Jesus Christ Liberator: A Critical Christology for Our Time

By any standards this is a radical vision—certainly for the early Christian community itself, which at that time was still loyal to the basic principles of Judaism and looked on Paul as a dangerous schismatic. For them, the key element of their belief was that the Messiah had come—and by Messiah they meant what Jews understood by the term— namely,

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

A careful look at Jesus Christ will reveal an extremely self-actualized person, an individual who preached self-reliance, and was not afraid to incur disapproval. Yet many of his followers have twisted his teachings into a catechism of fear and self-hate.

If God is liberating blacks from oppression, why then are they still oppressed? Where is the decisive liberation event in African-American history which gives credibility