Hermeneutics Cone wrote, "Exodus, prophets and Jesus—these three—defined the meaning of liberation in black theology." The
hermeneutic, or interpretive lens, for James Cone's theology starts with the experience of
African Americans, and the theological questions he brings from his own life. He incorporates the powerful role of the
black church in his life, as well as
racism experienced by African Americans. For Cone, the theologians he studied in graduate school did not provide meaningful answers to his questions. This disparity became more apparent when he was teaching theology at
Philander Smith College in
Little Rock, Arkansas. Cone writes, "What could
Karl Barth possibly mean for black students 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 black as non-being?" Cone's theology also received significant inspiration from a frustration with the black struggle for civil rights; he felt that black Christians in North America should not follow the "white Church", on the grounds that it was a willing part of the system that had oppressed black people. Accordingly, his theology was heavily influenced by
Malcolm X and the
Black Power movement.
Martin Luther King Jr. was also an important influence; Cone describes King as a liberation theologian before the phrase existed. Cone wrote, "I was on a mission to transform self-loathing Negro Christians into black-loving revolutionary disciples of the Black Christ." Nevertheless, "The black church, despite its failures, gives black people a sense of worth."
Methodology His methodology for answering the questions raised by the African-American experience is a return to
scripture, and particularly to the liberative elements such as the
Exodus-
Sinai tradition, prophets and the life and teaching of
Jesus. However, scripture is not the only source that shapes his theology. In response to criticism from other black theologians and religious scholars (including his brother, Cecil), Cone began to make greater use of resources native to the African-American Christian community for his theological work, including slave
spirituals, the
blues, and the writings of prominent African-American thinkers such as
David Walker,
Henry McNeal Turner, and
W. E. B. Du Bois. His theology developed further in response to critiques by black women, leading Cone to consider gender issues more prominently and foster the development of
womanist theology, and also in dialogue with
Marxist analysis and the
sociology of knowledge.
Contextual theology Cone's thought, along with
Paul Tillich, stresses the idea that theology is not universal, but tied to specific historical contexts; he thus critiques the Western tradition of abstract theologizing by examining
its social context. Cone formulates a theology of liberation from within the context of the black experience of oppression, interpreting the central kernel of the Gospels as Jesus' identification with the poor and oppressed, the resurrection as the ultimate act of liberation. As part of his theological analysis, Cone argues for God's own identification with "blackness": Despite his associations with the Black Power movement, however, Cone was not entirely focused on ethnicity: "Being black in America has little to do with skin color. Being black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are." In 1977, Cone wrote, with a still more universal vision: I think the time has come for black theologians and black church people to move beyond a mere reaction to white racism in America and begin to extend our vision of a new socially constructed humanity in the whole inhabited world ... For humanity is whole, and cannot be isolated into racial and national groups. In his 1998 essay "White Theology Revisited", however, he retains his earlier strong critique of the white church and white man for ignoring or failing to address the problem of race.
Early influences Cone credits his parents as being his most important early influences. His father had only a sixth-grade education but filed a lawsuit against the Bearden, Arkansas, school board despite threats on his life. White professors of religion and philosophy, James and Alice Boyack at Philander Smith College aided his belief in his own potential and deepened his interest in
theodicy and black suffering. He found a mentor, advisor and influential teacher in Garrett scholar William E. Hordern. Professor Philip Watson motivated him to intensive remedial study of English composition. Classmate Lester B. Scherer was a great help in this. Scherer volunteered to edit manuscripts of Cone's early books while Cone's wife Rose typed them, yet Cone complained that neither understood him. Cone wrote his doctoral thesis on Karl Barth. A 1965 breakfast meeting with
Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, convinced him that teaching and scholarship were his true calling. The sociologist
C. Eric Lincoln found publishers for his early books (
Black Theology and Black Power and
A Black Theology of Liberation) which sought to deconstruct mainstream Protestant theologians such as Barth, Niebuhr and Tillich while seeking to draw on the figures of the black church such as
Richard Allen (founder in 1816 of the AME Church), black abolitionists ministers Henry Highland Garnet, Daniel Payne, and Henry McNeil Turner ("God is a Negro") and
Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and other figures of the black power and black arts movement. == Criticism ==