Sublime

She wanted faculty and students to join her and guide her in reclaiming and retrieving what had been broken into pieces and scattered to the wind—the sounds, sensibilities, wisdom, knowledge, and life strategies of multiple peoples made black by a colonialist brush. But no one understood this as theological work to be done.

the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that

Christian Church has tended to overlook its Judaic origins, but the fact is that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew of Palestine when he went about his Father’s business,…

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theology that must emerge out of the dialectic of black history and culture. Instinctively, I went to the Scriptures as the primary source for this new approach and asked, “What has the biblical message to do with the black power revolution?” My answer is found in my first book, Black Theology and Black Power (Seabury, 1969). My second book, A Blac

His concern was to state the primacy of faith in relation to reason on matters of theological discourse. We have another concern and thus must rephrase that question in the light of our cultural history, asking: “What has Africa to do with Jerusalem, and what difference does Jesus make for African people oppressed in North America?” As Gerard Bissa

Those black students drove me back to the primary art forms of the black religious experience by refusing to accept a prefabricated theology from the lips of James Cone. I began once more to listen to the heartbeat of black life as reflected in the song and speech of black people. As I did so, I asked myself, What is theology? What is the substance

evaluate past interpreters of the faith. Since oppression of the weak by the powerful is one of those elements, we can put the critical question to Athanasius, Augustine, or Luther: What has the gospel of Jesus, as witnessed in Scripture, to do with the humiliated and the abused? If they failed to ask that question or only made it secondary in thei