Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody Quotes

“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?”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian

“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.”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian

“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.”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian

“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.”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian

“The oppressed…have a higher moral right to challenge their oppressors than these have to maintain their rule by force.”6”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian

“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.”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian

“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.”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian

“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.”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian

“I was black before I was a Christian. Martin and Malcolm, therefore, had to go together, which meant being unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian.”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian

“I wanted to construct a black theology—a theology that would be black like Malcolm and Christian like Martin.”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian

“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.”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian