God Takes the Side of the Poor. Never Forget That!
God Takes the Side of the Poor. Never Forget That!
Thoughts on the life and message of Black liberation theologian James Cone (1938-2018)
James Cone lived the intense racial segregation of 1940s and 50s America. What he witnessed stirred within him ‘a radical Spiritual conversion’ in 1969. Christianity was seen as the white person’s religion. But he wanted to shout out ‘No! The Christian Gospel is not the white person's religion. It is a religion of liberation…God created all people to be free.’ Cone realised that for Black people to be free, they must first love their blackness.
His Book, Black History and Black Power (1969) was a direct challenge to what he saw as a White Theological paradigm. From Cone’s point of view ‘God’s radical identification with Black people in the USA, is the same with the oppressed and vulnerable in any Society’ including here in the United Kingdom today.
At New York’s Union Theological Seminary (UTS) he taught for 50 years. Cone’s Black Liberation Theology ignited conversations across Theological and Cultural boundaries.
He drew inspiration from Rev. Martin Luther King Jnr and Malcolm X.: ‘King gave Black Theology a Christian identity; Malcolm X gave Black Theology its Black identity….Black Theology is Black Identity; it is an understanding of the Gospel which sees justice for the poor at the very heart of what being a Christian is all about and the very heart of what God is doing in this world.’ Black Americans were not made for exploitation or slavery but rather ‘for freedom that all followers of Christ should strive toward’.
According to UTS President Serene Jones, Cone’s lectures were challenging. Students routinely walked out of his class: ‘in tears…inspired…troubled’ but always ‘deeply touched by his kindness and fierceness’.
UTS Professor Claudio Carvalhaes regards Cone as ‘the most important theologian in the history of the United States’ who reminds us constantly not to forget the poor. God takes sides and God is always with the poor and the weak in society. As he puts it: ‘for Theology to be worthy of its existence…to be actually theology, it has to speak with…the poor, those economically and racially marginalised in society.’
Cone in the USA, Alves from Brazil (A Theology of Human Hope published 1969) and Gutierrez from Peru (Towards a Theology of Liberation 1977) bore witness to the oppression of peoples. From their experiences of systematic suffering these ‘fathers’ of Liberation Theology shook-up the world of theology.
All three wrote from dangerous terrain. Cone within the context of the systemic and civil structures of racism, grounded in slavery, segregation and the destitution of Black people in the USA. He forged his way literally out of no way, up against the mainstream of a vicious white supremacy that could never consider a Black person a fully-fledged theologian.
He crafted the Good News from elements in Black culture – whether Black Panthers, Black Power, the Spirituals or the Blues – and found his own voice, ‘to speak on behalf of voiceless Black masses in the name of Jesus, whose Gospel…had been greatly distorted by the preaching theology of the white churches.’ This, from his memoir, Said I wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian published posthumously. Leaving the final words to Rev Dr James Cone, theologian and proclaimer of liberation: ‘I couldn’t keep It to myself, what The Lord has done for me.’