Drawing from the grammar of Chalcedon, Carter maintains that orthodox Christology must be understood as the life of YHWH being fully suffused with the life of the creature. This covenantal Christology “decenter[s] dialectic” by refusing “ontologized understandings of the person and work of Jesus”:
The problem with dialectical thinking and related forms of philosophical thinking is that they begin from closure and then have to negotiate passage through an “ugly broad ditch” between things that are closed . . . The covenant witnesses to the fact that for God, and only because of God’s identity as God for us, there is no ditch to be crossed by us. God has from the first bound Godself to us in God’s communion with Israel as a communion for the world. This is the inner logic of the identity of Jesus, the inner logic by which Israel is always already a mulatto people precisely in being YHWH’s people, and by which therefore Jesus himself as the Israel of God is Mulatto . . . He is miscegenated, and out of the miscegenation discloses the God of Israel as the God of the Gentiles too.179
Because God is on both sides of the covenant, that of the Creator and that of the creature, dialectical frameworks such as Buber’s I-Thou are “not radical enough.”180 While Cone has labored to transform the I-It relationship that whiteness maintains with the “other” to an I-Thou relationship in which the latter party is no longer objectified by the former, Carter contends that Cone’s theology is ultimately unsuccessful in dislodging the “I” as the normalizing side of the equation. Carter explains that this formulation is “really only a settlement with whiteness, not its overcoming.”181 While it is “alluring” because it carries with it the benefit of a “settlement with blackness,” a settlement with the “blackness that whiteness created” is only a settlement with whiteness “in the idiom of cultural blackness.”182 In that arrangement, the “I relates to the other but allows it a separate-but-equal status in relationship to itself as I.”183 Carter’s analysis suggests the theological exhaustion that comes from the intellectual calisthenics necessary for the creature to attempt to fill the position of pseudo-creator as the universal “I.” Carter suggests the redemption that can be found in the arms of “impure” relations:
The conclusion to be drawn from my analysis is this: black liberation theology’s refusal to see the I, and in fact all of creation, in gratuitous terms, that is, as a covenantal reality, leaves the problem of whiteness uncontested, insofar as at root it is a theological problem. As a theological problem, whiteness names the refusal to trade against race. It names the refusal to enter into dependent, promiscuous, and in short, “contaminated” relations that resist an idolatrously false purity. The blackness that whiteness creates names the same refusal, albeit cast as the photo negative that yet retains the problem. What is needed is a vision of Christian identity, then, that calls us to holy “impurity” and “promiscuity,” a vision that calls for race trading against the benefits of whiteness so as to enter into the miscegenized or mulattic existence of divinization (theosis).184
As fraught with risks as this process may be, no less than this is at stake in the existence of a new body politic imaging Trinitarian mutuality. While a Conian ontologizing of blackness may be a helpful step out of objectifying relational patterns, a relationality of vulnerability and mutual dependance cannot be envisioned within his framework alone. Carter’s Christology more satisfactorily points to the beautiful messiness of the Incarnation.
I contend that, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone’s sounding of several more hopeful and conciliatory notes about the relational possibilities within the body of Jesus Christ allows him to more satisfactorily frame his critique of whiteness. I read The Cross and the Lynching Tree as written, at least in part, in response to Carter’s work. Cone is well aware of the work of Carter, about whom he has said: “I have nothing but praise for this work by a young African American scholar who must be reckoned with.”185 While I am not suggesting that Carter’s work was the direct impetus for the authoring of The Cross and the Lynching Tree, it seems that there are several points within the text at which Cone implicitly responds to Carter’s critique of him.186 Since Cone offers The Cross and the Lynching Tree as a “culmination” of his career, he is no doubt interested in utilizing the utmost precision in his theological formulations as he further cements his legacy. While some of his prophetic fury has mellowed a bit, his articulation of the theological problem of whiteness has intensified. Perhaps counterintuitively, this increased theological precision allows him to utilize rhetoric that is less self-conscious.
One gets the strong impression in reading God of the Oppressed that, for all its fire, the book was in some sense an apologetic to make black faith more palatable to whites. While it made use of primarily African American ecclesial sources, it did so in a way that sought to explain their insights to those not versed in a “black” church tradition. While he explicitly disavows the necessity that his reflections be judged against “the theological treatises of Euro-American theologians,”187 he nonetheless labors extensively to explain to the reader “why black people” utilize certain language or cultural forms in worship.188 Rhetorical formulations such as “this is what black people are affirming when they say . . . ” are presumably unnecessary for the very people Cone is describing. References to ecstasy in worship as “making it difficult for an observer to know what is actually happening,” demonstrate an ambiguity in Cone’s method. On the one hand, he wants to say that his utilization of black church traditions is in no way answerable to the white academy and, on the other hand, engages in describing what is “actually happening” in the worship of non-white bodies (as if the truth of the experience is found in an externally verifiable reality other than what the worshippers are themselves experiencing).
While this suggests that Cone is bound to presuppositions that favor white conceptions of rationality, in these moments one also feels that Cone is standing between two traditions and attempting to “translate” from one to the other. This proclivity in his work demonstrates both the paradoxical task of the black intellectual in modernity and, even in his early work, a marked desire to build connection and intimacy with others. Much in the same way as I interpreted Cone’s use of dialectic as a way of maintaining epistemological humility, I interpret Cone’s anger at subjugation as a deep desire for human connection and affirmation of the divinely-granted dignity of the creature. Rather than being committed to either dialectic or apologetic, Cone is defending people so as to establish non-objectifying connections between them. What I have characterized as Cone’s “apologetic of palatability” can also be read as desire for mutual vulnerability. Even in God of the Oppressed, while stressing “self-determination,”189 his goal was that “the neighbor [be] an end in himself or herself and not a means to an end.190 This posture is a point of convergence between the works of Cone and Carter.
In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone asserts the similarity between the instrument of the torture and death of Jesus at the hands of the Romans and the instrument of the torture and death of thousands of African Americans at the hands of white Americans. He asks how it could be that lynching has been so quickly “forgotten” in our collective memory and how it could be that the leading theologians of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries could have escaped the obvious parallels between them in their theological ethics. His contention is that white Americans would prefer to forget lynching because of the obvious Christological consequences of such a recognition, while black Americans have attempted to bury the memory because it is simply too painful to endure.191 Cone again presents black existence as cruciform existence, which bears similarities to Carter’s iconographic ontology. Whereas in God of the Oppressed the path from bondage to liberation was self-determination alone, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree the hope is that the demon of racism can be exorcised in part by white recognition of complicity in sin and a communal re-telling of the story of liberation. I will demonstrate several ways in which Cone’s thought is moving in the direction of Carter’s.
First, he states that his purpose in writing is that the “credibility and promise of the Christian gospel” would be maintained and that the hope of “heal[ing] the wounds of racial