James Cone's SAID I WASN'T GONNA TELL NOBODY, A Review

James Cone/UTSNYC.edu

James Cone, a brilliant man who is considered to be the father of black theology, was born in Arkansas and, as a young child, attended Macedonia AME Church in Bearden.

Years later, just before the cusp of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, he had earned a Ph.D. and was teaching.

But as he himself pointed out, during those six years of postgraduate work, he had never read a single book by a black theologian.

So after a mentor encouraged him to write, he started to form what became the foundation for Black theology. Going home to Arkansas to begin working on his first book BLACK THEOLOGY AND BLACK POWER.

"I would walk around in the office of my brother's church, reading aloud what I had written, amazed at the clarity and power of the message and the beauty of the words coming out of me. I felt as though it wasn't me writing, but some spiritual force telling me what to write. I felt as if black folk in Bearden were talking to me, telling me to speak the truth... I even felt the spirits of my slave ancestors rising up inside me, whispering words of encouragement, telling me to be strong in black faith and not to be afraid as long as I knew I was writing God's truth."

He notes that "While Black Power is not the church, it is a profound experience of blackness that all black people are called to embrace. All this deconstruction and recovery prepared me for the task of construction: the making of a black theology defined by black suffering and struggle"

Cone explains that "Black theology's spirit did not come from Europe but from Africa, from American slavery and its auction blocks, from the spirituals and the blues. The Christocentric center of black theology was defined by the Black Christ who enabled black people to survive slavery, to overcome Jim Crow segregation, and to defeat the lynching tree."

As recent events in America and the Black Lives Matter movement have underscored, Cone makes crystal clear: "People cannot live without a sense of their own worth. It black liberation theology, I was expressing black self-worth, which was denied or ignored by white theology and its churches."

And Cone offers a spiritual dimension to the on-going struggle for justice. "The black church, despite its failures, gives black people a sense of worth. They know they are somebody because God loves them and Jesus died for them. No matter what white people do to them, they cannot take their worth away."

Garnered from an academic career that spanned over fifty years, Cone observes: "Whether theologians acknowledge it or not, all theologies begin with experience. Theologians from the Western theological tradition often regard their theology as universal, something that everyone must study. But no theology is universal... We are all particular human beings, finite creatures, and we create our understanding of God out of our experience. Hopefully, our own experience points to the universal, but it is never identical with it. For when we mistake our own talk about God with ultimate reality, we turn it into ideology."

Cone takes narrow-minded views of God to task. "How could white Christians, who also claim to believe that Jesus died on the cross to save them, turn around and put blacks on trees and kill them?... Part of the answer lay in the unfortunate fact, during the course of two thousands years of Christian history, that the cross as a symbol of salvation had been detached from the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings, the crucified people of history."

"If we want to understand what the crucifixion means for Americans today, we must view it through the lens of mutilated black bodies whose lives are destroyed in the criminal justice system. Jesus continues to be lynched before our eyes. He is crucified wherever people are tormented. That is why I say Christ is black."

Of his own upbringing's influence on his theological outlook, Cone says "It was my parents' faith that gave them the inner resources to transcend the brutality and see the real beauty in the tragedy of their lives. It is a mystery, a profound and deep mystery, how many African-Americans, even after two and a half centuries of slavery and another century of lynching and Jim Crow segregation, still refuse to allow themselves to be infected with hatred."

"'Black Lives Matter' is a partial realization of my hope. It is also my hope that whites, too, will be redeemed from their blindness and open their eyes to the terror of their deeds so they will know that we are all of one blood, brothers and sisters, literally and symbolically, and that what they do to blacks, they do to themselves."

Cone devotes a chapter of SAID I WASN'T GONNA TELL NOBODY, discussing another of his books, THE CROSS AND THE LYNCHING TREE. Cone includes a prayer, that is powerful in its vision of the future. "Let us hope, through God's grace and our struggle together, that we will be able to overcome our prejudices and the hate that separates us, and thereby empower people of all races and faiths to become the one people God created us to be."