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The Cross and the Lynching Tree QUOTES

The Cross and the Lynching Tree QUOTES

21 " The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last. "

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree

22 " While Niebuhr agreed, he did not want to throw out “the white man as white man,” and asked “whether there is not a leaven in the other classes that would correspond to the light of truth in the despised minority.” Baldwin replied that “I don’t mean to say the white people are villains or devils or anything like that,” but what “I do mean to say is this: that the bulk of the white . . . Christian majority in this country has exhibited a really staggering level of irresponsibility and immoral washing of the hands, you know. . . . I don’t suppose that . . . all the white people in Birmingham are monstrous people. But they’re mainly silent people, you know. And that is a crime in itself. "

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree

23 " 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. "

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree

24 " 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. "

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree

25 " Just as Martin Luther King Jr. learned much from Reinhold Niebuhr, Niebuhr could have deepened his understanding of the cross by being a student of King and the black freedom movement he led. King could have opened Niebuhr’s eyes to see the lynching tree as Jesus’ cross in America. White theologians do not normally turn to the black experience to learn about theology. But if the lynching tree is America’s cross and if the cross is the heart of the Christian gospel, perhaps Martin Luther King Jr., who endeavored to “take up his cross, and follow [Jesus]” (Mark 8:34) as did no other theologian in American history, has something to teach America about Jesus’ cross. "

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree

26 " The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat. "

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree

27 " If white Americans could look at the terror they inflicted on their own black population—slavery, segregation, and lynching—then they might be able to understand what is coming at them from others. "

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree

28 " The lynching tree is the most potent symbol of the trouble nobody knows that blacks have seen but do not talk about because the pain of remembering—visions of black bodies dangling from southern trees, surrounded by jeering white mobs—is almost too excruciating to recall. In that era, the lynching tree joined the cross as the most emotionally charged symbols in the African American community—symbols that represented both death and the promise of redemption, judgment and the offer of mercy, suffering and the power of hope. Both the cross and the lynching tree represented the worst in human beings and at the same time “an unquenchable ontological thirst”[1] for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final meaning. "

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree

29 " When Niebuhr thought a little more deeply about Darrow’s empathy with black suffering, however, he said, “I suppose it is difficult to escape bitterness when you have eyes to see and heart to feel what others are too blind and too callous to notice.”[29] "

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree

30 " Unfortunately, during the course of 2,000 years of Christian history, this symbol of salvation has been detached from any reference to the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings—those whom Ignacio Ellacuría, the Salvadoran martyr, called “the crucified peoples of history.” The cross has been transformed into a harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks. Rather than reminding us of the “cost of discipleship,” it has become a form of “cheap grace,”[3] an easy way to salvation that doesn’t force us to confront the power of Christ’s message and mission. Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy "

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree

31 " Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. "

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree

32 " When a mob in Valdosta, Georgia, in 1918 failed to find Sidney Johnson, accused of murdering his boss, Hampton Smith, they decided to lynch another black man, Haynes Turner, who was known to dislike Smith. Turner’s wife, Mary, who was eight months pregnant, protested vehemently and vowed to seek justice for her husband’s lynching. The sheriff, in turn, arrested her and then gave her up to the mob. In the presence of a crowd that included women and children, Mary Turner was “stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.”[2] "

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree

33 " how to reconcile the gospel message of liberation with the reality of black oppression. "

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree

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

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree

35 " Whites acted in a superior manner for so long that it was difficult for them to even recognize their cultural and spiritual arrogance, blatant as it was to African Americans. "

― James H. Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree