Theologian James Cone dies at 81

(Image credit: Union Theological Seminary)

published 28 April 2018

Theologian and professor James Cone died Saturday, Union Theological Seminary reported. He was 81.

"Jesus Christ is not a proposition, not a theological concept which exists merely in our heads," Cone wrote of black liberation theology in 1975's God of the Oppressed. "He is an event of liberation, a happening in the lives of oppressed people struggling for political freedom. Therefore, to know him is to encounter him in the history of the weak and the helpless. That is why it can be rightly said that there can be no knowledge of Jesus independent of the history and culture of the oppressed."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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