God of the Oppressed

by James H. Cone

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.

The Bible was written from the perspective of the dominant class in Israel.

Human beings are made for each other and no people can realize their full humanity except as they participate in its realization for others.

The great problem with dominant white theologians, especially white men, is their tendency to speak as if they and they alone can set the rules for thinking about God. That is why they seldom turn to the cultures of the poor, especially people of color, for resources to discourse about God. But I contend that the God of Jesus is primarily found where dominant theologians do not look. On this point, Paul was absolutely right: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (I Cor. 1:27–28 NRSV).

Since whites have been the most violent race on the planet, their theologians and preachers are not in a position to tell black people, or any other people for that matter, what they must do to be like Jesus.

When one resists evil, suffering is an inevitable consequence of that resistance.

To resist evil is to participate in God's redemption of the world.

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

White people did everything within their power to define black reality, to tell us who we were—and their definition, of course, extended no further than their social, political, and economic interests. They tried to make us believe that God created black people to be white people's servants. We blacks, therefore, were expected to enjoy plowing their fields, cleaning their houses, mowing their lawns, and working in their sawmills. And when we showed signs of displeasure with our so-called elected and inferior status, they called us “uppity niggers” and quickly attempted to put us in our “place.”

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.”

Because theologians are exegetes, they are also prophets. As prophets they must make clear that the gospel of God stands in judgment upon the existing order of injustice. This task involves, as Abraham Heschel said, the “exegesis of existence from a divine perspective,”3 disclosing that God is not indifferent to suffering and not patient with cruelty and falsehood. But God's power and judgment will create justice and order out of chaos.

What has the gospel to do with the oppressed of the land and their struggle for liberation? Any theologian who fails to place that question at the center of his or her work has ignored the essence of the gospel.

I respect what happened at Nicea and Chalcedon and the theological input of the Church Fathers on Christology; but that source alone is inadequate for finding out the meaning of black folks’ Jesus. It is all right to say as did Athanasius that the Son is homoousia (one substance with the Father), especially if one has a taste for Greek philosophy and a feel for the importance of intellectual distinctions. And I do not want to minimize or detract from the significance of Athanasius’ assertion for faith one iota. But the homoousia question is not a black question. Blacks do not ask whether Jesus is one with the Father or divine and human, though the orthodox formulations are implied in their language. They ask whether Jesus is walking with them, whether they can call him up on the “telephone of prayer” and tell him all about their troubles.

most seminaries emphasize the need for appropriate tools in doing theology, which always means white tools, i.e., knowledge of the language and thought of white people.

ideology is deformed thought, meaning that a certain idea or ideas are nothing but the function of the subjective interest of an individual or group.

There can be no freedom for God in isolation from the humiliated and abused. There can be no freedom for God unless the hungry are fed, the sick are healed, and justice is given for the poor.

“In a sick country every step to health is an insult to those who live on its sickness.”

Violence is not only what black people do to white people as victims seek to change the structure of their existence; it is also what white people did when they created a society for white people only, and what they do in order to maintain it.

White people have a distorted conception of the meaning of violence. They like to think of violence as breaking the laws of their society, but that is a narrow and racist understanding of reality. There is a more deadly form of violence, and it is camouflaged in such slogans as “law and order,” “freedom and democracy,” and “the American way of life.” I am speaking of white-collar violence, the violence of Christian murderers and patriot citizens who define right in terms of whiteness and wrong as blackness. These are the people who hire assassins to do their dirty work while they piously congratulate themselves for being “good” and “nonviolent.” The assassins are the police who patrol our streets, killing our men, women, and children.

Violence is embedded in American law, and it is blessed by the keepers of moral sanctity. This is the core of the problem of violence, and it will not be solved by romanticizing American history, pretending that Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Vietnam are the first American crimes against humanity. If we take seriously the idea of human dignity, then we know that the annihilation of Indians, the enslavement of Africans, and (Reinhold Niebuhr notwithstanding) the making of heroes out of slaveholders, like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were America's first crimes against humankind. And it does not help the matter at all to attribute black slavery to economic necessity or an accident of history. America is an unjust society, and black people have known that for a long time.

The principalities and powers of evil, mythically expressed in the figure of Satan, represent not only metaphysical realities but earthly realities as well. They are the American system, symbolized in President Gerald Ford and other government officials, who oppress the poor, humiliate the weak, and make heroes out of rich capitalists. The principalities and powers are that system of government symbolized in the Pentagon, which bombed and killed helpless people in Vietnam and Cambodia and attributed such obscene atrocities to the accidents of war. They are that system, symbolized in the police departments and prison officials, which shoots and kills defenseless blacks for being black and for demanding their right to exist.