Dr. Raymond Carr (PhD, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley) is a research associate and director of the Codex Charles H. Long Papers at the Moses Mesoamerican Archive at Harvard University, as well as the president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion (SSBR). He is an international public theologian and serves on the committee for International Public Theology at the Forum-Center in Berkeley.
Dr. Carr engages two of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century: Karl Barth, who constructed his theology “from above,” and James H. Cone, who constructed his theology “from below.” Barth’s struggle against Nazism and his political engagement in the public sphere are juxtaposed with Cone’s confrontation with white racism in American public life.
In this three-volume project, Carr employs the aesthetic thinking of jazz legend Thelonious Monk to reimagine, restructure, and advance the theologies of Karl Barth and James H. Cone in light of a critically constructive, experiential public theology. Interestingly, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—central to Barth’s theological imagination—encounters Cone’s spirituals and blues while finding their resolution in Monk’s jazz as a form of analogical witness to the kingdom of God, made present through the resurrection of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit.
In the first volume, Carr draws on the Bebop tune Epistrophy as an analogical framework for reconstructing the socio-historical Sitz im Leben and hermeneutical thrust of Barth and Cone within a broader spectrum, for the sake of intertextuality.
Professor Willie James Jennings of Yale Divinity School offers the preface, naming the mode of transformation at the heart of Carr’s work. Carr seeks transformation through the incarnation—assumptio carnis—within a Barthian radical mode of thought, interpreted through Cone’s theologia crucis and the symbol of the lynching tree.
Musicality becomes the mode of being through which God meets us in times of trouble and distress. This resonates with Barth’s understanding of the gospel as viva vox evangelii—the living voice of the gospel—which must be sung and proclaimed in an irregular manner. God’s speech act (Wort-Tat) comes to us in a chaotic, even guerrilla-like style, outside the traditional walls of the church (Extra Muros Ecclesia), as exemplified and radicalized in the prophetic school of Berlin through figures like Helmut Gollwitzer and F. W. Marquardt.
Beyond that, Carr draws on the work of the great historian of religion and Black phenomenologist Charles H. Long, who provides a phenomenological lens through which to reread Barth and Cone. Carr writes in a marvelously interwoven reflection: “Karl Barth improvised on the subjective experience of the subject matter, whereas Cone improvised on the subjective experience of the subject matter.” While Barth sought to establish a theoanthropology, as expressed in The Humanity of God, Cone articulated a distinct theoanthropology in The God of the Oppressed.
That said, Barth’s Christological thinking—grounded in the assumptio carnis in its collective sense (Gattungswesen, in the language of left-wing Hegelianism à la Feuerbach)—cannot be fully understood apart from his seminal idea of theoanthropology, articulated through the concept of God’s humanity in accordance with the analogia relationis.
Carr’s major contribution lies in reconstructing the relationship between revelation and experience. He highlights how Barth critically engages with sociopolitical and cultural-religious regimes as problematic thresholds in understanding revelation and Scripture—since revelation, as the third form of the Word of God, takes priority over both Scripture and preaching. Carr challenges the American stronghold of Barthian Neo-Orthodoxy, cutting through even the critical-realist and dialectical interpretations of Barth. He aligns instead with George Hunsinger’s postliberal reading, advancing it in a distinctly sociopolitical and experiential direction.
George Hunsinger, a renowned Barth scholar and Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, characterizes Carr’s aesthetic-irregular approach to Barth and Cone:
“Raymond Carr has emerged as one of the most creative minds in contemporary African American theology. His intensive engagement with James Cone and Karl Barth has already made a mark in the field, but that impact is now assured with the appearance of these remarkable volumes.”
I believe Dr. Raymond Carr is a heuristic and inspiring thinker, undertaking an audacious attempt to restructure irregular phenomenological theology in an aesthetic mode. In doing so, he synthesizes Barth’s thought-form “from above” with Cone’s experiential theology “from below,” moving toward a dialectical-analogical theology of the theological subject matter, in continuity with the prophetic tradition of Helmut Gollwitzer and F. W. Marquardt as well as Black experiential theology in the mode of Monk.
A logos of society, in other words, Jesus as the partisan for the poor or massa perditionis (ochlos-minjung), finds its pivot in the Black experience of sociopolitical struggle against racism. In Carr’s interpretation, I sense that Barth appears to be a theologian of God’s speech event both from above and from below, more so from the Other, in a phenomenological mode à la Emmanuel Levinas.
Written by Paul S. Chung, distinguished professor of international public theology and director of the Forum-Center.