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

by Esau McCaulley

The public depiction of blackness put its foot on our back in an attempt to stomp out Black dreams. But it was also an era of Black consciousness in which hip hop artists began to bring anti-violence messages into their songs and push for a positive understanding of what it meant to be Black in the United States.

Black members of other religions or Black secularists who critique Christianity because of its lack of concern for justice has followed Black Christians since the beginning. This is a part of the two-sided critique that the Black pastor has to deal with that I mentioned in chapter one. Not only must we push back on the European deconstruction of the Christian faith, we must also take seriously the claims coming from the Black critics.

As we stated in the introduction, biblical interpretation is not a one-sided monologue. The Black Christian brings his or her questions to the text and the text poses its own questions to us. We enter into a patient dialogue trusting that the fruit of such a discussion is good for our souls.

There have to be some points of connection between Black hopes and the Bible. We are not blank slates upon which the Scriptures can write anything. We come to these texts with our own experiences, hopes, and dreams.

Luke’s place in the canon is a testimony to God’s value of all ethnic groups.

Absalom Jones uses the language of fulfillment found both in the opening of Luke’s Gospel (Lk 1:1-4) and the letters of Paul (Gal 4:4-7) to speak about the gospel coming to those of African descent.6 Their conversion, according to Absalom, is no afterthought after God’s original plan went astray.

According to Absalom, God’s plan is revealed in all its glory in the conversion of African men and women. Jones, then, comes close to Luke whose whole goal in writing Luke–Acts was to show that God’s plan was always for the nations to know, worship, and obey the Messiah.7

One might be tempted to say that the place of all ethnicities in the kingdom of God is a bright red line running right down the middle of the New Testament.

Zechariah and Elizabeth, then, were directly involved in making theological sense of Israel’s status as oppressed people under the thumb of the Roman Empire.

Zechariah’s son would address a community dealing with life as the disinherited (Lk 3:10-14). John knew about corrupt tax collectors and exploitative soldiers.

But more urgently, Zechariah and Elizabeth are the first generation of Black Christians who came to faith during slavery.

before. The child of promise, Isaac, was born of a woman long past birthing age. But that is the point. God has not changed.

Zechariah and Elizabeth function in Luke’s narrative as a reminder that a dream deferred is not a dream denied.

Mary’s song (Lk 1:46), known to history by the opening words in Latin, the Magnificat, begins with a word of praise: “My soul magnifies the Lord.” These words are important because they locate Mary squarely within the faith of Israel. Mary was a believer and a worshiper. Her song is more than a statement about political liberation. Her testimony includes the worship of the one true God. Political liberation (to use a modern dichotomy alien to the first century) had as its telos the liberty to worship, not merely an assertion of their own political vision.

The careful reader of Isaiah will note that Isaiah goes on from here to describe a suffering servant whose death for sins brings about a second exodus and the end of the covenant curses that led to Israel’s exile (Is 52:13–53:12).

John and Jesus’ ministry takes place in the shadow of the exodus, and therefore the Black hermeneutical practice of highlighting the exodus is thereby vindicated. God did not choose the Egyptians. He chose the enslaved and this is the story evoked as Jesus begins his ministry.

13). Three times Jesus responds to Satan’s temptation by quoting Deuteronomy, the text given to Israel on the verge of their entry into the Promised Land. By citing Deuteronomy, Jesus sets the stage for his first sermon in Nazareth to be heard as the greater law. They are words for the formerly enslaved on the verge of receiving God’s promises. One more point needs to be made here as it specifically relates to Black Christian biblical interpretation. In chapter one, I argued that all theology is canonical in that everyone who attempts to think about the Bible must place the variety of biblical texts in some kind of order, understanding one in light of others. This isn’t unique to Black Christians; everyone does it.

In a society where Black lives have historically been undervalued, we can know that we have an advocate in the person of Christ.

“God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (1 Cor 1:28).

“Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?” (Jas 2:5).

it is often stated that “good news” for the poor is bread or a job or political freedom. That is true insofar as it goes. But Jesus also cared about the spiritual lives of the poor. He saw them as bodies and souls. His call to repent acknowledges the fact that their poverty doesn’t remove their agency. The poor are capable of sin and repentance. Repentance means that even if they remain poor, they can do so as different people. The enslaved recognized this.

Jesus’ ministry and the kingdom that he embodies involves nothing less than the creation of a new world in which the marginalized are healed spiritually, economically, and psychologically. The wealthy, inasmuch as they participate in and adopt the values of a society that dehumanizes people, find themselves opposing the reign of God. This dehumanization can take two forms. First, it can treat the poor as mere bodies that need food and not the transforming love of God. Second, it can view them as souls whose experience of the here and now should not trouble us.25 This is false religion that has little to do with Jesus.

We are latecomers to a drama written by others. There are two ways to answer this question, one biblical and the other historical.

Historically, the claim that Christianity is European is fundamentally false. This can easily be proved by anyone with access to a history book and a map. It is a fact hiding in plain sight that the three major centers of early Christianity

were the patriarchs of Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria.

From this North African church comes some of the greatest minds that Christianity has produced, such as Augustine and Tertullian.

This means that the leading lights of early Christianity were Black and Brown folks or

Egypt isn’t as African as we say it is. We cannot have a pan-African account of history in which all Black and Brown people count as African in the secular account, but not the Christian one.

it is historically inaccurate to say that Africans first heard of

Christianity via slavery.

This divine judgment of the flood does not solve the problem of human sin. In the Genesis account, the people who leave the ark carry with them the same brokenness of their ancestors. This portion of redemptive history culminates in the tower of Babel, a human attempt to defy God’s command to fill the earth with image bearers.

Egypt and Africa are not outside of God’s people; African blood flows into Israel from the beginning as a fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

As it relates to the twelve tribes, then, there was never a biologically “pure” Israel. Israel was always multiethnic and multinational. As a Black man, when I look to the biblical story, I do not see a story of someone else in which I find my place only by some feat of imagination.

Given the strong link between the story of Abraham and ethnic diversity, the link between the Abrahamic promises and the Davidic promises take on special significance.

Given the fact that the future Davidic kingdom is depicted as just and multiethnic, it is important to remember the emphasis on Jesus’ Davidic and Abrahamic sonship throughout the New Testament:

And again Isaiah says, “The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope.” (Rom 15:8, 12, emphasis added)

family. God’s vision for his people is not for the elimination of ethnicity to form a colorblind uniformity of sanctified blandness. Instead God sees the creation of a

community of different cultures united by faith in his Son as a manifestation of the expansive nature of his grace.

Nonetheless, the picture of discipleship that comes to define early Christianity is the image of taking up one’s cross

Mark adds an interesting detail in his account of the

passion of Christ. He says that Simon of Cyrene was compelled to carry the cross.14 Cyrene is a city in North Africa in what we now call Libya. In the same way that Mary’s giving birth is seen an image of Christian faithfulness, Simon’s cross carrying is a physical manifestation of the spiritual reality that Christian discipleship involves the embrace of suffering. Mark states that Simon is the father of Rufus and Alexander. Why mention these men? The most logical answer is that Rufus and Alexander were known to Mark’s audience.15 If anyone was tempted to doubt the veracity of Mark’s account of the crucifixion, they could ask Rufus and Alexander, living members of the Christian community. We cannot say for sure when or how, but at some point this African father became convinced of the truth of the gospel and passed that faith to his sons and possibly his wife (Rom 16:13).16 At the moment in which Christ is reconciling the world to himself on the cross, an African family is making its first steps toward the kingdom.

We must not lose sight of the fact that the story of Christianity ultimately belongs to the triune God who glories in bringing the nations of the world into his family.

It has become common to claim that strong affirmations of ethnic identity are improper for Christians. Some white Christians have even begun to claim that they do not see color. This is rooted in a strange appropriation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In that message King speaks of his vision of Black kids and white kids playing together and people being judged, not by “the color of their skin,” but the “content of their character.”21 King’s point was never that ethnicity and culture are irrelevant, but that they should not be the cause of discrimination. King often called on African Americans to take pride in their culture and heritage:

Far from being colorblind, King called on his people to look upon themselves as Black and see in that blackness something beautiful.

Finally, we argued that at the end, when we finally meet our savior, we do not come to him as a faceless horde but as transformed believers from every tribe, tongue, and nation. When the Black Christian enters the community of faith, she is not entering a strange land. She is finding her way home.

Little boys see their blackness shift from cuteness to danger. Women find themselves pushed and pulled into sexual stereotypes that present them as objects of pleasure. As hips and thighs develop so do the threats to their safety. Black children are taught strategies of survival that often come at the cost of their childhood or basic humanity. There is a sense of not-rightness that grows in young Black hearts.

The psalms call for the complete economic and social collapse of their enemies resulting in death. Psalm 109 says,

The oppressor’s children live at ease while children of the oppressed starve.

The King James version captures it best: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof” (Ps 137:1-2 KJV). No one who has read of Black families being ripped apart after having survived the middle passage will fail to see the deep kinship with Israel in our shared stories of trauma.

Sometimes we need to lament injustice and call for God to right wrongs.