Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

by Esau McCaulley

Gospel music filled our home and shaped our imaginations even when we rebelled against it.

Put simply, I knew the Lord and the culture. Both engaged in an endless battle for my affections.

The struggle I speak of is not merely between two genres of music. I am referring to the struggle between Black nihilism and Black hope.

despair. I contend that a key element in this fight for hope in our community has been the practice of Bible reading and interpretation coming out of the Black church, what I am calling Black ecclesial interpretation.

Let’s be clear. The Black Christian tradition is not and has never been a monolith, but it is fair to say that the Black church tradition is largely orthodox in its theology in the sense that it holds to many of the things that all Christians have generally believed.

National Baptist Convention, the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), and African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME).

I want to make a case that this fourth thing, this unapologetically Black and orthodox reading of the Bible can speak a relevant word to Black Christians today. I want to contend that the best instincts of the Black church tradition—its public advocacy for justice, its affirmation of the worth of Black bodies and souls, its vision of a multiethnic community of faith—can be embodied by those who stand at the center of this tradition. This is a work against the cynicism of some who doubt that the Bible has something to say; it is a work contending for hope.

Every devout student who experiences higher biblical criticism for the first time is inevitably a bit bewildered.

Learning about the Bible changes our faith (and hopefully it matures and deepens it). Much depends on what the professor in the class attempts to do. He or she is not our pastor; it is not their job to be safe. Some skirt the problems saying that difficulties are not so difficult. Others face those problems head on and chart a different path through them to the other side. Some leave the students to wrestle with these questions on their own. Others still have a particular agenda: their goal is deconstruction.

In my professor’s attempt to take the Bible away from the fundamentalists, he also robbed the Black Christian of the rock on which they stood.

If the Bible needs to be rejected to free Black Christians, then such a view seems to entail that the fundamentalists had interpreted the Bible correctly.

In the end this war was not terribly interesting to me, and I decided that I would focus my efforts on history. I dropped my religion major, not because it challenged my faith with hard questions, but because it didn’t ask the right hard questions.

It is common knowledge that when it comes to beliefs about the Bible and Christian theology more generally, evangelicals and Black churches have much in common.7 Very few Black churches would have a problem with what is included in this list. The problem is what is left out.

In my evangelical seminary almost all the authors we read were white men. It was as if all the important conversations about the Bible began when the Germans started to take the text apart, and the Bible lay in tatters until the evangelicals came to put it back together again.

My struggle was more than different readings of American history and issues of justice. I had difficulty with how the Bible functioned in parts of evangelicalism. For many, the Bible had been reduced to the arena on which we fought an endless war about the finer points of Paul’s doctrine of justification.

What did I do in a world in which so few Black voices are prominent and the questions of my people were ignored? I began to look for anybody Black.

Talking of reading critically is a slightly dangerous thing because Black traditional voices are often weaponized in evangelical spaces against Black progressive voices.

What were the key elements of the early Black theological

enterprise especially as it relates to the practice of Bible reading?

Enslaved Black people, even those who remained illiterate, in effect questioned white exegesis.

there. Alongside the story of the God of the exodus is the God of Leviticus, who calls his people to a holiness of life.

Furthermore, we know that they avoided those Old Testament passages that spoke of God as liberator of the enslaved. It is not the case that Blacks uniquely emphasized certain passages and read other Scriptures in light of them; what was unique was what enslaved Black people emphasized.

They emphasized God as the liberator and humankind as one family united under the rule of Christ whose death for sins reconciles us to God. To put it more pointedly, I contend that the enslaved reading of the exodus as paradigmatic for understanding God’s character was more faithful to the biblical text than those who began with the Pauline slave passages.

Therefore, I contend that the enslaved person’s biblical interpretation, which gave birth to early Black biblical interpretation, was canonical from its inception. It placed Scripture’s dominant themes in conversation with the hopes and dreams of Black folks. It was also unabashedly theological, in that particular texts were read in light of their doctrine of God, their beliefs about humanity (anthropology) and their understanding of salvation (soteriology).

Stated differently, everybody has been reading the Bible from their locations, but we are honest about it. What makes Black interpretation Black, then, are the collective experiences, customs, and habits of Black people in this country.

But the dialogue goes both ways. If our experiences pose particular and unique questions to the Scriptures, then the Scriptures also pose unique questions to us.

My claim then is that Black biblical interpretation has been and can be ■ unapologetically canonical and theological. ■ socially located, in that it clearly arises out of the particular context of Black Americans. ■ willing to listen to the ways in which the Scriptures themselves respond to and redirect Black issues and concerns. ■ willing to exercise patience with the text trusting that a careful and sympathetic reading of the text brings a blessing. ■ willing to listen to and enter into dialogue with Black and white critiques of the Bible in the hopes of achieving a better reading of the text.

The divisions in biblical studies have meant that Black scholars have often felt torn between traditions of biblical interpretation that center cultural questions to the exclusion of what the text might say or force the cultural questions to the side for the sake of respectability. That is a false choice.

We can have both. Depending on the context we can place more emphasis on the text or the question...

If our cultures and histories define the totality of our interpretive enterprise, the price of admission can be complete acquiescence to that culture’s particularities. This

But if we all read the biblical text assuming that God is able to speak a coherent word to us through it, then we can discuss the meanings our varied cultures have gleaned from the Scriptures.

Rather than address all the issues in every text, my goal instead is to point toward a way of Bible reading that reflects the tradition that formed me and continues

to form a generation of scholars and clergy.

Instead it is an attempt to show that the instincts and habits of Black biblical interpretation can help us use the Bible to address the issues of the day. It is an attempt to show that for Black Christians the very process of interpreting the Bible can function as an exercise in hope and connect us to the faith of our ancestors.

I recognize the dangers that they face and the difficulties inherent in the vocation they choose.

But a difficult job does not absolve one of criticism; it puts the criticism in a wider framework.

If the difficulty of the job provides context, so does the historic legal enforcement of racial discrimination and the terror visited on Black bodies.

Paul says that the state’s policing duties should never be a terror to those who are innocent.

The problem is not that, according

their interpretation, Paul forbids rebelling against wicked rulers. The problem is the wicked rulers themselves.

One response to the problem of evil has been to posit the cross and resurrection as God’s answer to the question. We do not worship a God who sits apart, but who enters human pain and redeems it from within. The Christian is not given a series of deductive proofs that solve the problem of evil to our satisfaction. We are given an act of love that woos us. And we know that this wooing isn’t a false promise because the resurrection proves that God is sovereign over life and death. Our focus on eschatology in any case is not unique. The nihilist is just as driven by their eschatology. It’s just that his or hers is devoid of hope: let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die.

But God acts through Moses.

Instead, Paul shows rightful skepticism about our ability to discern how we are functioning in God’s wider purposes. Stated differently, God brings his judgment against corrupt institutions through humans in his own time, and we are not given insight into our proper role in such matters.

We are allowed to discern and even condemn evil like the prophets did. We are allowed to resist like the Hebrew midwives, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

As Christians, it is part of our calling to remind those charged with governing of their need to create an atmosphere in which people are able to live without fear. This has been the Black person’s repeated lament. We should not live in fear. Good should be rewarded and evil punished. The United States, historically and in the present, has not done that. Instead it has used the sword to instill a fear that has been passed down from generation to generation in Black homes and churches—but that fear has never had the final word. Instead Black Christians remembered that we need not fear those who can only kill the body.

When Black Christians look upon the actions of political leaders and governments and call them evil, we are making a theological claim in the same way that Paul was. Protest is not unbiblical; it is a manifestation of our analysis of the human condition in light of God’s own word and vision for the future. His vision may await an appointed time, but it is coming (Hab 2:1-4).

The question that ought to keep Christians up at night is not the political activism of Black Christians. The question should be how 1 Timothy 2:1-4 came to dominate the conversation about the Christian’s responsibility to the state. How did we manage to ignore the clearly political implications of Paul’s casual remarks about the evil age in Galatians and his wider reflections on the links between evil powers and politicians? How did John’s condemnation of Rome in Revelation fall from view?

The call to be peacemakers is the call for the church to enter the messy world of politics and point toward a better way of being human.

Jesus does not say make peace between Christians, but make peace. He doesn’t say establish peace by making them Christians, but make peace. Why? Because peacemaking can be evangelistic.

Through our efforts to bring peace we show the world the kind of king and kingdom we represent. The outcome of our peacemaking is to introduce people to the kingdom. Therefore the work of justice, when understood as direct testimony to God’s kingdom, is evangelistic from start to finish. It is part (not the whole) of God’s work of reconciling all things to himself.