God of the Oppressed

in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (I Cor. 1:27–28 NRSV).

Here freedom is obviously a structure of, and a movement in, historical existence. It is black slaves accepting the risk and burden of self-affirmation, of liberation in history. That is the meaning of the phrase, “And before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave.” But without negating history, the last line of this spiritual places freedom b

There are many ordinary blacks who point to Jesus’ suffering as a source of empowerment in their struggle to survive with dignity in a world they did not create.

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

from the perspective of the dominant class in Israel.

The role of the rabbit in the tales of the American Negro is similar to that of the hare in African folk narratives—that of the trickster who shrewdly outwits and gains a victory over some physically stronger or more powerful adversary. The animal tales told by Negro slaves with Br'er Rabbit as the hero had a meaning far deeper than mere entertainm

to black theologians’ claim? There is no easy response to this critique, since there is no rationally persuasive answer to the problem of theodicy. Faith is born out of suffering, and suffering is faith's most powerful contradiction. This is the Christian dilemma. The only meaningful Christian response is to resist unjust suffering and to accept th

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.

Black slaves rejected biblical traditions which whites used to justify slavery—such as the so-called curse of Ham (Gen. 9:24–27), the story of Cain (Gen. 4:1–16), and the sayings that admonished slaves to be obedient to their earthly masters (Eph. 6:5–8, Col. 3:22–25, I Pet. 18–25, I Tim. 6:1–2, Titus 2:9–10, and Philem). They turned instead to the