Category Archives: Race

Reading While Black – 6

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In chapter 6, Esau McCaulley discusses the anger that African Americans feel about their historic and ongoing mistreatment at the hands of others.

McCaulley writes movingly of his own and others’ experiences.  However, I shall focus on his biblical and theological reflections, for it is these which give the book its unique character and value.

In the chapter, the author presents four reflections on the issue of ‘Black rage’.

1. Israel’s anger as a means of processing Black grief

We turn especially to the psalms of imprecation, and especially Psa 137. …

Reading While Black – 5

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In chapter 5, Esau McCaulley discusses the issue of black identity.

For some people, he says, Black Christianity is a false notion, foisted upon black people by their oppressors.

History says otherwise.  In the days of the early church, there were three centres of Christianity – Rome, Antioch and Alexandria.  It cannot be true, then, that Christianity first came to Africans via slavery.  Christianity belongs to Africans as much as it belongs to Europeans.  Ethiopia was evangelised in the 4th century, and Nubia (in what we now call the Sudan) by the 6th century.…

Reading While Black – 4

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Chapter four is subtitled: ‘The Bible and the Pursuit of Justice.’

The burden of this chapter

‘is to outline the ways in which the Gospel of Luke contains a vision for the just society transformed by the advent of God that speaks to the hearts of Black Christians.’

Luke was a Gentile Christian.  As such, his very place in the Christian community would have been a matter of some controversy at first.

Luke’s Gospel reflects the resolution of this early controversy by heralding the fulfilment of God’s age-old plan to create an international, multi-ethnic people for his own glory.…

Reading While Black – 3

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In chapter three, Esau McCaulley discusses ‘the New Testament and the Political Witness of the Church’.

The white Christian consensus in America, writes McCaulley, has reduced its political theology to two things: prayer (as per 1 Timothy 2:1-4) and law and order (as per Romans 13:1-7).  Not, of course, that that there is anything wrong with these two things!  But to limit political theology in this was is to misread those very texts, and also to ignore the wider witness of the New Testament.…

Reading While Black – 1

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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.…

Thinking biblically about racial diversity

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John Stott argues from Paul’s celebrated Areopagus speech in Acts 17.

First, Paul affirmed the unity of the human race, or the God of creation. For God had “made from one every nation of men” (v. 26), and all human beings are therefore his “offspring” (28, 29). We evangelicals rightly reject the concept of “the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of men” if it is used to deny the special fatherhood and fellowship God gives to his redeemed people.…

The Bible and race

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The killing of George Floyd, a black American, by a white police officer, has become the lightning rod for protests and demonstrations around the world.

Church leaders in the UK have responded by voicing support for social justice, but seem to have little else to say that is distinctively Christian.

But what is a distinctively Christian view of race?  Or, to put it better (since the concept of ‘race’ is itself bound up in colonial-era thinking), what is a distinctively Christian view of ethnic, cultural and national diversity?…