The lynching tree—so strikingly similar to the cross on Golgotha—should have a prominent place in American images of Jesus’ death. But it does not. In fact, the lynching tree has no place in American...
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...
If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth.
If human power in history—among races, nations, and other collectives as well as individuals—is self-interested power, then the revelation of divine goodness in history must be weak and not strong.
Without concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor, the gospel becomes simply an opiate; rather than liberating the powerless from humiliation and suffering, the gospel becomes a drug...
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...
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...
And certainly the history of the black-white relations in this country from the Civil War to the present unmistakably shows that as a people, America has never intended for blacks to be free. To this...
In 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. God's reality is not bound by one manifestation of the...
Any analysis of the gospel which did not begin and end with God's liberation of the oppressed was ipso facto unchristian.
When he sent a manuscript of The Irony of American History to his historian friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Schlesinger called Niebuhr’s attention to the glaring omission of the Negro: One irony deserv...