Cone and Carter explicitly share the same dogmatic focus: Christology. While Cone names Christology “the starting point for Christian thinking about God,”143 Carter recognizes that Christology is the “capstone of Christian thought”144 and the “theological site of contestation, the site at which to engage modern racial reasoning.”145 Carter reads Cone’s early phase as suggesting “a Christology that deals with the humanity of Jesus as a Jew.”146 Cone explains that “[t]he Jesus about whom I speak . . . is not primarily the one of Nicea and Chalcedon, nor of Luther, Calvin, and Barth . . . For christological reflections, I turn to the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul.”147 It is this Jesus who is “the Jesus of . . . the Spirituals and Gospel Music, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King Jr.” The Jesus of “the biblical and black traditions” is “not a theological concept but a liberating presence.”
Whereas Carter fills out Cone’s Christology by focusing on the particular body of Jesus of Nazareth as the ground for the body politic, Cone’s insights into the particularity of Jesus do not sufficiently present Christ’s Jewish identity as encompassing, connecting, and reshaping all identity. Christ’s Jewish identity as the liberator of the oppressed and as an impoverished member of a first-century minority (as Howard Thurman called attention to in 1949148), means little more for Cone than that he is the God of oppressed people groups everywhere, particularly African Americans. Cone does not explore how it could be that the particularity of Jesus’ body redeems all particularities while simultaneously decentering European particularity-as-universality. Carter improvises beyond Cone in this regard, pointing toward a Christology of miscegenation that is both more radical than Cone’s and more sufficient in decentering whiteness as orienting anthropological metanarrative.149
Carter present a scandalous “impure” confluence of particularities centered upon the particularity of the body of Jesus of Nazareth as the path forward out of the strictures of race and the white hegemony that created them. For his part, Cone has difficulty seeing beyond his recognition that the black struggle is a more authentic representation of the incarnation of the Suffering Servant than is the triumphalist rhetoric often characteristic of both white liberalism and orthodoxy. This leaves Cone with the risky proposal that “black people” are “God’s Suffering Servant” for the “liberation of humanity.”150 While it is not my intent to debate the veracity of such a hermeneutical judgment, it does raise the question of the effects of “freezing” the status of “oppressed” and “oppressor” along racialized lines. If racialized identity is a product of the hierarchical evaluative scale of whiteness, then does not assigning divine election based upon such problematic ontological markers as race or socioeconomic status serve to reconfirm the identity categories of whiteness? At this point, Milbank’s work could offer a salient reminder that theology cannot simply sanctify the conclusions of sociology. Cone lays out a narrative of liberation from material oppression as the sole interpretative framework within which to exegete the Scriptures:
The hermeneutical principle for an exegesis of the Scriptures is the revelation of God in Christ as the Liberator of the oppressed from social oppression and to political struggle, wherein the poor recognize that their fight against poverty and injustice is not only consistent with the gospel but is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ the Liberator, the helper and the healer of the wounded, is the point of departure for valid exegesis of the Scriptures from a Christian perspective. Any starting point that ignores God in Christ as the Liberator of the oppressed or that makes salvation as liberation secondary is ipso facto invalid and thus heretical.151
While social liberation is no doubt an indispensable theme within the narrative of divine salvation, and while this motif has often been ignored within white Western theology, to narrow the scope of God’s work in the world to competing hermeneutical frameworks is a distinctly modern technique refined in the white academy. This exegetical tendency is what Carter refers to as the “oppositional struggle for the right to be hegemon.”152 A polity in which “otherness” is the morally preferable position will be a polity in which more people will find ever new categories by which to define themselves as “other.” As society increasingly splinters into competing groups staking this claim, it may relativize recognition of the evils perpetrated against those most often historically objectified. The problem of race, as the principal anthropological distortion in the history of the West, may not receive the careful and unique attention it requires.
A polity ordered around only a politics of identity cannot help but progress to an ever-increasing social splintering in which the only enemy is hegemony qua hegemony. Both the Christological category of Lordship153 and a particular social ground of being are excluded in such a framework. “Unity” is this modern liberal polity is ordered around an assimilationist universality that Carter calls whiteness. This is why Carter’s focus on the Jewishness of Jesus Christ as the ground for the body politic is so important and is preferable to Cone’s Christological politics of the oppressed.
Cone’s own hermeneutic often serves to relativize his conclusions. He states that we must recognize, as did Imamu Baraka, that “there is no objective anything,” to which Cone adds, “least of all theology.”154 He recognizes the situatedness of all ethical and theological inquiry and utilizes several proponents of the “sociology of knowledge” school to insist upon recognition of “the social context of theology.”155 While this important insight should not be ignored, the significance for my current purposes is that this trajectory leaves him with only one option: “The dissimilarity between Black Theology and white theology lies at the point of each having different mental grids which account for their different approaches to the gospel. I believe that the social a priori of Black Theology is closer to the axiological perspective of biblical revelation.”156 While this is arguably true, this relativizing trajectory places the burden of proof within sociological disciplinary confines and outside the realm of theology. In other words, theology here becomes only a Tillichian “answering discipline.”
If the truth of the biblical story is God’s liberation of the oppressed, then the social a priori of oppressors excludes the possibility of their hearing and seeing the truth of divine presence, because the conceptual universe of their thought contradicts the story of divine liberation. Only the poor and the weak have the axiological grid necessary for the hearing and the doing of the divine will disclosed in their midst . . . Since the gospel is liberation from bondage, and since the poor are obvious victims of oppression because of the inordinate power of the rich, it is clear that the poor have little to lose and everything to gain from Jesus Christ’s presence in history . . . This difference in socioeconomic status between the rich and the poor affected the way in which each responded to Jesus.157
Cone’s ontological freezing of the “difference in socioeconomic status” is further complicated by the fact that Cone calls “black people” “God’s poor people.”158 In like terms, he names “the oppressed” “God’s elect people.”159 And yet he maintains that “poverty is a contrived phenomenon, traceable to the rich and the powerful in this world” and that knowledge of this reality “requires that the poor practice political activity against the social and economic structure that makes them poor.”160 If poverty is described, I believe rightly so, as a “contrived phenomenon” perpetrated by the rich and powerful upon those who must struggle against it, would not that struggle, according to Cone’s logic, entail a rejection of the very ontological designation by which the poor receive divine election? In a similar vein, if “poor,” “black,” and “oppressed” are used by Cone as functionally synonymous, would not overcoming poverty and oppression be an exercise in self-hatred as one seeks to overcome