J. Deotis Roberts was one of the first Black theologians to publish in the wave that began in 1969. His 1971 book Liberation and Reconciliation made an argument that still unsettles people on both sides: Black Christians need freedom from oppression, and that freedom serves a larger goal, which is reconciliation between equals. James Cone, the better-known voice of that generation, pressed for liberation now. Roberts agreed the need was real. He disagreed about what liberation was for.
That difference touches how Christians think about justice, the end of history, who Jesus is and how the faith is defended in the Black community. Walter Strickland has studied Roberts closely and calls Liberation and Reconciliation “my favorite theological book of all time.” He makes the case that Roberts deserves a far wider reading than he gets. The fairest way to understand Roberts is to set him beside Cone carefully and be honest about where the two stood together and where they did not.
Where Does Roberts Fit?
Dwight Hopkins places Roberts in the first generation of Black theologians, which begins with Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power in 1969. Liberation and Reconciliation followed two years later, partly as a response. Cone became the household name. He wrote prolifically and deliberately tried to join the Christian faith of Martin Luther King Jr. with the Black Power of Malcolm X. Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, notes that many people know Cone without ever having heard of Roberts. She found him by accident while researching a seminary paper and kept reading.
One biographical fact matters for what follows. Roberts held degrees from historically Black colleges and universities and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, and he later taught and lectured in South America, Asia, Africa and Europe. He was rooted in the Black experience and formed internationally, and that breadth shows up directly in his theology.
What Did Roberts Argue?
Roberts did not soften the problem. He named systemic oppression and personal prejudice as forces really oppressing Black people in America, and he treated liberation as a genuine necessity. But as Strickland summarizes him, “We need to pursue liberation for the sake of being restored to one another, to be reconciled to one another.”
A condition keeps this from becoming a call for cheap peace. In Strickland’s words, Roberts held that “you can only be restored if you’re actually considered an equal.” A relationship in which one party still regards the other as less than a peer is not reconciliation. So liberation comes first in sequence, and reconciliation gives liberation its purpose.
That ordering also sets a limit. Strickland states the principle: “We can’t do anything for the sake of liberation that will hinder reconciliation.” He immediately guards against a misreading. Roberts was not saying justice work must never make anyone angry. He was saying there is a bigger goal than liberation for liberation’s sake. Hopkins’s label for Roberts, the theologian of balance, fits only if balance is understood rightly. It is not a midpoint between caring and not caring about oppression. It is a claim about the right order of two things Roberts believed were both necessary, and it follows from his writing for the whole people of God rather than for Black Christians alone.
Where Do Roberts and Cone Agree?
One caution comes before comparing them. What follows on Cone’s side comes from Strickland’s reading of Cone, offered as a critic who also admires him, and Cone would likely describe his own aims differently. Readers who want to weigh the comparison fully should read Cone himself.
The two men share more than a hero-and-villain story allows. Fields observes that both were, in a sense, bringing an apologetic for the Christian faith to the Black Power movement. The clearest evidence of common ground comes from a critic of both. William R. Jones, in Is God a White Racist?, faulted Cone, Roberts, Gayraud Wilmore and others together for assuming that God is for Black people and is the God of liberation. To Jones, Cone and Roberts shared the same basic confidence that God is good and sides with the oppressed. Their disagreement happened inside that conviction. Strickland’s own regard for Cone is real too. He urges people to read The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which he considers Cone’s most beautiful book.
Where Do They Part Ways?
Four disagreements surface, and they are easier to evaluate one at a time.
Which Leads: The Faith or the Movement?
Strickland reads Cone as letting Black Power ideology engulf and inform his theology. The better course, he says, would have been “his Christianity informing how he might utilize some of the helpful elements of the Black Power movement.” He does not treat the movement as worthless. “It’s not completely broken,” he says, but it contains things the Christian faith would call into question. The question is which one sits in judgment over the other. For Roberts, the faith did. In A Black Political Theology (1973), he acknowledged that he was less appealing to young people who wanted to be more militant and that he understood their anger. His answer, as Strickland puts it: “Protest, yes. But in a way that’s aligned with the Christian Scripture.”
How Does the Story End?
Roberts built his ethic on the coming kingdom of God. If believers are moving toward the kingdom God will bring, then how they act in public now has to cohere with what that kingdom will be. Cone, in Strickland’s account, lacked that driver, because “he got rid of eschatology because it was abused to keep slaves docile.”
Strickland frames the contrast: “You have somebody in Cone who needs to get justice now,” while Roberts says, “God is just, he will have the last say in this. And so in the end, in the kingdom, he’ll make all things right.” He blocks the passive reading at once: “not that we shouldn’t pursue justice and liberation now, but it will come about perfectly.”
Fields presses the human limit underneath this. Without final judgment, the oppressors who died unpunished simply got away with it, and justice becomes hopeless. People cannot carry the whole weight of it themselves: “We don’t have that capacity.” This matches the shape of Paul’s instruction:
“Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19).
The passage addresses personal retaliation, not the whole question of public justice, so it should not be stretched into a political program. It does show that hope in God’s final judgment is meant to shape how believers respond to evil now, which is Roberts’s claim.
Who Is Saved?
This is the most serious contrast and the one requiring the most care. Asked whether people who adopt Cone’s theology tend toward universalism, Strickland agrees and explains his reading of Cone’s Christology. Salvation, on that reading, means cohering with the Blackness of Christ as Cone perceived it, and “to be Black is to be oppressed,” or to align yourself with the oppressed. Strickland concludes that “it’s this oppression, liberation sort of binary that dictates salvation,” while familiar Protestant themes such as substitution recede.
That is Strickland’s interpretation, given in conversation, and it should be tested against Cone’s books. If it holds, the stakes are high. Paul places salvation in God’s gift received by faith:
“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8).
A theology that made identification with the oppressed the criterion of salvation would be relocating the center Paul names. Whether Cone actually did that is the question his own writing has to answer.
Is Christ Black?
Here Roberts’s international formation pays off. Strickland describes two unhealthy extremes. Some contextual theologians are “so focused on their own context that they lose the fact that God is doing a work that’s bigger than their context.” Others are “so theoretical that their theology is no good on the ground.”
Roberts held both a universal and a particular understanding of God. As Strickland renders it, “Jesus is not ontologically Black. He is whoever you are, wherever you are.” God meets the Black believer within the Black experience and the Asian or African believer within theirs, while doing one universal work of restoring creation’s brokenness. Making Christ Black in his essence would make him seem inapplicable to Christians who are not Black. Roberts refused that without retreating into a theology too abstract to touch anyone’s life.
Isn’t Cone’s Suspicion of Heaven Justified?
This is the strongest objection to Roberts. Strickland grants the history behind Cone’s move: talk of the afterlife was used to keep enslaved people docile. A promise of future justice can become a sedative. If Roberts’s kingdom ethic simply tells suffering people to wait, Cone’s urgency is the more faithful response.
The answer depends on what the hope does. Roberts did not use the coming kingdom to defer justice. He used it to measure present action, and that is a demand, not a delay. Jesus’s description of his own mission includes a commission “to preach deliverance to the captives” (Luke 4:18), so liberation language is not foreign to the gospel. The disagreement is whether present deliverance needs a final judgment behind it to be secure.
Strickland adds a sobering sequence. Jones, doubting whether God is good or loving toward Black people, called for a human-centered theism. Anthony Pinn later moved to full humanism, pursuing justice with God removed from the picture. Strickland is careful here. “I’m not a fan of the slippery slope argument,” he says, before observing that history shows the movement anyway. He offers a pattern worth watching, not proof that Cone’s view leads to atheism, and that restraint is right.
Why Does This Matter for Apologetics?
Fields reads Liberation and Reconciliation as an apologetic guide. Roberts argued that classical apologetics, which concentrates on proving God’s existence, often misses the Black community’s actual question. The issue is not God’s existence. As she puts it, “We believe he exists, but his character.” Why does God allow suffering?
Roberts learned this the hard way, in a story he told Strickland personally. Back from Edinburgh with classical apologetic training, he led a seminar for pastors in the Washington, D.C., area while teaching at Howard Divinity School. Partway through, he asked whether his arguments for God’s existence were helpful. The pastors answered that “it’s good information, but it’s not information that’s pertinent to our ministries.” They wanted to know what kind of God allows these conditions in America. That changed how Roberts wrote, Strickland explains, because “he’s answering a set of questions that’s contextualized for the Black context.” Strickland recommends starting with Liberation and Reconciliation, then A Black Political Theology and the more practical The Prophethood of Black Believers, which takes up church and state, family, incarceration and drugs.
This is where the Cone and Roberts debate stops being history. A defense of the faith in this setting has to say something true about God’s character in the face of suffering, and that requires taking a side on the question that divides the two men. When Christians pursue justice, does the belief that God will finally judge make them more committed to the work, or less? Roberts staked his ethic, and his apologetic, on the first answer.
