Quotes from James H. Cone

To be Christian is to be one of those whom God has chosen. God has chosen black people!

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

Indeed our survival and liberation depend upon our recognition of the truth when it is spoken and lived by the people. If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth. To know the truth is to appropriate it, for it is not mainly reflection and theory. Truth is divine action entering our lives and creating the human action of liberation.

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

It is ironic that America, with its history of injustice to the poor, especially the black man and the Indian, prides itself on being a Christian nation.

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