Quotes from James H. Cone

Whether theologians acknowledge it or not, all theologies begin with experience... We are all particular human beings, finite creatures, and we create our understanding of God out of our experience. Hopefully, our own experience points to the universal, but it is never identical with it. For when we mistake our own talk about God with ultimate reality, we turn it into ideology.

How could any theologian explain the meaning of Christian identity in America and fail to engage white supremacy, its primary negation?

To be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are." To become black is like what Jesus told Nicodemus, that he must be "born again," that is, "born of water and Spirit" (John 3), the Black Spirit of liberation.

I was black before I was a Christian. Martin and Malcolm, therefore, had to go together, which meant being unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian.

The essence of the gospel of Christ stands or falls on the question of black humanity, and there is no way that a church or institution can be related to the gospel of Christ if it sponsors or tolerates racism in any form.

Transvaluation of values," a term derived from Nietzsche (who derided Christianity's embrace of the weak), is the heart of Niebuhr's perspective on the cross.

If human power in history—among races, nations, and other collectives as well as individuals—is self-interested power, then "the revelation of divine goodness in history" must be weak and not strong.

Freedom means taking sides in a crisis situation, when a society is divided into oppressed and oppressors. In this situation we are not permitted the luxury of being on neither side by making a decision that only involves the self.

Appeals to reason and religion do not change the balance of power, because both are used to defend the interests of oppressors.

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 the painful consequence of that resistance.

Living in a world of white oppressors, blacks have no time for a neutral God.