Quotes and Notes from Black Theology of Liberation by James Cone (1970 edition)

There can be Christian theology which is not identified unreservedly with those who are humiliated and abused. pg17
Theology ceases to be theology of the gospel when it fails to arise out of the community of the oppressed. Pg17-18
Theology becomes a servant of the state, and that can only mean death for black people. Pg22
Black theology is a outcry and failure of white Christian to deal appropriately with the suffering of black people. Pg23
Black Theology centers around the belief that the black community is where God is at work. Pg24
…in a racist society, God is never color blind.- James Cone pg25
Theology by contrast cannot be separated from the community which it represents. Pg30
A community that does not analyze its existence theologically is a community that does not care what it says or does. It is a community which has no identity.- 31
…white theologians see no connection between whiteness and evil or blackness and God.- 31
God has taken sides in the struggle…pg 36
The black community must reclaim it’s history “by unraveling new meanings in old tales so that the past may emerge as an instrument of black liberation.- 39
Black Theology is survival theology because it seeks to provide the theological dimensions of the struggle for black identity.-39
The search for black identity is the search for God, for God’s identity is black identity,- 40
Black Theology is the theological expression of a people who lack social and political power.-40
Cone is very clear that the only to combat the structures of white power is to embrace pure essence of black being.- 41
To be human in a condition of social oppression always involves affirming that which the oppressor regards as degrading. – 41
Black Theology is a theology of survival because it seeks to interpret the theological significance of the being of a community whose existence is threatened by the power of nonbeing.- 43
The eschatological promise of heaven is insufficient to account for the earthly pain of black suffering. We cannot accept a God who inflicts or tolerates black suffering for some inscrutable purpose.- 44
American theology is racist; it identifies theology as a dispassionate analysis of “the tradition”, unrelated to the sufferings of the oppressed.- 46
…racism is incompatible to the Gospel of Christ.- 49
To be black is to be committed to destroying everything this country loves and adores.- 49
Since white American theologians do not belong to the black community, they cannot relate the gospel to that community.- 53 (I may disagree with this thought in general)
There can be no Black theology that does not take seriously the black experience – life of humiliation and suffering.-54
What does revelation mean when one’s being is engulfed in a system of white racism cloaking itself in pious moralities?-54
Black Power is the power for black folks to make decision regarding their identity.- 56
The black experience is a rage that “strikes against the enemy of black humanity by throwing a Molotov cocktail into a white owned building and watching it go up in flames.”- 56
Black is the experience of carving out an existence in a society that says you don’t belong.- 57
If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him.-59
The black experience lead the black community to want to encounter with him now.- 64
By taking seriously the witness of Scripture, we are prevented from making the gospel into a private moments of religious ecstasy or into the religious sanctification of the structures of society.-66
It matters little to the oppressed who authored scripture; what is important is whether it can serve as a weapon against the oppressed.- 67
…Literalism is being used by white scholars to encourage black people to be nonviolent, as if nonviolence is the only expression of Christian love.- Cone
We cannot use Jesus behavior in the first century as a literal guide for our actions in the twentieth century.
While the white church in America was rationalizing slavery through clever exegesis, the black church ministers were preaching freedom and equality.
Theology cannot take some existential leap over the very issues pressing black folks in order to prop up an universalism.-76
Black people have heard enough about God. What they want to know is what God is saying about the black condition.- 77
It is so tempting to take the white Jesus who always speaks to black people in the terms of white interest and power.-79
the Christian gospel offers men an authentic response by assuring them of God’s participation against human suffering -84
The most gross sin cannot be forgive in America because it has been overlooked by America.-90
Cone is very aware that God is in a personal relationship with humanity effecting the divine will of God.-90
Revelation is God’s self-disclosure to humanity in a situation of liberation.-91
Faith is the community’s response to God’s act of liberation.- 95
We do not need to read the Bible to know that human enslavement is ungodly, and the slaves will do everything possible to break the chains.-99
As the oppressed community recognized their situation in the light of God’s revelation, they know now that they should have killed him instead of “loving” him.- 101
There is no revelation that does not provide man with an understanding of his own authentic self.- 103
To know God is to know about ourselves…-105
When oppressed people come to know who they are they will not tolerate oppression.- 105
The courage to be black in the s pace of white people is what revelation means in our time- 106
…the true prophet of the gospel of God must become both “anti-Christian” and “unpatriotic.”-107-108
Black people are not elected to be Yahweh people of suffering.-108
The black theologian must assume the dangerous responsibility of articulating the revolutionary mood of the black community.- 109
The white God will point to a heavenly bliss as a means of directing black people aay from earthly rage-110
Freedom comes when we realize that it is against our interest, as a self-determining black community, to point out the god elements in an oppressive structure.-110
If whites were really serious about their radicalism in regard to black revolution and it theological implications in America, they would keep silent and take instructions form black people. – 119
How do we find meaning and purpose in a world in which God is absent? Are questions for an affluent society.- 120
There is no place for a colorless God is a society when people suffer precisely because of their color.-120
White theologians would prefer not to do theology based upon color.- 122
…blackness or salvation (the two are synonymous) is the work of God not man.-125
When wrath is removed from the nature of God it weakens the central biblical truth about God’s liberation of the oppressed from the oppressors.-131
Black people want to know whose side God is on…-131
What we need is divine love as expressed in Black Power which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors- 132
If the wrath of God is his almight No against man’s Yes, then black people want to know where the No of God is today in white America.-132
Love without righteousness is unacceptable to black people…-133
Love means that God will accept the whites, and black will not seek reprisal.-134
It takes a special kind of reasoning to conclude that God’s love means that he is no respecter of persons in a society filled with hate…-135
Black Theology will accept only a love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy.- 136
Black Revolution trumps reformation because reformation leaves the assumption that there is still something good left in the system, it just needs to be cleaned up.- 141
The hermeneutic of now is the very expressive nature of black people it captures the essence that God is entering into the struggle of black people.-142
God cannot be the God of Black people and also will their suffering.-149
It is not difficult for the oppressed to understand the meaning of freedom. They are forced by the very nature of their condition to interpret their existence in the world contrary to the value-structures of the oppressive society.-162
…whatever we s ay about sin and man’s inability to know God because of the Fall, it must not in any way diminish the freedom of man to be in revolt against his oppressors.- 169
Black Theology then emphasizes the right of black people to be black and by doing so to participate in the image of God.- 170
In a world in which mean are oppressed, the image is man in rebellion against the structures of oppression.- 170
Satres’s “the age of Reason” ability to capture the essence of irresponsibility is reminiscent of white privilege in America.-172
Whites tell you what you have to do to be a part of the larger society and if you resist they kill you.- 174
No black man will ever be good enough in the eyes of white people to merit equality.- 177
There is suffering because there is no hope that the reconciliation will be possible, and the only authentic response is to face the reality on the absurdity in rebellion.- 179
Sin is alienation from the source of humanity in the world…-190
Sin is not only the condition that produces lynchings, but it also makes white theologians define the theological enterprise as a “safe” venture.-193
If Christ is to have any meaning for us, he must leave the security of the suburbs by joining black people in their condition.-199
If Christ is white and not black, he is an oppressor, and we must kill him.- 199
In baptism Jesus embraces the condition of sinners, affirming their existence as his own,- 205
As long as the oppressor can be sure that the gospel does not threaten his social, economic and political security, he can enslave men in the name of Christ.- 208
This means that blacks are free to do what they have to in order to affirm their humanity.-219
Only oppressors can turn in upon themselves and worship their own projected image and define it as God.- 234
To be oppressed is to encounter the overwhelming presence of evil without any place for escape.- 234
For black people, death is not really a future reality; it is a part of their everyday existence.- 240
The proper eschatological perspective must be grounded in the historical present…-241