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

by Esau McCaulley

I dropped my religion major, not because it challenged my faith with hard questions, but because it didn’t ask the right hard questions.

While I agree that the enslaved people resisted any attempt to use the Bible to justify slavery, I think that such a view may concede too much. It implies that the slave masters themselves did not have a canon within a canon. Notice that the slave master whenever he had Paul read focused on a few texts. Whatever we might say of the Pauline slave texts, few would argue that Paul’s thoughts on slavery stand at the center of his theological world. Furthermore, it is also interesting to note that other portions of Paul’s letters such as Galatians 3:28 were not popular among slave masters.

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.

This holistic take on justice is missing from much theology that pertains to be Christian.

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.

This is a stunningly beautiful thought.

Slave masters’ fear of the Bible must bear some indirect testimony to what the slave masters thought it said.

I wonder how often in history this comment is true?

They put their lust for power and material wealth in front of the text and read the Bible from that perspective.

This might be said of more than just slaveholders. the western white traditions have all read from a place of power.

Together, the Methodists, Pentecostals, and the Baptists represent the earliest independent Black encounters with the Bible.