A Theology That Does Not Need the Throne

White Theology and White Power XV

The history traced through this series leaves Christians who care about public life with an uncomfortable problem.

Withdrawal is not an adequate answer to Christian supremacy. Christians live within political, economic, educational, cultural, and civic institutions whether they acknowledge that fact or not. Churches own property, employ people, educate children, invest money, distribute charity, shape voters, publish ideas, and influence public policy. Silence can protect injustice as effectively as bad theology can.

Yet the opposite answer—that Christians should control the institutions that shape society—recreates the temptation this series has traced from Christian empire through colonialism, racial slavery, segregation, Christian nationalism, dominion theology, and contemporary political power.

Christianity therefore needs a theology that can enter public life without needing to possess it.

Jesus provides a starting point. In Mark 10, after his disciples argue about status, he contrasts their vocation with rulers who “lord it over” others. “Not so with you,” he tells them. Greatness is to take the form of service (Mark 10:42–45). The passage does not provide a modern theory of democratic government. It does something more fundamental: it denies Christians permission to treat domination as the ordinary model of Christian greatness.

That principle sits comfortably beside the Great Commandment. Love of God cannot be separated from love of neighbor. The political meaning is not that government can be reduced to sentiment or that Christians must agree with everything their neighbors believe. It means the religious outsider never becomes merely an obstacle to Christian purposes. The treatment of the neighbor who rejects Christian teaching remains a theological test of Christian power.

Jeremiah offers another useful image. Judean exiles in Babylon are told to seek the peace and prosperity of the city in which they live (Jeremiah 29:7). They are commanded to contribute to the welfare of a society they do not own and whose rulers do not share their covenant.

That may be one of the clearest biblical models for Christian public responsibility in a pluralist democracy: seek the good of a city without believing the city has to belong to you.

A constructive theology of power can begin there.

It first requires truthfulness about social location. This does not mean theology becomes autobiography or that claims to universal truth disappear. It means theologians stop granting dominant traditions an exemption routinely denied to Black, womanist, liberation, Indigenous, Asian American, or postcolonial theology. Everyone reads scripture from somewhere. Institutions shape what appears obvious, what questions seem important, what experiences count as evidence, and which assumptions remain invisible.

Disclosure of location is therefore not ritual self-accusation. It is epistemic discipline. A theologian writing from within a powerful church, university, denomination, nation, race, class, or political coalition should ask what that location makes easier to see—and what it rewards the theologian for not seeing.

A theology that does not need the throne must also make power itself a theological subject.

Christian ethics can become extraordinarily specific about sexuality, marriage, family, personal behavior, and doctrinal boundaries while remaining comparatively vague about who owns land, controls institutions, writes rules, distributes resources, decides whose testimony is credible, determines public memory, and possesses the authority to compel others.

The history examined in this series requires harder questions. Who makes the decision? Who benefits? Who bears the cost? Who can appeal? Whose knowledge is treated as authoritative? What restraints exist when the decision-maker is wrong? What happens when power changes hands?

Those are theological questions because power affects what happens to neighbors.

This requires recovering structural sin without dissolving personal responsibility. Institutions do not sin as mysterious creatures independent of human beings. They are durable arrangements of laws, incentives, habits, property, practices, authority, and memory created and maintained by people. Structural analysis helps explain how injustice can survive even when many participants lack consciously malicious motives.

But structural sin cannot become an alibi. If people maintain structures, people can also change them. Repentance therefore involves more than changing private attitudes. A person who acquires the capacity to change an unjust rule, practice, allocation of resources, or institutional culture inherits a corresponding moral responsibility.

A theology of power must also cultivate restraint.

Restraint is not passivity. It is the refusal to use every power one possesses merely because one possesses it. Constitutional government depends on restraint. So do healthy churches, families, businesses, universities, and civic institutions. Christian theology has particular reasons to understand this because the tradition repeatedly warns about wealth, status, rulers, domination, self-exaltation, and the human tendency to confuse possession with entitlement.

Dorothy Day demonstrated one version of that restraint by building institutions of hospitality and solidarity without imagining that Christian faithfulness required possession of the state. Thomas Merton treated national power as something Christians must judge rather than an extension of Christian identity. The Berrigans accepted significant costs rather than allowing legality or patriotism to settle questions of war and conscience.

Their examples differ, and none provides a complete political program. What connects them is refusal to equate Christian effectiveness with domination.

Restraint must be joined to learning across social location. The previous essay examined Bonhoeffer’s encounter with Black Christianity in Harlem. His experience is important because dominant traditions are usually accustomed to speaking and teaching. Theological correction often begins when they learn how to receive.

James Cone forced that issue upon American Christianity. Black theology did not become necessary because God belonged to one racial group. It became necessary because supposedly universal American theology had developed within institutions that could tolerate racial domination while continuing to call themselves Christian. Cone compelled theology to answer a question dominant Christianity had learned not to ask: What does the gospel look like when interpreted from the side of the people being crushed by the social order?[1]

The goal is not to make social location infallible. Oppressed people can be wrong, and powerful people can be right. The discipline is to refuse a system in which proximity to institutional authority quietly determines whose knowledge counts as universal.

That same humility produces a theological defense of pluralism.

Christians do not have to believe all religions are equally true in order to believe citizens of every religion and no religion are equally citizens. Pluralism is not relativism. It is a political arrangement through which people with irreconcilable convictions can share public life without one group possessing the state by theological right.

Indeed, Christianity has its own reasons to defend such freedom. Faith cannot be coerced into existence. The Great Commission instructs Christians to make disciples; it does not authorize government to manufacture them. Christian witness depends upon persuasion, testimony, example, service, argument, and conversion. Government coercion is a poor substitute for all of them.

The strongest test of Christian religious liberty is therefore not whether Christians protect their own freedom. It is whether they protect the freedom of people whose beliefs and conduct Christians consider profoundly mistaken.

Finally, a theology that does not need the throne must be capable of repair.

Repentance becomes thin when it changes vocabulary while leaving consequences untouched. Churches and Christian institutions that benefited from slavery, segregation, Indigenous dispossession, exclusionary property practices, discriminatory education, or other documented injustices cannot reverse history. They can investigate it. They can open archives. They can identify who benefited and who bore the cost. They can correct commemorative practices, revise policies, transfer resources, restore relationships, and consider restitution appropriate to specific harms.

Repair should be historically specific. Otherwise repentance can become another performance through which institutions demonstrate moral sensitivity without surrendering anything.

None of these disciplines requires Christians to become politically passive. Black churches organized voters and built institutions. Abolitionists challenged law. Bonhoeffer resisted a regime. Day organized. Merton wrote against war and racial injustice. Christian public responsibility may require legislation, protest, administration, litigation, organizing, voting, institution building, and political office.

The distinction is not between engagement and withdrawal.

It is between responsibility and possession.

A Christian may exercise political power. The Christian cannot assume that Christianity creates a prior title to it.

A Christian may believe a law is morally wrong. The Christian must still recognize the equal citizenship of people who disagree.

A Christian may win an election. Christian theology should also prepare that person to lose one.

A Christian may build an institution. The institution should contain mechanisms capable of correcting Christians themselves.

That returns us to the question with which this series began.

Why do we call one body of thought Black theology while historically dominant European and American theology so often appears simply as theology?

Part of the answer is institutional power. Dominant traditions acquired the ability to treat their own location as the unmarked norm. Their historical assumptions became invisible precisely because the people making them possessed enough authority to define what counted as ordinary Christianity.

The answer, however, cannot be to put white permanently in front of every theological claim made by a white Christian.

The purpose of identifying white theology is diagnostic rather than tribal. It makes visible a theological formation that could confuse its own social location with universality, benefit from racial and political power while leaving that power largely uninterrogated, and sometimes transform Christian privilege into Christian order.

The goal is to outgrow that theology.

That does not require Christians to become ashamed of European, Western, or American intellectual traditions. It requires a theology confident enough to tell the truth about how those traditions were formed, humble enough to learn from traditions they marginalized, and disciplined enough to judge institutions that reward Christians themselves.

James Cone forced American Christianity to confront the gospel from the underside of its own history. The white Christian countertradition demonstrated that dominant theology can sometimes hear such criticism and change. The history of Christian supremacy demonstrates what happens when it does not.

The final question is therefore not whether Christianity will have power. Christians will continue to possess various forms of power, as every community does.

The question is what Christianity believes power is for.

Jesus’ answer does not require withdrawal from the world. It requires a different relationship to authority: leadership without entitlement, conviction without supremacy, public responsibility without political possession, and service that does not disappear when Christians cease to be in charge.

A theology that can do those things does not need the throne.

It can seek the good of the city without needing the city to belong to it.

Notes

[1] James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Seabury Press, 1969); Cone, God of the Oppressed; Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020).

[2] Mark 10:42–45; Jeremiah 29:7; Matthew 22:34–40. These texts serve different historical and theological purposes and are not offered as a direct biblical theory of modern democracy. Together they provide resources for thinking about service, neighbor-love, and responsibility within a political community Christians do not possess.

[3] Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952); Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968); Daniel Berrigan, No Bars to Manhood (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970).

[4] Reggie L. Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance, rev. ed. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2021).