‘The Values of White Culture Are Antithetical to Biblical Revelation’: God of the Oppressed, Part 5

Part 1 | Part 2| Part 3 | Part 4

In God of the Oppressed (1975), James Cone first laid the groundwork for his arguments that 1) theology cannot be separated from the social context of the theologian, and 2) God is revealed in historical events like the Exodus and the life and death of Jesus as the Liberator of the oppressed.

The problem then becomes: How do we make sure the things we say about God are actually true, and not just what we want them to be? If theology is contingent and God’s revelation is historical, how do we guard against lapsing into creating God in our image – a common critique of belief since Feuerbach.

Or, as Cone himself puts it, “To what extent is the God of Black Theology limited to the biological origin of its advocates?” (p. 84)

How Christianity Created Marxism

I didn’t anticipate writing more about Marx beyond my comments last week about how despite being an avowed critic of religion, Marx has had profound impacts on Christianity, but here we are because I couldn’t help notice some parallels between the Europe of Marx’s time and the America of ours.

In honor of Karl Marx’s 200th birthday, I’m reading Gareth Stedman Jones’ Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion.

As a philosophical biography, Stedman Jones’ work is focused beyond just the nuts-and-bolts info of Marx’s life; instead, he takes pains to paint the social and philosophical context into which Marx was born and raised. This is very helpful, as no one thinks in a vacuum, and if we are to understand Marx and what he believed, we should also understand the currents into which he was born.

How Marx Changed Christianity

Saturday was the 200th birthday of Karl Marx, occasioning a slew of think pieces and hot takes (he was a genius! he was a monster!) – but here’s one that rarely gets made: Marx, that notorious skeptic of religion, was arguably one of the most influential figures in shaping 20th century Christianity.

On the one hand, this is obvious – Marx’s influence on world history generally is hard to overstate, and to the extent that Christianity partakes in world history, it must also have been influenced by Marx. Likewise, because so much of American Christianity, especially the fundamentalist and evangelical strains, embraced anti-communism, Marx obviously exerted a significant, albeit negative influence in the development of those traditions.

But I mean something more specific, and more positive – that Marx’s critique of capitalism’s inherent depredations and his yearning for a better, more just society shaped at least two significant Christian movements in the 20th century.