Toward a Theology of Rebellion

Comparing James Cone and Karl Barth

Jun 09, 2025

About the author: Christopher Choi is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Virginia. His research engages modern religious thought, the philosophy of religion, and Black Studies. Most recently, his dissertation critically examined the intersection of philosophical and theological doctrines of state power with antiblackness and discourses on slavery. His scholarly interests include political theology, the theology of James Cone and Karl Barth, the thought of W. E. B. De Bois, German idealism and Romanticism, and modern Jewish philosophy.

The late James Cone begins his memoir by describing an awakening event. The Detroit Rebellion of the summer of 1967 “woke me out of my academic world.”1 The 1960s and ‘70s witnessed over 700 uprisings in impoverished, overpoliced, predominantly black urban zones, or “ghettoes.” The uprisings were often sparked in response to instances of police violence and at times took the form of looting and destruction of property. Across the country, rebellions were suppressed by brutal and militarized police responses. The editor of the Liberator magazine wrote in response to the Watts Rebellion:

In Watts the white power structure put on a display of raw naked power, consisting of the army supported by tanks[.]2

Cone’s words in the wake of these events remain startling, offering both challenge and opportunity to theological reflection. It was here, in the face of what many pathologized as anarchy, criminality, “riffraff,” and even foreign communist conspiracy, that Cone heard and awoke to a new and liberating word.

Even while condemning the violence of the rebellions, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. nevertheless described these so-called riots as a “language,” namely the “language of the unheard.”3 The Kerner Commission, established by President Johnson in large part in response to the Detroit Rebellion, aimed to explicate this language through sociological study. It highlighted unemployment, lack of resources, and racial grievance as important factors behind the uprisings. Famously, its final report stated, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”4 Even here, though, the report trafficked in antiblack tropes which pathologized black family structures, labelling the predominantly black ghetto an “environmental jungle.” Black social life in these ghettoized zones is depicted as “a system of ruthless, exploitative relationships,” riddled with a “culture of poverty.”5

Many black intellectuals and artists sought to give expression to and a deeper account of the “language” articulated in the rebellions. Jack O’Dell argued that the uprisings, rather than anarchic and senseless chaos, expressed a capacious critique of a society steeped in “slavery exploitation.”6 Amiri Baraka proposed approaching the uprisings as composing a poem, a “Black Poem” that contains the future of a new world: “Let the world be a Black Poem . . .”7 Gwendolyn Brooks attempted to capture the language of the uprisings (she quotes Rev. Dr. King’s remark on the “riots” in the epigraph) in her 1969 poem “Riot”: In seas. In windsweep./ They were black and loud./ And not detainable. And not discreet.”8 She also highlights the backlash of the state and the police:

The young men run
The children in ritual chatter
Scatter upon
Their Own and old geography
The Law comes sirening across the town.9

The Great Uprising of the 1960s and 1970s sparked a backlash, as new campaigns for “law and order” emerged and intensified. The Kerner Commission reported: “The police and other law enforcement agencies in Detroit are making extensive plans to cope with any future disorder,” including “some $2 million worth of police riot equipment, including tanks, armored personnel carriers, and Stoner rifles (a weapon which fires a particularly destructive type of bullet.” “Private and personal arsenals of incredible destructive force,” writes Cone, “testify to the determination of sick and brutal people to put an end to black revolution and indeed to black people.”10

In the very “disorder” against which police forces were arming and fortifying themselves, Cone heard in the “language” of the riots a sacred and liberative content. “It was like a revelation, a sudden bolt from the blue, a fire burning inside me,” he writes in his memoir. Drawing on language from Paul Tillich’s theology, Cone asserts that the uprisings, far from pathologic disorder, is the “affirmation of [black people’s] being despite the ever-present possibility of death.”11 And in this rebellious affirmation of being “in the midst of nonbeing,” Cone heard not simply a “language of the unheard,” but the gospel itself: “Black Power is the gospel of Jesus in America today!”12

Responding to this message, Cone envisioned black theology as “tak[ing] on the character of rebellion against things as they are,” which is to say, the violent and oppressive vertical structure of American society rooted in the legacies of slavery. Black theology aims at the “destruction of everything ‘masterly’ in society.”13

Only six years earlier, an elderly Karl Barth had also found himself wrestling with the idea of rebellion [Aufstand]. While ultimately unfinished and published posthumously in fragmentary form, his The Christian Lifeis a testament to the importance this concept took for Barth in his later years. In rhetoric that scholars of Barth still find “striking” and “arresting,”14 he describes the Christian vocation as a “revolt against all the oppression and suppression of man by the lordship of lordless powers.15

Conceiving sinful existence as oppressed by idolatrous and “lordless” powers, Barth argues that the reconciling work of God in Jesus Christ calls for and empowers the Church to rebel against them. In praying for God’s Kingdom to come, the Christian “ris[es] up and revolt[s] against” all other powers which stand opposed to and aim to supplant it. The “splendor” of God’s Kingdom before the eyes of the rebels, they are placed under the struggle for its actualizing, a “binding requirement to engage in a specific uprising.”16

Several contributors to this Substack have written thoughtful reflections on the relationship between Cone’s and Barth’s theologies. I wish here to gesture towards an approach to this complex relationship from a slightly different angle. How would Barth have registered the urban uprisings in which Cone unreservedly heard the very gospel of Jesus Christ? Does Barth’s theology provide tools for hearing and expounding the “language of the unheard”? What might be gained by incorporating Cone’s theology of revolt into Barth’s architectonic? What is lost and escapes our analysis when Cone’s revolt is assimilated into Barth’s architectonic, complex, and capacious as it may be? In what ways does Cone’s theology of revolt and liberation exceed or even contradict Barth’s theology, which, as the late John Webster put it, “generally emphasises law, order, and political stability?”17 How is this emphasis challenged by Cone’s assertion that God unequivocally identifies with blackness, which in society “means criminality,” the pathology whose criminalization enables the “stabilization of the status quo?”18 Or by Cone’s awakening to God’s liberative message precisely in the rejection of such stability? Perhaps exploring these questions will be of use in constructing theologies of resistance and liberation that reach beyond state violence.

Toward a Theology of Rebellion

Comparing James Cone and Karl Barth

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