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I am going to try and blog again. All previous attempts have been more or less failures, thus we should all probably expect the same again. Nonetheless, I am going to give it one more shot.

I just finished reading James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power. This text was a seminal work in establishing the academic discourse known as Black Theology. I am currently on a quest to complete an exhaustive reading of the Conian corpus, hopefully completing a large chunk of this project during this spring quarter.

Let me offer a brief reflection in response to this text. The central contention of this book is that Black Power is God’s central message to 20th century America. This contention is unfolded through out the book. The crux of the argument is that Black Power is that movement which is speaking both to and for poor black people. In other words, Black Power is clearly on the side of the oppressed.

An important caveat on Cone’s understanding of blackness will be helpful for those not familiar with Cone. Blackness moves beyond skin pigmentation in Cone’s thought. Blackness functions as a symbol for the oppressed peoples and classes in America. This is intelligible because of the deep history of black suffering and oppression within American history. The Black community has historically been the oppressed and the suffering group, and thus blackness is an appropriate contextualized way of speaking about the American poor and oppressed.

An important aspect of Cone’s central contention, which struck me, was his willingness to identify God, in a very specific way, with a social/political movement such as Black Power. The theological basis for this implication of God in political struggle is rooted in the theological affirmation of the transcendence of God. In the past, I have taken this theological foundation to mean that God stays above the fray of the dominant political discourse, and instead embodies himself within the church community creating an alternative body politic. This becomes problematic because it creates a massive void within a world characterized by deep injustice and slavery. From the perspective of those outside of the Christian community an ominous silence is all that can be heard. And silence is the close friend of injustice. Thus a politic which stands over and against the dominant political discourse must in fact manifest itself within the dominant discourse as a voice of resistance. NO, NO, NO should be constantly heard from an appropriately Christian political stance. These loud and adamant “no’s” can only ever be heard from within the context of the dominant discourse.

Thus, in order for the transcendent God to truly stand over and against the dominant political structures in America, which purvey violence, injustice, and slavery, that God must enter into the depths of the struggle against the dominant political structures, represented in movements such as the Black Power movement. Retreat to the church is not an option. God is in the world and that is precisely the place to which we are called. God is before us in the world, not behind us in the church. Let us press on!