Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation 1968-98

by James H. Cone

Risks of Faith offers for the first time the best of noted theologian James H. Cone's essays, including several new pieces. Representing the breadth of his life's work, this collection opens with the birth of black theology, explores its relationship to issues of violence, the developing world, and the theological touchstone embodied in African-American spirituals. Also included here is Cone's seminal work on the theology of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the philosophy of Malcolm X, and a compelling examination of their contribution to the roots of black theology. Far-reaching and provocative, Risks of Faith is a must-read for anyone interesting in religion and its political and social impact on our time.

Genres: Theology, Religion, Christianity, Race, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Essays

194 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

James Hal Cone was an advocate of Black liberation theology, a theology grounded in the experience of African Americans, and related to other Christian liberation theologies. In 1969, his book Black Theology and Black Power provided a new way to articulate the distinctiveness of theology in the black Church. James Cone’s work was influential and political from the time of his first publication, and remains so to this day. His work has been both utilized and critiqued inside and outside of the African American theological community.

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A MARVELOUS COLLECTION OF CONE’S ESSAYS, OVER THIRTY YEARS

James Hal Cone (born 1938) is an American theologian who is Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary, where he has taught since 1970. [NOTE: page numbers below refer to the 168-page hardcover edition.]

He wrote in the fascinating and illuminating Introduction of this 1999 book, “This book provides an opportunity for me to reflect on the origin and development of my theological perspective. When I think about my vocation, I go back to my childhood years in Bearden, Arkansas… I remember Bearden because it is the place where I first discovered myself---as black and Christian. There, the meaning of black was defined primarily by the menacing presence of whites, which no African-American could escape.” (Pg. ix) He continues, “The search for a reasoned faith in a complex and ever changing world was the chief motivation that led me to study at Garrett Theological Seminary… Theology quickly became my favorite subject in seminary because it opened the door to explore faith’s meaning for the current time. And situation in which I was living.” (Pg. xiii)

He continues, “The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s awakened me from my theological slumber… I soon discovered how limited my seminary education was. The curriculum at Garrett … did not deal with the questions black people were asking as they searched for the theological meaning of their fight for justice in a white racist society…. I knew deep down that I could not repeat to a struggling black community the doctrines of the faith as they had been reinterpreted
by Barth, Bultmann, Niebuhr, and Tillich for European colonizers and white racists in the United States…. I had to discover a theological identity that was accountable to the life, history, and culture of African-American people.” (Pg. xiv)

He goes on, “Martin King was extremely modest about his political achievements and rather naïve about the intellectual impact he made on the theological world. Theologians and seminarians have been slow to recognize the significance of his theological contribution. But I am convinced that Martin Luther King Jr. was the most important and influential Christian theologian in America’s history… Martin King is America’s most important Christian theologian because of what he said and did about race from a theological point of view. He was a liberation theologian before the phrase was coined by African-American and Latin American religious thinkers in the late sixties and early seventies. King’s mature reflections on the gospel of Jesus emerged primarily from his struggle for racial justice in America.” (Pg. xvii)

He explains, “I disagreed with both Martin and Malcolm and insisted on the importance of bringing blackness and Christianity together… Malcolm taught me how to make theology black and never again to despise my African origin. Martin showed me how to make and keep theology Christian and never allow it to be used to support injustice. I was transformed from a Negro theologian to a BLACK theologian, from an understanding of theology as an analysis of God-ideas in books to an understanding of it as a disciplined reflection about God arising out of a commitment to the practice of justice for the poor… Blackness gave me new theological spectacles, which enabled me to move beyond the limits of white theology, and empowered my mind to think thoughts that were wild and heretical when evaluated by white academic values… Using the black experience as the starting point of theology raised the theodicy question in a profound and challenging way that was never mentioned in graduate school… It forced me to search dee into a wellspring of blackness… for a new way of doing theology that would empower the suffering black poor to fight for a more liberated existence.” (Pg. xxi-xxii)

He recalls, “as soon as I… was leaving Adrian College to teach at Union Theological Seminary in New York, the most liberal and influential seminary in America… I decided that I had to address head-on white theology, the intellectual arm of the white church… Although I respected [Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich] … and had learned much from their brilliant theological insights, I was not intimidated by their legacy. I was audacious enough to think that my understanding of the gospel was a simple truth, available to anyone who opened his/her heart and mind to the God revealed in the Scriptures and present in the world today… I did not regard this point as a brilliant insight. It was an obvious biblical truth and only white theologians’ racism blinded them to it. In ‘A Black Theology of Liberation’ I merely sought to remind them of it.” (Pg. xxiii-xxiv) He concludes the Introduction, “‘Risks of Faith’ represents thirty years of searching for the truth of the gospel. I do not claim to have found the whole truth. I am still searching.” (Pg. xxvi)

In the first essay, he states, “It is my thesis … that Black Power … is not an antithesis of Christianity, nor is it a heretical idea to be tolerated with painful forbearance. It is rather Christ’s central message to twentieth-century America. And unless the empirical denominational Church makes a determined effort to recapture the Man Jesus through a total identification with the suffering poor as expressed in Black Power, that Church will become exactly what Christ is not.” (Pg. 3)

In an essay on Spirituals, he observes, “the basic idea of the spirituals is that slavery contradicts God; it is a denial of His will. To be enslaved is to be declared NOBODY, and that form of existence contradicts God’s creation of men to be his children. Because black people believed that they were God’s children, they affirmed their SOMEBODINESS, refusing to reconcile their servitude with divine revelation. They rejected white distortions of the gospel, which emphasized the obedience of slaves to their masters. They contended that God willed their freedom and not their slavery. That is why the spirituals focus on biblical passages that stress God’s involvement in the liberation of oppressed people.” (Pg. 18)

In another essay, he states, “White oppressors cannot share in this future reality as defined by the black revolution. Indeed, we blacks assume that the white position of unauthorized power as expressed in the racist character of every American institution---churches and seminaries not excluded!---renders white oppressors incapable of understanding what black humanity is, and it is thus incumbent upon us as black people to become ‘revolutionaries for blackness,’ rebelling against all who enslave us… In contrast to the revolutionary thrust of Black Power, Christianity usually is not thought of as being involved in radical change. It has been identified with the status quo, a condition that encourages oppression and not human liberation.” (Pg. 28-29)

He adds, “My difficulty with white theologians is their use of Jesus’ so-called nonviolent attitude in the Gospels as the primary evidence that black people ought to be nonviolent today… the resurrected Christ is not bound by first-century possibilities. Therefore it is possible to conclude that the man from Nazareth was not a revolutionary zealot, and still contend that the risen Christ is involved in the black revolution today… we must not regard his past activity as a pointer to what he is doing now. It is not so much what he did; but his actions were signs of God’s eschatological future and his will to liberate all people from slavery and oppression. To be for Jesus means being for the oppressed and unwanted in human society.” (Pg. 37)

In another essay, he notes. “The term ‘black theology’ was created in this social and religious context. It was initially understood as the theological arm of Black Power, and it enabled us to express our theological imagination in the struggle of freedom independently of white theologians. It was the one term that white ministers and theologians did not like, because, like Black Power in politics, black theology located the theological starting point in the black experience and not the particularity of the Western theological tradition. We did not feel ourselves accountable to Aquinas, Luther, or Calvin but to David Walker, Daniel payne, and W.E.B. Du Bois.” (Pg. 42-43)

In an essay on Martin Luther King and the Black Church, he observes, “even I myself used to think that the sources for explaining my theology were Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Tillich, because these were the theologians who made the most conscious intellectual impact on me during my seminary days. After writing a Ph.D. dissertation on Karl Barth’s anthropology, I naturally turned to him for communicating my deepest feelings about the theological implications of the black struggle for freedom. At that time, Barth and others like him were the only intellectual resources at my command for explicating the theological meaning of the black struggle, even though the truth of it did not arise from the experience of white neo-orthodox theologians. Since the publication of ‘Black Theology and Black Power,’ I have come to realize the limitation of this procedure and have attempted to correct it as much as possible, while not denying the usefulness of ideas from all cultures. I now know… the Black Church was and still is the most dominant element for a proper understanding of my own theological perspective.” (Pg. 75)

In a later essay, he says, “The Christian gospel is God’s good news to the victims that their humanity is not determined by their victimization. This means that the poor do not have to adjust to poverty; the oppressed do not have to reconcile themselves to humiliation and suffering. They can do something to change not only their perception of themselves, but also the existing structures of oppression. Indeed, this is what the Exodus, the prophets, and the Incarnation are all about. These events and people are God’s way of saying that injustice is a contradiction of the divine intention of humanity. Persons, therefore, who embark on a vocation in the Christian ministry and do not view their calling as a commitment to the victims of the land are not really servants of the gospel of Jesus.” (Pg. 115)

In another essay, he admits, “I hope the young university blacks will … find their way back into the church. For I must admit that I cannot support any revolution that excludes my mother, and she believes in Jesus… Now I know this testimony will not go over big with young blacks whose theoretical frame is derived from white educational institutions. But if we believe that white oppressors will not provide the means of black liberation, then we had better become suspicious of what is happening to black consciousness in white educational contexts. It could be that our freedom is not found in Karl Marx or any black facsimile thereof, but in the shouts and moans in the black experience… Is it possible that our freedom is found here in black life and culture and nowhere else? This is certainly the belief of the Black Church.” (Pg. 126-127)

He acknowledges, “People often ask me whether I am still angry as when I wrote ‘Black Theology and Black Power.’ When I hear that question I smile to contain my rage: I remain just as angry because America, when viewed from the perspective of the black poor, is no closer to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a just society than when he was killed. While the black middle class has made considerable economic progress, the underclass, despite America’s robust economy, is worse off in 1998 than in 1968. The statistics are well known, yet they still fail to shock or outrage most Americans… What deepens my anger today is the appalling silence of white theologians on racism in the United States and the modern world… progressive white theologians, with few exceptions, write and teach as if they do not need to address the radical contradiction that racism creates for Christian theology… We must ask therefore: Is racism so deeply embedded in Euro-American history and culture that it is impossible to do theology without being antiblack?” (Pg. 130-131)

These essays address many topics not covered in Cone’s many books; this will be “must reading” for anyone seriously studying Black Theology.

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading James Cone was a fascinating walk in anthropology, sociology, and theology. In some ways, he was profoundly challenging and eye-opening. In others, he was disappointingly predictable and shallow. Sure, that probably describes all of us as people, but when we read the writings of those who purport to expound the gospel of Jesus Christ, we expect more.

Cone's power is in his perspective and in his assault upon what SHOULD be an obvious affront to Christianity – the oppression of human beings merely because of the color of their skin. As Cone states, "No white theologian has taken the oppression if black people as a point of departure for analyzing the meaning of the gospel today." For anyone who has studied the Bible, particularly Isaiah and Ephesians, this is a brutal – and deserved – rebuke of American Christianity.

I wish I could put that last word in scare quotes, implying that it was only the faux Christians that so commonly wear the label today that ignore the plight of the downtrodden in society. Sadly, Cone is right. Any clear-eyed historical look at the church in America will find it generally silent on the issue, if not apologetic toward the oppressors. While Wilberforce and the church in England stamped out racism decades prior to the US Civil War, and Northern (often “liberal”) Christians in the US stood against it, the bastions of evangelicalism and orthodoxy in America were largely - though not entirely – complicit in their silence.

Perhaps thats the hardest part to swallow – that the locus of the historic faith in America, the one that today stands against a theology of glory without a theology of suffering, is called out by Cone as "the church does not appear to be a community willing to pay up personally. It is not a community that views every command as a call to the cross – death." It's not hard to swallow because it isn't true...but because it has been. While significant strides have been made in my lifetime, during the 30 years that this book covers, orthodox Christians were slow to embrace their darker-skinned bretheren as equals whom we would fight and die for.

In a condemnation of the church in America (white and otherwise) that still stands true to this day, he writes: "Our church is an impostor, because we no longer believe the gospel we proclaim.  There is a credibility gap between what we say and what we do.  While we may preach sermons that affirm the church's interest in the poor and the downtrodden, what we actually do shows that we are committed to the "American way of life," in which the rich are given privileged positions of power in shaping the life and activity of the church." It is this sinful, “natural” mode of operation of human beings that creates an underclass in society, and it shouldn't be so in the church. The church SHOULD be invested in the rescue and liberation of the downtrodden, whatever they may look like.

"We must ask, 'What is the gospel, and how is it different from my own social conditioning?'" unlike the church of today, the prophets (in particular), James, Galatians, and the history of the church stand alongside of James Cone, calling out with the Psalmist, “How long, O Lord?”

If that were the substance of Cone's theological emphasis, a call to recognize the mandate of the church to be active in liberation, to stop abetting the oppressors, to worry more about those under the boot of power and less about their own peace and security – a call to live the gospel in word and deed – then Cone would rank as a top-shelf author in my library.

Sadly, that is not the case.

What Cone demonstrates is the logical and expected result of nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberal theology. Cone never once considers any theologian or theological system prior to Barth, Bultmann, Niebuhr and Tillich. In fact, aside from mentioning Jonathan Edwards only to state he is NOT the greatest American theologian, it is hard not only to find any theologian that pre-dates neo-liberalism, but any actual historic, orthodox theology written, spoken, or practiced before Schleiermacher.

Cone even makes this explicit. "At the time Barth and others like him were the only intellectual resources at my command for explicating the theological meaning of the black struggle..."  And he never goes anywhere else beyond Neo-liberalism and his own personal experience.  This is reflective of the racists Whites of the evangelical church I his time, whose similarly poor (though radically different) hermeneutic made them ignore orthodoxy and justify racism. He dismisses orthodoxy either because he was taught to do so in seminary (which still happens today) and/or because his experience of “orthodox” Christians led him to universalize their poor attitude toward the oppressed. Regardless, we are called to “rightly divide the word of truth.” We simply cannot do so when we are "Using the black experience as the starting point of theology [which] raised the theodicy question in a profound and challenging way that was never mentioned in graduate school."

Starting with experience and shaping theology by my experience results in a God made in my own image, which is what liberalism always does. He notes that God is "the liberator of the oppressed from physical and spiritual bondage".  He ignores that He put his people into bondage,repeatedly.   Thankfully, Cone is fully honest and doesn't play the games of deception of many white liberal theologians. By saying, “"Black theology located the theological starting point in the black experience and not in the Western theological tradition,”, he tells us that, for him, there can be no other theology that is not liberation theology.

This can be seen as he condemns those who oppose his perspective as not only wrong, but wicked, a common tactic seen today. "When a particular interpretation of Scripture benefits people who hold positions of power, it can never be the gospel of Jesus." Never mind that the scriptures explicitly command submission to authority, honoring rulers, and giving regard to elders in the church. The experience-based theology of liberalism results in the hermeneutic that takes "Slaves obey your masters" to mean "the Christian task is to rebel against all masters"; it results in an insistence that God will use us only if we use our resources for the empowerment of the poor and weak, which is striaght-up the Works-righteousness condemned in the New Testament, and ends with "If Jesus Christ is more than a religious expression of our economic and sexists interests, then there is no reason to,resist the truth of the Marxist and feminist analyses".

Yes, that Marx. In fact, I think no person is cited or praised more than Marx, and explicit atheist. Cone demands we shape our understanding of God by the writings of the atheist Marx, as opposed to understanding Marx by starting with the Scriptures.

This goes, over his lifetime, exactly where you would expect. Every politically liberal sacred cow somehow becomes the gospel of Jesus. Cone throws sexual orientation, gender roles, environmentalism, and opposition to the Vietnam War into the same pile as black liberation.  And, of course, he predictably beats Rob Bell to the punch 50 years earlier by saying, "The church includes...all men who view their humanity as inextricably related to every man." To Cone, the gospel of Jesus Christ, historically summarized as salvation for people and nations by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, actually involves none of those things.

So, given the situation in American culture, it makes complete sense. According to Cone, because a racist, violent system is in place, murderous violence - against those who do no violence themselves - to overthrow the system it is justified.  While that may be defendable from a human perspective, it is anathema to the gospel.  He justifies it by pointing to the white colonists revolt against the crown, but there is nothing particularly Christian about the American Revolution, either.

Disappointingly, he not only follows the standard line of liberal theology in his own experience, he ignores and distorts history, seemingly through willful ignorance. I don't know if Cone is stunningly ignorant of Northern White Chrisitan abolitionists and advocates of equal treatment for blacks, or if he is stunningly deceptive. "No group holding power will voluntarily empower those who are powerless." Like the 14th amendment, maybe, sir? Such a declaration is completely true apart from the grace of God in Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, but history and the Bible show otherwise when God acts in history, which he continues to do.

Contrast his personal theology with his sections on the theology of the black church and of Martin Luther King, and we find a starkly different approach to history. While Cone does redefine “theology” in away that allows him to declare MLK as the greatest American theologian, he is oddly orthodox in evaluating the hymns and sermons of MLK and the black church in American history. Frustratingly, his uses really, really sloppy citations to justify his attacks on previous theologians.  For example, he cites one of the Objections in Aquinas' Summa Theologica to claim Aquinas promoted slavery.  However, as anyone who has actually read Aquinas knows, the Objections are objections to what Aquinas proposes, not Aquinas's argument.  I figured this out when I looked at the note  and saw he didn't use the primary source. I'm no Aquinas expert, but it sounded fishy and took me mere moments to debunk Cone's claim. He condemns black conservatives for “proof-texting” Malcolm X, but the very words he is to praise Malcolm X could be used to praise Donald Trump with very little changes.

In closing, I was challenged and educated by Cone's dismemberment of gradualism in healing race relations, blessed by his thorough evaluation of the black church and MLK, and saddened by his overall theological system. Not only does he define everything by his experience and refuse to submit himself to the Word as the authority on theology, Cone defines power and liberation by the world's standards - to have the positions the world has called important and to be free to do what others in the world do. Unlike the Scriptures, which define freedom as freedom from sin, Cone channels the prosperity preachers that come on his heels by demanding that the church preach and act in a way that brings temporal power to oppressed people now, by any means necessary (he has a section on that phrase that puts it into context as he preaches Malcolm X into heaven).

His razor-sharp wit left me with memorable lines such as “Whites have had affirmative action for 200 years!” It's true. But, when the sins of others are so obvious and evil - particularly the sins of those not like me - it makes it easy to ignore the wickedness of my own heart. I have no reason to think that James Cone has ever met Christ, or thinks he needs to. There is certainly nothing in this volume to indicate otherwise. I'm really not sure he actually believes in God, but instead finds the Scriptures useful tools to advance his ideology that demands power for his particular group he identifies with. In that way, he is just like those he deplores.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provided excellent insight into a view point of theology that I have not encountered a lot in my life. The parts of this book that made the largest impact on me was Cone's discussion of spirituals. Even though, I knew much of the history his discussion of them made them even more powerful. Also, his discussion of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as being connected is an important piece of history that is usually overlooked. Finally, his stinging remarks about white theology usually ignoring poverty and racism is a chapter that I will not forget any time soon.

[K Kriesel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hadn't read James Cone for many years because I was intimidated by everything I had been told about him. His writing intimidated me, so I gradually worked up to it. But the moderate analysis of this book really surprised me!

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely interesting set of essays written in the 80's and 90's. Issues of white supremacy and environmental racism are called out here --- 30 years ago! And then are some cogent pieces on MLK and Malcolm X.

[Turiya · Rating 4 out of 5]

really good stuff, introduced me to black liberation theology and it explained how it can be used in the white church, the black church and ecological spaces

[Sharon Cronan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading these essays. They show the evolution of the author's theology. There is also a clear theological defense in the early essays against the white church protesting the need for the Black Power Movement which clearly reflects the protests we've heard recently against Black Lives Matter... clearly we haven't learned.
While feminist/womanist theology isn't even a glimmer during the early essays, this is acknowledged in the introduction, and considered in the later essays.
This book is a great look of a time of dramatic growth in theology. We see it from one perspective, but isn't that true of any book of essays?

[Drick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a collection of essays written by Cone between the late 1960's and mid 1990's, which gives both the essential elements of Cone's thought, while also showing its growth and expansion. I found the section on Martin Luther King, Jr, and Malcolm X to be most insightful as Cone shows how the two leaders shared many similar views but different approaches,a nd how current black theolgoy is indebted to both. For anyone wanting an introduction to Cone, this is a great book.

[Austin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seems to have lost some edge, but makes some creative theological claims about environmentalism, community justice, and what faith means to him in his later years.

[Chantee · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I love James Cone and this book compiled a fair amount of his major essays/ideas and he signed it for me so I love this book!

[Darrell Vandervort · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection of essays covering 40+ years. Especially poignant was the last essay on environmental racism. The essay, written in 1998, is still unfortunately accurate.

[Anthony Everett · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good liberation theology treatise with a classical European systematic approach. Got to live Dr. Cone no matter the flavor.

[Sade' · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Book, it took me through years of Black Theology and presented many imperative points oppression in general.