Black Liberation Theology and the Lynching of Jesus

Abstract

It took james h. cone four weeks to write his first book, Black Theology and Black Power, a work surging with revolutionary expectation. It took him six years to write his latest work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, a book of haunting sorrow and beauty.Staring at the pictures of tortured black victims was too much to bear on a weekly basis. Writing about them was slow and tortuous. On numerous occasions he had to push the manuscript away. I learned to stop asking him if he was making progress on the book; he could tell me only so many times that he was proceeding “like a turtle.” But it helped that Cone is a Christian theologian who had never quite gotten clear on what he wanted to say about the cross of Jesus. The cross helped him grapple with the lynching tree, and the lynching tree helped him grapple with the cross.Cone’s joyful ebullience, playfulness, and tender heart don’t often register on his written pages the way they do in person. But joyfulness distinctly pokes through in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, despite the book’s gut-wrenching subject matter. This book is a magnificent capstone to Cone’s forty-three years of theological leadership. It teaches that the lynching tree is a metaphor for the crucifixion of black American Christ figures. And it points the way to the redeeming presence of God and to Martin Luther King Jr.’s hopes for a beloved community.The Cross and the Lynching Tree builds on decades of Black Power theology. To appreciate the significance of this latest book, it’s helpful to look back through the years of its author’s powerful contributions. In 1967 Cone was a young theologian at Adrian College, ninety minutes from Detroit, when Detroit and Newark erupted in summer riots. Cone had spent the climactic years of the Civil Rights Movement in a seminary library, earning a doctorate. He lamented that his teachers fixated on European theologians, but he wanted the degree and an academic career, so he mimicked his teachers, writing a dissertation on Karl Barth’s theological anthropology. Then he taught theology at two colleges, feeling increasingly alienated from his field, while the Black Power movement arose. Cone prized the writings of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), which blazed with anti-racist rebellion, but he was stuck with white theologians who epitomized the culture of whiteness and who rarely uttered more than a few words against racial prejudice.Cone decided that he was in the wrong field. He could not spend his life teaching theologies that dismissed slavery and white supremacism as topics not germane to theology. But then Detroit and Newark exploded, and Cone decided that he lacked time for the doctorate in black literature that he had been considering. He would have to make do with the education that he possessed, to say something on behalf of the struggle of oppressed American blacks for freedom.Cone found his voice upon hearing white theologians and pastors admonish blacks to follow Jesus instead of resorting to violence. He later recalled: “I was so furious that I could hardly contain my rage. The very sight of white people made me want to vomit. ‘Who are they,’ I said, ‘to tell us blacks about Christian ethics?’ ” How did whites muster the gall to lecture oppressed blacks about love and nonviolence? How could whites be so surprised by the anger of American blacks? “My rage was intensified because most whites seemed not to recognize the contradictions that were so obvious to black people,” he added.That was the wellspring of emotion and conviction that produced Cone’s electrifying first book, Black Theology and Black Power, which was published a year after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and three months before Cone moved to Union Theological Seminary, in 1969. He later recalled, “I had so much anger pent up in me I had to let it out or be destroyed by it.” King’s murder was merely the last straw after the killing of Malcolm X and many Black Power militants.In Cone’s telling, his anger stretched back to the slave ships and the auction block, but more pressing were his personal encounters with race hatred in Arkansas, Illinois, and Michigan. He vowed to make no compromise with the evils of white racists: “Racism is a deadly disease that must be resisted by any means necessary. Never again would I ever expect white racists to do right in relation to the black community.”Black Power theology was an announcement that self-respecting blacks would no longer depend on the good will of white liberals. Malcolm X’s phrase “by any means necessary” was fundamental to Cone’s project: “Complete emancipation of black people from white oppression by whatever means black people deem necessary.” Black Power, Cone explained, used boycotts when necessary, demonstrations when necessary, and violence when necessary. Cone lumped white liberals “in the same category with the George Wallaces,” which made them howl with wounded moral pride. Cone told liberals to deal with it. All white Americans were responsible for the oppression of black Americans, and the last thing that black people needed was to be assimilated into white culture.Cone stressed that Black Power theology was against integration — especially the humiliating assumption that white institutions were superior. White liberals, to the extent that they acknowledged white racism, sought to cure their culture of it by integrating blacks into it. They claimed to believe that race should not matter; the Christian liberals added that Jesus was above race. Cone replied that race mattered everywhere in real-world America, assimilation was deadly for blacks, and thus, in the American context, Christ was black. The humiliating phase of linking arms with white liberals was over. The black struggle for liberation would get nowhere if blacks got tied up with the anxieties and superiority complexes of white liberals.Cone acknowledged that there was a place in the justice struggle for white radicals — the John Browns who burned with hatred of white racism. They didn’t get in the way of black liberation or presume to tell black radicals what to do, and they risked their lives for freedom. But a theology of Black Power had to repudiate the white liberal quest of innocence and its bogus solidarity with black freedom.Cone’s first book contained the liberationist principle of responding to a world that defined the oppressed as nonpersons. However, neither personhood nor the word liberation was a key concept for him as yet. Then he wrote his epochal work, A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), which launched the North American liberation theology movement. At the time Cone was unaware of similar stirrings in Latin America and South Africa, but he defined “blackness” as a symbol of oppression extending beyond the North American context. The object of black theology, he declared, was “liberation from whiteness.” Black theology was “theology of and for the black community, seeking to interpret the religious dimensions of the forces of liberation in that community.”Cone stressed that whites were “in no position whatever” to make judgments about the truth claims or legitimacy of black theology. The point of black theology was to “analyze the satanic nature of whiteness” and to offer a liberating alternative to it. No white theologian had ever taken white America’s oppression of blacks as a point of departure for theology. Even white theologians who wrote about racial injustice failed to attack white racism in its totality. Thus, white theology was not Christian theology at all, but its enemy.Black theology did not claim a universal starting point or aim. In Cone’s rendering, Black theology was intrinsically communal, refusing to be separated from the black community of faith; it identified liberating activity with divine action; and it rejected abstract principles of right and wrong, operating by a single, partial, and contextual principle: liberation. The test of truth in black theology was whether a statement or action served the end of black liberation.In a paradigmatic liberationist move, Cone lifted up the scriptural themes of exodus from slavery and liberation from oppression, stressing that God is a partisan, liberating power. The God of the Bible calls blacks to liberation, not redemptive suffering: “Blacks are not elected to be Yahweh’s suffering people. Rather, we are elected because we are oppressed against our will and God’s, and God has decided to make our liberation God’s own undertaking.” God is black because liberation is the very essence of the divine nature.This liberationist starting point distinguished Cone from his teachers and the field of theology. He put it sharply: “White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God, because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very essence of divinity.” For blacks, evil was anything that arrested or negated liberation; salvation was liberation. For whites, evil was normal life, benefiting from the privileges of whiteness; salvation was the abolition of whiteness. White theologians, preferring their privileges, pleaded that color should not matter. Cone replied, “This only reveals how deeply racism is embedded in the thought forms of their culture.”Many reviewers complained that Cone’s books were emotional, intellectually thin, obsessed with race, infatuated with violence, and dependent on the accusative mode. Often they claimed that Cone’s appeal to epistemic privilege made him impervious to criticism or falsification. But liberation theology was too profound in its critique and constructive import to be blown away by ridicule. Why did racial justice disappear from the agenda of white American theology after slavery was abolished? How was one to account for the stupendous silence of white American theologians through decades of segregation and racist lynching? If liberal theology flowed out of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment rationalized racism and the slave trade throughout the eighteenth century, what did that say about liberal theology? What would it mean if theology interpreted history from the standpoints of oppressed and excluded peoples?Cone was the apostle of the revolutionary turn in American theology that privileged liberationist questions. Black theology, in his rendering, was about liberating oppressed people from dependency and oppression by privileging their struggles, contexts, and spiritual experiences. It found in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures a radical witness to a partisan, black, liberating God of the oppressed.All of Cone’s authored works since 1970 — The Spirituals and the Blues (1972), God of the Oppressed (1975), My Soul Looks Back (1982), For My People (1984), Speaking the Truth (1986), Martin & Malcolm & America (1991), and Risks of Faith (1999) — explored the liberationist departure in Christian theology. Always he pressed hard on one question, which led to a second: (1) How was it possible for a religion based on the witness of Jesus and the prophets to be so deeply implicated in the oppression of black people? and (2) How could theologians not regard this as a central issue for theology?In recent years he has pleaded with black theologians not to exaggerate their fluid postmodern identities in a supposedly post-racial society. In 1998 he told a gathering of black theologians: “We have opposed racism much too gently. We have permitted white theological silence in exchange for the rewards of being accepted by the white theological establishment. This is a terrible price to pay for the few crumbs that drop from the white master’s table.”Yet for all of Cone’s insistence on confronting painful truths and evils, he had some major unfinished business to confront after forty years of writing black liberation theology. He had repressed the terror of lynching that he felt as a child, the importance of lynching for his own subject, and the meaning of the lynching tree for his theology of the cross.Growing up in Bearden, Arkansas, where he attended Macedonia A.M.E. Church, Cone heard a great deal about the cross of Jesus. There were more hymns, gospel songs, spirituals, prayers, testimonies, and sermons about the cross than about anything else. They conveyed that Jesus was a friend of oppressed people and knew about their suffering. Jesus achieved salvation for “the least of these” through his solidarity with them, even unto death. Black Christians, like Jesus, did not deserve to suffer. But keeping faith in Jesus was the one thing blacks possessed that white people could not control or take from them. For black Christians, Cone stresses, merely knowing that Jesus suffered as they did gave them faith that God was with them, even if they ended up, like Jesus, tortured to death on a tree: “The more black people struggled against white supremacy, the more they found in the cross the spiritual power to resist the violence they so often suffered.”The crucifixion of Jesus placed God among a persecuted, beaten, tortured, and crucified people. White communities lynched blacks in nearly every state of the United States. Cone notes that lynching was a media spectacle in the 1890s and the early twentieth century, as prominent newspapers announced the place, date, and time of the next festivity. Lynching was “a ritual celebration of white supremacy,” suitable for family gatherings, attracting up to 20,000 celebrants. American blacks, like Jesus, were stripped, paraded, mocked, whipped, spat upon, and “tortured for hours in the presence of jeering crowds for popular entertainment.” Revelers posed for pictures with the burned and dismembered black victims — pictures that were then turned into postcards that hawkers sold to members of the crowd.Just as Jesus was a victim of mob hysteria and imperial violence, American blacks were victims of mob hysteria and white supremacy. Cone stresses that the cross and the lynching tree struck terror in the heart of the subject community. Terrorism was the point in both cases — terrorizing to enforce obedience and conformity.Cone acknowledges that it took him many years to appreciate Martin Luther King’s theology of redemptive suffering, partly because he loathed the common misunderstandings of it. King’s idea of redemptive suffering had nothing to do with legitimizing suffering or sanctifying it. King tried to end racist harm in the United States, and he sacrificed his life so that others would not suffer.Many womanist and feminist theologians have dissented on this subject. Womanist theologians Delores Williams and Emilie Townes, and feminist theologians Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, have sharply criticized the emphasis on the suffering of Jesus in most forms of Western and Eastern Christianity. This is not merely a protest against the ransom theory (which makes Satan the problem) or the various satisfaction theories (in which Jesus rescued sinners from a wrathful God by suffering in their place). The womanist and feminist critiques focus much of their critical fire on moral influence theory, in which Jesus offered an exemplary religious ideal through his willingness to die for others. Moral influence theory pervades a great deal of liberal theology: it plays a role in Eastern Orthodox theologies of deification and it is also featured in traditional black church preaching.Some womanist and feminist theologians reject all atonement theorizing and all theologies that emphasize the cross of Jesus. Some reject atonement theory but not an emphasis on the cross. Others contend for a form of atonement theory that adjudicates womanist and feminist criticism. For all theologians in the first camp, and most in the others, atonement theology as a whole is problematic for perpetuating patriarchy, magical thinking, a vengeful deity, and/or an ethic of martyrdom. If Jesus exemplifies a religious ideal by suffering for others, the gospel becomes a message of self-sacrifice and moral perfectionism. To the extent that this message retains any concept of a substitutionary or surrogate sacrifice, the problem worsens.Cone summarizes this topic very briefly, taking no interest in interrogating or interpreting the various doctrines of atonement. Atonement theory and liberation theology are incom patible, he judges; thus, it is pointless to belabor the finer points of atonement theology. All atonement doctrines turn the gospel of Jesus into a rational concept that is explained by a theory of salvation. Even moral influence theory perpetuates the logic of surrogacy, at least implicitly. Cone allows that too much black church preaching has taken this tack.But black Christians were not wrong to fixate on the cross of Jesus, he argues. Having struggled with this issue for many years, Cone sides with womanist theologians Shawn Copeland and JoAnne Terrell, who insist that the cross is central to the gospel faith and Christian community, especially African American Christianity. Copeland admonishes that the spirituals did not emphasize the cross because American blacks were masochists who enjoyed suffering. They sang of Jesus because he endured what they suffered. The cross enthroned “the One who went all the way with them and for them.”Cone puts it equally vividly: “The cross is the burden we must bear in order to attain freedom. . . . One has to have a powerful religious imagination to see redemption in the cross, to discover life in death and hope in tragedy.”Billie Holiday’s sublime and horrific song “Strange Fruit” conveyed what white ministers should have said — that the lynching tree was the cross in the United States of America. But only a handful said anything like that in public space — notably Quincy Ewing (an Episcopal priest) and E. T. Wellford (author of The Lynching of Jesus). Moreover, Cone observes, secular black writers like Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes were stronger critics of lynching than were black theologians, who rarely discussed it.For U.S. Americans, Cone rightly argues, to speak of the cross without relating it to the lynching tree is evasive and unreal. It is to reduce the cross to an abstract sentiment, a contemplative piety. But the lynching tree without the cross is “simply an abomination.” The lynching tree without the cross has nothing to do with redemption, nor with anything not repugnant. Only those who stand in solidarity with the oppressed can embrace the cross of Jesus. God’s loving solidarity, Cone urges, can transform even the hideous ugliness of imperial crucifixion and American lynching into occasions of beauty — “into God’s liberating presence.”