God of the Oppressed

If de blues was whiskey, I'd stay drunk all de time.

It is the ability of black people to express the tragic side of social existence but also their refusal to be imprisoned by its limitations.

My brother and I (aspiring young theologues at the time) often discussed the need to confront the white “Christians” of Bearden with the demands of the gospel by invading their Sunday worship service with our presence, making them declare publicly that all are not welcome in “God's” house. But the fear of bodily harm prevented us from carrying out

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 black experience and the Bible together in dialectical tension serve as my point of departure today and yesterday. The order is significant. I am black first—and everything else comes after that.

But when blacks went to church and experienced the presence of Jesus’ Spirit among them, they realized that he bestowed a meaning upon their lives that could not be taken away by white folks. That's why folks at Macedonia sang: “A little talk with Jesus makes it right”—not that “white is right,” but that God had affirmed the rightness of their exis

Father or divine and human, though the orthodox formulations are implied in their language. They ask whether Jesus is walking with them, whether they can call him up on the “telephone of prayer” and tell him all about their troubles. To be sure Athanasius’ assertion about the status of the Logos in the Godhead is important for the church's continue

and the concreteness of the historical reality from which the vision is created bestow upon us a new perspective, a black perspective that grants free thinking in relation to our cultural history and thus enables us to hear the urgent call to speak the truth. In this context, truth is not an intellectual datum that is entrusted to academic guilds.

That truth did not come from white preachers; it came from a liberating encounter with the One who is the Author of black faith and existence. As theologians, we must ask: What is the source and meaning