God Takes Sides—Against Whiteness
Barth, Cone, and Christological Concreteness
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 second 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?
In my previous post, I suggested that Cone’s early theological interpretation of the Black Power movement—asserting that, “for twentieth century America the message of Black Power is the message of Christ himself”; and “Black Power is God’s new way of acting in America”1—constituted an example of what Barth had in mind with his vision of God here and now: a vision of theology bound to and directed by a God whose word and action always occurs as a living event, address, and encounter in and for a particular, concrete time and place. I suggested that, while he was not attempting to follow through on Barth’s vision—and certainly never claimed to be a Barthian—Cone’s work shines a damning light on the silence of most white US Barthians in relation to the concrete realities of the here and now of a racist USA.
Even for those of us who read and use Barth generously that are willing to acknowledge it is the non-Barthian Cone rather than white Barthians in the US who demonstrate most clearly the risks involved in Barth’s vision of a theological commitment to God here and now, there is something in Cone’s words that is likely to both make us panic and instinctively respond with an instructional corrective. Both responses demand interrogation.
One of the reasons Cone’s theology resonates with Barth’s vision of God here and now is its Christological concreteness. For both Barth and Cone (at least the early Cone), God speaks and acts decisively and concretely, once for all, in the particular history, event, and divine-human relation that is God for the creature in Jesus, through the Spirit. And it is through the Spirit that the living reality of this once for all history, event, and divine-human relation speaks and acts again and ever anew in and for particular, concrete contexts; a speaking and acting that calls for corresponding creaturely response.
For many white Christians like myself, who have been formed by conservative theological cultures and categories and have found in Barth’s vision of radical, illimitable grace a more redemptive gospel, the central significance of this Christological concreteness is that the particular divine decision enacted once for all in the history of Jesus is truly enacted for all. It addresses and embraces each and every one in the same way and with the same unqualifiable and irrevocable divine “Yes.” Good news indeed for those of us with enough material privilege that the only threat to our existence we truly fear is divine wrath over our personal sinfulness. This was exactly the good word I first heard in Barth that saved me from the judgmental narrowness of conservative white evangelicalism.
However, as Cone reminds us—a reminder that Barth himself was often in need of, as we will see in later posts—the concrete particularity of God’s decision enacted once for all in Jesus was a decision for a very specific creaturely reality—a creaturely reality under very specific social, economic, and political conditions.
Jesus was no human-being-in-general. Far from it. In Jesus, through the Spirit, God shows up in a dung-filled manger, not a princely palace; God chooses table fellowship at the margins of the colonized, not at the full tables of comfortable citizens of the realm; God is executed as a threat to the law and order of empire, not the executor of the law and order of empire. Barth’s own affirmation of the “cause Dei”—of God’s cause in the world—is an affirmation that God takes sides.2
The most prevalent refrain about God’s taking sides in Barth’s version of Christological concreteness—the refrain which most of us conservative white Christians drawn to Barth focus on and take great comfort in—is that, in the particularity and concreteness of God’s self-determining decision enacted in Jesus, God takes the side and cause of the sinful creature in its history with God—against the transcendence and purity of God’s own cause! However, in God’s Christologically concrete “Yes” to and for the sinful creature—and so to and for all—God also takes the side of particular sinful creatures over against other sinful creatures within that history. Again, it falls to Cone to remind us Barthians (and Barth himself) of Barth’s own words: in the manger, at the margins of colonized communities, and as threat to empire, “God always takes his stand unconditionally and passionately on this side alone: against the lofty and on behalf of the lowly; against those who already enjoy right and privilege and on behalf of those who are denied it and deprived of it.”3
Enter, the panic experienced by generous white readers of Barth mentioned above: in taking the side of the creature in Jesus, through the Spirit—here and now, as there and then—there is a very real sense in which God is not taking our side. In the here and now of a racist USA, God speaks and acts for—on the side of—the denied and deprived black community and against those inhabiting the right and privilege of whiteness. This means God speaking and acting in, for, and through the Black Lives Matter movement, the work for the abolition of prisons, the demand for reparations, black queer and trans activism, and the Poor People’s Campaign—and that’s just for starters.
Cone couldn’t be more clear: in the concrete particularity of God speaking and acting for the creature in Jesus through the Spirit, “divine activity is inseparable from the history of black people.” So radical and total is God’s identification in Jesus (through the Spirit) with the lowly, denied, and despised in history, and so in the here and now of a racist USA, that “Black culture…is God’s way of acting in America”; “black experience, black history, and black culture…are God himself at work”; to the extent that “[God’s] Word is our [the black community’s] word; his existence, our existence.”4
But it is here, at the very site of our panic, that we—as white readers of Barth—glimpse the consoling possibility of a remedy. We glimpse what every good Barthian cannot fail to notice as the apparent need for an instructional corrective to Cone’s version of black Christological concreteness.
Cone not only says God speaks and acts on the side of the black community, as the lowly, denied, and deprived in a white supremacist USA, he seems to say God speaks and acts so completely that God’s Word and action becomes the word and action of the black community itself. God’s solidarity with the black community becomes God’s identity with the black community. The Word of God becomes identical to black human words; the word and action of the black community is the Word and action of God in history. And this would appear to cross what for Barth is the un-crossable line: the line separating God in God’s free divine life, will, and action from the grasping capacity and initiative of the sinful creature.
Barth’s uncompromising “no” to natural theology rejects any identity between the Word of God and the human word by which the former becomes an extension of the latter, at its disposal and subject to its initiative. The concrete Word and act of God for the creature in Jesus through the Spirit “presents and places itself as an object over against us…an object which can never in any sense be our possession”; it “cannot be anticipated and never passes under our control”; and if anyone “think[s] they can handle the Word and faith like capital at their disposal, they simply prove thereby that they have neither the Word nor faith.”5 For Barth, any such identity between Jesus Christ as the Word of God—which only God can speak and must always come to the creature from God—and human words and actions inevitably violates and domesticates the very divine freedom that ensures the goodness of the gospel, presuming to bring both God and the neighbor under creaturely mastery and control.6
Whew! A huge collective sigh of relief is audible from white readers of Barth everywhere. Our panic is alleviated as we rush to instruct Cone on this keystone of Barth’s theology, inwardly rejoicing as it reasserts a reassuring distance between God and the word and action of the black community, particularly as they rise up to name, resist, and fight—to fight back—against the racist societal forces that incessantly target their community for harm and ordain us as the appropriately bred and educated keepers of the theological flame. If Cone is wrong here, the devil whispers in our hopeful hearts, then perhaps he is wrong elsewhere, perhaps his unforgiving judgment of an unqualifiable and indiscriminating divine “Yes” to all that we—that I—have experienced as so profoundly redemptive and life-giving is off the mark as well, and does not demand our full and serious attention.
As we move forward to ask whether the identity between the Word of God in Jesus Christ and black human words and actions that Cone affirms is in fact the kind of identity described by Barth, those of us who are white and informed by Barth must, at every step, ensure that we are first and foremost doing the work of self-examination:
Are we rushing to an instructive corrective in response to Cone as a performance of whiteness, a racist impulse to avoid the costs of accountability by assuming a God-given role of paternalistic instruction to the black community in matters of Christian theology and faith, and in doing so revealing our true confession that Christianity is in fact the “white man’s” religion?
As we move forward, we must accompany any questions we have for Cone and other black theological voices with a more urgent question for ourselves: Does our invoking of Barth’s signature dialectical logic—the “Yes” and “No” by which the “Yes” of God’s unqualifiable and irrevocable self-giving to the creature in Jesus Christ is prevented from passing over into a creaturely possession and possibility—even when believed to be formally “correct” as a theological concern, constitute the performance of a white racist allergy to black equality, authority, and power? And does it thereby become an instance of the very grasping presumption of control and mastery over the Word of God that we are claiming to reject?
For next time: Does Cone in fact assert an identity between the Word of God and black human words and actions that cross the line of Barth’s dialectical firewall? In Cone’s own words, this is a question that “must be answered both negatively and positively,“ so that “God’s No and a Yes can be spoken” and heard.7
James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1969), 37, 61.
Karl Barth, “The Gift of Freedom: Foundation of Evangelical Ethics,” in The Humanity of God, trans. John Newton Thomas and Thomas Wieser (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 80ff; see also, Cone, Black Power, 27.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, trans. T. Parker et al (Edinburgh, UK: T&T Clark, 1957), 386–87; my emphasis.
James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1997), 59, 62, 65.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley, 2nd ed. (London: T&T Clark, 1975), 91, 93, 225.
Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1, 119-186.
Cone, God of the Oppressed, 89.