The Weight of His Words
Tyler Davis reflects on James Cone’s encounter with Latin American Liberation Theology
Iconic photo of James Cone at the pulpit delivering the annual Rall Lectures in the Chapel of the Unnamed Faithful at his alma mater, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois, 1969. Source: Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The following draws from collaborative research conducted by Tyler B. Davis and Matthew M. Harris on James Cone’s Third World theology, presented as “‘In the Hope That They Can Make Their Own Future’: James H. Cone and the Third World,” Journal of Africana Religions, Vol. 7, No. 2 (July 2019): 189-212.
From the pulpit of the Riverside Church in New York City at the 2018 memorial service for Dr. James H. Cone, Raphael Warnock fittingly invoked the book of Amos: “the land is not able to bear all his words” (Amos 7:10).
Reminding listeners of Cone’s unrelenting commitment to liberation, the prophetic text highlighted the weight of Cone’s words, of their fundamental theological challenge to racial regimes and unjust social arrangements in the United States.
But Warnock’s message was fitting for another, often less appreciated reason. The message also evoked the way Cone’s theology was “unbearable” in this land precisely because his Black liberation theology refused to be enclosed by national borders, as it was shaped in and through transnational relationships and dialogue. As Cone often wrote, his work was informed by his lived experiences and collaboration with people struggling for freedom in other places and on other lands.
“It is one thing to read books about poor people,” Cone reflected in Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody, “but another to meet them where they live and struggle, sharing stories, talking about justice and life’s ultimate meaning with confidence, in the hope that they can make their own future.”1
1. James H. Cone, Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 116.
Letter from James Cone to Theo Witvliet written in January of 1987 about Witvliet’s book and Cone’s intention to publish a major study of Third World Theology. Courtesy of Professor Witvliet
Cone’s encounter with Latin American theology exemplifies the profound role transnational engagement played in expanding his theological vision of a new heaven and new earth. This encounter involved a number of critical moments, including a symposium in Geneva, Switzerland in May of 1973 at the World Council of Churches (WCC) that facilitated an extended dialogue between Black and Latin American liberation theology. Over the course of four days, Cone discussed issues in liberation theology with Hugo Assmann and Paulo Freire of Brazil, and Eduardo Bodipo Malumba of Nigeria, in addition to the many European theologians in attendance. The conversations were strained, however, characterized in terms of “heated debates,” “open confrontation,” and, at times, “awkward silence” by Archie LeMone of the United States. Assmann summarized the difficulties as “incommunication.” Cone was quick to point out, however, that the primary lack of communication took place not between US Black and Latin American theologians but between First- and Third-World Theologians, as European theologians were forced to reckon with the irruption of theology in Europe from the underside of history. José Míguez Bonino of Argentina would later recall that this early symposium was a turning point in the discipline, initiating a short but intense era of radical polarization that marked the arrival of liberation theology.2
2. Archie LeMone, “When Traditional Theology Meets Black and Liberation,” Christianity and Crisis, vol. 33, no. 15 (September, 17, 1973): 177-178; Hugo Assmann, “Black Theology and Latin American Theology: Excerpts from a Symposium of the World Council of Churches” in Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966-1979, eds. Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979), 512-13; José Míguez Bonino, “Reading Jürgen Moltmann from Latin America,” The Asbury Theological Journal, vol. 55, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 106.
From right to left: Hugo Assmann, Paulo Freire, James Cone, Eduardo Bodipo Malumba at a WCC conference in Geneva, May 1973. Courtesy of James Cone. Source: James D. Kirylo, Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 197.
While the symposium provided an occasion for Cone and Freire to develop a mutual bond of admiration (Freire would later write the forward to the 1986 edition of Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation3), there was still incommunication between Latin American and Black liberation theology, particularly around the issue of the place of race and class in analyzing the social conditions of oppression.
Cone was weary that the "class-first" approach taken by many early Latin American liberation theologians came at the expense of appreciating the power of racism in defining structures of oppression, and this concern was exacerbated by his experience at the first Theology in the Americas conference convened by Chilean priest Father Sergio Torres and others in Detroit, Michigan in 1975. This conference was notoriously contentious. Although it had the laudable goal of introducing US Christians to Latin American liberation theology, the conference framing marginalized homegrown Black liberation and feminist theology in the US by implying that authentic emancipatory theology must be imported from elsewhere. The error was routed through the question of the significance of racism and class in social analysis, which resulted in certain Black theologians promoting a reactionary position with respect to class and political economy.
Through sustained dialogue with Latin American liberationists—contentious conferences notwithstanding—Cone came to articulate the necessity of integrating class and race in his social analysis. In For My People, he urgently writes that “Black theology would incorporate class analysis into its perspective or it would become a justification of middle-class interests at the expense of the Black poor.”4
The fruit of the engagements at what would be known as The Detroit I Conference can be discerned in Cone’s comments at The Black Theology Project of 1977. The project was among the networks established by the Detroit conference and was where the influence of Cone’s relationships and participation in international conversations became concretized. Here, he drew from the wells of the Black radical tradition to cast an expansive vision of liberation that is attentive to conditions of international economic exploitation alongside regimes of race.
3. For an extended discussion, see Cone’s reflections on his relationship to Freire in an interview in James D. Kirylo’s Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2011), 195-212.↩
4. Cone, For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984), 94-95.↩
Benjamin Chavis, Charles S. Spivey, Muhammad Kenyatta, Sister M. Shawn Copeland, and Gayraud S. Wilmore, “MESSAGE TO THE BLACK CHURCH AND COMMUNITY (Drafted and Adopted by the National Conference of the Black Theology Project, Atlanta, August 1977.).” CrossCurrents, vol. 27, no. 2, (Summer 1977), p. 140. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24458314.
The full history of Cone’s transhemispheric engagement with Latin American intellectuals, clergy, and activists cannot be recounted here. Yet, one observation I’d like to make is how Cone’s narration of the deepening of his theology is inseparable from naming the people with whom he was in conversation and the places in which these conversations took place. Cone pays attention, unwaveringly, to the where and the who of theological work. In the Americas, this where includes Trinidad, Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, and Brazil. The whos include many different Latin American organizers, clergy, and theologians—people like Rubem Alves of Brazil and Beatriz Melano Couch of Argentina.
Especially notable is Fr. Sergio Torres, an exiled priest from Chile, who Cone credited with sustaining and moving “dialogue to a much deeper level” among US Black, Latin American, and other liberation theologians at meetings held by Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT) and Theology in the Americas.5 Regarding Gustavo Gutiérrez, Cone affirms that, after co-teaching a course in 1976, “we deepened our exchange with each other and with other religious thinkers in [EATWOT].” Their relationship flourished as a model of the practice and promise of transnational theological solidarity: “We visited each other’s continents, talked about our similarities and differences, and expanded our knowledge of racism, classism, sexism, and cultural exploitation.”6
5. Cone, “Introduction to Part VI: Black Theology and Third World Theologies,” Black Theology: A Documentary History, 452-453.↩
6. Cone, Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody, 115.
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From left to right: James Cone, visiting professors Dorothee Soelle, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Christopher Morse (doctoral student), and Jürgen Moltmann at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, early 1970s. Source: Jürgen Moltmann, A Broad Place: An Autobiography (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 22.
Sergio Arce of Cuba also played a crucial role in shaping these developments at conferences in Cuba and Mexico City, particularly as he refused “to minimize the sickness of racism” in social analysis.7 Just as significant, Cone credits his time and relationships in Latin America with raising his consciousness of gender and patriarchal oppression. At a meeting in Mexico City in October of 1977, Cuban theologian Dora Valentín leveled a sharp critique of the masculinism of early liberation theology. About this occasion, Cone writes, “No one could question Valentin’s commitment to class analysis, but she insisted that such an analysis was inadequate without combining it with racism and sexism. She asked her Latin American brothers why none of their sisters had been invited to participate in the discussion.”8
That this land could not bear Cone’s words, as Warnock eulogized, is a testimony to the weight of these transnational relationships and struggles. Alongside the central influence of the Black church and community, Cone’s theology was shaped by crossing oceans and borders to share stories and life with people from the Third World in an effort to collectively articulate a theology of true liberation.
It is useful, then, to conclude with Paulo Freire’s remark at the Geneva symposium that James Cone was “a Third World man.”9 Freire’s comment is, to be sure, an acknowledgment of the fact that Cone was born and raised in the First World but as a Black person faced conditions of oppression similar to those in the Third World. Furthermore, it is also a description of Cone’s commitments, that is, the way his insurgent theology exceeded oppressive conditions and was accountable to other people striving for a just world.
7. Cone, “Introduction,” 453. For a retrieval of Sergio Arce’s theology and his presence in these dialogues, see Ary Fernández-Albán, Decolonizing Theology in Revolution: A Critical Retrieval of Sergio Arce’s Theological Thought (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), esp. 49, 67-68.↩
8. Cone, “Introduction to Part V: Black Theology and Black Women,” Black Theology: A Documentary History, 364. This experience anticipates the critical intervention of womanist theology, as Cone notes: “It is one thing...to be challenged by women from a different cultural and political context, and quite another to hear the cry of pain from women in one’s own community.”↩
9. See Freire’s comments in “Black Theology and Latin American Liberation Theology: Excerpts from a Symposium of the World Council of Churches,” 511.↩
RELATED
Audio and transcripts of public lectures delivered by James Cone are available at the Princeton Theological Seminary Media Archive:
“Christian Faith and Political Practice,” Theological Student Fellowship Forum, 1980
“Black Theology and Third World Theologies,” Association of Black Seminarians, Forum for Politics and Ethics, 1984
“Martin and Malcolm on Nonviolence and Violence,” Martin Luther King, Jr. Lectures, 1999