Editorial Note
Links to other media and further information regarding this topic can be found in the German version of this article.
1. Introduction
Black theology or Black liberation theology advances the claim that the God made known in in the life, ministry, death, resurrection, ascension, and return of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God, and attested in the witness of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, is One who identifies with oppressed peoples, specifically African Americans, and wills, empowers, and joins them in their struggle for freedom and human dignity. The task of Black theology therefore is to analyze the historical, social, cultural, environmental, and political conditions of African Americans – indeed, all Black peoples across the diaspora – in light of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ the Liberator. Second, Black liberationists draw upon Scripture along with diverse Black cultural, social, and religious experience(s) to reconstruct Christian symbols and rituals in order to articulate a theological vision of Christian faith and life for Black people who share the common belief that systemic racism and white supremacy are sinful structures that must end. Therefore, to follow Jesus Christ and his way means to fight alongside all Black people in their struggle to end white supremacy, antiblack racism, and all other forms of systemic oppression. For Black liberation theologians, this is the true mark of Christian discipleship. In the following, I briefly consider the historical context into which Black theology emerges. Then I will briefly analyze theologian James H. Cone’s 
pioneering work, Black Theology and Black Power. Finally, this article concludes with remarks regarding how the Black theology movement has developed since its inception. It does so by highlighting the work of several thinkers to signal trajectories for the movement’s further development.
2. Early and Modern Origins
Black theological reflection began centuries before peoples of African descent demanded and then were granted access into the halls of the modern white European and American theological academy. As theologian Willie Jennings aptly argues, Black theology has “two beginnings;” it first began as early as the late fifteenth century as peoples from the western part of the African continent were captured, transported to, enslaved, and exploited by Western European colonial powers (cf. art. Postcolonial Theologies) in the so-called New World. In the context of the United States, many African Americans became suspicious upon hearing the Christian message, specifically in its colonial configuration. While some outrightly rejected Christianity as utter nonsense and detrimental for their people, other African Americans used the religion’s symbols and rituals to reconstruct their indigenous religions and ways of knowing without regard for maintaining the canons of Christian orthodoxy.1Cf. Jennings, Willie James, Black Theology, in: Allen, Michael (Ed.), The New Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, New York 2023, 267–281, 270.
Yet other African Americans, however, responded to the Christian message by embracing it. However, as Jennings insists, their embrace must be understood in two significant ways. On the one hand, many African Americans accepted the colonial Christian message along with its justification of the racial and gender hierarchy. On the other hand, many African Americans embraced the Christian story but rejected its colonial configuration. In order to demonstrate that Christian faith was a viable option for them, African Americans embraced Jesus Christ as the interpretive key for understanding the Christian message. Additionally, these African Americans not only accepted but also imaginatively entered the world of the biblical text and identified themselves with the story of God and God’s dealings with ancient Israel, privileging the Exodus narrative as central for understanding their relationship with God as they struggled for freedom from chattel slavery.2Cf. Jennings, Black Theology, 270–272. See also Marbury, Herbert Robinson, Pillars of Cloud and Fire. The Politics of Exodus of African American Interpretation, New York 2015. The reality of African peoples embracing Christian faith during and in the aftermath of Western settler colonialism provides the broader context for understanding the emergence of the Black theology movement in the middle of the twentieth century.
The Black theology movement as an academic theological discourse began in the late 1960s. Despite the achievements of the civil rights movement, e.g. the Civil Rights Act 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, many African Americans found themselves resisting ongoing systemic racism, economic inequality and exploitation, and the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War.
These factors alongside the rise of the Black consciousness movements, the uprisings in Newark, Detroit, and other major urban centers across the nation, and the assassination of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, provide the more immediate social, political, and historical context for understanding the emergence of Black theology as a critical intervention into the predominately Euro-American theological academy and, more broadly, American Christianity.
On July 31, 1966, a group of African American clergy formally known as the National Committee of Negro Churchmen released a statement on “Black Power” that was published in the The New York Times. Despite promoting racial integration, the statement criticized white churches and theologians for either being woefully silent about or willingly disapproving of the burgeoning Black Power movement.3Cf. Wilmore, Gayraud S., Introduction, in: Cone, James H./Wilmore, Gayraud S. (Eds.), Black Theology. A Documentary History, Vol. 1 1966–1979, Maryknoll 1993, 15–19, 16.
Three years later, on June 13, 1969, that same group, under the later name, the National Committee of Black Churchmen, released another statement titled “Black Theology.” James H. Cone (1938–2018), a young African Methodist minister and theologian, served as the statement’s principal drafter. The statement read in part:
Black Theology is a theology of black liberation. It seeks to plumb the black condition in light of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, so that the black community can see that the gospel is commensurate with the achievement of black humanity. Black Theology is a theology of ‘blackness.’ It is the affirmation of black humanity that emancipates black people from white racism, thus providing authentic freedom for both white and black people. It affirms the humanity of white people in that it says No to the encroachment of white oppression.4National Committee of Black Churchmen, Black Theology, in: Cone, James H./Gayraud S. Wilmore (Eds.), Black Theology. A Documentary History, Vol. 1 1966–1979, Maryknoll 1993, 37–39, 38 (emphasis added). Cone previously earned his Ph.D. in systematic theology in the joint programs of Northwestern University and Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.
Weeks before the published statement, Cone released his first book, Black Theology and Black Power and, one year later, A Black Theology of Liberation (1970). Consequently, Cone, as its founding member, spearheaded Black theology as a movement in the late modern theological academy. In the following, I will briefly analyze Cone’s central claims in his first book.
3. James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power
In Black Theology and Black Power, Cone set out to analyze the claims of the Black Power movement in relation to? [TH] Christian theology and American Christianity. In so doing, Cone boldly insisted that the message of “Black Power” was not merely compatible with Christian faith. It is, in fact, “Christ’s message to twentieth-century America.”5Cone, James H., Black Theology and Black Power, Maryknoll 1997, 1. Cone insisted that the burgeoning radical movement was a historical demonstration of the Christian gospel. Salvation means for Cone then God’s decisive action in human history to free all oppressed peoples from tyranny of all kinds. In the context of the United States, salvation entails God’s decisive partnership and empowerment of African Americans in their longstanding resistance efforts against racial domination (cf. art. Racism). Therefore, Cone insisted that Black theologians’ task was to offer prophetic interpretations of the Christian message’s radical sociopolitical implications (cf. art. Politics and Religion) and to instigate more participation from Black and white Christians alike in the struggle for Black freedom. To demonstrate these bold claims, Cone analyzes and expounds on the core of the Christian message considering the witness of African American religious experience.
According to the early Cone , Jesus Christ stands at the center of Christian faith. Christ is the definitive revelation of God who discloses God’s saving and redemptive purposes for humankind. Christ’s work is essentially the work of human liberation. As attested in the New Testament, Christ has come into the world to announce the kingdom of God. The reign of God is God’s in-breaking and decisive intervention in history to upend the past and current-day sociopolitical orders that ravage the poor and the oppressed. The reign of God is the irruption of a new state of affairs wherein God takes sides with those downtrodden. In the contemporary situation, African Americans encounter the crucified and risen Christ as One who actively dignifies and emboldens them to resist. Effectively, Black Christian faith is thus a religion of protest and resistance against structural evil and for the freedom, human worth, and dignity of Black people. According to Cone, the message of the gospel and the message of Black Power converge on this point.6Cf. Cone, Black Theology, 37. Seeing both messages as essentially the same, Cone anticipated criticisms from both white and Black Christian theologians. Willing to risk these messages’ conflation, or, at worst, the collapsing of the work of God into potentially violent human political endeavors, Cone insists that the active work of the risen Christ in the contemporary situation of African Americans far outweigh accusations of theological heresy.7Cf. Cone, Black Theology, 38. In the end, the Christian gospel is nothing less than the message of Black people’s total liberation. Consequently, one must interpret the historical Black freedom struggle through the lens of salvation.
But this raises the question of the means by which God in Christ puts into effect Black people’s salvation. In other words, how does Christ Jesus liberate poor and oppressed peoples from oppressive powers? While he will further develop this point elsewhere, Cone argues that Christ liberates the oppressed through the power of his death and resurrection. He demonstrates this by retrieving and radicalizing the atonement motif known as Christus Victor.8Cf. Aulén, Gustaf, Christus Victor. An Historical Study of the Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, Eugene 2003, 4–5. Twentieth-century Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulén famously characterized this motif as this “classic” idea of atonement wherein a dramatic, cosmic-level conflict ensues between God and all that opposes God’s good creation, namely, Satan and the powers of death. Within this dualistic framework, the atonement then is God in Christ’s decisive battle against and ultimately victory over these forces, thus liberating creation and reconciliation it back to Godself. Cone found this motif to be closer to the New Testament witness. However, he argued that Swedish theologian and bishop Gustaf Aulén’s analysis failed to connect Christ’s reconciling activity to the concrete historical situation of oppressed peoples.9Cone offers this critique of Aulén’s study in his later work. Cf. Cone, James H., God of the Oppressed, Maryknoll 1997, 212–213. And so, through his Black liberation interpretive lens, Cone argued that Christ through his death and resurrection has decisively destroyed the powers of white supremacy and antiblack racism. Consequently, African Americans who encounter the risen Christ’s saving power are freed to walk in the newness of life and to join Christ in his solidarity with all oppressed peoples resisting destructive powers in the contemporary world. Cone will later develop these points in his works A Black Theology of Liberation and in his mature systematic theology, God of the Oppressed. In the latter, Cone argues that Jesus is the Black Christ in whom God has assumed the condition of an oppressed human person to reveal God’s self-identification (cf. art. Trinity) and solidarity with all oppressed peoples. Christ stands in agreement with Black people, affirming their humanity, and empowering them to fight because God wills all God’s creatures to be free.
Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power was met with criticism from other Black theologians and scholars of religion. For instance, Baptist theologian J. Deotis Roberts insisted that Cone failed to address the matter of reconciliation. For Roberts, reconciliation is the aim or goal of God’s work of liberation. This means that God wills to liberate Black people from the powers of antiblack racism and white supremacy in order to reconcile them back to God and each other. This reconciliation entails the full restoration of Black people’s pride, dignity, and worth. God’s saving work also entails Black and white Americans being reconciled to each other. For Roberts, the task therefore of the Black theologian was not to interpret the Black Power movement but to interpret Christian faith in light of the experience of African Americans. Second, Roberts criticized the early Cone for relying too heavily upon Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth’s alleged Christocentrism. Roberts beckoned Black theologians to develop their understandings of Jesus Christ drawing primarily from the Scriptures and the witness of African American religious experience.10Cf. Roberts, J. Deotis, Liberation and Reconciliation. A Black Theology, Philadelphia 1971.
A second critique came from historian and theologian Gayraud S. Wilmore (1921–2022) and Cone’s brother, Cecil W. Cone (1937–2016), who was a theologian in his own right. For Wilmore, Cone’s Black theology narrowly relied on Christian theological categories to account for the myriad of ways the divine has revealed Godself to African Americans over the course of history, e.g. African traditional religions, other Abrahamic religions, and non-religious African American culture and literature.11Cf. Wilmore, Gayraud S., Pragmatic Spirituality. The Christian Faith through an Africentric Lens, New York 2004. And so, Wilmore insisted that Black theologians should treat both Christian and non-Christian sources as equally valid. Similarly, Cecil Cone accused James Cone of relying on white Christian categories to account for which is already a broad and complex range of Black religious experiences. Cecil suspected that this failure on James’ part was due to James’ Black theology’s “alien theological methodology,” that relied on a Barthian (read: European) Christological framework which was equally alien to Black religious experience.12Cf. Cone, Cecil W., The Identity Crisis in Black Theology, Atlanta 1974, 77.
The most piercing critique of Cone and these first-generation Black theologians was their male bias, blatant sexism, and patriarchal assumptions. A subsequent generation of self-identified womanist theologians and scholars entered the conversation to challenge Black liberationist theologians for providing skewed, masculinist portrayals of African American experience and Black Christian faith (cf. art. Womanist Theology).
4. Conclusion: The Development of Black Theology into the 21st Century
Black theology is fast approaching its sixth decade as an academic discourse. Black theology has been analyzed, harshly criticized, outright rejected, or enthusiastically yet critically appropriated by members from a range of constituencies within and outside the boundaries of Afro-Christianity in the United States and worldwide. While this article cannot adequately account for the range of issues Black theology has or has not adequately addressed over its course of existence, it is important to address several issues by highlighting the work of several thinkers. In so doing, it signals trajectories for Black theology’s further development.
Since its inception, the Black theology movement has reached across the globe, sparking critical conversations with theologians from across the African diaspora and the Majority World. Specifically, the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT), founded in 1976, provided formal context for these conversations.
The question of Black theology’s continued relation to African thinkers and other theologies of liberation and struggle have been addressed by second-generation Black theologian Dwight N. Hopkins .13Cf. Hopkins, Dwight N., Black Theology. Essays on Global Perspectives, Eugene 2017. Another second-generation Black theologian Noel Leo Erskine has more recently challenged the dominant narrative of the origins of Afro-Christianity in colonial and antebellum United States. Erskine argues that history shows that Black religious experience, and thus Afro-Christianity, emerges in the context of the Caribbean and South America. Consequently, this historical record justifies the prioritizing of Afro-Caribbean religious experience to reframe discussion of Black theological reflection.14Cf. Erskine, Noel Leo, Black Theology and Black Faith, Grand Rapids 2023.
More work is needed to flesh out the relationship between Black life and the ongoing and increasingly dire ecological crisis. How might Black theology further explore African Americans’ connections to the Earth and that their liberation is inextricably linked with the Earth’s own liberation? Melanie Harris has recently argued that African American women make distinctive contributions and offer theological reflection upon environmental justice.15Cf. Harris, Melanie L., Ecowomanism. African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths, Maryknoll 2017. Furthermore, Philip Butler has challenged Black liberation theology to rethink theological anthropology considering the emergence of transhumanism, a philosophical movement that aims to improve the human condition through the use of technology. Butler insists that technology may potentially be an apt partner with Black people’s spirituality in their enhancement of themselves toward their total liberation.16Cf. Butler, Philip, Black Transhuman Liberation Theology. Technology and Spirituality, New York 2020.
Finally, one area of continuing reflection for Black liberation theology is in the area of sexuality and gender. Indeed, while womanist theologians began to address the matter in passing or more directly, e.g. Kelly Brown Douglas’ Sexuality and the Black Church, Black liberation theology remains woefully underdeveloped in its analysis of the structural domination of Black LGBTIQA+ people. Moreover, it failed to adequately integrate the analysis and lived experiences of Black LGBTIQA+ people into their accounts of Black experience. Scholars such as Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajajé , Renee L. Hill , Victor Anderson , Horace L. Griffin , Roger Sneed , Monica Joy Cross , and Pamela R. Lightsey , among others, challenged both Black liberation and womanist theologians for their silence about Black queer and transgender lives alongside the pervasive heterosexism and trans-antagonism in African American Christian communities. While Black queer theology has emerged as a movement, further exploration is needed from constructive systematic perspectives. One central question: How do Black theologians adequately account that Black queer lives are taken up into the life of the Son of God and consequently joined into Christ’s body? In other words, what does it mean to be Black, LGBTIQA+-identified, and saved? This question lingers not merely as a matter of faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). Indeed, it is also that. It also remains for many Black LGBTIQA+-identified people a matter of life and death.