In the first few months of the pandemic, cloistered on a hill in Maine and awaiting my first child’s birth, I read through a number of significant works by Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Latinx authors in theory and theology. I was curious how “place” — as a theoretical category and the fundamental matrix of real life and relationships — functioned in their work and imaginations. I wrote out a number of short essays summarizing what I saw in what I read. I am grateful share them here as part of my ongoing dialogue in the praxis for liberation. Thank you for being part of this community and conversation!
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As the groundbreaking intellect behind Black liberation theology, James Cone energetically argued that all theology is historically and socially contextualized and that every context must be read through the lens of power imbalance. In the United States, social reality is created and dictated by the power of white supremacy. For Cone, from the Exodus to the Incarnation and through each era of racialized America, God is socio-historically present among the oppressed for their liberation. Theological reflection is thus today made possible and faithful in and through the condition of Black people’s oppression.
Cone developed these ideas in a string of groundbreaking works published over five decades. Here I’m just closely reading two of his books—God of the Oppressed, in which his theology of liberation found its most mature articulation, and Cone’s sensitive late-career thought expressed in The Cross and the Lynching Tree.
Cone is not concerned with place explicitly. Rather I am interested in the ways that place functions sub-textually in the work of a scholar highly attuned to sociality. True to method, Cone always contextualizes himself and does so by reference to the places of his childhood where his dispositions toward God and the world were formed:
“I was born in Fordyce, Arkansas, a small town about sixty miles southwest of Little Rock. My parents moved to Bearden, fourteen miles from Fordyce, when I was a year old. In Bearden, a small community with approximately eight hundred whites and four hundred blacks, two important realities shaped my consciousness: the black Church experience and the sociopolitical significance of white people.”
Cone sets Bearden’s white racism in dialectical tension with the black religious imagination. At Macedonia A.M.E. where his family worshiped, he internalized the hopes and rhythms of Black Christianity: its “prayer, song, and sermon” that “reassured the people of God’s concern for their well-being and the divine will to bring them safely home.” Appropriate to the geographical and spiritual natures of their oppression, home functioned in two ways. It was “heaven—that ‘otherworldly’ reality beyond the reach of the dreadful limitations of this world.” But also, in the subversive double entendres of slave spirituals and the blues, an escape to the North or some other place free from the clutch of white people who “did everything within their power to define black reality, to tell us who we were—and their definition, of course, extended no further than their social, political, and economic interests.”
To illustrate the challenges of relating Jesus to a social situation and the contextual particularities of the Christian theological tradition, Cone references Tertullian’s classic question, “What…has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” In his critique of ahistorical theology that pretends to universality, Cone dismisses the specifics while advancing the model as the means of revealing the significance of the gospel today:
“We have another concern and thus must rephrase that question in the light of our cultural history, asking: ‘What has Africa to do with Jerusalem, and what difference does Jesus make for African people oppressed in North America?’….If our theological vocation emerges out of the matrix of that vision, then we will not be limited to Euro-American definitions of theology.”
Both cases illustrate a function of place in the development of vernacular cultural. A place name, as a symbol for the complex social dynamics and stories of a particular place, functions heuristically. In this passage, Athens represents rational philosophy; Jerusalem, theological or covenantal faith. Africa signals blackness, displacement, racial oppression; while North America stands for racial displacement and oppression. Without unpacking the idea, Cone deftly illustrates the placially representable and differentiated nature of societies. As with analysis, so also with the act of transforming social reality. For Cone, theology is only meaningful so far as it is “translated into theological praxis, that is, the Church living in the world on the basis of what it proclaims.” Praxis is thus emplaced action upon the structured webs of human relationships which are themselves emplaced.
In God of the Oppressed, Cone is insistently materialist. A theology which does not reflect and lead to action upon material reality is useless. “Theologians must ask,” he writes, “‘What is the connection between dominant material relations and the ruling theological ideas in a given society?’” Later, he says “it is material reality (social, economic, and political existence with the poor) that makes for the proper understanding of spiritual reality.” Like Marx, despite thick elicitations of the social, Cone rarely makes the turn to place in his early work. However, in The Cross he writes, “Blacks and whites are bound together in Christ by their brutal and beautiful encounter in this land,” acknowledging that the particularity of these relations is derived from their geographical coincidence.
Cone goes on to reflect in The Cross & the Lynching Tree on the function of places for freedom and oppression. First, he shows how places held apart for Black life allowed Black communities to experience and develop a culture of freedom.
“I remember hearing the blues erupt from the juke joints, especially at ‘Sam’s Place’…. To be able to laugh, to say what’s on one’s mind, expressing feelings of disgust and rage, was liberating for blacks, who usually remained silent, hat in hand and head bowed in the presence of whites.”
Similarly, Black churches were a place of respite, humanity, and full expression.
“It is only when we are within the walls of our churches that we can wholly be ourselves, that we keep alive a sense of our personalities in relation to the total world in which we live, that we maintain a quite and constant communion with all that is deepest in us.”
It was within the place formed by the four walls of those buildings, and the social dynamic enabled by their ability to operate outside “the presence of whites,” that a subaltern people could freely carve out a counter-culture of belonging. Conversely, outside of the safety of Black cultural places, Black life was tenuous and threatened by violence. Cone tells a place-thick story of the lynching of Emmett Till. “He was so young; only fourteen—just a child from Chicago, not really aware of the etiquette of Jim Crow culture in Mississippi and what it could mean if he failed to observe the ‘ways of white folk.’” Again we are asked to bear witness to the hegemonic liturgies inscribed in places by whiteness and the threat posed to dark bodies who enter such places unawares.
Consistent with most first-wave liberation theology, Cone uses “history” as shorthand for the this-worldly actions of God in contradiction to otherworldly models of salvation that overlook human struggle and social oppression within mortal life. Nevertheless, he sees that the historical relevance of Jesus’ resurrection “introduces a factor” that roots the relevance of salvation squarely in the ground.
“The difference is not that we are taken out of history while living on earth—that would be an opiate. Rather, it is a difference that plants our being firmly in history for struggle, because we know that death is not the goal of history.”
As with Fanon, time is recaptured from the imagination of whiteness for the goals of the oppressed. Cone offers us resources to affirm how God’s ongoing creative and atoning work of making “earth as it is in heaven”—of cultivating places of shalom—is practiced in the history of this world to the extent history has been reclaimed from the techno-capitalist progress time celebrated by whiteness.
Cone’s work demonstrates that the struggle for liberation is made possible because of God’s embodied, historical participation in places of violence. Through the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, God in Jesus entered the fray of a violent world and bore the suffering of those marginalized by that violence in his body:
“The reality and depth of God’s presence in human suffering is revealed not only in Jesus’ active struggle against suffering during his ministry but especially in his death on the cross. The cross of Jesus reveals the extent of God’s involvement in the suffering of the weak. God is not merely sympathetic with the social pain of the poor but becomes totally identified with them in their agony and pain. The pain of the oppressed is God’s pain, for God takes their suffering as Gods own, thereby freeing them from its ultimate control of their lives.” 161
The cross becomes the penultimate reordering of place: heaven to earth, Empire of Rome to Kingdom of God, spaces of enmity to community of creation. Because of God’s ongoing participation in place and time among the oppressed, Cone perceives how “the lynching tree is a metaphor for white America’s crucifixion of black people. It is the window that best reveals the religious meaning of the cross in our land.”
For him, both the cross and the lynching tree represent a union of creation and divinity in time and place. Creation and divinity find union as political history and eschatological hope merge (the horizontal axis). They become one in place as heaven comes to earth (the vertical axis). And so he declares,
“the transcendent and the immanent, heaven and earth, must be held together in critical, dialectical tension, each one correcting the limits of the other. The gospel is in the world, but it is not of the world; that is, it can be seen in the black freedom movement, but it is much more than what we see in our struggles for justice.”
Cone is uncovering a theology that provides for a view of place that breathes the holy into soil, drawing us into the teleological mission of shalom while rooting our praxis in the harsh beauties of human history and present. In this renewal, creation does not dissolved into a spiritualized plane of Platonic forms but is liberated for enfleshed communion. In the crucified body of God on a hill in Palestine and in lynched Black bodies hanging from Southern trees, the whole earth is filled with God’s glory not because suffering is redemptive to some divine economy, but because God manifests in solidarity as a fellow embodied and implaced sufferer to defeat the powers of fear, violence, and death.