Why Is White Theology Just Called ‘Theology’?
White Theology and White Power
James Cone called his 1969 book Black Theology and Black Power. The title located the theology before the reader reached the first page. Cone was writing from the Black experience in America, particularly the effort to understand Christianity amid slavery’s legacy, segregation, racial violence and the emerging Black Power movement. His work became foundational to Black liberation theology because it refused to pretend that theology could be separated from the historical circumstances in which Christians attempted to understand God, freedom and power.[1]
Something interesting happens, however, when we walk to another part of the theological library. We find Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Hodge, Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. Ordinarily, we do not describe this body of work as culturally located theology. It is simply called theology. That difference deserves examination.
Black theology has a context. Womanist theology has a context. Feminist theology has a context. Latin American liberation theology has a context. Asian, African and Indigenous theologies have contexts. Their interpreters routinely ask how race, gender, colonialism, poverty or political power affected the questions theologians asked and the answers they reached. Cone himself later made the role of social and historical context central to theological method.[2]
The dominant Western theological tradition also developed within history. That does not mean Augustine or Aquinas should simply be called “white theologians.” Augustine was a North African Christian who lived long before the modern racial category of whiteness took shape; Aquinas likewise predates that modern racial order. Scholars disagree about how far back the concept of race itself should be traced, but the modern history of whiteness is a later development.[3] Their place in the Western canon illustrates a related problem: one theological tradition came to function as theology itself, while others were more often identified by geography, race, gender or social circumstance.
That raises the first question of this series: Why is the dominant tradition so often treated as though it came from nowhere? A second question emerges later in Christian history, when European colonial expansion, racial classification, slavery and modern ideas of whiteness became intertwined with societies in which Christians exercised enormous religious, political and cultural influence.
Christians did not merely observe those societies from the outside. They lived within empires, colonial societies, slaveholding economies and nations increasingly organized around racial hierarchy. Christians helped build some of those institutions, resisted others and inherited still others. Their theology was therefore produced inside particular arrangements of power.
The issue is deeper than the claim that white Christians sometimes behaved badly while producing otherwise unaffected theology. The question is whether living within systems of unusual social and political power influenced what Christians believed about humanity, Scripture, providence, land, authority, nation, race and social order.
That is where the term white theology becomes useful, but it requires precision. By white theology, I do not mean theology written by white people. Nor do I mean that whiteness explains everything Calvin, Edwards, Barth or any other theologian believed. Serious theology cannot be reduced to the biography or racial identity of its author.
I use white theology more narrowly: Christian theological interpretation developed within societies structured by European or white dominance when that location of power affected theology’s assumptions about God, humanity, authority, land, race, nation, social order or whose experience was allowed to function as normative.
This distinction matters because social location influences theology without mechanically determining it. George Fox and the movement he helped establish contributed to a Quaker tradition that would become an important force against slavery. Walter Rauschenbusch helped articulate the Social Gospel. Dietrich Bonhoeffer resisted Nazism. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement challenged poverty, war and concentrated power. Thomas Merton confronted racism and war, while Daniel and Philip Berrigan resisted American militarism.[4] These examples make the analytical question more precise: when did theology challenge power, when did it accommodate power, and when did it fail to see power at all?
Willie James Jennings has made this problem difficult to avoid. In The Christian Imagination, Jennings examines Western Christianity alongside colonial expansion, displacement, racial formation and Christian understandings of land and belonging. His argument goes beyond saying that otherwise pristine Christianity was occasionally misused by racist individuals. He asks how Christian formation itself became entangled with ways of imagining peoples and places that helped create and maintain segregated societies.[5]
Once that question is raised, Christian history looks different. Consider Jonathan Edwards. His reflections on religious experience, grace, divine beauty and the sovereignty of God remain important. He also owned enslaved people. The Yale & Slavery Research Project describes Edwards as a willing slaveholder who regarded slavery as compatible with Scripture, even while condemning the Atlantic slave trade and affirming the common humanity and spiritual potential of Africans and Native Americans.[6]
Why should the first set of facts belong principally to theology while the second belongs principally to biography?
We would never approach Cone that way. No serious student of Cone would attempt to understand his theology while ignoring segregation, Black Power, the civil rights struggle or the racial violence surrounding him. Those circumstances help explain why he asked the questions he asked. Edwards deserves the same kind of historical examination.
The purpose is not to remove Edwards from the theological canon. It is to take his theology seriously enough to ask whether his understanding of sin, grace, Scripture, providence and Christian responsibility helped him recognize the moral contradictions around him—or permitted important contradictions to remain outside his theological field of vision. That is not merely a biographical question. It is a theological one.
It also exposes an asymmetry in how theology has often been studied. We ask what Black experience contributed to Cone, what Black women’s experience contributed to womanist theology, and how poverty, dictatorship and economic exploitation shaped liberation theology. We should ask comparable questions of Christians occupying more powerful locations in history.
What did possessing power allow theologians to see? What did it allow them not to see? What happens when people interpreting Scripture also possess unusual authority to decide which interpretation counts as orthodox, who controls theological institutions and which questions deserve theological attention?
This is where the title White Theology and White Power deliberately echoes Cone. Black Power was not simply about Black identity. It concerned agency, freedom, oppression, dignity and control over the institutions shaping Black life.[7] If we examine the relationship between Black theology and people struggling for power, we should also examine the relationship between Christian theology and people who already possessed considerable power.
The ability to define theology itself was one expression of that power. Black theology is marked as Black. Womanist theology is marked as womanist. Liberation theology is marked as liberation theology. Indigenous theology is marked as Indigenous. The dominant tradition often remains unmarked, and what is unmarked can easily appear universal.
There is an important danger here. If every theology is historically situated, does that mean theology can no longer make universal claims about God, truth or morality? It does not. Context does not eliminate truth. Recognizing Cone’s historical location does not make his claims true only for Black Christians. Recognizing Edwards’s social location does not make his theology false simply because he lived within a slaveholding society.
It means neither theologian receives an exemption from historical examination. The same method should apply to everyone.
Throughout this series, I will therefore ask how Christian theology interacted with white power without assuming that the relationship was always the same. Sometimes Christians sanctified racial hierarchy. Sometimes they accommodated it or failed to perceive it. Sometimes they resisted it at considerable cost. Those differences matter if this is to be theological inquiry rather than a predetermined indictment.
The argument is not that Black theology is contextual while white theology is corrupted. The argument is that all theology is done somewhere, by someone, within history, and power belongs among the circumstances theology must examine.
That principle will matter as this series turns to slavery, colonialism, the Doctrine of Discovery, segregation, Christian nationalism, Dominion Theology, the Seven Mountain Mandate and contemporary efforts to unite Christian authority with political power. These subjects should be investigated with the same seriousness with which scholars examine Black theology, womanist theology and liberation theology.
Cone forced American Christians to ask what Christianity looked like from the underside of American history. White Theology and White Power asks what happened to Christianity when its interpreters were frequently standing closer to the top.
Notes
[1] James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Seabury Press, 1969).
[2] James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). Cone gives particular attention to the role of Black religious experience and social and historical context in theological reflection.
[3] Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Heng is particularly important as a caution against treating race itself as an exclusively modern phenomenon, while Painter traces the later development of whiteness as a racial category.
[4] For representative works and historical background, see Thomas D. Hamm, The Quakers in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1917); Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1971); Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952); Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968); Daniel Berrigan, No Bars to Manhood (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970); and Philip Berrigan, Prison Journals of a Priest Revolutionary (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970).
[5] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
[6] David W. Blight with the Yale and Slavery Research Project, Yale and Slavery: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024), chap. 1; Yale & Slavery Research Project, “Jonathan Edwards.” Yale’s research describes Edwards as a slaveholder who accepted slaveholding while condemning the Atlantic slave trade.
[7] Cone, Black Theology and Black Power.
