James H Cone Quotes

In the “lynching era,” between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these “Christians” did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.

The scandal is that the gospel means liberation, that this liberation comes to the poor, and that it gives them the strength and the courage to break the conditions of servitude.

The Gospel of liberation is bad news to all oppressors because they have defined their "freedom" in terms of slavery of others.

Without concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor, the gospel becomes simply an opiate; rather than liberating the powerless from humiliation and suffering, the gospel becomes a drug that helps them adjust to this world by looking for “pie in the sky.

The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair.

The cross can heal and hurt; it can be empowering and liberating but also enslaving and oppressive. There is no one way in which the cross can be interpreted. I offer my reflections because I believe that the cross placed alongside the lynching tree can help us to see Jesus in America in a new light, and thereby empower people who claim to follow him to take a stand against white supremacy and every kind of injustice.

The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching.

For [Martin Luther] King nonviolence was more than a strategy; it was the way of life defined by love for others—the only way to heal broken humanity.

Unlike Europeans who immigrated to this land to escape from tyranny, Africans came in chains to serve a nation of tyrants.

Suffering naturally gives rise to doubt. How can one believe in God in the face of such horrendous suffering as slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree? Under these circumstances, doubt is not a denial but an integral part of faith. It keeps faith from being sure of itself. But doubt does not have the final word. The final word is faith giving rise to hope.

What people think about God, Jesus Christ, and the Church cannot be separated from their own social and political status in a given society.

takes a whole lot of empathic effort to step into those of black people and see the world through the eyes of African Americans.

If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth.

The Christian community, therefore, is that community that freely becomes oppressed, because they know that Jesus himself has defined humanity's liberation in the context of what happens to the little ones. Christians join the cause of the oppressed in the fight for justice not because of some philosophical principle of "the Good" or because of a religious feeling of sympathy for people in prison. Sympathy does not change the structures of injustice. The authentic identity of Christians with the poor is found in the claim which the Jesus-encounter lays upon their own life-style, a claim that connects the word "Christian" with the liberation of the poor. Christians fight not for humanity in general but for themselves and out of their love for concrete human beings.

One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of a pure regard for truth,” wrote French philosopher, activist, and mystic Simone Weil. “Christ likes for us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.

And yet the Christian gospel is more than a transcendent reality, more than “going to heaven when I die, to shout salvation as I fly.” It is also an immanent reality—a powerful liberating presence among the poor right now in their midst, “building them up where they are torn down and propping them up on every leaning side.” The gospel is found wherever poor people struggle for justice, fighting for their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But there is no perfect guide for discerning God's movement in the world, Contrary to what many conservatives say, the Bible is not a blueprint on this matter. It is a valuable symbol for point to God's revelation in Jesus, but it is not self-interpreting. We are thus place in an existential situation of freedom in which the burden is on us to make decisions without a guaranteed ethical guide.

The acceptance of the gift of freedom transforms our perception of our social and political existence.

And certainly the history of the black-white relations in this country from the Civil War to the present unmistakably shows that as a people, America has never intended for blacks to be free. To this day, in the eyes of most white Americans, the black man remains subhuman.

The most sensitive whites merely said: “We deplore the riots but sympathize with the reason for the riots.” This was tantamount to saying: “Of course we raped your women, lynched your men, and ghettoized the minds of your children and you have a right to be upset; but that is no reason for you to burn our buildings. If you people keep acting like that, we will never give you your freedom.

any analysis of the gospel which did not begin and end with God's liberation of the oppressed was ipso facto unchristian.

I do think that it is impossible to do Christian theology with integrity in America without asking the question, What has the gospel to do with the black struggle for liberation?

The word of God is upon me, [and] it’s like fire shut up in my bones. And I just have to tell it.” What King had to tell was the truth about war, racism, and poverty. “It may hurt me,” he said. “But when I took up the cross I recognized its meaning. . . . It is not something that you wear. The cross is something that you bear and ultimately that you die on.”[38]

Heresy is the refusal to speak the truth or to live the truth in the light of the One who is the Truth.

Unfortunately, during the course of 2,000 years of Christian history, this symbol of salvation has been detached from any reference to the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings—those whom Ignacio Ellacuría, the Salvadoran martyr, called “the crucified peoples of history.” The cross has been transformed into a harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks. Rather than reminding us of the “cost of discipleship,” it has become a form of “cheap grace,”[3] an easy way to salvation that doesn’t force us to confront the power of Christ’s message and mission. Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.

Only the oppressed can receive liberating visions in wretched places. Only those thinking emerges in the context of the struggle against injustice can see God's freedom breaking into unfree conditions and thus granting power to the powerless to fight here and now for the freedom they know to be theirs in Jesus' cross and resurrection.

The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.

It never ceased to amaze me how white scholars could quibble, making simple things more complicated than they really were. What is more central in the Christian Bible than the exodus and Jesus stories and the prophetic call for justice for the poor?

Christian theology is for the liberation of all humanity, and it could never be neutral in the fight against oppression. That much I knew. And that was how A Black Theology of Liberation was born: with the spirit of Martin and Malcolm, Jimmy, and the black poets of the 1960s.

Luke's Gospel was clear: Jesus's ministry was essentially liberation on behalf of the poor and the oppressed. I didn't need a doctorate in theology to know that liberation defined the heart of Jesus's ministry. Black people had been preaching and singing about it for centuries.

The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. Both were public spectacles, shameful events, instruments of punishment reserved for the most despised people in society. Any genuine theology and any genuine preaching of the Christian gospel must be measured against the test of the scandal of the cross and the lynching tree. 'Jesus did not die a gentle death like Socrates, with his cup of hemlock....Rather, he died like a [lynched black victim] or a common [black] criminal in torment, on the tree of shame.' The crowd's shout 'Crucify him!' (Mk 15:14) anticipated the white mob's shout 'Lynch him!' Jesus' agonizing final cry of abandonment from the cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Mk 15:34), was similar to the lynched victim Sam Hose's awful scream as he drew his last breath, 'Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus.' In each case it was a cruel, agonizing, and contemptible death.

Whites acted in a superior manner for so long that it was difficult for them to even recognize their cultural and spiritual arrogance, blatant as it was to African Americans.

Through the reading of scripture, the people hear other stories about Jesus that enable them to move beyond the privateness of their own stories.

For most evangelicals, revelation was found in the inerrant scriptures, and one need not look elsewhere. I knew in my gut that God's revelation was found among poor black people.

Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear.

The oppressed…have a higher moral right to challenge their oppressors than these have to maintain their rule by force.”6

For Mrs. Bradley, the voice she heard was the voice of the resurrected Jesus. It spoke of hope that, although white racists could take her son’s life, they could not deprive his life and death of an ultimate meaning. As in the resurrection of the Crucified One, God could transmute defeat into triumph, ugliness into beauty, despair into hope, the cross into the resurrection.

The lynching tree—so strikingly similar to the cross on Golgotha—should have a prominent place in American images of Jesus’ death. But it does not. In fact, the lynching tree has no place in American theological reflections about Jesus’ cross or in the proclamation of Christian churches about his Passion. The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching. In the “lynching era,” between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these “Christians” did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.

If white Americans could look at the terror they inflicted on their own black population—slavery, segregation, and lynching—then they might be able to understand what is coming at them from others.

find myself suddenly in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other. One duty alone: That of not renouncing my freedom through my choices.18

in 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. God's reality is not bound by one manifestation of the divine in Jesus but can be found wherever people are being empowered to fight for freedom. Life-giving power for the poor and the oppressed is the primary criterion that we must use to judge the adequacy of our theology, not abstract concepts.

People reject the cross because it contradicts historical values and expectations—just as Peter challenged Jesus for saying, “The Son of Man must suffer”: “Far be it from You; this shall not happen to You.” But Jesus rebuked Peter: “Get behind me, Satan!” (Mt 16:21; Mk 8:31, 33). “In the course of a few moments,” Peter went from being “the mouthpiece of God” to a “tool” of Satan, because he could not connect vicarious suffering with God’s revelation. Suffering and death were not supposed to happen to the Messiah. He was expected to triumph over evil and not be defeated by it. How could God’s revelation be found connected with the “the worst of deaths,” the “vilest death,” “a criminal’s death on the tree of shame”?[15] Like the lynching tree in America, the cross in the time of Jesus was the most “barbaric form of execution of the utmost cruelty,” the absolute opposite of human value systems. It turned reason upside down. In his sermon-lecture “The Transvaluation of Values” in Beyond Tragedy, Niebuhr turns to Paul to express what it meant to see the world from a transcendent, divine point of view.

It is this fact that most whites seem to overlook: the fact that violence already exists. The Christian does not decide between violence and nonviolence, evil and good. He decides between the less and the greater evil. He must ponder whether revolutionary violence is less or more deplorable than the violence perpetuated by the system. There are no absolute rules which can decide the answer with certainty. But he must make a choice. If he decides to take the "nonviolent" way, then he is saying that revolutionary violence is more detrimental to man in the long run than systemic violence. But if the system is evil, then revolutionary violence is both justified and necessary.

My message to blacks was: “It is time to stop hating who you are. God created you black—love yourself, love your hands and face, big nose and lips, for that is the only way you can love God. Blackness is God's gift to humanity.

King refused to lose hope or to relinquish the belief that “all reality hinges on moral foundations.” He focused his hope on Jesus’ cross and resurrection. “Christ came to show us the way. Men love darkness rather than the light, and they crucified Him, there on Good Friday on the Cross it was still dark, but then Easter came, and Easter is the eternal reminder of the fact that the truth-crushed earth will rise again.” No matter what disappointments he faced, King still preached hope with the passion of a prophet: “I still have a dream, because, you know, you can’t give up on life. If you lose hope, somehow you lose that vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you to go on in spite of all.”[49]

When Niebuhr thought a little more deeply about Darrow’s empathy with black suffering, however, he said, “I suppose it is difficult to escape bitterness when you have eyes to see and heart to feel what others are too blind and too callous to notice.”[29]

If whites do not get off the backs of blacks, they must expect that blacks will literally throw them off by whatever means are at their disposal. This is the meaning of Black Power. Depending on the response of whites, it means that emancipation may even have to take the form of outright rebellion. No one can really say what form the oppressed must take in relieving their oppression. But if blacks are pushed to the point of unendurable pain, with no option but a violent affirmation of their own being, then violence is to be expected.

If the Church is to remain faithful to its Lord, it must make a decisive break with the structure of this society by launching a vehement attack on the evils of racism in all forms. It must become prophetic, demanding a radical change in the interlocking structures of this society. This

Only the oppressed can receive liberating visions in wretched places. Only those thinking emerges in the context of the struggle against injustice can see God's freedom breaking into unfree conditions and thus granting power to the powerless to fight here and now for the freedom they know to be theirs in Jesus' cross and resurrection

While white mob violence against African Americans was an obsession in the South, it was not limited to that region. White supremacy was and is an American reality. Whites lynched blacks in nearly every state, including New York, Minnesota, and California. Wherever blacks were present in significant numbers, the threat of being lynched was always real. Blacks had to “watch their step,” no matter where they were in America. A black man could be walking down the road, minding his business, and his life could suddenly change by meeting a white man or a group of white men or boys who on a whim decided to have some fun with a Negro; and this could happen in Mississippi or New York, Arkansas, or Illinois. By the 1890s, lynching fever gripped the South, spreading like cholera, as white communities made blacks their primary target, and torture their focus. Burning the black victim slowly for hours was the chief method of torture. Lynching became a white media spectacle, in which prominent newspapers, like the Atlanta Constitution, announced to the public the place, date, and time of the expected hanging and burning of black victims. Often as many as ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children attended the event. It was a family affair, a ritual celebration of white supremacy, where women and children were often given the first opportunity to torture black victims—burning black flesh and cutting off genitals, fingers, toes, and ears as souvenirs. Postcards were made from the photographs taken of black victims with white lynchers and onlookers smiling as they struck a pose for the camera. They were sold for ten to twenty-five cents to members of the crowd, who then mailed them to relatives and friends, often with a note saying something like this: “This is the barbeque we had last night.”[17]

If the interpreters are willing to say what the people have to say about their struggle and the reality of Jesus in the fight for freedom, and proceed to develop their tools of critical analysis in the light of their identification with the goals and aspirations of the people, then and only then are they prepared to ask the right questions and hear the right answers.

Present-day Christians misinterpret the cross when they make it a nonoffensive religious symbol, a decorative object in their homes and churches. The cross, therefore, needs the lynching tree to remind us what it means when we say that God is revealed in Jesus at Golgotha, the place of the skull, on the cross where criminals and rebels against the Roman state were executed. The lynching tree is America's cross.

Black Power, in short, is an attitude, an inward affirmation of the essential worth of blackness. It means that the black man will not be poisoned by the stereotypes that others have of him, but will affirm from the depth of his soul : "Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone." 16 And "if the white man challenges my humanity, I will impose my whole weight as a man on his life and show him that I am not that `sho good eatin' that he persists in imagining.

While Niebuhr agreed, he did not want to throw out “the white man as white man,” and asked “whether there is not a leaven in the other classes that would correspond to the light of truth in the despised minority.” Baldwin replied that “I don’t mean to say the white people are villains or devils or anything like that,” but what “I do mean to say is this: that the bulk of the white . . . Christian majority in this country has exhibited a really staggering level of irresponsibility and immoral washing of the hands, you know. . . . I don’t suppose that . . . all the white people in Birmingham are monstrous people. But they’re mainly silent people, you know. And that is a crime in itself.

Epigraph The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American . . . preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching. In the “lynching era,” between 1880 and 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the crucifixion of Jesus. . . . As Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence, many African Americans were innocent victims of white mobs, thirsting for blood in the name of God and in defense of segregation, white supremacy, and the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Both the cross and the lynching tree were symbols of terror. —James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree

The lynching tree is the most potent symbol of the trouble nobody knows that blacks have seen but do not talk about because the pain of remembering—visions of black bodies dangling from southern trees, surrounded by jeering white mobs—is almost too excruciating to recall. In that era, the lynching tree joined the cross as the most emotionally charged symbols in the African American community—symbols that represented both death and the promise of redemption, judgment and the offer of mercy, suffering and the power of hope. Both the cross and the lynching tree represented the worst in human beings and at the same time “an unquenchable ontological thirst”[1] for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final meaning.

Thinking of Christ as nonblack in the twentieth century is as theologically impossible as thinking of him as non-Jewish in the first century. God's Word in Christ not only fulfills his purposes for man through his elected people, but also inaugurates a new age in which all oppressed people become his people. In America, that people is a black people. In order to remain faithful to his Word in Christ, his present manifestation must be the very essence of blackness. It is the job of the Church to become black with him and accept the shame that white society places on blacks. But the Church knows that what is shame to the world is holiness to God. Black is holy, that is, it is a symbol of God's presence in history on behalf of the oppressed man. Where there is black, there is oppression; but blacks can be assured that where there is blackness, there is Christ who has taken on blackness so that what is evil in men's eyes might become good. Therefore Christ is black because he is oppressed, and oppressed because he is black. And if the Church is to join Christ by following his opening, it too must go where suffering is and become black also. This is what the New Testament means by the service of reconciliation. It is not smoothing things over by ignoring the deep-seated racism in white society. It is freeing the racist of racism by making him confront blacks as men. Reconciliation has nothing to do with the “let's talk about it” attitude, or “it takes time” attitude. It merely says, “Look man, the revolution is on. Whose side are you on?

Unfortunately, during the course of 2,000 years of Christian history, this symbol of salvation has been detached from any reference to the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings—those whom Ignacio Ellacuría, the Salvadoran martyr, called “the crucified peoples of history.” The cross has been transformed into a harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks. Rather than reminding us of the “cost of discipleship,” it has become a form of “cheap grace,”[3] an easy way to salvation that doesn’t force us to confront the power of Christ’s message and mission. Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy

When he sent a manuscript of The Irony of American History to his historian friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Schlesinger called Niebuhr’s attention to the glaring omission of the Negro: One irony deserving comment somewhere perhaps is the relationship between our democratic and equalitarian pretensions and our treatment of the Negro. This remains, John Quincy Adams called it in 1820, “the great and foul stain upon the North American Union”; and I think you might consider mentioning it.[46] But Niebuhr did not mention it, finding it apparently not a substantial concern. This was a serious failure by an American religious leader often called this nation’s greatest theologian. How could anyone be a great theologian and not engage America’s greatest moral issue? Unfortunately, white theologians, then and since, have typically ignored the problem of race, or written and spoken about it without urgency, not regarding it as critical for theology or ethics.

Whether theologians acknowledge it or not, all theologies begin with experience ... We are all particular human beings, finite creatures, and we create our understanding of God out of our experience. Hopefully, our own experience points to the universal, but it is never identical with it. For when we mistake our own talk about God with ultimate reality, we turn it into ideology.

The essence of the gospel of Christ stands or falls on the question of black humanity, and there is no way that a church or institution can be related to the gospel of Christ if it sponsors or tolerates racism in any form.

Living in a world of white oppressors, blacks have no time for a neutral God.

Intrigued by their own expertise in Christian theology, white religionists think they have the moral and intellectual right to determine whether black churches are Christian. They fail to realize that their analysis of Christianity is inseparable from their oppressor-mentality, which shapes everything they say about God.

Freedom means taking sides in a crisis situation, when a society is divided into oppressed and oppressors. In this situation we are not permitted the luxury of being on neither side by making a decision that only involves the self.

Some present-day theologians, like Hamilton and Altizer, taking their cue from Nietzsche and the present irrelevancy of the Church to modern man, have announced the death of God. It seems, however, that their chief mistake lies in their apparent identification of God's reality with the signed-up Christians. If we were to identify the work of God with the white church, then, like Altizer, we must “will the death of God with a passion of faith.” Or as Camus would say, “If God did exist, we should have to abolish him.

Appeals to reason and religion do not change the balance of power, because both are used to defend the interests of oppressors.

Faith is born out of suffering, and suffering is faith's most powerful contradiction. This is the Christian dilemma. The only meaningful Christian response is to resist unjust suffering and to accept the painful consequence of that resistance.

Transvaluation of values,” a term derived from Nietzsche (who derided Christianity’s embrace of the weak), is the heart of Niebuhr’s perspective on the cross.

If human power in history—among races, nations, and other collectives as well as individuals—is self-interested power, then “the revelation of divine goodness in history” must be weak and not strong.

I wanted to construct a black theology—a theology that would be black like Malcolm and Christian like Martin.

To be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are.”6 To become black is like what Jesus told Nicodemus, that he must be “born again,” that is, “born of water and Spirit” (John 3), the Black Spirit of liberation.

I was black before I was a Christian. Martin and Malcolm, therefore, had to go together, which meant being unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian.

how to reconcile the gospel message of liberation with the reality of black oppression.

How could any theologian explain the meaning of Christian identity in America and fail to engage white supremacy, its primary negation?

The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.

When a mob in Valdosta, Georgia, in 1918 failed to find Sidney Johnson, accused of murdering his boss, Hampton Smith, they decided to lynch another black man, Haynes Turner, who was known to dislike Smith. Turner’s wife, Mary, who was eight months pregnant, protested vehemently and vowed to seek justice for her husband’s lynching. The sheriff, in turn, arrested her and then gave her up to the mob. In the presence of a crowd that included women and children, Mary Turner was “stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.”[2]

When persons encounter God's self-disclosure, they not only know who God is but also who they are.

They shouted, danced, clapped their hands and stomped their feet as they bore witness to the power of Jesus’ cross which had given them an identity far more meaningful than the harm that white supremacy could do them.

Just as Martin Luther King Jr. learned much from Reinhold Niebuhr, Niebuhr could have deepened his understanding of the cross by being a student of King and the black freedom movement he led. King could have opened Niebuhr’s eyes to see the lynching tree as Jesus’ cross in America. White theologians do not normally turn to the black experience to learn about theology. But if the lynching tree is America’s cross and if the cross is the heart of the Christian gospel, perhaps Martin Luther King Jr., who endeavored to “take up his cross, and follow [Jesus]” (Mark 8:34) as did no other theologian in American history, has something to teach America about Jesus’ cross.