White Theology and White Power

James Cone called his 1969 book Black Theology and Black Power. The title located the theology before the reader reached the first page. Cone was writing from the Black experience in America, particularly the effort to understand Christianity amid slavery’s legacy, segregation, racial violence and the emerging Black Power movement. His work became foundational to Black liberation theology because it refused to pretend that theology could be separated from the historical circumstances in which Christians attempted to understand God, freedom and power.[1]

Something interesting happens, however, when we walk to another part of the theological library. We find Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Hodge, Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. Ordinarily, we do not describe this body of work as culturally located theology. It is simply called theology. That difference deserves examination.

Black theology has a context. Womanist theology has a context. Feminist theology has a context. Latin American liberation theology has a context. Asian, African and Indigenous theologies have contexts. Their interpreters routinely ask how race, gender, colonialism, poverty or political power affected the questions theologians asked and the answers they reached. Cone himself later made the role of social and historical context central to theological method.[2]

The dominant Western theological tradition also developed within history. That does not mean Augustine or Aquinas should simply be called “white theologians.” Augustine was a North African Christian who lived long before the modern racial category of whiteness took shape; Aquinas likewise predates that modern racial order. Scholars disagree about how far back the concept of race itself should be traced, but the modern history of whiteness is a later development.[3] Their place in the Western canon illustrates a related problem: one theological tradition came to function as theology itself, while others were more often identified by geography, race, gender or social circumstance.

That raises the first question of this series: Why is the dominant tradition so often treated as though it came from nowhere? A second question emerges later in Christian history, when European colonial expansion, racial classification, slavery and modern ideas of whiteness became intertwined with societies in which Christians exercised enormous religious, political and cultural influence.

Christians did not merely observe those societies from the outside. They lived within empires, colonial societies, slaveholding economies and nations increasingly organized around racial hierarchy. Christians helped build some of those institutions, resisted others and inherited still others. Their theology was therefore produced inside particular arrangements of power.

The issue is deeper than the claim that white........

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