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

by Esau McCaulley

This is good and fair, but God’s word to us is more than “vengeance is mine saith the Lord.” The miracle of Israel’s Scriptures is not that there are calls to repay our enemies to the full.

Yet these prophetic texts call us to the costly and painful work of imagining a world beyond our grievances. This does not rule out justice; it speaks to what happens afterward.

The picture of God judging wickedness is not an idea reserved for the Old Testament.

The meek and mild Jesus of popular imagination is the creation of the comfortable middle class.

What is God’s first answer to Black suffering (and the wider human suffering and the rage that comes alongside it)? It is to enter that suffering alongside us as a friend and a redeemer. The answer to Black rage is the calming words of the Word made flesh. The incarnation that comes all the way down, even unto death, has been enough for us to say yes, God, we trust you.

Rome and the antebellum South may not be twins, but they are definitely close relatives, maybe even siblings of the same father. On the cross we meet a God who experienced injustice in the flesh.

The results have come back from the analysis of the human condition and the data is clear: we are all sinners. Jesus is not.

It is only by looking at our enemies through the lens of the cross that we can begin to imagine the forgiveness necessary for community.

What do Black Christians do with the rage that we rightly feel? We send it to the cross of Christ.

early Jewish Christians, who had all the historical ammunition needed to seek the ruin of their Gentile oppressors, made it their mission to convert a largely hostile Roman world.

There are two reasons that willingly accepting abuse is inappropriate for Christians. First, the theological energy of the Bible is toward liberation. The exodus speaks of freedom from slavery and the New Testament speaks in numerous places about freedom from sin.

Second, the New Testament also calls on believers to help those who are suffering.

James does not say, “Tell the orphans and the widows to put up with suffering.” He says to the Christian, “Help them!” Therefore, finding a place of forgiveness does not mean that we must

allow suffering to continue indefinitely when we have the resources to do something about it.

I am convinced the God who had the power to judge me did not. Instead he invited me into communion with his Son and through that union with the Messiah I discover the resources to love that I did not possess before. When anger is victorious in my own heart it never defeats God.

When God finally calls the dead to life, he calls them to life with their ethnic identity intact (Rev 7:9). And yet, Christianity does teach that all will have to give an account for their actions. The final judgment is a source of terrifying comfort. John’s apocalypse recounts a scene when the saints who had been martyred ask a question, “Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?” (Rev 6:10). John does not respond with, “There will be no reckoning.” Instead he says that the time has not yet come. John later speaks of the end in which Babylon is judged for its misdeeds (Rev 18:21-24). God will judge wickedness. The sins that have been committed against us matter. This is both terrifying (I find it difficult to long for such an outcome even for my enemies) and comforting (because sin is judged). God’s terrible power to judge makes me long for everyone to take advantage of God’s offer of forgiveness. Christian eschatology breeds compassion. Many years into my Christian life I still feel the anger, but the cross and the reality of God’s power have changed me. I want the oppressor to repent and find healing. I want him or her to be free as well. My rage, then, has hints of sympathy that linger in the back of my most heated moments. CONCLUSION It is difficult for the African American believer to look deeply into the history of Christianity and not be profoundly shaken. Insomuch as it arises in respo...

The question for Pennington was not whether this verse or that verse condones slavery. His questions revolve around the character of God.

If the Bible supported the kidnapping of Black bodies, the rape of Black men and women, the separation of families, the whip and the chain, then he needed another book altogether. He needed another faith and another hope. In a sense the question behind all questions for the Black Christians is this one. Did God intend our freedom? Our reflections on the Bible and the Black Christian then should end here at the origin of all our problems, the question of the Bible and slavery.

The story of Christianity does not on every page legislate slavery out of existence. Nonetheless, the Christian narrative, our core theological principles, and our ethical imperatives create a world in which slavery becomes unimaginable. The Bible, taken in its entirety, remains a light in a dark and broken world. It is their fault that slave masters took so

long to walk out of darkness and into the light. To make this case, I want to begin by highlighting how Jesus’ interpretive method allows us to state plainly that God didn’t intend our slavery. Then we will examine select Old and New Testament texts that allow us to imagine a world with God as king and slavery ended.

(Mt 16:21; Lk 24:25-27).

The Pharisees wanted Jesus to interpret Deuteronomy 24:1-4 and other parts of the Torah that dealt with the question of

Here the divorce question is similar to the slave question as it was handled by the slave masters of the antebellum South. They maintained that the options were biblical slavery versus bad slavery. The problem was not slavery itself, which had strong biblical support, but the excesses of a few.

Instead, he turns to the opening words of Genesis. He speaks about God’s creational intent. The question, for Jesus, is not what the Torah allows, but what God intended.

Jesus argued that before the fall there was no divorce and therefore we were not made for divorce. Instead man and woman were made to enjoy each other forever. This seems to leave his opponents stunned. Why have these passages at all? Jesus replies that Moses instituted these laws because of their hardness of heart. He wanted them to remember that “it was not this way from the beginning.”

Jesus’ argument here suggests that the norms for Christian ethics are not the passages that are allowances for human sin, such as Moses’ divorce laws. What matters is what we were made to be. Jesus shows that not every passage of the Torah presents the ideal for human interactions. Instead some passages acce...

This means that when we look at the passages in the Old...

to ask ourselves about their purpose. Do they present a picture of what God wanted us to be or do they seek to limit the ...

Paul speaks in a similar way when he says that the law was instituted because of sin and functioned as our guardian until the coming of Christ (Gal 3:19-24). This does not mean that the law is bad (Gal 3:21), nor does it dismiss the formative role that the law played on Christian ethics. But it...

If slavery is a result of the fall, then it is false to claim that God’s will is slavery. It is also false to claim that the Bible presents slavery as a good thing for Black people. Slavery is always and forever wrapped in sin. One way to see this is to turn our eyes from Genesis and move toward Revelation. What is God’s vision for the reconciliation of all things (Rev 21:3-4)? It is a community of the healed and transformed, not the enslaved. If Christian ethics is about living now in light of the coming future, then the coming future freedom of all people has to at some point become flesh in the formerly enslaved bodies whose very physical freedom is an enacted parable of the gospel.

What is even more interesting is that no society that preceded the eighteenth-century abolitions contended that slavery itself was fundamentally immoral. The widespread move to abolish slavery is a Christian innovation.

I argued that Jesus makes a distinction within the Torah between passages that articulate God’s purposes (creation account) and those that limit the impact of human sin (divorce laws). When he was making ethical judgments, then, Jesus did not begin with the allowances and reason from there. He called people to remember their creational purposes. I argue a similar logic should be used with the Old Testament slavery laws.

No fancy exegetical moves could convince them that the God who liberated the Israelites didn’t care about enslaved persons in this country:

When they turned to the biblical texts, they didn’t see God describing himself as the God who enslaves people and therefore his chosen nation should enslave others. Instead they saw in the stories of Daniel, Moses, and Jonah a much different God than the one described by their slave masters.

In Israel, no Hebrew slave could be enslaved for more than six years, and when the slave was freed he or she was to be given resources to start a new life:

Provide liberally out of your flock, your threshing floor, and your wine press, thus giving to him some of the bounty with which the LORD your God has blessed you.

Manumission was rooted in a specific call to imitate what God did for Israel.

James Henry Hammond, senator of South Carolina, said the following during a speech before the senate in 1858: In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. . . . Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes.11 His words are important because American slavery was not rooted in a detached reading of biblical texts. Instead the biblical text was read in light of an anthropology growing out of blatant racism, lust, and greed.

When God promised to bless Israel, it was for the specific purpose of blessing the world.

If we take that passage seriously, if the nations were supposed to adopt the Torah, that would in effect eliminate permanent slavery (due to the six-year manumission law) in

all those nations and create an ever-expanding place of refuge for enslaved people.14 When reflecting on manumission laws, God’s justice becoming “a light to the nations” takes on real significance (Is 51:4).

Israel’s purpose was to show that there was a better way to order their societies and in so doing positively in...

In other words, the vision for the freedom of enslaved Israelites and the laws governing that freedom shoul...

many scholars have noted that the word translated punished usually does not merely mean “punish.” It means “avenge.”

This passage shows that the Old Testament did not see the enslaved person as mere property whose life had no value. Instead a murder of a slave, was just that; a murder of a human being made in God’s image.

The question I wanted to pursue was whether the biblical texts condoned slavery as good or whether it sought to limit the damages of a broken world.

Paul doesn’t appear to believe that his small and fledging communities could do anything so dramatic as to change Roman Law.

three Pauline texts as examples of the ways in which he does provide the resources to see the enslaved differently. These are his letter to Philemon, 1 Timothy 6:1-3, and 1 Corinthians 7:21-24.

Paul refers to himself and others as prisoners of Jesus Christ (Philem 1, 9, 10, 12, 23). This lower status has the effect of placing Paul on the same level as Onesimus in the eyes of society.27 If some were tempted to view Onesimus as a criminal for escaping, they would also be forced to condemn the apostle.

Oneness in Christ transforms relationships. Society values those with power and status. Christians treat all people—slave, free, or prisoner—as family.30 This idea that slaves and masters are family undermines slavery. Who would enslave a brother or a sister?