Cecile Cone, James Cone's brother, critiqued his brother's project, saying that it ultimately failed to help the black community because "*The confessional story* of black people's relationship with the Almighty Sovereign God is replaced by the call to political activity" - https://twitter.com/lukestamps/status/1248745263449194498

_The Identity Crisis in Black Theology_, p. 86

As @mika_edmondson once told me, Cecile Cone essentially said James's theology wasn't grounded in the scriptures the way the older black church was. The reason Cone thinks it necessary to reject a juridical and objective view...

...of the atonement is in order to emphasize its subjective impact upon man. Because sin is not the breaking of God’s law where man is in cosmic treason with his creator, God cannot unilaterally redeem man from Satan, sin, and death.

Thus, Cone feels safe to agree with Delores Williams in rejecting all western views of the atonement, contra Martin Luther King Jr., finding “nothing redemptive about suffering in itself,” even Christ’s suffering on the cross (The Cross & The Lynching Tree, 150).

Ref. theo. agrees that the atonement does have a subjective element, the experience of the atonement in the Christian’s life is only penultimate. Re: Cone, the concern is that his demand for the atonement to be purely sociopolitical/subjective leaves redemption chiefly up to us.

Just as Cone eschews the objective and priestly work of Christ on the cross, he also abrogates Christ’s objective prophetic work on the cross, where, regardless of our compliance with this work, or opposition to it, man is still redeemed through his substitutionary sacrifice.

Michael Horton notes that the cup that Christ drank “was not the cup of human injustice...but the cup of the Father’s wrath (Luke 22:42; Isa. 51:17)” (Lord and Servant: A Covenant Christology, 182).

In Christ’s own words, his death on the cross is a priestly sacrifice on behalf of our sins: “for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28; cf. Matt. 20:28; 27:46; 2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13).

Christ’s mission “to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18b) is rooted in his priestly mission to “take away the sins of the world” (John. 1:29).

Christ’s mission was not merely to identify with the plight of those oppressed, for they cannot drink the cup that he drank, or share in his baptism (Mark 10:35).

Since sin *is* the problem of man, the atonement is that work where Christ satisfies the wrath of God toward sin by keeping the law perfectly and by lovingly offering up his life as a propitiatory sacrifice (Rom. 3:25; 1 John 4:10).

With God’s wrath and justice being satisfied at the cross, constitutive to this is the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:19-20; Rom. 5:6-11). Passing the peace to our brethren can only happen if we first have peace with God.

This is perhaps where Cone’s view proves most unsatisfactory. He sees the confrontation of white supremacy as a perpetual work. Yet, it is Christ who “reconciles to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20; Eph. 2:14).

Mika Edmondson points out that Cone confuses the roles of the atonement and the sacraments here (The Power of Unearned Suffering: The Roots and Implications of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Theodicy, 198-99).

Cone looks to the cross for a sign instead of the bread and wine, where God efficaciously nourishes us to live the Christian life.

It is precisely because the atonement and all of its aspects, like reconciliation, are objective that Christians can comfort and succor the distressed, and protect and defend the innocent (WLC 135).

Though Cone’s reticence to the resources in orthodox categories is unfortunate, it is not surprising. As some of the churches who preach substitutionary atonement are the ones who bared their doors from blacks, the arms of neo-orthodoxy were that much more appealing.

On March 22, 1964, “Joe Purdy (a black student at Memphis State University) and Jim Bullock (a white Southwesterner) attempted to worship at Second Presbyterian Church (SPC) in suburban East Memphis”

(Stephen R. Haynes, The Last Segregated Hour: the Memphis Kneel-Ins and The Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation, 56). The session of the church arranged for its officers to stand guard:

“As the students approached the church’s main entrance, Purdy was asked if he was “African.” When he answered, ‘No. I’m an American, but I’m black,’ Purdy and Bullock were told they could not enter the sanctuary."

Cone’s justification in using the neo-orthodox schools of Barth and Tillich is in, what he says is their ability “to take the best and reject the worst in both liberal and orthodox theology" (My Soul Looks Back, 83). In his view, the orthodox folks were "blatant racists" (ibid.)

Cone’s theology of the cross, though inadequate, serves as an important lesson for the American church, in that, Cone’s theology is in part a creation of a church who showed “partiality” (Js. 2:1);

we failed, and often still fail, to embrace the reconciliation in our own theology of the atonement by participating in the segregation and oppression of African-Americans. For the American church, then, the lynched bodies of African-Americans speak to us in a prophetic sense;

similar to the severed body of the concubine in Judges 19, the church must look at the lynched bodies of these image-bearers in its history and “consider it, take counsel, and speak” (Judges 19:30).

end.

FYI, I adapted this thread from a Christology paper I wrote.