Theology Book Club: The Cross and the Lynching Tree

Join Theology Book Club in Tallahassee on Tuesday, May 10, 7:00 pm, at Argonaut Coffee above Midtown Reader. We will be discussing The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone. Cone was an ordained African Methodist Episcopal minister and an American theologian known as the founder of black liberation theology. His work extended liberation theology’s claim that God is on the side of the oppressed by including the black people of the United States. He saw the gospel as the act of asserting the humanity of black people and other marginalized people across the world and freeing them from the chains of poverty, colonization, and disenfranchisement.

Cone’s work has impacted the world in innumerable ways. One of his last works before his death in 2018, was The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011). This book explores the history of lynching in America and points out the failures of white Christians to see the parallels between the public execution of Christ and the public executions of thousands of black people in America’s history of slavery and white supremacy. It reminds us of what so many black Americans already know: God suffers alongside those who suffer.

More about the book via Goodreads:

A landmark in the conversation about race and religion in America.

“They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.” Acts 10:39

The cross and the lynching tree are the two most emotionally charged symbols in the history of the African American community. In this powerful new work, theologian James H. Cone explores these symbols and their interconnection in the history and souls of black folk. Both the cross and the lynching tree represent the worst in human beings and at the same time a thirst for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final meaning. While the lynching tree symbolized white power and black death, the cross symbolizes divine power and black life, God overcoming the power of sin and death. For African Americans, the image of Jesus, hung on a tree to die, powerfully grounded their faith that God was with them, even in the suffering of the lynching era.

In a work that spans social history, theology, and cultural studies, Cone explores the message of the spirituals and the power of the blues; the passion and the engaged vision of Martin Luther King, Jr.; he invokes the spirits of Billie Holiday and Langston Hughes, Fannie Lou Hamer and Ida B. Wells, and the witness of black artists, writers, preachers, and fighters for justice. And he remembers the victims, especially the 5,000 who perished during the lynching period. Through their witness he contemplates the greatest challenge of any Christian theology to explain how life can be made meaningful in the face of death and injustice.