James Cone
God is Black — theology done from the underside of American racial history
"Black Theology and Black Power" (1969), written in the months after Martin Luther King's assassination and at the height of the Black Power movement, founded Black Liberation Theology: God is identified with Black people's struggle for liberation, and any theology that does not begin from that identification is captive to white supremacy. "A Black Theology of Liberation" (1970) and "God of the Oppressed" (1975) systematize the program; "The Cross and the Lynching Tree" (2011) is the late masterpiece reading Calvary through the iconography of American racial terror. Cone taught at Union Theological Seminary for fifty years.
Key works
- Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
- A Black Theology of Liberation (1970)
- God of the Oppressed (1975)
- Martin & Malcolm & America (1991)
- The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011)
- Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody (2018)
Declared Influences
Liberation Theology 35%
Reformed / Calvinist Theology 15%
Evangelical Protestantism 15%
Dialectical Materialism 15%
Christian Existentialism 10%
Cone is the founder of Black Liberation Theology, the African American counterpart to Latin American liberation theology.
"Christian theology is a theology of liberation." (A Black Theology of Liberation)
Cone's graduate training was Barthian (Northwestern, dissertation on Barth's anthropology); the doctrine of revelation as God's self-disclosure is unmistakably Reformed.
"Revelation is God making himself known to humankind in events of liberation." (God of the Oppressed)
Cone was raised in AME (African Methodist Episcopal) churches in Arkansas; the African American Protestant tradition of preaching, song, and conversion is the bedrock.
"The Black Church in slavery preserved a religion of liberation despite the masters' theology." (God of the Oppressed)
Cone's social analysis is Marxist-inflected: theology must be read as the product of social location, and the underside of history is the privileged site.
"The Christian must work for socialism." (A Black Theology of Liberation)
Cone's account of the existential moment of Black self-definition draws on Tillich and Niebuhr while displacing them.
"The task of Black theology is to analyze the nature of the Christian faith in such a way that its message will be commensurate with the achievement of Black humanity." (Black Theology and Black Power)
Internal Tensions
Cone's early identification of God with Blackness was attacked as racial reverse-theology by white critics and as too narrow by some womanist successors (Delores Williams, Katie Cannon) who pressed him to include Black women's experience more centrally. Cone publicly accepted the womanist correction. The relationship to King's nonviolent Personalism and Malcolm's Black nationalism was the unsettled tension Cone returned to throughout his career.
I. Time
Historical time read from the underside; God acts liberatively in the events of Black resistance.
Attributes
II. Space
Standard substantival; the segregated landscape of American racial geography is the site of God's action.
Attributes
III. Matter
Standard substantival matter; the lynched body and the gathered congregation are the theological loci.
Attributes
IV. Observer
Plural observers; Black self-definition over against white categorization. Personal-divine cosmic agency: the God of the exodus and the cross.
Attributes
V. Energy
Standard physics.
Attributes
VI. Information
Personal soul conserved; the cloud of witnesses includes the lynched and unnamed dead.
Attributes
Classified works
Works in the atlas that James Cone authored or that draw on this persona's writings, with full attribute fingerprints of their own.
Computed school proximity
The persona's attribute fingerprint scored against all 195 schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated influences above.
Philosophical neighbors
Other personas whose attribute fingerprint sits closest to James Cone's — intellectual neighbors across traditions and eras.
How James Cone resolves each dilemma
57 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 2 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas, all mainstream
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 2 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.
35 mainstream positions
Information · 4 dilemmas, all mainstream
Films Referencing This Persona (7)
Either directly referenced in the film, or reading the film through one of this persona's top schools.
Experiments Engaging This Persona's Schools
Surface via influence-schools that respond to the experiment. Each entry shows the school through which the connection runs.