Presbyterion 45/1 (Spring 2019): 153–159 REVIEW ESSAY A RHETORIC OF REVOLUTION: EVALUATING THE LEGACY OF LIBERATION THEOLOGY Andrew C. Stout* The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, by LILIAN CALLES BARGER. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 392. 978-0190695392 Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian, by JAMES H. CONE. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018. Pp. 192. ISBN 978-1626983021 Last year saw the passing of one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive and chal- lenging theological voices. When James Cone died in April 2018, tributes poured in for the father of black liberation theology. Later in the summer, another sort of trib- ute was published by Lilian Calles Barger. The Word Come of Age is a history of the intersecting streams of the first generation of liberationist thought. Barger traces a narrative of the emergence of liberation theology among Latin American, black, and feminist religious thinkers in which James Cone is, of course, one of the major pro- tagonists. In the radical political environment of the late 1960s and 1970s, the afroed and angry Cone brought the revolutionary fervor of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements into conversation with traditional Western theology. He urged African Americans to recognize the value of their humanity and their spiritual traditions, and he intimidated white audiences with his strident insistence that European theology was a theology of white supremacy. Cone’s uncompromising insistence that “Christ is black” unsettled many and brought the tragic reality of Christianity’s legacy of racial oppression (particularly in North America) into disturbing clarity. Following his death, Cone’s last book (his second memoir), Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody, was released, giving us his final reflections on his own controversial legacy. Barger’s history and Cone’s memoir are essential texts for understanding the legacy of libera- tion theology, and they are important new engagements with political and contextual theology. For some, liberation theology is considered a relic of the counterculture. Barger dispels this notion through an extensively researched and engaging account of the first generation of liberation theologians. As the subtitle, An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, indicates, Barger is concerned primarily with ideas. She places her emphasis on “a web of interconnected and circulating ideas rather than direct * ANDREW C. STOUT is access services librarian for the J. Oliver Buswell Jr. Library at Cove- nant Theological Seminary. 154 PRESBYTERION: COVENANT SEMINARY REVIEW 45/1 lineage to antecedent thinkers, social networks, or personal biography” (8). She is most concerned with the religious ideas circulated by Latin American, black, and feminist theologians and the intellectual environments that produced them. This ap- proach stands in contrast to the personal tone of Cone’s memoir, as I will discuss later, in which he feels the need to discuss “how [black theology] found me and gave me voice” (xv). For Barger, the ideas that arose out of liberation theologies are essen- tial for understanding the continuing relevance of religion on the political scene. One of the primary aims of The World Come of Age is to dispense with the as- sumption that “liberation theology” is synonymous with Latin American theology— all other theologies of liberation being derivations. This impression is understandable given the influence of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s landmark A Theology of Liberation1 (1971), which reread the Christian tradition from a perspective committed to soli- darity with the poor and oppressed in the midst of anti-colonial sentiment in Latin America. Instead, Barger shows that black, feminist, and Latin American liberation theologies, while certainly drawing from much of the same revolutionary cultural momentum, developed largely independent of one another. She credits Duke theo- logian Frederick Herzog with the first North American use of the term “liberation theology,” noting that he used the term in 1970 without any particular knowledge of liberation movements in Latin America and prior to the publication of James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation.2 Cone himself insists that he was not attuned to Latin American liberation theology when he began to articulate his own theology of liberation.3 As Barger states it, “black and feminist liberation theologies that US thinkers developed were not an import of Latin American theology. Rather, libera- tion theologians were intellectual siblings born of shared revolutionary history” (9). As she strives to depict liberation theology as an intersecting web of religious ideas inspired by anticolonial and antiestablishment movements, Barger argues that liberation theology was an attempt to bring Christianity out of the purely private sphere and into the public sphere. Feminist theologians like Mary Daly and Rose- mary Radford Ruether “began a deep questioning of modern theology as key to un- derstanding women’s subordination in society and uncovered a rhetoric of privatized religion that hid its political and masculinist underpinnings” (32). Barger does some excellent work in charting the trajectory of privatization in Western theology. She sees liberation theology as a radical challenge to the neat separation between the reli- gious and the political spheres that has developed since the Reformation. For African Americans facing the subjugation of slavery and segregation, and for Latin Americans opposing colonial rule, religious values and expression became the primary weapons 1 Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (1971; Engl. trans. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973). 2James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1970). 3 Cone emphasizes that “It is important to note that black and Latin theologians began to use the term ‘liberation’ almost simultaneously but independently of each other.” James H. Cone, My Soul Looks Back (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1982), 103.  REVIEW ESSAY 155 of fighting political oppression. Barger forcefully makes the point that it is impossible for people experiencing political persecution to separate religious hope from the hope of liberation from government-sponsored racism and sexism. Instead, religion be- comes a source of political energy. In this sense, there are significant affinities between liberationists and Reformed Christians in the Kuyperian tradition in which theolog- ical reflection informs all spheres of life, including the cultural and the political. Another major theme of the book is the way that liberationists combatted the temptation to leave religious thought in the purely transcendent realm by rooting it in the temporal and political. As Barger says, “Liberationists engaged in a full assault on the spatial and temporal location of salvation by challenging the understanding of God’s transcendence and the sacred/profane binary of modernity” (71). Not sat- isfied to leave salvation or liberation as an otherworldly reality, liberationists drew on the social sciences to revive the eschatological impulse within religious thought. The utopian drive of the early social sciences became a stream that funneled into liberation theology. In this way, the social sciences became “a handmaiden for theology” that “promised liberationists the needed tools for their project” (86). In fact, liberation theology is partially a product of the relationship negotiated between sociology and theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This negotiation resulted in a turn from epistemology to ethics. Liberal theology attempted to synthesize secular and religious values. Neo-orthodoxy set the religious and the secular in opposition to one another. Both failed to take up the plight of the oppressed, to start with the lived experience of the excluded. In bringing together religious and secular streams of thought, Barger claims that liberationists produced a secularized Christian theology. Even if one might quibble with the language of “secularized” Christian theology, the value of liberation theology for the dialogue surrounding the relationship between religion and politics should be clear. By employing the social sciences to critique rac- ism, classism, and sexism, liberation theology “supplied the intellectual means for reconnecting political expectations with religious hope” (259). Barger does not claim to be a theologian, but rather, a historian. Despite this disclaimer, she is adept at handling theological subtleties. She notes the diversity of Catholic social thought and the ambivalent relationship between the Catholic Church and liberation theologians. Vatican II brought a renewed emphasis on social justice in Catholic theology, and Latin American theologians like Gutiérrez capital- ized on that emphasis. However, Barger notes a key difference between more main- stream Catholic social thought and liberation theology. While most Catholic social theory emphasized the duty of the powerful to act with charity toward the poor, liberation theology called for “empowering the poor to alleviate their own situation” (202). This is just one example of the way that Barger draws out the various conver- gences and divergences between liberation theology and more traditional modes of theology. Barger’s narrative of the first generation of liberation theologians culminates in the Theology in the Americas conference in Detroit in 1975. This conference saw 156 PRESBYTERION: COVENANT SEMINARY REVIEW 45/1 black theologians James Cone and J. Deotis Roberts come together with Latin Amer- ican theologians Hugo Assmann and Gustavo Gutiérrez and feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether. Far from depicting liberation theologians as a cohesive group, Barger takes care throughout the book to detail both the external and internal critiques of liberation theology. Tensions surfaced in Detroit with feminist accusa- tions of sexism among black theologians and disagreements among black and Latin American theologians about whether race or class was more determinative for theo- logical reflection. Despite fierce debate and disagreement among liberationists, Barger ultimately sees commonalities emerging out of the Detroit conference. Liber- ationists of all stripes were concerned with “bringing into view the experience of the oppressed hidden by abstraction” (249). If there was a “new orthodoxy” that arose out of this moment, it was the insistence of the inseparability of the religious and the political. The World Come of Age is a work of historical depth and theological insight. Barger’s extensive research makes this book an excellent survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian social thought. As she explores the intellectual and his- torical context that gave rise to theologies of liberation in the Americas, Barger creates a layered account that reveals these theologies to be more than simply the faddish product of a revolutionary moment. She pairs her historical analysis with a passion to further the best impulses of liberation theology. It challenged the racism, classism, and sexism implicit in much of the Christian tradition, and it redefined the relation- ship between religion and politics. Liberationists stubbornly refused to allow the church to live and theologize in the midst of political abstractions. They forced their audience to take notice of the poor and the marginalized and to listen to those groups on their own terms. In doing so, liberationists pushed back on the secularization thesis and demonstrated the continuing relevance of religion in the contemporary world. It could be said that Barger’s focus on the ideas that inform liberation theology leaves out an important dimension of the lived experience of the disenfranchised. However, as I turn to Cone’s memoir, the inevitable entanglement of ideas and ex- perience becomes unavoidable. The importance of chronicling this first generation of voices in liberation theol- ogy is emphasized by the passing of James Cone. This new memoir, along with the earlier My Soul Looks Back, are essential for interpreting the rhetoric of Cone’s early and groundbreaking work on black theology. The intention of his early work (at least in part) is to shock and provoke. The theological circles in which he had been edu- cated had shown no interest in the black experience. Cone wanted to jolt the theo- logical establishment into noticing how deeply formative the African American experience was for theology. He was justly angry about the oppression of black people and about theology’s apparent disinterest in this injustice. In Black Theology and Black Power4 (1969) and A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), he wrote from within the context of black oppression and left it to his audience to deal with his rhetoric. 4 James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).  REVIEW ESSAY 157 In those books, he made definitive and unqualified statements like “Christianity is not alien to Black Power; it is Black Power” (referenced in the present volume at p. 38) and “Christ is black, baby” (referenced here at 68), offering little explanation to cushion the shock. In Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody, Cone steps back and reflects on his rhetoric. He never (or rarely) apologizes for it, but he is willing to explain the context that made his aggressive tone necessary. I am tempted to say that Cone is concerned with reconciling his training in European theological methods and thinkers with his experience of blackness in Amer- ica—and yet this would not be quite right. Instead, it would be more accurate to say that Cone deconstructs traditional European and North American methods and at- titudes in order to allow his blackness to more fully shape his theological vision. While many African Americans had been giving their lives to the struggle for civil rights, Cone had been in seminary studying Barth, Niebuhr, and Bultmann. By the time he had earned his PhD from Northwestern University, Cone was disturbed by his own lack of engagement with the issues that directly concerned black people in America. The Detroit riot of 1967 and the Black Power movement proved to be a moment of crisis for Cone as he asked himself what possible relevance the theology he had studied could have for his own oppressed people. As he began work on his first book, Black Theology and Black Power, Cone did not simply reject his Western theological heritage, but rather, he employed European theology against itself, using its own resources to reveal how it contributed to white supremacy. As he puts it, “I quoted sixteenth-century reformer Martin Luther, Swiss theologian Karl Barth, and French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus to show that I was academically in- formed in theology and philosophy. I made them say what I wanted to say, even though I knew that they probably would reject the blackness I saw in the gospel of Jesus” (17). Cone’s appropriation of European theology—or rather, his repurpos- ing—is a major theme of the memoir. As he struggled to make sense of the theological tradition in which he was trained and his experience as a black man in American, Cone came to the point where he could confidently declare, “Black Power is the gospel of Jesus in America today!” (9). One of the notable features of Cone’s final book is its celebration of black hu- manity and the significance that this celebration holds for theological method. “I soaked myself in blackness, embraced it as my birthright” (62), Cone explains. As he wrote the classic The Spirituals and the Blues5 (1972), he listened to the music of black artists like Mahalia Jackson and B. B. King. In the process, he began “singing a new theological song, a blues song, messing with theology the way B. B. King messed with music. I used Barth’s theology the way B. B. used his guitar and Ray Charles used his piano” (92). Black culture not only provides resources for theology, but it “keeps black people from hating white people” (167). Cone has received criticism from some for reducing the black experience to that of an oppressed minority. His emphasis on 5 James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (New York: Seabury Press, 1972). 158 PRESBYTERION: COVENANT SEMINARY REVIEW 45/1 the cultural products of black humanity in this memoir goes some way toward an- swering those objections. For Cone, theology is a discipline chock full of paradox and mystery, making imagination and creativity essential tools of the theologian. The black imagination, forged in the context of American oppression, contributes a dis- tinctive and necessary voice. Cone devotes an entire chapter to the influence on his work of essayist, novelist, and playwright James Baldwin. This is noteworthy, particularly considering the re- newed place of prominence that Baldwin holds in conversations about race in Amer- ica (through the recent documentary I Am Not Your Negro [2016] and his influence on the celebrated journalist and cultural critic Ta-Nehisi Coates). Much of Cone’s career was defined by his struggle to reconcile or synthesize the nonviolent love preached by Martin Luther King Jr. with the sometimes violent assertions of the value of black humanity in Malcolm X. Cone valued the legacies of both men, and in Baldwin he found the synthesis: “Nobody could preach love like Martin; nobody could talk black like Malcolm; and nobody could write with eloquence about love and blackness like Baldwin” (159). Religiously speaking, Baldwin is a complex figure, but Cone contributes important reflections on the theological character of Baldwin’s work. This is important not only for better understanding Cone, but also for ongoing evaluations of Baldwin’s legacy. One final observation relates to Cone’s approach to Scripture. He states that “we cannot accept biblical inerrancy or literalism: there’s no creative future on that road” (121). Questions about how exactly Cones defines terms like “inerrancy” and “liter- alism” aside, there is no doubt that his approach to Scripture differs from evangelical approaches. He has even been criticized, perhaps rightly, for elevating the revelatory nature of black experience about Scripture. However, one thing that can be learned from Cone’s approach (especially in missionally focused Reformed circles) is the un- derstanding of how deeply our cultural contexts determine our reading of Scrip- ture—for better and for worse. Whatever the faults of various forms of liberation theology, the impulse to recognize liberation as a central theme of Scripture is a good one. And it seems simply to be a fact of history that this central theme has only become fully valued, at least in North American circles, when the experiences of op- pressed minorities began to be taken seriously and could guide the focus of theolog- ical reflection. Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody has many other strengths to commend it. These include Cone’s example of how to engage graciously with and learn from critics and his own students. The wisdom and charity that he displays in this area is striking, especially in light of his reputation for combativeness. Cone also includes important reflections on the nature of academic ghettos and the roadblocks that he experienced as a black man trying to learn the ropes of scholarly writing. This is a topic of con- tinuing relevance for minority students who face particular challenges in higher edu- cation environments. This final word from one of the first-generation voices in liberation theology is important for both the historical context that it provides for  REVIEW ESSAY 159 the movement and the inspiration it provides to new generations of theologians working through issues of race, politics, and other social and religious questions. What then is the legacy of liberation theology? Some have claimed that the fail- ure of liberation theologians to develop sustained political coalitions represents a fail- ure of the movement.6 Barger claims that “The power of a movement in ideas is its ability to transform the assumptions of the cultural conversation” (260). Both Barger and Cone point to Black Lives Matter as a movement that has appropriated many of the emphases of black liberation theology. It could also be noted that racial reconcil- iation, global theology, and social justice issues have become important topics in con- temporary evangelical theology. Despite the differing theological assumptions of evangelicals and many liberation theologians, the theologies of people like Gutiérrez, Cone, and Ruether have played a significant role in determining what issues are rel- evant for evangelicals to consider. Specifically, Cone’s influence can be seen on the contemporary theological scene by the creative proposals of “new black theologians” like Willie James Jennings and J. Kameron Carter. Theological concerns about race, gender, poverty, and other social issues are on the minds of religious thinkers across the theological spectrum. Liberation theology has a played an important role in re- shaping the trajectory of contemporary theological conversations. Barger and Cone help us to see how this came about and why the conversations are important. 6 Though ambitious political projects are still being proposed by contemporary liberation theologians. See Ivan Petrella, The Future of Liberation Theology: An Argument and Manifesto, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016). Gustavo Gutiérrez has laid out a fresh vision for liber- ation theology in recent years. See Gustavo Gutiérrez and Gerhard Ludwig Muller, On the Side of the Poor: The Theology of Liberation, trans. Robert A. Krieg and James B. Nickoloff (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015).