Position · 1969

Black Theology

A theology that interprets the gospel from the experience of Black people under racism, holding that God is revealed as siding with the oppressed in their struggle for freedom.

History

Roots

Black theology as an academic field dates from 1969, but its material is much older. Enslaved Africans in America heard a gospel preached to make them obedient and found in it something else: a God who brought Israel out of Egypt and a Jesus who suffered as they did. The spirituals, the “invisible institution” of slave worship held out of the master’s sight, and the independent Black denominations (the African Methodist Episcopal Church from 1816) all carried the conviction that God did not bless slavery. Preachers such as Henry Highland Garnet and Henry McNeal Turner, whose 1898 editorial was titled “God Is a Negro” (National Humanities Center), spoke of a God who took the side of Black people. Gayraud Wilmore traced this line in Black Religion and Black Radicalism (1972, Archive.org), arguing that Black Christianity had always held a radical, liberating strand alongside its accommodating one.

Causes

The immediate cause was the split in the freedom movement in the mid-1960s. In June 1966 Stokely Carmichael’s call for “Black Power” alarmed white liberals and many Black church leaders, who heard it as a rejection of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and integration. On 31 July 1966 a group of Black clergy calling itself the National Committee of Negro Churchmen bought a full page in the New York Times to defend the term (scan of the advertisement, Episcopal Church Archives). Its address to white churchmen argued that love and power are not opposites and called the view that they are “sheer hypocrisy or … a blind and dangerous illusion” (excerpt, PBS, secondary). Signatories later described it as one of the founding documents of Black liberation theology (NPR interview with W. Sterling Cary, 2008).

The urban uprisings of 1967, Albert Cleage’s The Black Messiah (1968, Archive.org) and the assassination of King in April 1968 pushed the question further: was Christianity a white religion, or could it speak to Black Power? James Cone, a young theologian with a doctorate on Karl Barth, answered in Black Theology and Black Power (1969, Archive.org; Orbis 50th anniversary edition). Black Power, he argued, was “Christ’s central message to twentieth-century America” (Encyclopedia.com, secondary), and a church that opposed it opposed Christ. A Black Theology of Liberation (1970, Archive.org) turned that thesis into a systematic theology. In between, in June 1969, the National Conference of Black Churchmen (the 1966 committee under a new name) issued a statement defining Black theology as a theology of Black liberation, and in May 1969 James Forman’s Black Manifesto (secondary) demanded reparations from white churches and synagogues.

Influence

Cone joined Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1970 and taught there until his death in 2018. Black theology became a recognized field, with a society, journals and doctoral programs. It ran in parallel with Liberation Theology in Latin America, which Gustavo Gutiérrez set out in 1971; when the two met, at the “Theology in the Americas” conference in Detroit in 1975, each charged the other with a blind spot, race on one side and class on the other.

It travelled to South Africa, where Basil Moore’s collection The Challenge of Black Theology in South Africa (1973, Archive.org) joined it to Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement, and Allan Boesak’s Farewell to Innocence (1976, Archive.org) applied it to apartheid. That current fed the Kairos Document (1985, secondary), which condemned the “state theology” that defended apartheid. In the United States it gave rise to womanist theology and shaped preaching in some Black congregations, most visibly Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which made it a national news story in 2008.

Key ideas and contributors

Theology begins from the oppressed. Cone argued that there is no neutral theology. Every theology speaks from a social place, and white theology had spoken from the place of power while calling itself universal. Christian theology must therefore start from the experience of those who suffer, and in America that meant Black experience.

God sides with the oppressed. The God of the Bible acts to free slaves (Exodus 3:7–8), speaks through prophets who demand justice (Amos 5:24), and comes in Jesus to “proclaim liberty to the captives” (Luke 4:18–19). Cone read this as God taking sides, not standing above the conflict. God of the Oppressed (1975, Archive.org) defended the claim at length and grounded it in the Black church’s songs and sermons as well as Scripture.

God is Black, and Christ is Black. Cone’s most quoted claim was that God is Black. He meant it chiefly as a theological symbol: God identifies so fully with the oppressed that in a racist society God takes the condition of the despised. “Whiteness” likewise named a structure of oppression more than a skin color. Cleage went further, teaching that Jesus was literally a Black revolutionary leading a Black nation, and founded the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit on that basis.

Salvation includes liberation. Black theology did not deny forgiveness of sin, but it held that salvation must include freedom from the social and political powers that crush people. A gospel that saved souls while leaving slavery or segregation in place was, in Cone’s judgment, a distortion. See Salvation and Liberation and Justice.

The cross and the lynching tree. In his last major book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011, Archive.org), Cone argued that the cross was a Roman lynching and that American Christians who venerated it while ignoring or taking part in lynching had failed to see what it meant. He made the case on television in a 2007 interview with Bill Moyers.

Other contributors: J. Deotis Roberts, whose Liberation and Reconciliation (1971, Archive.org) argued that liberation must lead to reconciliation between Black and white; Wilmore, who supplied the historical grounding; and Cone’s brother Cecil Cone, author of The Identity Crisis in Black Theology (1975).

Key controversies

Is God really on our side? William R. Jones put the hardest question in Is God a White Racist? (1973, Archive.org). If God sides with Black people, where is the evidence in centuries of uneven suffering? Without an exodus event in Black history, the claim of divine solidarity rests on faith alone, and a God who allows such suffering could just as well be indifferent or hostile. Jones proposed a humanist alternative that stressed human responsibility. Black theologians answered with the cross and with eschatological hope, but Jones’s challenge is still treated as unanswered by some.

Too Western, or not Black enough? Charles Long and Cecil Cone charged that James Cone had poured Black experience into a framework borrowed from Barth and white Protestant theology. Cecil Cone argued that the true source should be the Black religious tradition itself, especially its sense of an Almighty Sovereign God, not Black Power. Cone later conceded part of this and drew more heavily on spirituals, blues and slave narratives.

Liberation or reconciliation? Roberts accepted liberation as the first word but insisted on reconciliation as the goal, and worried that Cone’s language left no room for it. Cone replied that reconciliation offered before justice simply protects the oppressor. The same dispute recurs in the gap between King’s integrationism and the Black Power current.

Women’s experience. Black women theologians argued that Black theology spoke for Black men and treated sexism as secondary. Jacquelyn Grant’s White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus (1989, Archive.org) criticized both white feminism and male Black theology. Delores Williams’s Sisters in the Wilderness (1993, Archive.org) went further. She took Hagar, not the Exodus, as her model, noted that God in the Bible does not always liberate, and questioned atonement theories that make surrogate suffering redemptive, a challenge that reaches Atonement and Penal Substitution. Cone acknowledged the criticism and revised his language in later editions. The movement Alice Walker named “womanist” in 1983 became a field of its own (overview, secondary).

Race as essence. Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness (1995, Archive.org) argued that Black theology fixed Black identity around suffering and resistance, leaving little room for the variety of Black lives. A later generation, including J. Kameron Carter and Willie James Jennings, shifted the question from Black experience to how whiteness itself shaped Christian thought.

Evangelical and conservative criticism. Conservative critics, many of them Black, raised three objections. They argued that the Bible’s central problem is sin against God, not oppression, and that reading Scripture through a racial lens subordinates it to experience (see Scripture and Inerrancy). They objected that dividing humanity into oppressors and oppressed cuts against the unity of the church in Christ (Galatians 3:28). They also charged that the movement’s anger at “whiteness” sometimes became plain hostility. Anthony Bradley’s Liberating Black Theology (Crossway, 2010) made the case that Cone’s framework trapped Black Christians in a “victimology.”

The 2008 controversy. When video clips of sermons by Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Barack Obama’s church, circulated in the 2008 presidential campaign, commentators traced his views to Black liberation theology and the term entered national politics (summary, secondary). Defenders said the clips stripped Wright’s prophetic critique of its context (NPR, 2008); critics saw them as proof that the theology bred resentment of America.

What remains unresolved

Most Christians now accept the core claim that the Bible shows God’s concern for the poor and oppressed, and that American churches long blessed slavery and segregation. The live disagreement is about how far that concern should govern theology. For Black theologians, it is the center: the gospel is liberation or it is not the gospel. For critics, it is one true theme that becomes distorted when it is made the lens for everything. Whether Black theology describes an experience every Christian must learn from, or only one community’s reading of the faith, is still argued.