While Niebuhr agreed, he did not want to throw out the white man as white man, and asked whether there is not a leaven in the other classes that would correspond to the light of truth in the despised...
The cross can heal and hurt; it can be empowering and liberating but also enslaving and oppressive. There is no one way in which the cross can be interpreted. I offer my reflections because I believe...
But there is no perfect guide for discerning God's movement in the world, Contrary to what many conservatives say, the Bible is not a blueprint on this matter. It is a valuable symbol for point to God...
And yet the Christian gospel is more than a transcendent reality, more than going to heaven when I die, to shout salvation as I fly. It is also an immanent reality—a powerful liberating presence among...
While white mob violence against African Americans was an obsession in the South, it was not limited to that region. White supremacy was and is an American reality. Whites lynched blacks in nearly eve...
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 las...
I wanted to construct a black theology—a theology that would be black like Malcolm and Christian like Martin.
For Mrs. Bradley, the voice she heard was the voice of the resurrected Jesus. It spoke of hope that, although white racists could take her son’s life, they could not deprive his life and death of an u...
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: wit...
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 kno...
Unfortunately, during the course of 2,000 years of Christian history, this symbol of salvation has been detached from any reference to the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings—those whom I...
The scandal is that the gospel means liberation, that this liberation comes to the poor, and that it gives them the strength and the courage to break the conditions of servitude.
Find myself suddenly in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other. One duty alone: That of not renouncing my freedom through my choices.18
The oppressed…have a higher moral right to challenge their oppressors than these have to maintain their rule by force.6
Takes a whole lot of empathic effort to step into those of black people and see the world through the eyes of African Americans.
What people think about God, Jesus Christ, and the Church cannot be separated from their own social and political status in a given society.
Just as Martin Luther King Jr. learned much from Reinhold Niebuhr, Niebuhr could have deepened his understanding of the cross by being a student of King and the black freedom movement he led. King cou...
Transvaluation of values, a term derived from Nietzsche (who derided Christianity’s embrace of the weak), is the heart of Niebuhr’s perspective on the cross.
The word of God is upon me, [and] it’s like fire shut up in my bones. And I just have to tell it. What King had to tell was the truth about war, racism, and poverty. It may hurt me, he said. But when...
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 d...