The Man from Galilee, Part III

Ruminations in African American Christology

James Cone (photo courtesy of Orbis Books)

About the author: Jason Oliver Evans is a research associate and lecturer at the University of Virginia. He is a constructive theologian working at the intersection of Christian systematic theology with theological and social ethics, Africana studies, and studies of gender and sexuality. Evans completed his dissertation on the person and work of Jesus Christ through critical engagement with key texts by Karl Barth, James H. Cone, Delores S. Williams, and JoAnne Terrell. Drawing upon these authors, Evans renders overall a constructive Black queer theology of atonement and Christian life.

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The Man from Galilee is the One who sets the captive free! In other words, Jesus Christ is the saving and liberating Lord of life. This is the central claim of African American Christian faith.¹ Drawing insights from the New Testament and their lived religious experience, African American Christians insist that Israel’s God has sent Jesus the Anointed One into the world to not only save them from their sins but also set them free from sinful, even demonic structural forces that materially enslave and oppress God’s beloved creatures (cf. Matt. 1:22; Luke 4:14–30; John 3:16; Acts 10:38). In the history of the United States, these destructive forces take the form of antebellum era chattel slavery along with persistent white supremacy and systemic racism. And yet, despite the nefarious deployments of Pauline texts by white slaveholding Christians to justify their enslavement, many African Americans—in response to divine grace—decided to make Jesus their choice!² Remarkably, however, the Jesus whom they received through faith was not white slaveholders’ Christ. The Christ in whom Black Christians believed was One who willed their total freedom from the house of bondage and actively empowered them to resist racial domination.

Perhaps, no theologian has explicated the ratio of Black Christian faith and contended theologically with intractable racial domination with the same deftness, intensity, and passion as James H. Cone, the founding member of Black liberation theology.³ Cone (1938–2018), throughout his storied career, articulated the meaning of Black Christian faith, which is grounded in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.⁴ He once wrote, “Christianity begins and ends with the man Jesus—his life, death, and resurrection. He is the Revelation, the special disclosure of God to man, revealing who God is and what his purpose for man is. In short, Christ is the essence of Christianity [sic].”⁵ On this Christological basis, Cone condemned the racial subjugation of African Americans in the United States as an affront to the gospel. He also excoriated white Christian theologians for their overwhelming failure to connect the risen Christ’s objective saving and liberating action with the present situation in which African Americans find themselves. To counter this failure, Cone advanced a Black theology of liberation, which bore witness to Jesus Christ, who was, is, and will be presently active in African Americans’ ongoing struggle for freedom until the culmination of the reign of God.

For Cone, Jesus of Nazareth is Christ the Liberator. Jesus was God’s Chosen One who came into the world to proclaim the in-breaking of God’s decisive intervention in human history, namely, the fulfillment of the divine will to liberate those who suffer under oppressive regimes. The divine will has been disclosed in the scriptural testimony of Jesus’ ancestors. As attested in the Hebrew Bible, especially in the Book of Exodus, the God who names Godself as YHWH freed the people of Israel from enslavement in Egypt. YHWH constitutes Israel anew as a liberated and then reconciled people, making a covenant with them at Sinai. The New Testament depicts Christ’s ministry of salvation as a work of liberation. In his ministry, Christ reveals the God of Exodus as his “Father” and himself as God’s “Son.” Both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament attest to the inextricable link between divine and human freedom: divine freedom is the condition of possibility for human freedom. This is to say, human freedom is at the heart of the good news and that the God who is free to be God-for-us disclosed in the event of Exodus-Sinai was fully incarnated in the person of Jesus himself.⁶ Overall, Cone insists that the biblical writers understood salvation in primarily, but not exhaustively, sociopolitical terms.⁷ Salvation is a material reality wherein God actualizes God’s will in human history. It is the total upheaval and ultimate transformation of the sinful state of affairs in the present age.

Moreover, Cone argues that Jesus is the Black Christ. By saying this, Cone draws our attention to an insight into the mystery of the Incarnation that few Christians have fully reckoned with. In the poor, subjugated Jewish flesh of Jesus, God has assumed the condition of the oppressed. Thus, Christ reveals God’s self-identification and full solidarity with Black people in particular and all oppressed peoples in human history. Alongside this, the Black Christ discloses God’s eternal will that all God’s creatures live in total freedom, becoming liberated and reconciled people living in peaceful co-existence and loving communion with God.⁸

Furthermore, Cone argued that the whole course of Christ’s history, Jesus’ life, ministry, death, resurrection, ascension, and return, as attested by the New Testament, is soteriologically significant for African Americans. Christ was not merely a “lowly, meek, and mild” figure who acquiesced to oppressive authorities—sacred and secular; rather, Christ staunchly opposed the principalities and powers that threaten the well-being of God’s “little ones.” Christ freely aligned himself with social outcasts and “sinners.” He offered respite, deliverance, and healing to those afflicted by oppressive powers and infirmed by conditions not of their own making. He willingly gave himself to proclaim and enact God’s righteous cause in the world. While Christ actively confronted the powers of sin and evil throughout his life, his liberating ministry reached a critical turning point in the event of his death and resurrection.

To adequately describe God’s reconciling action in the cross and resurrection, Cone retrieves and radicalizes the Christus Victor motif⁹ to offer a sociopolitical account of the atonement.¹⁰ This means that Cone applies the soteriological implications of Christ’s decisive battle and victory over satanic powers in his cross and resurrection to the situation of oppressed peoples throughout human history. Cone summarizes this account as follows:

The cross of Jesus is God invading the human situation as the Elected One who takes Israel’s place as the Suffering Servant and thus reveals the divine willingness to suffer in order that humanity might be fully liberated. The resurrection is God’s conquest of oppression and injustice, disclosing that the divine freedom revealed in Israel’s history is now available to all. The cross represents the particularity of divine suffering in Israel’s place. The resurrection is the universality of divine freedom for all who “labor and are heavy laden.”¹¹

The consequence of Christ’s reconciling action in the atonement is the liberation of African Americans from the powers of racial domination. This saving power is made present by the risen Christ through the Holy Spirit, who radically affirms Black people’s lives, dignifying and empowering them to live in freedom procured by the cross and resurrection. By experiencing the liberating power of Christ, Black people are born anew as free people, joining Christ as his disciples in the fight against oppressive forces.

Cone’s Christological statement faced criticisms from Black womanist theologians.¹² Cone failed to account for African American women’s distinctive experience of racism and gender oppression in the United States. Specifically, Delores Williams famously challenged Cone’s notion of redemptive suffering and his appropriation of the cross of Christ as liberative for Black women. For Williams, the cross makes sacred, and thus sanctions, Black women’s oppression.¹³ Additionally, theologians William R. Jones and Anthony B. Pinn challenged Cone’s assumptions about the goodness of God in the face of evil and Black suffering.¹⁴

Admittedly, Cone acknowledged in his later work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, the tension that ensues because of the ongoing challenges racism and oppression present African Americans: How can African American Christians continue to embrace the cross of Christ as a symbol of redemption in the face of intractable oppression captured in the extra-judicial instrument of the lynching tree?¹⁵

While no statement of theodicy is ever adequate, Cone perceptively understood that at the heart of Black Christian faith lies the paradoxical mystery, namely, that the God revealed in Christ Jesus overcomes the condition of the oppressed through the assumption of this condition to God’s life. It is through the cross of the risen Christ, the Man from Galilee, that African American Christians find inspiration and hope to live in total defiance of the powers that seek to destroy their lives.

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For Further Reading

Cone, James H. Black Theology and Black Power. Orbis Books, 1997. First published in 1969 by Harper & Row.

———. God of the Oppressed, rev. ed. Orbis Books, 1997.

———. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Orbis Books, 2011.

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1. For a helpful introductory guide into Black Christological reflection, see James H. Evans, We Have Been Believers: An African American Systematic Theology, 2^nd ed. (Fortress Press, 2012), 89–113; see also Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Christ, 25^th anniversary ed. (Orbis Books, 2019).

2. For this phrase, I am indebted to gospel writer Harrison Johnson’s memorable chorus. See Harrison Johnson, “I’ve Decided to Make Jesus My Choice,” in One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism: An African American Ecumenical Hymnal, ed. W. James Abbington (GIA Publications, Inc., 2018), 437. I am also indebted to theologian and scholar of Black religion J. Kameron Carter for his retrieval of Johnson’s words in his underappreciated critique of white American evangelical Christianity. See J. Kameron Carter, “Race and the Experience of Death: Theologically Reappraising American Evangelism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology, ed. Timothy Larsen and Daniel J. Treier (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 177–198.

3. Indeed, while Cone is widely considered the pioneering member of academic Black liberation theology, he was not alone in this work. Other first-generation Black liberation theologians include the Rev. Albert Cleage (the Black nationalist Christian minister and founder of the Shrine of the Black Madonna of the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church), J. Deotis Roberts, Cecil W. Cone (James’ brother), and Gayraud S. Wilmore.

4. See James H. Cone, Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian (Orbis Books, 2018). This is Cone’s posthumously published memoir.

5. James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (1969; reis., Orbis Books, 1997), 31. In the Preface of the 1989 edition of this text, Cone remarks that he evolved from his earlier Christocentric perspective on revelation: “As in 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. God’s reality is not bound by one manifestation of the divine in Jesus but can be found wherever people are being empowered to fight for freedom (xii).”

6. James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, rev. ed. (Orbis Books, 1997), 128.

7. Cone, God of the Oppressed, 209f.

8. Cone, God of the Oppressed, 124–6.

9. See Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A. G. Hebert (1931; reis., Wipf & Stock, 2003). Aulén portrayed this motif as the “classic” idea of atonement, in which a dramatic, cosmic-level conflict ensues between God and Satan/demonic forces. Within this dualistic framework, the atonement then is God in Christ Jesus’ decisive battle against and ultimate victory over these forces, thus liberating creation and reconciling all things back to Godself. Aulén argues that this motif predominated the patristic era and was reprised in the thought of the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther. For a contemporary challenge to Aulén’s thesis, see Peter Schmiechen, Saving Power: Theories of Atonement and Forms of the Church (Eerdmans, 2005).

10. See my account of Cone’s doctrine of atonement in Jason Oliver Evans, “If God Be for Us: Toward a Theology of Atonement and Christian Life from a Black Queer Perspective,” PhD diss., (University of Virginia, 2024), 176–202.

11. Cone, God of the Oppressed, 124 (emphasis added).

12. The christological perspectives of key womanist thinkers will be attended to in a subsequent post.

13. See Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, 20th anniv. ed. (1993; reis, Orbis Books: 2013).

14. See William R. Jones, Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973); Anthony B. Pinn, Why, Lord? Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (Continuum, 1999).

15. See James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis Books, 2011).