How might a white male theologize liberatively?

Growing up in a conservative evangelical church, I can remember learning about Moses leading God’s people out of Egypt, where life was pretty hard. But the details of the skits the teenagers performed at Vacation Bible School are a little blurry today. As I recall, there were frogs and locusts and I think Moses was white, with a beard, and a staff. After a few rounds of “Pharaoh, let my people go,” they were on their way. So, it seems as if my indoctrination into liberation theology started at a young age—except that I most definitely did not learn it as such. It’s one thing to say, “God helped Moses lead the people out of Egypt where life was hard,” and quite another to say, “God liberates the oppressed from bondage.”

Beyond a basic awareness that Jesus was nice to people that no one else was nice to, and that we should love one another too—a powerful and important lesson at a young age, no doubt—my religious upbringing did not include the notion that God cares about the material, economic, social, or political conditions and distributions and relationships of human beings and society’s structures and institutions—that God desires and manifests, and desires for humans to struggle for, the freedom of people suffering under unjust circumstances. This, in part, is why, when I gained the perspective (largely from my non-Christian friends at school) in 2002 and 2003 that a militaristic response to the attacks of September 11 and its evolution into the Iraq War were wrong, and when I heard only the beating of war drums from Christian peers and people at my church, I fell into an existential crisis: I literally did not know it was possible to be a Christian and to oppose the war that seemed based on exploitation and which would almost certainly result in the deaths of all sorts of people. There was, for me, no precedent—no Liberator God, no Prince of Peace Jesus—by which to make sense of my anti-war convictions from a religious point of view. All I had been taught was that God was concerned that I not “sin” (individual bad choices or thoughts), and that if I get baptized and keep “following” Jesus, and help others to do the same, I would go to heaven when I die—the ultimate goal of my life on earth.

It’s all too easy to go on believing God doesn’t care about the material conditions of human beings if you’ve never heard otherwise, and especially if you’re white, upper-middle-class, and live in the suburbs. This is why, according to James Cone, people who are white, who have never seen poverty, who have never suffered under unjust social, economic, or political arrangements, cannot speak the word of truth that God liberates the oppressed: it is not their experience, so they cannot ascertain the God of the Exodus, the God of Jesus, who brings freedom to the captives and liberation to the oppressed. As Cone writes, “Theologians of the Christian Church have not interpreted Christian ethics as an act for the liberation of the oppressed because their views of divine revelation were defined by philosophy and other cultural values rather than by the biblical theme of God as the Liberator of the oppressed” (James Cone, God of the Oppressed, 183). For Cone, the stories I learned as a child—of the people of Israel being freed from bondage, of Jesus helping strangers and healing wounds—are the stuff of liberation. But because of my social context—which determined, in large part, my interpretation of scripture and reality—I could not know the Liberator God, the God who gives the gift of salvation in the form of liberation from oppression (130).

My theological perspective and orientation is somewhat different today. I grew up a Christian, but I have been “converted” again and again in recent years through my interactions with people enduring poverty and incarceration here in Nashville. When I stepped down from my position as editor of The Contributor street newspaper this summer after five years with the organization in order to begin my doctoral work, one of our vendors, a wise and weathered woman named Bobbie told me, “When you go and study your religion, remember these people.” I took—and take—Bobbie’s words to me as a charge. I have not experienced poverty myself, but after my experiences engaging with people who have, I cannot “do” theology without them in mind. I cannot theologize uninformed by the lived experiences of the oppressed people I now know by name. As James Cone instructs, the truth of God’s salvific liberation, which is both concrete and cosmic, cannot be proclaimed by theologians who have not experienced or been exposed to the suffering of marginalized people—and to not speak that liberating truth is, for Cone, to miss the point of Christian theology altogether (75).

A question that remains for me is the apparent truth of Cone’s indictment of dominant white theologies’ inability to proclaim the truth of God’s liberation-salvation, which is evidenced in my own upbringing, and to what extent this fact must remain true. In other words, Cone is right about dominant white theology’s inability to speak liberatively to and for oppressed peoples, and his entire project of forging a black liberation theology informed by black experiences of oppression is justified in light of that fact; but can it only be that way? Unfortunately, for anything to change, people who are white and upper-middle-class who cannot comprehend the notion of a Liberator God likely will not encounter that God until they encounter people enduring oppression in its various forms today. And such encounters can hardly be forced. What would it mean for a white male such as myself to practice a form of liberation theology? I carry this question with me as someone who seeks and tries to theologize liberatively and who also recognizes—or tries to—my multiple forms of privilege. And if I were to find such theologizing possible, who would my audience be—and who would listen? Such are the further questions I continue to carry with me after my reading of Cone’s God of the Oppressed.

I had the opportunity to spend a window of time with Professor Cone in his office at Union last year, and I spoke with him again after he spoke at Vanderbilt in April of this year. Hearing him speak again on his lifelong theological project, I told him that I take his theological work and witness as a charge to my own beginnings as a theologian—that I never let my theologizing become separate from the lives of oppressed peoples. With what I received as charges from both Dr. Cone and my friend Bobbie, I feel I have no choice but to follow through. The question is, as a white male, what sort of liberative theology might I practice? And how, methodologically, might it be different from that of black and Latin American liberation theologies?

Episteme #3