Top 40 James H. Cone Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Any theology that is indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian theology.”

— James H. Cone

2. “The truth about injustice always sounds outrageous.”

— James H. Cone

3. “To sing about freedom and to pray for its coming is not enough. Freedom must be actualized in history by oppressed peoples who accept the intellectual challenge to analyze the world for the purpose of changing it.”

— James H. Cone

4. “Luke’s Gospel was clear: Jesus’s ministry was essentially liberation on behalf of the poor and the oppressed. I didn’t need a doctorate in theology to know that liberation defined the heart of Jesus’s ministry. Black people had been preaching and singing about it for centuries.”

— James H. Cone

5. “Anger and humor are like the left and right arm. They complement each other. Anger empowers the poor to declare their uncompromising opposition to oppression, and humor prevents them from being consumed by their fury.”

— James H. Cone

6. “Suffering naturally gives rise to doubt. How can one believe in God in the face of such horrendous suffering as slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree? Under these circumstances, doubt is not a denial but an integral part of faith. It keeps faith from being sure of itself. But doubt does not have the final word. The final word is faith giving rise to hope.”

— James H. Cone

7. “The belief that the soul continues its existence after the dissolution of the body is a matter of philosophical or theological speculation rather than of simple faith, and is accordingly nowhere expressly taught in Holy Scripture.”

— James H. Cone

8. “The cross can heal and hurt; it can be empowering and liberating but also enslaving and oppressive. There is no one way in which the cross can be interpreted. I offer my reflections because I believe that the cross placed alongside the lynching tree can help us to see Jesus in America in a new light, and thereby empower people who claim to follow him to take a stand against white supremacy and every kind of injustice.”

— James H. Cone

9. “If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth.”

— James H. Cone

10. “Only the oppressed can receive liberating visions in wretched places. Only those thinking emerges in the context of the struggle against injustice can see God’s freedom breaking into unfree conditions and thus granting power to the powerless to fight here and now for the freedom they know to be theirs in Jesus’ cross and resurrection.”

— James H. Cone

11. “Christian theology is for the liberation of all humanity, and it could never be neutral in the fight against oppression. That much I knew. And that was how A Black Theology of Liberation was born: with the spirit of Martin and Malcolm, Jimmy, and the black poets of the 1960s.”

— James H. Cone

12. “Testimony is an integral part of the Black religious tradition. It is the occasion where the believer stands before the community of faith in order to give account of the hope that is in him or her.”

— James H. Cone

13. “The acid test of any truth is found in whether it aids victims in their struggle to overcome victimisation.”

— James H. Cone

14. “If the Church is to remain faithful to its Lord, it must make a decisive break with the structure of this society by launching a vehement attack on the evils of racism in all forms. It must become prophetic, demanding a radical change in the interlocking structures of this society. This.”

— James H. Cone

15. “The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair.”

— James H. Cone

16. “They shouted, danced, clapped their hands and stomped their feet as they bore witness to the power of Jesus’ cross which had given them an identity far more meaningful than the harm that white supremacy could do them.”

— James H. Cone

17. “If we save the planet and have a society of inequality, we wouldn’t have saved much.”

— James H. Cone

18. “Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.”

— James H. Cone

19. “One can lynch a person without a rope or tree.”

— James H. Cone

20. “Through the reading of scripture, the people hear other stories about Jesus that enable them to move beyond the privateness of their own stories.”

— James H. Cone

21. “Patrick Cheng’s Radical Love is not only an excellent introduction to LGBT theology but an important contribution to the discipline of theology and the life of the church. It is a must read for anyone who cares about the health of the church and theology today.”

— James H. Cone

22. “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

23. “And yet the Christian gospel is more than a transcendent reality, more than “going to heaven when I die, to shout salvation as I fly.” It is also an immanent reality – a powerful liberating presence among the poor right now in their midst, “building them up where they are torn down and propping them up on every leaning side.” The gospel is found wherever poor people struggle for justice, fighting for their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

— James H. Cone

24. “To be Christian is to be one of those whom God has chosen. God has chosen black people!”

— James H. Cone

25. “What people think about God, Jesus Christ, and the Church cannot be separated from their own social and political status in a given society.”

— James H. Cone

26. “Anger and humour are like the left and right arm. They complement each other.”

— James H. Cone

27. “The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching.”

— James H. Cone

28. “The Gospel of liberation is bad news to all oppressors because they have defined their “freedom” in terms of slavery of others.”

— James H. Cone

29. “One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of a pure regard for truth,” wrote French philosopher, activist, and mystic Simone Weil. “Christ likes for us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.”

— James H. Cone

30. “For most evangelicals, revelation was found in the inerrant scriptures, and one need not look elsewhere. I knew in my gut that God’s revelation was found among poor black people.”

— James H. Cone

31. “Heresy is the refusal to speak the truth or to live the truth in the light of the One who is the Truth.”

— James H. Cone

32. “In the “lynching era,” between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these “Christians” did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.”

— James H. Cone

33. “I do think that it is impossible to do Christian theology with integrity in America without asking the question, What has the gospel to do with the black struggle for liberation?”

— James H. Cone

34. “My message to blacks was: “It is time to stop hating who you are. God created you black – love yourself, love your hands and face, big nose and lips, for that is the only way you can love God. Blackness is God’s gift to humanity.”

— James H. Cone

35. “Without concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor, the gospel becomes simply an opiate; rather than liberating the powerless from humiliation and suffering, the gospel becomes a drug that helps them adjust to this world by looking for “pie in the sky.”

— James H. Cone

36. “If the interpreters are willing to say what the people have to say about their struggle and the reality of Jesus in the fight for freedom, and proceed to develop their tools of critical analysis in the light of their identification with the goals and aspirations of the people, then and only then are they prepared to ask the right questions and hear the right answers.”

— James H. Cone

37. “For Mrs. Bradley, the voice she heard was the voice of the resurrected Jesus. It spoke of hope that, although white racists could take her son’s life, they could not deprive his life and death of an ultimate meaning. As in the resurrection of the Crucified One, God could transmute defeat into triumph, ugliness into beauty, despair into hope, the cross into the resurrection.”

— James H. Cone

38. “The acceptance of the gift of freedom transforms our perception of our social and political existence.”

— James H. Cone

39. “The scandal is that the gospel means liberation, that this liberation comes to the poor, and that it gives them the strength and the courage to break the conditions of servitude.”

— James H. Cone

40. “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

41. “Unlike Europeans who immigrated to this land to escape from tyranny, Africans came in chains to serve a nation of tyrants.”

— James H. Cone

42. “And certainly the history of the black-white relations in this country from the Civil War to the present unmistakably shows that as a people, America has never intended for blacks to be free. To this day, in the eyes of most white Americans, the black man remains subhuman.”

— James H. Cone

43. “It never ceased to amaze me how white scholars could quibble, making simple things more complicated than they really were. What is more central in the Christian Bible than the exodus and Jesus stories and the prophetic call for justice for the poor?”

— James H. Cone

44. “Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear.”

— James H. Cone

45. “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