God of the Oppressed

There is one overmastering problem that the socially and politically disinherited always face: Under what terms is survival possible?

“More than three hundred years ago your forefathers were taken from the western coast of Africa as slaves. The people who dealt in the slave traffic were Christians. One of your famous Christian hymn writers, Sir John Newton, made his money from the sale of slaves to the New World. He is the man who wrote ‘How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds’ and ‘A

And for me that meant, whatever can stand before the face of the crucified Christ is true Christian theology. What cannot stand there must disappear. This is especially true of what we say about God. Christ died on the cross with a loud cry, which Mark interprets with the words of the twenty-second psalm: ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ This c

this mysticism of the cross on the part of the oppressed is in fact an ‘expression of misery’, and is already implicitly a ‘protest against misery’, as Marx said. In essence, however, it is something more, and something quite different, which was not recognized by Marx: the expression of human dignity and self-respect in the experience that God cou