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

by Angela N. Parker

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”