Victor Anderson's Beyond Ontological Blackness and James Cone's Black Theology: A Discussion

Abstract

Thirty-seven years have passed since the publication of James Cone's Black Theology and Black Power in 1969, but it wasn't until 1998 that Cone received one of his strongest challenges from a fellow African American religious thinker: Victor Anderson and his book Beyond Ontological Blackness. This essay explores the contours of both Cone's theology and Anderson's critique and, in its latter half, discusses different strategies a Cone proponent might employ to respond to Anderson. The author argues that the best rejoinder to Anderson would be to develop a strategic, eschatological essentialist notion of blackness, drawing on the "parabolic" notion of blackness Cone advanced in his earlier works, rather than one fueled by a "hermeneutics of return."