What Future Does Black Theology Imagine with Adam Clark (Part 1)

Ilia Delio sits down with theologian and scholar Adam Clark for a wide-ranging conversation on the roots and future of Black theology.

A student of the late James Cone—the founding voice of Black liberation theology—Adam brings deep theological insight and cultural awareness to questions at the heart of faith, justice, and the human story.

Together, Ilia and Adam explore:

• What Black theology is and why it matters
• The unique contributions of Black theology to the broader Christian tradition
• How academia becomes disconnected from lived experience
• What a future paradigm for justice, ecology, and liberation might look like

As co-chair of the Black Theology Group at the American Academy of Religion and an advocate for social justice in Cincinnati, Adam speaks with clarity, depth, and urgency about the kind of world we might yet build.

ABOUT ADAM CLARK

"To be filled with God is a great thing; to be filled with the fullness of God is still greater; to be filled with all the fullness of God is greatest of all."

Adam Clark is a professor of Theology at Xavier University and holds a PhD from Union Theological Seminary. Studying under James Cone, Adam brings rigorous and skillful expertise to the movement of liberation theology. He currently serves as co-chair of the Black Theology Group at the American Academy of Religion, actively publishes in the area of black theology and black religion and participates in social justice groups at Xavier and in the Cincinnati area.

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Transcript

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness. We return today with a deeply engaging conversation between Ilia Delio and Adam Clark, theologian and student of the late James Cone, a foundational figure in the development of Black theology. Ilia asks Adam, "What is Black theology? What insights does it have for human experience? What role does it play in the history of the Church? And later, Adam describes what he imagines as a new paradigm for the future of liberation, justice, and religion.

Ilia: We are pleased to welcome Professor Adam Clark, professor at Xavier University. Adam, it's just really great to be with you. I remember having a wonderful conversation with you last November, I think it was at Theology Beer Camp. And I attended one of your talks at one of the seminars and I was really impressed by your insights, your process thinking. And so I think we have a lot to talk about this afternoon. So to begin with, maybe you could just introduce yourself where you're coming from, your interests, your theological interests. I'll just give you the floor.

Adam: Sure, my name is Adam Clark. I'm currently a professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio in the Theology Department. My research interest is in Black and African-American theology and religion. I did my PhD under James Cone at Union Theological Seminary. I did my M. Div at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, which is the home of Martin Luther King Jr. and Howard Thurman. And I actually did my undergrad at Colgate University where I was a philosophy major. 

So my bent has been much in the kind of theological, religious and philosophical realm all of my academic career. I currently became director of our initiative for civic engagement at Xavier University. So I'm partly in the faculty, but I do some administrative work as well there now. And I've been trying to shift the focus of civic engagement from just political science to really try to have a deeper type of moral and ethical understanding of what our responsibility is as citizens of this country.

Ilia: Right. So maybe I could just begin, Adam, by asking you just for the sake of clarifying and deepening our understanding, how do you define black theology?

Adam: Yeah, that's a very good question. Black theology, I would say, classically, let me start with Cone's definition that most people accept. Cone understood black theology as, early in his career, as defining the gospel of Jesus Christ from a black perspective. And what that meant was, is just a way of interpreting through the lens of black experience and black culture. That's been the kind of common definition. 

He later, in his more mature life, talked about exploring the black religious imagination. And that's part of his last— one of his last books. He talked about it there, as I now define it. So it went from a very heavily Christocentric and really looking at the gospels to this idea of the black religious imagination that was kind of Christian plus. is not just specific to the Christian tradition, but just all types of religious expressions. And I kind of tend toward there, it's the black religious imagination frame toward this ideal of liberation and wholeness.

Ilia: In that respect, I mean, Christianity functions, I mean, in a sense, is it experientially based rather than doctrinally based? I mean, this doctrine takes certain, like, it's less important than the actual experience of Jesus as one meets Jesus in the Gospels.

Adam: The black church in this country has never been a doctrinal church, right, at large. It's always been an experiential church. just the very idea of the formation of it. So much so that when black theology first emerged, some people said, well, this is not a theology because it's not doctrinal, right? Some of Cone's most earliest work was named sociology or black studies because it was so different from the kind of classical idea of rearranging doctrine in that way. That's intrinsic to black theology, like black experience, right? like a perspective on what we're trying to understand.

Ilia: I actually think it's more authentic, in a sense, it's more authentic theology in the sense of the experience of God and through this person. And I think the Hellenization of Christianity distorted and led to a type of, and in a sense, you might wanna say that European white God that we have inherited, it comes out of this Hellenization, I think, this platonizing of Christianity and having this kind of ideal of what God is and further and further moving away from the praxis or the praxeological dimensions of the gospel that this is a, Jesus was, as I always say to people, Jesus was Jewish. People are often surprised by that. “Like, what? He was Jewish?”

Adam: And so was Paul.

Ilia: And so was Paul. Could you imagine that? Our old Christology really is grounded in a whole different framework, I think, that has over time become deeply distorted and sort of exported, for other purposes. And so I really appreciate Cone and your work in Black theology retrieving that authentic voice. And therefore, do you see theology, how do you see it in terms of subject? Is it a subjective experience or is there an object of devotion and belief? I mean...

Adam: That's a great question. Wow. traditionally, as theology does, came up with this kind of subject-object kind of distinction. That's a classical kind of the theological tradition. And I think part of the challenge is trying to fit new wine into old wineskins, right? Like sometimes we use the type of language that doesn't quite capture the experience. So we still have that language, like some people, like, for example, Cone has gone through tremendous critique by the very idea of blackness being too essential or ontological and that kind of thing. And I look at it as more of a theopoetic. Like it's not necessarily— he's using the type of categories that were present in his milieu at the time to try to re-articulate an experience. 

But some people read that as him trying to make a philosophical statement, when he's really trying to make an existential statement about the moment at hand, right? So I think sometimes some intellectuals and theoreticians, they just use what's available to them at the time, and they may not be philosophically precise, but it's effective for the moment. 

So I have a more generous reading of the theology, and I just say, look, people were just using what was available for them at the time, and we have to be very, I guess, flexible, applicable on how we're interpreting them, even though the categories, like you might use the same type of category as Plato, but you didn't mean the same thing as Plato. You might have used some type of Aristotelian metaphysics, in terms of that, but you're meaning something completely different by it in your historical context. So I think that's what it is. It's kind of almost like liberation theologies in general are kind of like guerrilla theologies, right? You're just kind of picking up what's there to try to overthrow the evil that's in front of you, that's urgent in front of you. And then think about the creative possibilities for something new to flourish.

Ilia: Let me just ask you this. Do you think black theology has effectively liberated us or given us sort of a new paradigm or a new, an opening for a new way of community, a more just relationship, or do you think black theology is still too academic? Is it still too circumscribed among the elite?

Adam: That's a great question. Yeah, I think it tended to do that because black theology, and I think all marginalized theologies, went into a legitimation crisis. So in order to actually be seen as legitimate by their academic peers, they had to engage the type of new theoretical thought that was current in the academy at the time. So it went postmodern, right? It goes to all this type of literary theory. 'Cause at first it started out as very sociological, and then it went to really this literary theory, and now it's engaging art and poetics and that type of thing. And then the people are like, "Well, what about me?" 

It started out as a social movement trying to serve a social movement and now with serving other academics because of this legitimation crisis. So here's how I would make a distinction. There's a difference between black theology as an academic discipline and black theological activity, right? And I think there's a lot of black theological activity that might go on outside of the actual academic institutions while black theology proper is really like being kind of surrounded in this kind of academic discipline, this cocoon sometimes, and it's hard to penetrate because even our conferences, right, they used to include preachers and practitioners and everything like that, but now it's just a group of academics kind of talking among themselves.

Ilia: Right, yeah, which is sort of a flaw within the academy. we become disconnected. And I think this is a crucial point because, look, we're in a new political situation today, where all the work that's been done toward, equality, diversity, inclusivity now is being undermined. And I think this is a huge question, like, can we ever come to a just community of persons, of whatever color, race, religion, ethnicity, gender, the total inclusivity of personhood. 

Is it possible, or is bias just built into where you are on this question of the inability for the I'm going to say the white privileged idea, that it's always been, there's an implicitness here. Right. David, for as much talk and as much theory we have and we all look so wonderfully enlightened, but when you come down to the last moment, it's like, do you feel that it's still a block? You know that it's still...

Adam: As we speak in 2025, March, through our ordinary eyes, it doesn't look good, right? You know if we look through the eyes of faith right and think about evolving standards of dignity Then that's our ray of hopefulness, right? So I think our eyes of faith would tell us that this thing can be overcome. But if we look at the actual empirical evidence, it doesn't look very hopeful.

Ilia: So basically stick around for another 2,000 years.

Adam: We're hoping some catalyst comes in and like ushers in this new time of revolution of dignity before that could happen.

Robert: Black theology isn't alone in its struggle to break out of the academy and penetrate real life so what exactly is creating these disconnections and what is preventing justice from breaking into our ecology, politics, and communities? Next, Ilya asks Adam whether Black theology and ecology have anything in common. And later, Adam describes what he imagines as a new paradigm for the future.

Ilia: I love the liberation idea of disruption and creative imagination—to disrupt the boundaries of injustice are those that thwart the fullness of personhood on every level and then that imagination of a new type of... So I'm going to ask you, what would you imagine up ahead? 
But the other thing, and here's what I'm really concerned about as well, there's something a little bit stifling within us to come into this wholeness that we talk about. And I think that same stifling is on the level of ecology. So in a sense, our disconnect from the natural world is our disconnect in the human world. Do you see something like that as well? Do you see an ecological parallel to, in a sense, the inability or the ecological crisis as a mirror of the human crisis, so to speak?

Adam: Wow. Well, here's how I'd answer that. Well, your first part about the imagination, like when I think about if you look at the black American experience, the greatest metaphor for the imagination, for the world we want to desire and live into was offered by King, the beloved community, right? As this kind of moral paradigm for what we should aspire to, our highest possibilities of human existence, right? Or maybe even the existence of all life, if we kind of expand that ecologically, Right? Beloved community. 

So, in "Community is Deep," there's been two dominant themes. There's been this theme of liberation and this theme of community from our African heritage that's been embedded in the Black resistance movement. Thurman talks about this community of life, right? Like, in terms of that, that all of life communes together and that cooperation is stronger than competition and division. that innate and core within the kind of the living project, as he would say. So, there's competing, there's plural visions, I should say, plural visions of what this should look like. But I do think the idea of non-human life, right, is something that the urgency of suffering And the immediacy of pain has made it not as likely for black theology to engage the ecological spear, right? 

As other perspectives, they're starting to do it, but there really hasn't been a point of emphasis until very, very recently. But I think there's a lot of resources to really talk about that, because we come from traditions that honored the whole of life. Yeah, but I think what's happened has been very anthropocentric, because part of the very contradiction that made Black theology come into being was a misplaced anthropocentrism, right? This type of devaluing of the anthropocentric, right? So because you've been so devalued in your pain, at your pain point, you tend to overemphasize that, but you don't overemphasize to the exclusion of, but it's both/and. And I think we're coming to that point where it's both/and, and we're starting to see it. And I think Howard Thurman kind of points us to the way within our tradition to actually do that.

Ilia: That makes a lot of sense, actually. I've never thought of it in those terms, but I think the deep pain and suffering of black people has been such that there is a real need to address that from an anthropocentric perspective, but not to the exclusion, certainly of ecology. The other thing I think to keep in mind is we're really talking about the Western, a Western phenomenon here, right? 

One of my students is working on the culture of Ubuntu, the African culture of Ubuntu. It is such a deep, rich interconnectedness of community, of person, like people wouldn't even think of themselves as individuals in Ubuntu, like that sense of identity comes from within the community itself. And the community itself being woven into the natural world of spiritual life. And when I think of the… it's just hard to honestly get one's head around, taking one out of that beautifully enriched and woven culture into this patriarchal, anthropocentric and just power and abusive power of the West. We do have a lot of healing to do here, before we move into wholeness. 

But the other thing I was thinking of is Einstein's idea that you can't solve a problem with the same conditions that created it. I do think there's a need for a new paradigm. What would you envision as a new paradigm? A creatively new paradigm of human planetary life?

Adam: Wow, that's a big question. As I mentioned earlier, I have turned to Thurman, he has a book called Common Ground. And in it, he really tries to talk about God's dream of community. And I pair that with what I took from one African theologian. He calls it the community of life. It's similar to Ubuntu, but it talks about a certain notion of bondedness of all of creation, right, in terms of that. And that's what I think we need to center our kind of moral vision on. And it's very difficult at this moment, like, when so many just things that we used to take for granted are under attack, right? So we're really in a defensive posture right now. kind of crawled up. 

But one of the things I've told some of my friends is like, who does our despair serve? Does it serve our movement? Or does it serve the very people that are trying to harm and destroy us? Right? Like when we get frustrated or overly cynical and lack trust, does that really serve us? Does it serve the larger vision of Ubuntu, of the community of life? That's one of the things that I think theologians in the faith-based communities, that's I think our gift at this historical moment, is that we have to understand liberation not just as the act of freeing us from structures of evil and undoing, but also a creative process of trying to bring into being, right? 

Like in terms of that, new forms of flourishing create a possibility of that, that's at the heart of our tradition. So I think that that's what's called for this moment, is not to just react to what's happening, but to put forth a genuine alternative, right? Like in terms of that. And I think that's our gift right now, is that we're trained probably more so than other people to think and to find like strings of possibility, even in the midst of deep despair.

Ilia: I think you used the word for moral imagination or imagination. And I think of someone like Martin Luther King or Howard Thurman, great, deeply reflective men. I mean, and I think that they had deep interiority, that power for seeing like the vision of Martin Luther King, I have a dream. I just reflect on those words. I'm like, “wow, that's amazing.” Where did those words come from? I have a dream that one day, and I'm so inspired by that because I think what is our dream that one day, what do we anticipate on the horizon? What might it look like? How will we live together in a new way? 

I like to ask my students this question as well because I'd like to empower younger generations to start having dreams, to start envisioning what can the world look like? And I think you're absolutely right. I think the present situation weakens us and we're overly reactive and we're using a lot of energy to defend what we've known and what we love and what we feel stable with. And we feel that earth kind of wave, it's shifting beneath our feet and we're just frightened to death that the earth's gonna split open and we're gonna be swallowed into a massive world of pathology or something. The one way to conquer people is to weaken them, to weaken them psychologically, to weaken them emotionally. 

I think you're right. I think what we have to do is, like in the example of Thurman or MLK, we have to find our inwardness, we have to move inward. I really think I'm a firm believer of the infinite potential of the human person, what we call the place of the soul, that place of the inner capacity really to find a goodness and to see life in a new way, even in the midst of suffering and pain. that's where I think we need to go ever more collectively. I'd like to see religions empower us, you know. Do you find religion helpful? Established religion, institutional religion, or do you find it more of a hindrance? Now, I don't want to jeopardize your position at Xavier.

Adam: I want to go back to another thing that you said where you talked about what does it look like? Sometimes I get asked that question and it's hard to envision because it's gonna be something new and maybe something that is not even historically available to us what it looks like. But what I think is I could kind of better sense what it feels like than what it looks like, right? Like, I think it might be an intuitive thing, like the feeling of affirmation or the feeling of assuredness or the feeling of groundedness. So I think we'll probably know what it feels like before we know what it looks like.

Ilia: That's interesting. Yeah, I like that. I actually think we also need to keep in mind that what the new will emerge with. In other words, technology for all the hype around it, may actually bring about a new reality for us, as a human community, as a human earth community. And the one thing I've noted among younger generations is that they are not as, I don't know what your experience, but even though they're very concerned about justice and peace, ontologically they don't have the same stuff as older people do because they're born into wired worlds. 

So from the age of like three years old, they're playing these games. And video games, you play with people all over the world. and no one says, "What color are you?" or "What language do you speak?" They just live in that space. It's the interstitial space of shared information and shared fun. And I actually think that that place of interstitiality, is where the new kind of person's going to emerge beyond black, white, yellow, brown, into a new type of person that we have to just name that person. Some people call it post-human of some sort, but that always scares us, like, you know.

But I do think we can, in fact, I think the new person could be more at home in one's skin, literally, because that's not what's gonna define us in the future. What will define us will be a sense of identity that's not so much ontological, but interstitial identity.

Adam: The processes of formation are different now. My challenge or my concern is always, is with the new generation, the problem of evil and resilience in that phase, right? Like, there's literature on the COVID generation and how that moment led to a lack of resilience to so many people, right? In terms of that, like, and I'm talking about emotional resilience in terms of that. And I'm wondering if all of our devices, the time of our devices, a lack of kind of person to person contact, does that lead to like this type of thinning of the inner architecture and our capacity to deal with the blows that life just gives us normally? 

Ilia: So I think it can insofar as I think if we consent to technology and its attention grabbing, and its desire seeking, it can take us out of ourselves. But I also think I have come to a new understanding of evil as I call it sort of the wild god within. I don't think evil is a thing. I think I'm falling more into a kind of a school of Schelling and where I see Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard never really speaks of this explicitly, but sort of the dark. I think of God as that potential for love that needs to be actualized by a choice for love. And therefore the unresolved God is sort of a wild God because it's just, in a sense, God is the possibilities of everything, including evil. And I think, I just put it this way, the unresolved lover can get very wild and jealous and which is what we read about in the Old Testament.

Robert: Next time, Ilia and Adam pick up on the question, What role, if any, does technology play in evil or injustice? And how does it relate to our development as humans? Thanks to our partners at the Fetzer Institute. As always, I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.