deeply influenced by the late James Cone. But I was his teaching assistant at Union Theological Seminary in the late 1970s, and he served on my dissertation committee. There was thus a time when I was very much in his camp. Even though we parted ways after he pronounced “shock” upon reading my doctoral dissertation—more on this later—I was deeply stamped by my relationship to him.
One of the main things I learned from Cone is that I am not a “white” theologian. As Matthew Burdette has explained in a blog post:
Whiteness, Cone observed, is the social attempt to escape human particularity, to be the universal people in general of a god in general, freed of the burden of being this or that particular people, and oppressing those particular people in the process. The inferior others are particular, colored; but white people? To be white is just to be a stock human, the default model. And when this belief meets Christianity, what we end up with is a white Jesus: a spiritualized Christ whose particular humanity is of no real value, a Christ who only seems to have the particular flesh of a first-century Jew but is in fact just the revelation of the same old god in general of no people in particular. In other words, a Docetic Christ, a god who only seemed to take on flesh.
