“There is No Universalism that is Not Particular”: Revelation, Christology, and Power in the Theology of James Cone

ABSTRACT James Cone’s assertion that Christ is Black seems at odds with Karl Barth’s retrieval of Kierkegaard’s “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and creation. Both were concerned with the sociopolitical implications of theology. Barth saw the impulse to make some human capacity the prompt or measure of divine revelation as directly implicated in the rise of German nationalism, while Cone laboured to understand what the protestant liberalisms and neoorthodoxies of his graduate education could possibly mean for Black victims of White racism. In claiming that Christ is Black, did Cone not breach the infinite qualitative distinction between God and humans – is Cone’s Black Christology triumphalist? I argue, rather, that Cone’s Black Christology not only escapes the charge of triumphalism, but actually resists triumphalism more successfully than Barth’s because of its grounding in Christ’s incarnational identification with oppressed humanity within history; a grounding which implicates Cone’s subject position without necessarily valorising it.