The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

Niebuhr was a Christian theologian of the cross who knew all about Jesus’ solidarity with the poor and the consequences he suffered for that from the Roman Empire. If the American empire has any similarities with that of Rome, can one really understand the theological meaning of Jesus on a Roman cross without seeing him first through the image of blacks on the lynching tree? Can American Christians see the reality of Jesus’ cross without seeing it as the lynching tree? How could Niebuhr make the tragedy of the cross the central theme in his theology while ignoring the obvious tragedies of slavery, segregation, and lynching in the United States? Even confronting the death of four children in a Birmingham church and a dialogue with James Baldwin about the event, Niebuhr did not summon the language and passion to speak adequately to that event. What is missing in his language about Calvary was the racial context that defined the actual cross bearers in American society. Unless we look at the “facts of experience,” as Niebuhr’s own realism demanded, what we say about the cross remains at the level of theological abstraction, like Karl Barth’s Word of God, separated from the real crosses in our midst.