God of the Oppressed

people is to relate the story of our mothers’ and fathers’ struggles to our present struggles and thereby create a humane future for our children. We must take the speeches and tales, the blues and the spirituals, the prayers and the sermons of black people and incorporate them into our present existence, relating our parents’ strivings to our dail

It is this affirmation of transcendence that prevents Black Theology from being reduced merely to the cultural history of black people. For black people the transcendent reality is none other than Jesus Christ, of whom Scripture speaks.

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

It is impossible to interpret the Scripture correctly and thus understand Jesus aright unless the interpretation is done in the light of the consciousness of the oppressed in their struggle for liberation.

The Bible is the witness to God's self-disclosure in Jesus Christ. Thus the black experience requires that Scripture be a source of Black Theology. For it was Scripture that enabled slaves to affirm a view of God that differed radically from that of the slave masters.

Jesus Christ is not a proposition, not a theological concept which exists merely in our heads. He is an event of liberation, a happening in the lives of oppressed people struggling for political freedom. Therefore, to know him is to encounter him in the history of the weak and the helpless.

Ron Karenga, you said that ‘The fact that I am Black is my ultimate reality.’ But then on page 34 of the same book, you wrote that ‘Christianity begins and ends with the man Jesus—his life, death and resurrection.’ Which do you really mean? Blackness or Jesus Christ? You cannot have it both ways.” This is an important matter, and perhaps the place

Throughout black history Scripture was used for a definition of God and Jesus that was consistent with the black struggle for liberation.

The key to the theological affirmation here is not only the verbal assent to the power of God to grant identity and liberation to an oppressed and humiliated people. Equally important is the verbal passion with which these affirmations are asserted and the physical responses they elicit from the community in which the testimony is given. Some will