When African slaves became Christians and were exposed to the Bible, they naturally gravitated to certain parts of it, such as the liberation of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt, the theme of the Promised Land, and the hoped-for redemption at the end of a period of suffering. From the New Testament they drew sustenance from a doctrine that Unitarians have often regarded as intellectually absurd: namely, the idea that God or God's son Jesus (the distinction was not very important in black Christianity according to Cone) so identified with the suffering people, the victims of injustice, that he became one of them and suffered a terrible death as a result.
The conclusion many black Christians drew from this was that God took the side of the victims of injustice; and the statement (which they took to be fact) that Jesus was resurrected, and thereby vindicated, symbolized God's promise that they too would someday be victorious: it might not be in this life, and yet again it might.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Wednesday, August 25th 2010 at 3:06PM
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