As we complete our first series for Advent this year, let’s take one more look at Cone’s reminder. Cone repeats our theme years later in his career in God of the Oppressed, expanding what it means in our context today:
“There can be no Christian theology that is not social and political. If theology is to speak about the God of Jesus who is revealed in the struggle of the oppressed for freedom, then theology must also become political, speaking for the God of the poor and the oppressed.” (James H. Cone; God of the Oppressed, p. 75)
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This is Part 2 of the series The Liberation at the Heart of Advent
(Read this series from its beginning here.)
Jesus is too often only envisioned as a peacemaker who accepted everybody. But this fails to take in the story in its entirety. Peacemakers who accept everybody don’t end up on Roman crosses. Jesus’ teachings and actions were rooted in his alternative social vision for his society. Jesus did not preach personal piety that left the status quo unchallenged, uncritiqued, or unchanged. He called his followers to a social vision that included the distributive justice found in Torah that many of those in his society had either forgotten or were choosing to ignore. He called this vision the kingdom, proclaimed it had come near (Advent), and invited his listeners to follow him in being a part of it.
Today, too many Christians want to claim Jesus so they can go to heaven but leave Jesus’ politics alone because it threatens their privilege, their power, or their social standing. Advent reminds us that Christianity’s gospel is rooted in a Jesus who proclaimed the advent of liberation for the oppressed and the beginning of a whole new world where injustice, violence and oppression are replaced by loving one’s neighbor as oneself and relating our neighbor as we would like our neighbor to relate to us. Anything less is a failure to grasp Jesus in his entirety.
I’ll close with one more quotation from Dr. Cone that it would be life-giving for us, this Advent season, to meditate on.
After all, are we not all oppressed, especially those who think that their freedom is found in social, political, and economic domination of others? Although these questions point to an essential truth of the gospel of liberation, they have been used by oppressors for untruth. The untruth of these questions lies in the subjective and often undisclosed intention of the people who ask them. While pretending to be concerned about the universal character of the human condition, oppressors are in fact concerned to justify their own particular status in society. They want to be oppressors and Christians at the same time. Since the oppressed are the only true Christians, oppressors claim to be victims, not for the purpose of being liberated but for their own social interests in retaining a ‘Christian’ identity while being against Jesus Christ. This is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer in another context called ‘cheap grace.’ I call it hypocrisy and blasphemy. (James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, p. 136)
What does it mean this Advent season for us, together, to be a part of the advent of justice for the marginalized, oppressed, and disenfranchised?
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