Short Take 4: Resurgence Turned Divergence, Part 2

What is the Truth Network Podcast? What is the Gospel in America? Jesus came to liberate the oppressed, advocating the same thing as black power. He argued that white American churches preached a gospel based on white supremacy, antithetical to the gospel of Jesus. His work has been used and critiqued inside and outside the African American theological community. He was the Charles Augustus Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary until his death.

He was the former legal officer of the Southern Baptist Convention, one of the professors. I just want to play a sound byte here and let you actually hear from James Cone himself and some of the messages that he has given over time. James Cone talked about the aspect of what the cross of Christ actually is. Listen to this sound byte about how he reinterprets the cross of Christ. Again, James Cone, father of black liberation theology, great influencer, and now it's morphed or just maybe a different name.

name for black liberation theology of critical race theory. The cross, as I said, is God taking the side of the victim. It's a symbol of that. God making ultimate identification with the powerless. Now if the powerful in our society, the white people, if they want to become Christians, they have to give up that power and become identified with the powerless. If you're going to be a Christian, you can't be identified with the powerful and also Christian at the same time.

That's a contradiction of term. Now how do I know that you're really identifying with the victim? Well, if you're identifying with the victim, you not only want to feel good about that, you also have to pay back that which you took. You just don't say, please forgive me now. The only way in which your repentance, your forgiveness can be authentic, your reception of it can be authentic, your repentance can be authentic, is that you give back what you took. And white people took a lot from black people.