What's the Use? A Black Queer (Critical) Appreciation of Karl Barth

Early African American critics of James H. Cone, the pioneering member of Black liberation theology, criticized Cone for his appropriation of Karl Barth’s thought, specifically decrying what they deemed as Cone’s uncritical use of Barth’s alleged Christocentrism. For instance, Cone’s brother Cecil—a theologian in his own right—challenged James for using a theological methodology not grounded in the religious experience of African Americans. [1] However, Cone over time became critical of Barth as well as his white American “Barthian” followers. Consequently, Cone left Barth behind by retrieving African American cultural and religious sources for his Black theological reflection. Subsequent generations of Black theologians have adopted and deployed Cone’s suspicion of Barth’s thought, fearing that it is no longer useful—if it ever was—for Black people’s collective liberation!
This paper aims to buck this trend among Black theologians. It argues that the early Cone was right to draw on Barth, and in so doing, the early Cone alerts readers to an often-unnoticed liberative potential of Barth’s theology. Despite his shortcomings, this paper argues that Barth proves useful for Black queer liberative ends. But this paper is not merely an apologia although it is indeed that. By drawing insights from queer theorist Sara Ahmed and theologian Hanna Reichel, this paper aims to tease out what makes Karl Barth—or any thinker for that matter—useful along with the affordances Barth’s Christological perspectives offer Black queer theological reflection. 
To demonstrate, this paper makes three moves. First, it will briefly account for Cone’s decisive self-departure from Barth and, following, suggest that Cone was on to something in his early use of Barth that Cone’s critics did not immediately recognize. Cone intuited the sociopolitical dimensions of Barth’s theology, which provided the necessary albeit insufficient grounds to advance a distinctly Black theology of liberation. Second, the paper will raise questions about Black liberation theological method, primarily asking “What makes a source and a set of procedures for Black theological reflection Black?” It argues that the so-called "Black Hermeneutical School of Black Theology" limits its own liberative potential by hastily foreclosing on "non-Black" and even queer sources. [2] Then, the paper will consider Ahmed’s theory of queer use and Reichel’s account of doctrine’s affordances. Ahmed argues that queer use refers to “how things can be used in ways other than for which they were intended or by those other than for whom they were intended.” [3] Reichel understands the affordances of doctrine to be its most likely and persistent use, given the relationship between the theologian as agent and doctrine as object in the context of the environment. [4] With these insights in hand, the paper finally sketches out a constructive proposal for a Black queer critical appropriation of Barth’s thought through a brief reflection on Barth’s mature Christology found in Church Dogmatics IV. In so doing, the paper demonstrates the potentialities of Barth’s thought for not only Black queer theological reflection but also Black theological reflection more broadly.

Footnotes

[1] Cecil W. Cone, The Identity Crisis in Black Theology (Nashville: AME Sunday School Union, 1978).

[2] For a discussion of this particular “school” within Black liberation theology, see Frederick L. Ware, Methodologies of Black Theology (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2002), 28–65. 

[3] Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use? (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 199.

[4] Hanna Reichel, After Method: Queer Grace, Conceptual Design, and the Possibility of Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2023), 188.