White(count me) Christians need to hear what this man says.
James H. Cone
'The Father of Black Theology'
The Cross and the Lynching Tree
''Work to make the world the way it ought to be”
I listened to Mr. Cones' 2006 Ingersol Lecture at Harvard and made these notes.
It is exponentially more powerful to listen to this speech on the Internet.
There is White Gospel and Black Gospel
Black Church Worship transforms a nobody in white society to a somebody in black society.
The contradiction – How is Gods' Love explained to black people over 400 years of white supremacy.
What is the truth of the Gospel-Many preachers, black and white, claim that they have special communication with God. Be wary of these people.
Faith is the primary way to gain knowledge of the gospel, not by how intellectual you are.
The Gospel (Gods Word) is not in this world.
Everyone is corrupted by sin-even theologans and preachers and disciples.
Paul said it this way: Romans: 7 :15-20
I do not understand what I do.
For what I want to do, I do not do,
But what I hate I do.
And if I do what I do not want to do,
I agree that the law is good.
As it is, it is no longer I my self who does it,
But it is sin living in me.
I know that nothing good lives in me, that is,
In my sinful nature.
For I have the desire to do what is good,
but I cannot carry it out.
For what I do is not the good I want to do;
No, the evil I do not want to do-
this I keep doing.
Now if I do what I do not want to do,
It is no longer I who do it,
But it is sin living in me that does it.
Jesus is the physical slave form of the oppressed.
It requires a powerful religious imagination to find life in death and hope in tragedy.
Linking the cross and the lynching tree presents the audacity to challenge supremacy.
Their (the cross and the lynching tree)obcenity(in the original way) is linked.
Black gospel makes beautiful what white supremacy made ugly.
The gospel of Jesus on the cross is not a happy story. It is a story of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat – finding life in death- transforming lynched blacks into a symbol of victory.
The paradox -physical, ugly bodies can be transformed into beauty through faith.
Todays lynching tree- one half of 2,000,000 people in jail in the U.S. Are black.
If you have never been lynched by another group it is hard to understand the need to remember it.
Jesus did not want to die on the cross and blacks did not want to be lynched.
In confronting the legacy of white supremacy there is hope beyond the tragic for all humankind.
Hope beyond the lynching tree.
