Reading While Black – 1
Having read Ben Lindsay’s book We Need to Talk About Race, I have now turned to Esau D. McCaulley’s Reading While Black (IVP, 2020).
I am finding it a more satisfying read.
McCaulley is an American biblical scholar and Assistant Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, Illinois.
Subtitled, ‘African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope’, this book advocates an approach to biblical interpretation that is faithful to the inspired Scripture but that also reflects the experiences, needs and perspective of black readers.
The gist of chapter 1 is that white evangelical Christianity, while promoting doctrinal orthodoxy, has often neglected issues that are particularly important to black people. white progressive Christianity, on the other hand, has tended to do the opposite: focus on those issues while neglecting (or denying) the central doctrines of the faith.
We black theologians and writers, says McCaulley,
‘are thrust into the middle of a battle between white progressives and white evangelicals, feeling alienated in different ways from both. When we turn our eyes to our African American progressive sisters and brothers, we nod our head in agreement on many issues. Other times we experience a strange feeling of dissonance, one of being at home and away from home. Therefore, we receive criticism from all sides for being something different, a fourth thing. I am calling this fourth thing Black ecclesial theology and its method Black ecclesial interpretation. I am not proposing a new idea or method but attempting to articulate and apply a practice that already exists.’
McCaulley is convinced that
‘the best instincts of the Black church tradition—its public advocacy for justice, its affirmation of the worth of Black bodies and souls, its vision of a multiethnic community of faith—can be embodied by those who stand at the center of this tradition.’
Following the well-known work of Bebbington, McCaulley outlines the following key characteristics of evangelicalism:
- Conversionism: the belief that lives need to be transformed through a “born-again” experience and a lifelong process of following Jesus.
- Activism: the expression and demonstration of the gospel in missionary and social reform efforts.
- Biblicism: a high regard for and obedience to the Bible as the ultimate authority.
- Crucicentrism: a stress on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross as making possible the redemption of humanity.
But, for many white evangelicals, their self-identity included a reaction against the ‘social gospel’, and therefore to a neglect of issues of racism and systemic injustice.
American evangelicals will (quite rightly) defend the sanctity of life, the authority of legitimate government, and religious freedom. But,
‘what about the exploitation of my people? What about our suffering, our struggle? Where does the Bible address the hopes of Black folks, and why is this question not pressing in a community that has historically been alienated from Black Christians?’
So, when clergy are sent to colleges and seminaries,
‘it seemed like they needed to go to one source for theological analysis and another for social practice.’
For the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, emancipation was not about abandoning the Christian faith, but recovering it:
‘What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.… I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.’
Whereas the white slave masters would privilege those texts which supported social order and obedience of subordinates to superiors, enslaved persons
‘viewed events like God’s redemption of Israel from slavery as paradigmatic for their understanding of God’s character. They claimed that God is fundamentally a liberator. The character of Jesus, who though innocent suffered unjustly at the hands of an empire, resonated on a deep level with the plight of the enslaved Black person. This focus on God as liberator stood in stark contrast to the focus of the slave masters who emphasized God’s desire for a social order with white masters at the top and enslaved Black people at the bottom.’
So we have, in effect, both black and white believing in ‘a canon within a canon’ – the one finding texts about obedience to masters unpalatable, and the other ignoring the texts of liberation.
More generally, biblical scholarship has been dominated by the Euro-American perspective. But the Bible is equally amenable to Black interpretation. This, according McCaulley, should entail ‘a hermeneutic of trust’, following the text wherever it leads. It has been, and can be,
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unapologetically canonical and theological.
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socially located, in that it clearly arises out of the particular context of Black Americans.
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willing to listen to the ways in which the Scriptures themselves respond to and redirect Black issues and concerns.
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willing to exercise patience with the text trusting that a careful and sympathetic reading of the text brings a blessing.
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willing to listen to and enter into dialogue with Black and white critiques of the Bible in the hopes of achieving a better reading of the text.
McCaulley’s book then,
‘is not an apologetic attempting to explain away all the problematic parts of church history nor is it a defense of the entire Black Christian tradition. Instead it is an attempt to show that the instincts and habits of Black biblical interpretation can help us use the Bible to address the issues of the day. It is an attempt to show that for Black Christians the very process of interpreting the Bible can function as an exercise in hope and connect us to the faith of our ancestors. More than that, it is one attempt of one son to do justice to the faith given to him by his mother, as a representative of a tradition that has borne Black people in this country up under suffering for centuries. It is an assertion of a claim, namely that the Black ecclesial tradition has something to say that strikes a different note than the standard options often given to students of the Bible and theology.’