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 ofAge 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 blackv 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 ofAge 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 Gutierrez’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 ofLiberation.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 Gutierrez, A Theology ofLiberation (1971; Engl, trans. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis,
1973).
2 James H. Cone, A Black Theology ofLiberation (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 Gutierrez 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 Gutierrez 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 PoweA (1969) andH Black Theology ofLiberation (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

^ 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.
SaidIWasn’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 Gutierrez,
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 ofLiberation Theology: An Argument and Manifesto,
2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016). Gustavo Gutierrez has laid out a fresh vision for liber­
ation theology in recent years. See Gustavo Gutierrez 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).
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