If God Still Breathes, Why Can't I?: Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority

by Angela N. Parker

If the first five hundred years after the Reformation was about the democratization of our faith, then the work of the next five hundred years will be its decolonization. The Protestant Reformation was a particular event, in particular space, at a particular time, addressing particular issues that arose within a particular geographical, historical, and geopolitical context. The Reformation flowed from the lineage of Constantine—the state-based imperial European church. The Roman Church flowed from the Roman Empire, an arguably White supremacist empire. At the heart of the Roman Empire was the belief that its civilization was ordained to rule the world.

Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas points out that Aristotle coined the term “western supremacy,” which shaped Roman discourse and life and fueled the European imperial and colonial projects of the next two thousand years.

Context matters. The entirety of Scripture was written and originally read and heard within the context of the colonized or those under threat of colonization. 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.

Likewise, the Protestant Reformation took place in a particular context. It took place within European struggles for power and dominance. It took place on the edge of the Age of Discovery, which quickly became the Age of Conquest and Slavery. Martin Luther nailed his Theses to the door in Wittenberg in 1517. The first slave ships sailed from Spain in the 1400s. Those ships did not traverse the Atlantic, but it did not take long. The first slave ship recorded in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Voyage database arrived at its destination in Vigo, Spain, in 1514, in the context of Catholic Spain—three years before Luther’s Theses. Flip forward one century following Luther’s monumental moment. Germany is entangled in global slavocracy, fueling its own economic well-being through industries that support the trade. Several German families financed Portuguese slave ships. One must face this simple truth: 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.

“the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility serve as tools of White supremacy”

“What is your relationship to the biblical text?”

Their firm belief in so-called inerrancy and infallibility often means they read superficially without thinking about the hard questions of the text.

In essence, If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I? allows me to hold the idea of Scripture as authoritative while interrogating the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility as tools of White supremacist thought that promote the erasure of communal memory. This book is written from the perspective of a Womanist Christian who has questioned what her relationship to the biblical text is in the age of Black Lives Matter and the White supremacist authoritarianism that pervades American society since Donald Trump became president of the United States.

First, I unapologetically interact with the Black Lives Matter movement as a way to synthesize reading of the biblical text with women and men who suffer consistently from police violence in the United States.2 Second, I bring my own embodied identity as a Womanist scholar who teaches and preaches the gospel message of Jesus as the Christ while recognizing that sometimes the God-breathed authority of Scripture gets lost within the confines of White supremacist authoritarianism.

So what does “White supremacy” actually mean? According to Merriam-Webster, White supremacy is “a doctrine based on a belief that the White race is inherently superior to other races and that White people should have control over people of other races.” I do believe “White supremacy” is an especially appropriate term to use when I engage evangelical and mainline Protestants along issues of race and biblical interpretation, because those who identify as White are the arbiters of power when it comes to biblical interpretation.

I employ the term “White supremacist authoritarianism” as distinct from the idea of “biblical authority.” The concept of authority, as many feminists have already asserted, is problematic for women, as men often use the patriarchal ideas found in the Bible as a way to exert permanent and unquestionable authority over women.3 For the purpose of this book, I use the term “authoritarianism” to emphasize that while not all authority is problematic, authoritarianism is, since it is a distorted or misguided use of authority. “White supremacist authoritarianism” in particular is the problematic and misguided use of authority based on an ideology steeped in White supremacy as defined above. I will make the argument that the doctrines of biblical inerrancy and biblical infallibility are inherently steeped in White supremacist authoritarianism.

The term “inerrant” simply means “free from error.” Many evangelical and mainline Protestants employ the term as a way to describe what they feel is the “trustworthiness” of the biblical text as God’s word.

In the history of the Protestant idea of Scripture, “inerrancy” means the Bible points humanity to the way of salvation.

The related concept of “infallibility” is the characteristic of being incapable of failing to accomplish a predetermined purpose. The Protestant Reformers broke with the Catholic Church by stating that only the biblical text is infallible, whereas Catholic doctrine teaches that the teaching of the church under the authority of the pope, its earthly head, is infallible as well.

The problem with many evangelicals and mainline Protestants today stems from their belief that God inspired absolutely everything in the Bible according to these sixteenth-century ideas of inerrancy and infallibility. If that is the case, then every word on every page—every command, every idea, every scenario—is intended for and relevant to every single Christian who is reading the biblical text today. However, every single Christian must embody a particular White Protestant identity that, I argue, is found in most conservative White evangelical Christian circles. Since these White evangelicals bring so much of their own culture and personal lives to the Bible, there is no room for other engagement (such as Black Lives Matter) with the biblical text. In this way of thinking, there is room for only one particular life experience: a White life experience.

What I realized that day is that inerrancy and infallibility are tied together with authority. If God is perfect, Jesus is perfect and the Bible is also perfect and cannot be questioned whatsoever. The question hinges, for me, on whether as Bible readers we are seeking authority or authoritarianism.

So how am I reimagining “God-breathed” in this book? Specifically, I am playing with the idea of “God-breathed” in relation to the words “I can’t breathe,” uttered by both Eric Garner and George Floyd in their final moments and taken up as a slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement. My loose translation of 2 Timothy 3:16–17 is as follows: All writings are God-breathed and advantageous toward teaching, toward rebuke, toward correcting faults, toward instruction in justice, so that the person of God may be capable of finishing all good works.5

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.

Oftentimes I think that some of my seminary experiences were specialized training in crap no one cares about.

I had a difficult time wrapping my head around historical Jesus studies—and truth be told, sometimes I still do! However, what scholars of Jesus and the historical Jesus find is that language centered on the Jesus of history and on the glorified Jesus actually convey ideas rooted in ethnic identities and nationalism, doing harm to those who do not possess Aryan lineage or come from a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant background. Baur was under the influence of German idealists like G. W. F. Hegel, who believed there was a pure, authentic culture that could be found not only within the biblical text but also in Europe.

Hegel, a pure, authentic culture is a culture that progresses toward consciousness of freedom. He believed the “Spirit” directed history through phases, beginning with “the Oriental World,” then moving into the Greek and Roman worlds, and finally culminating in the “Germanic” age with Christianity. Both Horrell and Kelly stress that Hegel’s philosophy of history and progress is a racialized one that promotes a narrative of western European (specifically German) cultural, religious, and racial superiority.2 Other cultures (whether Jewish, Black, Asian, etc.), by default, cannot exert such a superiority.

Hegelian logic of moving from lower to higher levels of consciousness

Hegel developed a narrative of history that denied humanity to Africans and denied the consciousness of freedom to Jews and “Orientals.”

White male biblical scholarship is linked to the idea of objectivity in the academic study of the Bible. For generations biblical scholars studied under the belief that “objective” inquiry was the prime way to do biblical scholarship—that is, keeping one’s personal thoughts and feelings away from any inquiry into the biblical text. Objective reality as a stance for biblical interpretation is, I argue, one of the systemic evils of academic biblical studies. Renita Weems begins her seminal article on Womanist hermeneutics by stating that scholarship is now beginning to assert the “inherent biases and limitation of the historical-critical method as an objective, scientific approach to the Bible.”4 I call stifled breath in the form of objectivity “evil” because I, as a Black woman in biblical studies, was not being trained to be my fully authentic, God-ordained self. Actively engaging issues of identity to confront objectivity in biblical interpretation has helped me “catch my breath”

The starting point for my understanding of Womanist identity is consciousness of these felt and lived inequities as well as determination to disrupt them.

Walker articulates four tenets of Womanism: radical subjectivity, traditional communalism, redemptive self-love, and critical engagement.

Radical subjectivity is the epistemological privileging of Black women’s identity and selfhood.

Traditional communalism is the recognition of the collective value of the entire Black community. If a slave was going to walk to Canada to gain her freedom, she was not going alone; she was taking everyone else with her.

Redemptive self-love is love and acceptance of the self regardless of what others say or think. When a Womanist proposes redemptive self-love, she recognizes that there is a struggle that occurs within herself and with other people as she seeks and asserts her desire for self-love.

Finally, critical engagement is a deep and sustained analysis of Jacquelyn Grant’s tridimensional intersection of oppression: racism, sexism, and classism. Critical engagement also includes dialogue with feminism since Womanists recognize that “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender,” meaning that Womanist purple is a deeper shade of feminist lavender.

For Womanists, identity is also connected to the body.10 I’ve been forced to ask where my body can stand that actually makes predominantly White institutions feel good about themselves. In this thought I agree with M. Shawn Copeland, who notes that the “Black woman’s body has been reduced to body parts—parts that allowed white men pleasure, however unsettling; parts that afforded white men economic gain; parts that literally nursed the heirs of White racist supremacy.”11 Part of recognizing my own identity as a Black woman in the United States is recognizing that Black women’s bodies have stood at the oppressing intersection of gender, race/ethnicity, class, colonialism, and sexuality for hundreds of years.

This is where ideas of who has the authority to ask certain questions of Scripture come to the forefront.

While precedent does matter when it comes to auctoritas, what matters more is having conversations with what comes before and after. Therefore, the idea of authority actually stems from movement between interpretation and contextualization.

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. White supremacist thought in the midst of biblical authority is immature and promotes immature readings of and conversations with the biblical text. So where does maturity originate? 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. The ability to discern the many voices within the biblical text is the challenging task of mature biblical interpretation. 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.

Hear me well: I love my husband, and he is an authority in my life. He is not the authority in my life, though. I also love the biblical text, and it is an authority in my life but not the authority in my life.

As a practicing Buddhist and Catholic, my doctoral adviser Seung Ai Yang often regaled us students with stories from the Buddhist tradition that were spot-on as we engaged biblical interpretation and issues of authority. One such story tells of a Buddhist teacher who takes his students up to the top of a mountain. He then points toward the moon and tells the students to identify and ponder that to which he is pointing. As the students focus on their teacher’s finger, the teacher advises that they focus not on the finger but on that to which the finger points. The biblical text is the finger that points to the almighty God.

This is also the main point of NT Wright's book on biblical authority

My argument is that irrational reverence of the Bible is often a form of White supremacist authoritarianism, because it is usually White men who have wielded the power of the Bible.

The poin t here is not that the fixed meaning of the text is and is only white suoremecist but that meaning comes from interpretation and the interpreters have been white supremacists

Where does the Bible’s authority come from? Do we look to the literal words on the page of an English translation? Does authority come from the biblical text’s connection to “apostolic witness”? Is some combination at play? Or perhaps the biblical text’s authority comes from the whisper of the Holy Spirit that often points to the words’ impact and importance? I believe the latter: that biblical authority, as opposed to White supremacist authoritarianism, comes from the small whisper of the female Holy Spirit4 that prompts and prods divine understandings of ourselves even as we negotiate our relationship with the Almighty.

Part of my job in this book is to develop a genuine understanding of biblical authority, apart from White supremacist authoritarianism, that will foster a healthy society in which all participants are able to make distinctive and valuable contributions and therefore BREATHE!

Here is my argument in a nutshell: 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.

So what do these doctrines actually control? According to my research, these doctrines control the questions one can ask of the biblical text.

Protective strategies are simply ways in which particular interpreters privilege certain religious claims and then seal them off from any type of academic analysis. Any terms, beliefs, and judgments must concur and meet with that interpreter’s approval. This is a protective strategy. In other words, White male biblical scholars have outlined inerrancy and infallibility in such a way that anyone who questions or pushes back against these accepted viewpoints becomes disciplined and subsequently ostracized. Young (among other scholars) mentions, for example, the excommunication of Robert H. Gundry from the Evangelical Theological Society.

In fact, part of authoritarian thought is the idea that every biblical passage has only one right interpretation and that all passages across all the biblical books must be perfectly harmonized. Disagreement among biblical authors or interpreters is not valued—quite the opposite.

Sproul

Maxwell and Shields argue that the GOP has, with great success, married ideas about women’s place in society, White evangelical Christianity, White racial grievances, and even issues pertaining to the economy. Because the strategy worked only temporarily (until the election of Georgian Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter in 1976), new coded messages had to be spread so that Ronald Reagan could secure his 1980 run for the presidency. Reagan advocated that the United States move past identity and become “color-blind” while also invoking the idea of the “welfare queen,” code for a Black woman driving a Cadillac while receiving over $150,000 a year in tax-free entitlements from the government as a result of her twelve social security cards. Reagan’s portrait of undeserving racial minorities as “takers” was successful. I would argue that by using language about Mexicans being “rapists and murderers” who are “bringing drugs” in caravans to the United States, the Trump administration utilized the same strategy as Reagan.

the protective strategies found in the Gundry conversation mirror the Southern Strategy of the Republican political machinery, which aims to “protect” fundamental ideas about culture, women’s place, racial issues, and economics that appeal to a particular type of Christian.

Critical theory gives me language to address how certain areas of evangelical thought are organized, using the paradigm and frameworks espoused by some Marxist thinkers.

wear masks of White supremacy.

Dubois

Microaggression is “a relatively minor insulting event made disproportionately harmful by taking part in an oppressive pattern of insults,” and it is connected to systemic macroaggressions.1 In other words, an incident of microaggression is particularly harmful because it works within a larger system of domination and oppression.

microaggression and shaming work especially well against minoritized identities.

The new culture of victimhood is not new, and it is not about victimhood. It is a culture of solidarity, and it has always been with us, an underground moral culture of the disempowered. In the culture of solidarity, individuals who cannot enforce their honor or dignity instead make claim on recognition of their simple humanity. They publicize mistreatment not because they enjoy the status of victim but because they need the support of others to remain strong, and because public discomfort is the only possible route to redress.