HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
On Spending the Day with Amos, i.e. Professor James H. Cone
So much of Christianity is a delusion, built as it is around power images and institutional claims to possess either an infallible Pope or an inerrant Bible. The Christian Church also traditionally operates out of a definition of life as something evil, fallen and corrupted by original sin, which it has used to enhance guilt and fear in the service of controlling behavior. From the days of the Emperor Constantine in the Fourth century, the Christian Church has frequently been a tool of the state enforcing cultural conformity. Drunk with its own claims to possess ultimate truth, the church has become a primary source in the dehumanization of men and women.
Our victims through the centuries were first the Jews. Anti-Semitism is a Christian gift to the world. One finds evidence of this in the New Testament, in the church “fathers,” in the Inquisition, in the leaders of the Reformation and ultimately when we Christians watched benignly as these seeds of violence, long nurtured in the Christian bosom, erupted in the murderous violence that we call the Holocaust, when six million Jews, along with others defined by the Nazi regime as sub-human, were exterminated in Hitler’s ovens.
Later in Christian history, Muslims felt the pain of Christian hostility. Vatican-sponsored and supported wars called “The Crusades” in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries put Muslims to death with impunity. The Crusades also planted in our world the hatred that today has given birth to an Islamic hostility toward the “Christian West,” expressed in the rising tide of terrorism in which we now live. How could a religious system, based on the teachings of Jesus, who called us to “love our enemies,” wind up doing these things? Must something in our humanity have to die to make this behavior possible?
Other victims of a dehumanizing Christianity throughout our history have been women, who were judged and defined as inadequate, dependent human beings; and gay and lesbian people, who, in our ignorance, were defined as either mentally sick or morally depraved people. The dominant members of Western civilization, who were overwhelmingly Christian, passed laws, designed both to control and to dehumanize those members of our society that they thought were either less than fully human or deviant.
We need to recall that the leadership of the Christian Church also led the way in the oppression of people of color. The Pope has owned slaves. It was in the Bible belt of the South that African enslavement was most enthusiastically practiced and defended with the blood of white southerners on the battlefields of Gettysburg, Antietam and Appomattox. When slavery finally died, segregation was born to replace it. In 1876 Republican Rutherford B. Hayes became president because of a deal worked out with the white leaders of four Southern states. They agreed to throw to him their state’s disputed electoral votes in exchange for his commitment to withdraw Union forces from the South and to allow the white South to make segregation legal and binding. Blacks were disenfranchised in that act and the lynching of black people without fear of retaliation became the activity of choice to keep the black population of the South under control. So many black people were hanged by mobs on southern trees that their bodies were referred to in black music as “strange fruit.” White Christian leaders participated in this reign of terror. Somehow Jesus was quoted by them as blessing this horror. The Christian life that Paul had once extolled as “the glorious liberty of the children of God” was now used by these followers of Jesus as the agent of a life-destroying hostility and oppression.
Through the centuries Christian theology, while making claims to triumphal power has remained insensitive to the victims of its own violence. Christians have been willing participants in oppression and generally have been unwilling to face the results of our own distortions. We have rather perfumed our violence so that it did not smell as bad as it was.
All of these things were forced into my consciousness just recently when I spent the day with James H. Cone, the Charles A. Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Seminary in New York City. His most recent book is entitled, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. This book asks why the white church remained silent while thousands of black citizens were lynched in the religious South and none of these murderers was ever arrested or convicted for these crimes. His earlier books, which included such titles as Black Theology and Black Power; God of the Oppressed, and Martin and Malcolm, had propelled him into the ranks of the premier theologians of our time. Professor Cone rooted his theological work in the lives of the victims of our society. He read the same Bible as his white oppressors, but his focus was on the biblical stories of the plight of the marginalized. God, he noticed, had been on the side of the slaves, not the Egyptians. He read Jesus’ parable of the judgment, in which the ultimate test of the Christian life was not what one believed, but how one acted. Christianity, that parable proclaims, is present when love is unhindered toward those defined as “the least of these,” those whom society defines as lacking in ultimate value. Instead of debating the morality of birth control and abortion, he wanted Christians to be aware of how those who are already born are treated. He listened to the parable of the Good Samaritan, which defined the “neighbor” we are commanded to love to include those who elicit from us our deepest prejudices and our most virulent fears. Though well trained in classical theology (his PhD dissertation at Northwestern University was on the work of Karl Barth), James Cone began to ask questions that classical theology had never thought to ask, and in the process he forced classical theology to face its own irrelevance. “What could Karl Barth possibly mean for black students,” Dr. Cone asked, “who had come from the cotton fields of Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, seeking to change the structure of their lives in a society that had defined blacks as non-beings?”
So the starting place for his theology came out of his own biography. He was born in 1938 in Fordyce, Arkansas. He was raised in a rural, segregated part of that state, which defined people of color as inferior, even calling them less than human. He lived in the fear that powerless people always experience. The deck was stacked against him. When violated, he could not defend himself; when rejected by the symbols of a society that circumscribed what he was allowed to do within very limited boundaries, his only recourse was to absorb it. Public water fountains, public restrooms, public libraries, public parks and public schools were not available to him. If he dared to challenge any of these practices the law would not defend him. Attempts to change his world were met with vigilante administered “justice.” His segregated school compromised his ability to learn, stocked, as it was, with inferior books and teachers trained in inferior colleges. His one bulwark against this culturally-imposed, debilitating self-image was his parents, who placed a cocoon of love around him. This cocoon was also supported by his attendance at the Macedonia African Methodist-Episcopal (AME) Church, which proclaimed to him the infinite love of God and defined him as a precious child of God.
Nonetheless in his inadequate school, he exhibited an intelligence and ability to learn that set him apart. For college he attended Philander Smith, a small, “black only” Little Rock institution, graduating in 1958. Then, seeking a career as a pastor, he gained admission to Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Illinois from which he received his divinity degree in 1961. Seminary was his first step out of his oppressive society. Having gained recognition as one with significant intellectual gifts, he went on to Northwestern University to achieve a Master’s degree in 1963 and a PhD in 1965. His ability to write was hampered, he said, by his lack of training in proper grammar, proper punctuation and the extensive vocabulary that comes with expanded experience. Segregation was still preventing him from communicating what he grasped intellectually quite well. Armed with his new PhD, he discovered that his teaching opportunities were still circumscribed by the same forces that had always defined him as inferior. His only job offer was to teach at Philander Smith. In 1970, he moved away a second time to teach in Adrian College in Michigan. From there Union Seminary, in an act of brilliance, reached into this tiny midwestern school to tap him for its chair in Systematic Theology.
At Union Seminary, James Cone turned the theological paradigm upside down. He began his work, not with some obscure doctrine of God, but with the life he had lived as a victim inside the Christian world. He listened to the anger in the Civil Rights Movement; it was his anger. He sought to understand the insights of a black leader like Malcolm X, who articulated that anger. He was not impressed with theologians as eminent as Reinhold Niebuhr, who never seemed to see the black struggle as a Christian concern or even to engage the reality of lynching. He stated that Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man “the devil.” He had little time for this false Christianity of oppression and proceeded to develop his call for the Christian Church to place itself, humbly and obediently at the side of those who had heretofore been its victims. He confronted institutional Christianity, which placed its own wealth and status ahead of challenging a debilitating racism. Above all, he dared to be a prophetic voice of judgment within Christianity whenever it put its institutional well-being ahead of its duty to break the bonds of oppression. In doing these things, he revealed a new vision of God.
One cannot hide inside religious clichés in the presence of this man of God. Like the prophet Amos, he is an uncomfortable presence to the religious establishment, but his message is correct. He cannot be dismissed in the language of the 1960’s, as a “communist” or a liberal as people sought to do. James Cone is the voice of authentic Christianity, calling us into a Christian future. We will fail to listen to him at our own peril.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
William P. Wright, Jr., via the Internet, writes:
Question:
It is a great relief to find you in today's world and to know someone else feels as I do about many things. You have helped me to see that real Christianity need not die to accommodate the reality in which the human race finds itself living today. Since I was born, some 80 years ago, I have been attending the First Baptist Church in my home town, first as a child and now as a mature (hopefully not yet senile) adult. I have seen pastors come and go, sung the hymns and spoken the words of the first century many times and wondered if I were the only person who was grasping to emulate Christ in my life amid a confusing and contradictory belief system. It came to a head when I was asked to dedicate a private cemetery on a Texas ranch for dear friends. How do you speak with integrity of belief when your audience is seemingly traditional and literal? This is what I said:
“We are gathered here to consecrate this ground; this special place; a place for meditation, inspiration and for remembrance. Years ago, I was walking in the place here they called the orchard because that was what it was, an apple orchard tended by my friend’s grandfather. The apples he grew, he peddled far and wide to support his family during hard times. My wife was with me that day and she bent and picked up a piece of flint that her ever watchful eyes had observed. It was proof of the presence of human activity at this place hundreds, perhaps thousands of years before.
“More recently, the name of that mountain south of us, Mitre Peak, marked this as a special place. It suggested the passage of Spanish explorers for whom it was both a symbol of a bishop’s hat and of the church which served as a guide for the journey. Another reason that this is a special place is that behind us is a spring that produces hundreds of gallons of water in this Chihuahuan Desert. Water is life. There is no life without it. So for these thousands of years the spring has been there and, because it was, life was here also and still is.
“Today, however, we are reminded that there is also death here. Death is everywhere. We think of death because it is part of life and those of us gathered here are alive. Mountains, however, also die. Mitre Peak, which looks so strong and eternal, is in the midst of its life cycle just as we are. Millennia from now it will be dissolved by the inexorable forces of erosion, wind, rain, changes of temperature and other processes will carry its bulk to the sea where it will be reconstituted as the sea bed. Perhaps someday it will once again become a mountain. That is the eternal cycle of existence of which we are but a miniscule yet important part.
“It is fitting that we think upon these things as we visit this place where our friends and relatives, have passed this life and have begun another phase in this cycle of existence. They still exist, but in ways our limited intelligence cannot imagine. Even as their bodies are re-constituted into their original minerals and elements and then again into plants and animals they are still with us when we come here.
“We meditate on their lives and on the lives of those we did not know who came before us. It is in hallowed ground like this that history is recorded and endures. We feel the unbroken chain that ties our earliest ancestors to us for all time. We relive the joys of our association with them in life and we honor those lives with our remembrance. We can learn from their successes and be warned by their failures and just as those ancient travelers, who established their location from sighting Mitre Peak, we can recast our own directions by reflecting on the lives of those who are buried here.
“God, we know you as the great architect of this universe. Your energy is transformed in your laboratory of stars into the elements that make visible the world we see and know. Understand that, we know you are with us in every nook and cranny of existence, in the cells of our body, in the dirt beneath our feet, in the birds and animals and in everything that is. In a very real way, we are made from your energy - therefore in your image.
“Let us leave today with that knowledge and with the assurance that we, just as those who are honored here, are eternal. As we visit this place let us be reminded of that and let it give us peace and direction for our lives.”
Answer:
Dear Bill,
Thank you for sending me your words at the dedication of a cemetery. You have rightly discerned the fact of human connectedness, not only with those we love, but with those who have formed the chain of life that has bridged the years of human history.
You have also plumbed the depths of human meaning and discovered anew that life is much more than simply the passage of time.
My study of human origins informs me that the universe is somewhere between 13.7 and 13.8 billion years old. It tells me that everything is made of star dust. It tells me that out of matter life has flowed and out of life consciousness has emerged. The miracle of humanity is discovered when we recognize that out of consciousness, self-consciousness has appeared.
Everything that I know about evolution tells me that it is an ongoing, never ending process. For out of self-consciousness, a universal consciousness is being born today and human divisions are being transcended. For Paul that was the very nature of the Christ experience. “In Christ,” he noted, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor free.” Human oneness continues as we realize that in Christ there is also neither black nor white, Catholic nor Protestant, gay nor straight, Jew nor Muslim, capitalist nor communist. To see barriers fade is scary to some people because barriers protect us from fear. As the universal consciousness enfolds us, however, the barriers will inevitably disappear and oneness - both human oneness and the oneness of the human with the natural world will become clear.
Ultimately, this will also cause us to redefine God. God will no longer be understood as a supernatural being, who invades the world miraculously from somewhere outside it. God will rather be perceived as the Source of Life calling us to live fully, the Source of Love freeing us to love wastefully and as the Ground of Being empowering us to be all that each of us can be. That is the God presence that I find in Jesus and that is why he calls me to step beyond even the boundaries of religion. Increasingly, God is for me a verb to be lived and not a noun to be defined.
You seem to be on a similar journey. I feel privileged to have you as a fellow pilgrim. Walk in faith!
~John Shelby Spong
Announcements
“Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith”
― Paul Tillich
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