In case you hadn’t heard yet, James Cone died today. He was known for his groundbreaking work in the area of what has come to be called Black Liberation Theology. There has been a lot of critique of BLT from conservative evangelical and Reformed Christians with the guilt by association fallacy that simply because Liberation Theology (with its genesis in Latin America) developed through the appeal to a neo-Marxist mode, that this in and of itself makes it a heretical theological development. The reality is that Liberation Theology just as any other theology—yes even the type that funds most conservative evangelical reformed theology; i.e. Aristotelian philosophy—it attempts to reify neo-Marxist categories under the pressure of the Gospel categories themselves. Apparently conservative evangelical types only think this kind of evangelistic process can be done with Aristotle and Plato but not with German or other continentally sourced philosophies. And so these types want to label people like James Cone a heretic, and condemn him to hell. Indeed, there is a growing fear among conservative evangelical reformed minds that their whole movement is being hood-winked into Black Liberation Theology; the fear was given fuel recently by The Gospel Coalition’s MLK50 conference and in particular Russell Moore’s talk that these folks believe gives way too much credit to the work that Black Liberation Theology has been doing for these past many years.

So just today, just as Cone has died, a black Reformed Canadian blogger named Samuel Sey posted the following (with all that I just mentioned in mind). You can see the gist of exactly what I just described in his Tweet.

This is unwarranted, to say the least! Are there aspects of Cone’s theology that I don’t agree with? I’m sure there is; indeed I know there is. But can I recognize how he has been used of the Lord to motivate a theological movement that elevates concerns that actually are grounded in the scandalous Gospel of Jesus Christ? Yes. But what is really concerning is that Samuel somehow has come to the conclusion that James Cone didn’t know Jesus; thus condemning Cone to hell, just as James Cone has died no less. How does Samuel know if Cone knew Christ or not? Cone did all of his work precisely in relation to and from Jesus Christ; from the reality that God’s wisdom and power are located in Jesus’ identification with the weak and powerless of this world. How does this indicate to someone that Cone did not personally have a relationship with Jesus Christ? To me it indicates just the opposite! Again, does Cone have some things in his theology that I might even consider aberrant? Probably. Does he have something like Rahner’s anonymous Christian present in his understanding of salvation? I think he might (I need to pursue that line further; it has been years since I’ve read Cone). But even so; even if he does have some aberrant ideas in his theology, does this necessarily mean he didn’t know Jesus Christ? Of course not! I’d venture to say that when we come to the eschaton we will realize that we all had some aberrant ideas in our various theologies. What I consider to be aberrant in this whole thing, in regard to Samuel’s tweet, is that he has concluded that James Cone didn’t know Jesus. This is aberrant because in order to ultimately or absolutely conclude something like that you would have to be God with access to someone’s heart; that seems quite aberrant to me; it even seems like Samuel has displaced God’s place with his own, as if he has a God’s eye view. That seems dangerous and imprudent to me.