James Cone (1938 - 2018)

Fri Aug 05, 1938

Image

Image: **

James Hal Cone, born on this day in 1938, was an American theologian known for his advocacy of black liberation theology, authoring texts such as “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” (2011) and “God of the Oppressed” (1975).

His 1969 work “Black Theology and Black Power” provided a new way to comprehensively define the distinctiveness of theology in the black church.

On the text, Cone stated “This book was my initial attempt to identify liberation as the heart of the Christian gospel and blackness as the primary mode of God’s presence. I wanted to speak on behalf of the voiceless black masses in the name of Jesus whose gospel I believed had been greatly distorted by the preaching and the theology of white churches.”

After receiving his doctorate, Cone taught theology and religion at Philander Smith College and Adrian College. He later taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, which had not accepted a black student into its doctoral program since its founding in 1836. Cone supervised over 40 black doctoral students while teaching there.

“Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”

- James Cone