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January 9 - January 10, 2022
Every single writer of the entire Bible was a colonized person, under its threat or recently released from slavery. Likewise, every single writer of Scripture was Brown. The color of their skin does not matter intrinsically. In the Hebrew Bible, all of the characters were Brown—both the colonists and the colonized. But the entire New Testament was written by Brown colonized Afro-Asian peoples in the context of the White and western supremacist Roman Empire. Color here is not about hues of the rainbow. It is about geopolitical context and power. It matters.
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When a society’s Christian faith—faith born from colonized and serially enslaved Brown people—does not cause that society to challenge and reject slavery outright, then there is a problem with the construction of that faith. To save our faith we must decolonize it.
From the foreword
My relationship to the Bible is one of love, respect, and deep wrestling along with fierce defense when I see it used in public as a prop.
I will argue that to question inerrancy or infallibility is not to challenge God or even the biblical text but rather to challenge the White supremacist authoritarianism behind many interpretations of the biblical text.
The underlying theme of this book is that our faith communities cannot fully breathe because White supremacist authoritarianism in the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility have stifled God’s breath in us.
most evangelicals would understand biblical authority to be fixed. Fixedness perpetually keeps parish members as immature children in relationship to the Bible and to God, as does “preaching to.” If we take biblical authority seriously, then we also have to take seriously the Bible’s ability to transform each and every one of us from immature to mature communities of faith and from immature to mature conversation partners.
If we truly believe the biblical text is not equivalent to God but mediates God’s presence, then we also have to take into account the diversity of contexts, authors, cultures, and worldviews of every person who wrote portions of what the church has canonized as Scripture.
Mature people engage the complexity of the biblical text as it points us to the presence of God without it becoming God or an idol.
Nice point well made
what happens when our view of the Bible moves from reasonable reverence to irrational reverence? Irrational reverence means folks begin to use the Bible not as a conversation starter but as a conversation ender.
Think of the phrase “the Bible says” and how it is often considered the be-all and end-all in an argument. The biblical text becomes a bludgeoning tool used to exert supremacist authoritarianism; what the Bible says (or rather, how the wielder interprets what the Bible says) goes.
Because the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility are designed to protect the idea of Scripture being free from error and from failing to accomplish its predetermined purpose, they act as tools of control for the people who normally have the most power over deciding the “proper” readings of Scripture. These people tend to be a certain group: White male biblical scholars.
gaslighting through doctrines shaped in particular readings of the biblical text are tools of White Supremacist authoritarianism that seek to promote “godly order” at the expense of the critical-thinking minds of both women and Black and minoritized Christians.
I follow Fatima in defining gaslighting as when “the hearer of testimony (typically about a harm or injustice committed against the speaker) raises doubts about the speaker’s reliability at perceiving events accurately.
contemporary readers of the biblical text suffer gaslighting interpretations, since we are trained through the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility not to question the text and not to question the White male interpreter who expounds the text from a White supremacist authoritarian viewpoint.
