Cone, James H. (1938–)

James H. Cone, Charles A. Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology, has taught at Union Theological Seminary (New York City) since 1969. Cone published Black Theology and Black Power in March of that same year. His first book introduced liberation theology into the academy and in church circles. Prior to the spring of 1969, theological conversations in the United States swung between liberal and conservative discussions about God. With Cone's creation of black theology of liberation, a whole new way of thinking about and doing theology arose. Cone's work crystallized the thought and ministry of black [Page 387]American pastors who had supported the call for Black Power in June 1966. Significantly, these African American preachers from diverse denominations (i.e., the National Committee of Negro Churchmen) moved their faith reflections and African American constituencies out of the civil rights struggle into the Black Power movement.

Indeed, the friction between these two streams of black people's resistance—civil rights integration versus black power self-determination;black suffering to convert white racists versus black folk's self-defense—demanded a reinterpretation of the North American religious landscape. How do pastors lead a congregation whose communities are occupied by the National Guard or threatened by local sheriffs in Ku Klux Klan groups? What should seminaries and divinity schools teach when urban America is burning literally blocks from their classrooms?

Cone returned to the Bible to hear a new “word from the Lord.”There he discovered the foundational mission and criteria of the historical Jesus as liberation of the economically poor, binding the wounds of the brokenhearted, and organizing to set oppressed people free. In the 1960s, the most marginalized communities in the United States were among black people. Jesus Christ, therefore, called on the church to radically do away with the old and forge an entirely new economic and political system of the United States for poor blacks and other downcasts. Thus, the emergence of a new (psychological and cultural) black individual self and revolutionary (political and economic) black communal selves fostered all sharing in collective control of wealth, equal political participation, and affirmation of cultural differences. By resurrecting the radical Jesus Christ in the particularity of black theology, Cone created a universal liberation theology for the least of these throughout the world.

Cone's family of origin had laid the basis for his future elaboration of liberation theology. Born in Arkansas in 1939, he grew up in a black, working-class church that offered black self-love, communal solidarity, and an acute theological understanding that white supremacist Christians contradicted the love and justice of Jesus Christ. How could Jesus embrace white Christians if they monopolized all resources and claimed white phenotype as the normative image of God? Cone's Black Theology and Black Power answers by calling white liberals and conservatives, as well as black churches, to conversion. The Bible's purpose is for the oppressed. Christ's presence is among the downtrodden. And God's heaven on earth belongs to the materially poor.

Cone's career has produced dozens of Ph.D. students, three generations of black theologians, including some of the third-generation womanist scholars in North America, and doctoral students from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. With roughly 10 honorary degrees and books translated into Dutch, German, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Malayalam (in India), and French, he is known globally as the father of black theology of liberation.

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