24 quotes
Being black in America has little to do with skin color. Being black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are.
Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
By becoming poor and entrusting divine revelation to a carpenter from Nazareth, God makes clear where one has to be in order to hear the divine word and experience divine presence.
Speaking the Truth: Ecumenism, Liberation, and Black Theology (1986)
If the church ... does not make God's liberation of the oppressed central in its mission and proclamation, how can it rest easy with a condemned criminal as the dominant symbol of its message?
Speaking the Truth: Ecumenism, Liberation, and Black Theology (1986)
A man is free when he sees clearly the fulfillment of his being and is thus capable of making the envisioned self a reality.
Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
Black Power seeks not understanding but conflict; addresses blacks and not whites; seeks to develop black support, but not white good will.
Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
A God minus wrath seems to be a God who is basically not against anything.
A Black Theology of Liberation (1970)
What difference does it make that one should "prove" a philosophical point, if that point has nothing to do with spreading freedom throughout the land?
God of the Oppressed (1975)
As long as man is a slave to another power, he is not free to serve God with mature responsibility. He is not free to become what he is—human.
Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
To be Christian is to be one of those whom God has chosen. God has chosen black people!
Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
'People should love each other' sounds like Riis Park at sundown. It has very little meaning to the world at large.
Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
The Christian does not decide between violence and nonviolence, evil and good. He decides between the less and the greater evil.
Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
Any talk about God that fails to make God's liberation of the oppressed its starting point is not Christian.
Speaking the Truth: Ecumenism, Liberation, and Black Theology (1986)
Therefore, simply to say that Jesus did not use violence is no evidence relevant to the condition of black people as they decide on what to do about white oppression.
Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
We cannot solve ethical questions of the twentieth century by looking at what Jesus did in the first. Our choices are not the same as his. Being Christians does not mean following 'in his steps.'
Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
Oppressed and oppressors cannot possibly mean the same thing when they speak of God. The God of the oppressed is a God of revolution who breaks the chains of slavery. The oppressors' God is a God of slavery and must be destroyed along with the oppressors.
A Black Theology of Liberation (1970)
The revolution which Black Theology advocates … [means] confronting white racists and saying: 'If it's a fight you want, I am prepared to oblige you.' This is what the black revolution means.
Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
In Christ, God enters human affairs and takes sides with the oppressed. Their suffering becomes his; their despair, divine despair. Through Christ the poor man is offered freedom now to rebel against that which makes him other than human.
Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
Since most professional theologians are the descendants of the advantaged class and thus often represent the consciousness of the class, it is difficult not to conclude that their theologies are in fact a bourgeois exercise in intellectual masturbation.
God of the Oppressed (1975)
Whether the American system is beyond redemption we will have to wait and see. But we can be certain that black patience has run out, and unless white America responds positively to the theory and activity of Black Power, then a bloody, protracted civil war is inevitable.
Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
As ambassadors of Jesus Christ, Christians have no choice but to join the movement of liberation on the side of the poor, fighting against the structures of injustice. Faith in Jesus Christ, therefore, is not only an affirmation that we utter in Sunday worship and at other church gatherings. Faith is a commitment, a deeply felt experience of being called by the Spirit of Christ to bear witness to God's coming liberation by fighting for the freedom of the poor now.
Speaking the Truth: Ecumenism, Liberation, and Black Theology (1986)