Cone and Barth on Divine Blackness, Part II

Why Doesn’t Barth See the Problem?

From left to right: portrait of James Cone (Filip Wolak / Union Theological Seminary), icon of the Black Christ (Mark Doox), and portrait of Karl Barth (Karl Barth-Archiv, Basel, Switzerland)

About the author: Chris Boesel is associate professor of Christian theology at Drew Theological School. His primary interest is the extent to which traditional confessions of faith can be seen to call for progressive socio-political visions and commitments. He is the author of In Kierkegaard's Garden with the Poppy Blooms: Why Derrida Does Not Read Kierkegaard when He Reads Kierkegaard (Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2021) and Reading Karl Barth: Theology that Cuts Both Ways (Cascade, 2023).

This post is the fifth in a year-long series putting Barth’s theology in conversation with black theological voices. Our primary question: To what extent is Barth’s theology complicit in the silence of white Barthians on racism in the US and to what extent might Barth’s theology function as an anti-racist resource?

We have already seen that Barth is fully capable of insisting upon the socio-political implications of his Christocentric concreteness. God’s eternal decision to be for all in Jesus Christ, through the Spirit, is enacted in and through a very particular preferential commitment and movement within history: The last shall be first—to be on the side of the denied and deprived and against the privileged and powerful.

Here we see a divine identity with the social location of the poor and oppressed that resonates strongly with the symbolic dimension of divine blackness in Cone. To this extent, based on his own Christocentric concreteness, we can say that the Word of God, for Barth—God only and wholly for the creature in Jesus, through the Spirit—is black, in the particular two-fold way that Cone employs the language of divine blackness.¹

However, Barth does not employ the language of divine blackness as the inescapable consequence of his Christocentric concreteness in the way that Cone does.

Why not?

On one hand, the answer may be found within Cone’s view of the two-fold form of divine blackness itself. In the here and now of a particular historical context in which the constructed racial category of blackness is not the pivotal reason for a community’s subjection to the marginalized social location of the denied and deprived, then God’s identity with that community in their oppressed social location may not be best named in terms of blackness, but rather, named in terms of whatever other socio-cultural identity markers function as the justification for that community’s subjugation to marginalization and oppression (e.g., economic status, immigration status, caste, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, ethnicity/tribal identity, ability/capacity, etc.). Again, Cone clarifies, “‘Blackness’ as a Christological title may not be appropriate in the distant future or even in every human context in our present.”²

It can seem obvious, then, that Barth does not speak of the blackness of the Word of God as a consequence of his radical Christological concreteness because he is not doing theology in and for the particular context of a racist USA in the way that Cone is. Given the early and mid-twentieth century European context Barth was writing in and for, it can appear to make perfect sense that the language Barth himself was most inclined to employ for the socio-political implications of his Christocentric concreteness for divine identity in that particular context was “Jesus is socialism” rather than “Jesus is black.”³ The culpability for avoidance and erasure of divine blackness by Barthian theologians in the US context would then seem to lie clearly at the feet of US Barthians, a result of their denial of the socio-political implications of Barth’s Christocentric concreteness in and for the here and now of a racist USA—implications, it is assumed, that Barth himself would have drawn, as Cone did, if writing in and for that context alongside Cone. 

While there is something to this distinction between Barth and US Barthians regarding their avoidance of the language of blackness in relation to Jesus, the Word of God, and divine identity, I believe it lets Barth too much and too easily off the hook. For two reasons:

1. It is true that, through the particular history of slavery, segregation, lynching, and urban ghettoization in the USA, white supremacy and its denigration of blackness was developed distinctively in this context, woven uniquely into the DNA of national identity, its effects materially present and visible in the social fabric of everyday life in ways that it was not on the European continent.

2. However, it is not true that the Europe of Barth’s day was a stranger to white supremacy. White supremacy was, in fact, invented by Anglo-Europeans to justify colonial expansion and violence, the very colonial expansion and violence that gave rise to the USA.

Indeed, living in a racist USA is not like living in a racist Europe. It is like living in the colonies of a racist Europe, where the “color line” is the “front line” at which the violence of Europe’s white supremacy is directly imposed upon non-European peoples.

For early to mid-20^th century Europeans, the direct material effects of their white supremacy may have been more visible “over there,” in the colonies, than at home. However, the centrality of white supremacy to the philosophical, cultural, aesthetic, and theological traditions and self-conceptions of Europe should have been plainly visible to any European intellectual—theologians included—with eyes to see and ears to hear. See, for example, the presumed subhuman animality of African peoples in relation to Europeans on open display in no less a pivotal philosopher of modern Europe than Georg W. F. Hegel. For Hegel, the African continent is a “land... removed from the light of self-conscious history and wrapped in the dark mantle of night.”⁴

Hegel goes on:

Life there consists of a succession of contingent happenings and [arbitrary] surprises…there is not subjectivity, but merely a series of subjects who destroy each other… Thus, man as we find in Africa has not progressed beyond his immediate existence… All our observations of African man show him as living in a state of savagery and barbarism, and he remains in this state to the present day. The negro is an example of animal man in all his savagery and lawlessness, and if we wish to understand him at all, we must put aside all our European attitudes.⁵

There was no general outcry from European theologians of the 19^th or 20^th centuries denouncing the explicit white supremacy of such passages as a fundamental betrayal of the gospel of Jesus Christ, demonstrating the ultimate bankruptcy of Hegel’s philosophy. Not even as radically anti-Hegelian a Christian thinker as Soren Kierkegaard appeared much bothered by the explicit racism of Hegel’s thought. And neither did Barth—who knew both his Hegel and his Kierkegaard—distinguish himself on this point. He did not go out of his way to identify this kind of ubiquitous philosophical and cultural white supremacy, with its denigration of blackness as the sub-human bottom of Europe’s invented skin-color hierarchy, as a fatal distortion of the gospel in European hands and on European soil. He did not make it central to his critique of the idolatrous presumptions of modern European philosophy and the liberal theology so thoroughly informed by it. If he had had the critical eyes to see and ears to hear, he would have more explicitly connected his recognition of Jesus’s identity with the denied and the deprived to the social condition of peoples of African descent within his own white supremacist Euro-colonial context.

This first reason for Barth’s stopping short of the language of divine blackness can be seen as a personal failure of Barth to see through to the full socio-political implications of a key dimension of this theological vision and commitment; a failure that might have been avoided if he’d been more faithful to the content of his theology. However, the second reason we cannot let Barth off the hook for ignoring the blackness of his own concept of the Word of God—and for providing cover for US Barthians to not only ignore divine blackness but the very identity of God-in-Christ with the denied and deprived—has more to do with a deep-tissue structural lapse embedded throughout his theology as a whole. In this case, faithfulness to the content of his theology may not guarantee recognition of the blackness of Barth’s Christocentric conception of the Word of God, but result in being led on theological detours around and away from it.

For next time: We will examine this structural lapse in the next post. Our focus will be on a central dimension of Barth’s Christology in the context of his doctrine of reconciliation, framed as “The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country.”⁶ Why does this journey into the far country turn out to be not far enough?

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1. See my previous post for an explication of Cone’s two-fold form of divine blackness: a symbol of the divine identity with the poor and oppressed in every context that is essential to God’s nature, which entails a contingent, literal identity with black communities in particular contexts of white supremacy.

2. James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll: Orbis Press, 1997) 123.

3. Karl Barth, “Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice,” in Karl Barth and Radical Politics, ed. and trans. George Hunsinger (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2017).

4. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 174.

5. Hegel, Philosophy of World History, 176–177.

6. See, Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/1, trans. G. W. Bromiley (London: T&T Clark, 2010).