Stony the Road We Trod

African American Biblical Interpretation. Thirtieth Anniversary Expanded Edition

Cain Hope Felder

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506472041
• eBook ISBN: 9781506472058
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The publication of Stony the Road We Trod thirty years ago marked the emergence of a critical mass of Black biblical scholars--as well as a distinct set of hermeneutical concerns. Combining sophisticated exegesis with special sensitivity to issues of race, class, and gender, the authors of this scholarly collection examine the nettling questions of biblical authority, Black and African people in biblical narratives, and the liberating aspects of Scripture. The original volume reshaped and redefined the questions, concerns, and scholarship that determine how the Bible is appropriated by the church, the academy, and the larger society today.

To the original eleven essays this expanded edition adds a new introduction by Brian K. Blount and three new chapters by Kimberly D. Russaw, Shively T. J. Smith, and Jennifer T. Kaalund. Not only does Blount's new introduction access the impact of the first edition, but the new contributions extend the implications of Cain Hope Felder's vision for the book.

Part I

The Relevance of Biblical Scholarship and the Authority of the Bible

1

Interpreting Biblical Scholarship for the Black Church Tradition

Thomas Hoyt Jr.

Various methods have been used to interpret the biblical text in its own context and to explore its contemporary relevance. Whether the biblical interpreter has been a layperson reading the Bible “devotionally,” a pastor preparing a sermon, or a trained scholar doing technical exegesis, some method or methods of interpretation have always been operative. Black biblical interpreters have developed their own unique interpretative tradition based on ancient, recent, and contemporary scholarship. The task of this chapter is to survey traditional scholarship and to see how it was used to develop a school of interpretation informed by the black experience.

Interpretation within the Text

We know that biblical writers were themselves interpreters, for the historical-critical method has shown us how writers in both testaments exercised a certain freedom in building upon traditions that they received.1 Let us look briefly at several models from the Old and New Testaments where interpretation is transpiring within the text itself. These include (1) texts that reenact tradition, (2) texts that have layers of ancient contexts, (3) the contemporary application of a text, and (4) the perennial problem of proof-texts. In both the Old and New Testaments, examples abound of what may be called “reenactment.” For example, historical-critical scholars have shown that Deuteronomy is not simply a compilation of laws. Its nature is made clear in the introductory verses, “Beyond the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moses undertook to explain this law” (1:5). The Law is being restated and applied to the generation about to enter the land. From the point of view of modern scholarship, this is a patent example of the Deuteronomic school updating and explaining an already ancient tradition in relation to a new situation.

The same point was made by Gerhard von Rad as he exercised his traditio-historical approach to Scripture. He stressed the manner in which Israel remembered the bases of salvation: the covenant with the patriarchs, Sinai, the covenant with David, and the establishment of the special status of Zion. All of these bases of salvation were reenacted and reinterpreted in the context of worship in order to confront new events in the acts of God toward God’s people.2 The same process of interpretation and reinterpretation transpired within the New Testament. The writers took traditions and shaped them according to their own contexts. For example, the New Testament writers, who were dedicated to Jesus, exercised a new freedom in their use of the traditions that they had received. Let us look briefly at a Pauline model within the New Testament.

Paul, a mere two decades removed from Jesus, discovered that the tradition of Jesus’s teaching about marriage was not sufficient to deal with the specifics of the Corinthian problem. In 1 Corinthians 7, he cannot simply repeat the “command of the Lord” but must also use his own considered judgment. On matters of divorce, Paul said, “not I but the Lord” (7:10). He quoted the prohibition against divorce that is found also in Mark 10:29. Yet Paul makes some concessions. An unbelieving partner had a right to ask for divorce. Married Christians should not divorce, but if they did, there should be no remarriage (7:10–16). His counsel is derived from bringing the tradition of Jesus’s command into direct relationship with the complex problems in Corinth.

This Pauline model commends itself to us in our interpretation of Scripture. Paul tried to ascertain which understanding took seriously both the tradition and the special situation with which he was faced. Unafraid to take personal responsibility, he regarded himself as accountable to his risen and living Sovereign. Paul could, then, use traditions in a creative manner because of the freedom that he had experienced in the risen Lord. Likewise, the contemporary interpreter—though bound by Scripture, tradition, and commitment to the risen Lord—is also free to make judgments in light of the present situation.

Those employing the historical-critical method can discern how Paul refused to give exegetical warrant for what the Corinthians were already doing. By following and adapting Paul’s method, one might, in a measure, avoid becoming merely an ideological interpreter of the tradition and avoid a tendency toward interpretative stagnation.

Let us now consider another type of interpretation—namely, that found in the layers of contexts within and behind a given text. Finding the context of specific passages can get rather complicated. Take, for example, the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7). It is a collection of diverse materials compiled and edited by the writer of Matthew’s Gospel. The literary context of any given teaching within the sermon is, therefore, chapters 5–7, and the Gospel of Matthew as a whole. Similarly, the situational and cultural background of the sermon is Matthew’s own day, the latter decades of the first century. The theological context is also supplied by the Gospel itself, but we cannot stop there. We must place specific sayings of Jesus in the sermon in the situational and cultural context of Jesus’s own ministry and in the theological context of Jesus’s own proclamation of the kingdom of God. If, therefore, the church is going to reclaim the Sermon on the Mount for today, it must also reclaim its multiple contexts or the text itself does not “live.”

In Scripture, we find our predecessors in the faith struggling to hear, to interpret, and to obey God’s Word in the midst of the realities and demands of the times and places in which they lived. They offer us no ready-made answers for the specifics of the issues and situations we face today. They do, however, offer us the witness of their faith, of their experience of God’s gift and claim, of their commitment to understanding the meaning of the gift and claim, and of their endeavor to be responsive to God’s call in the midst of their world.

If interpretation is a part of the internal operation of the canon itself, as the historical-critical method has shown, what is the interpretative task for today? How can texts written thousands of years ago in ancient Israel speak to the life of faith of a twentieth-century person? That is the problem of hermeneutics. The more specifically relevant a biblical teaching was for its own time, place, and circumstances, the less specifically relevant it is apt to be for our time, place, and circumstances. The logic of this proposition is clear enough, but we seldom take time to think it through. Some interpreters would prefer merely to ignore the literary, cultural, and theological context of a text and resort to the arbitrary use of allegorical, proof-textual, typological, and analogical modes of biblical interpretation.

In order to allow the text to speak for their generations, the early church fathers like Augustine and Origen utilized the allegorical method. According to this method, each concrete or historical element of a scriptural story possesses also a meaning that lies outside the text. This method seeks a “spiritual” meaning behind the concrete and historical meaning of a text. This manner of scriptural interpretation is illustrated by Saint Augustine’s rendition of the parable of the good Samaritan, a rendition composed during the latter part of the fourth century:

The wounded traveller is fallen man, half alive in his knowledge of God and half dead in his slavery to sin; the binding up of his wounds signifies Christ’s restraint of sin; the pouring in of oil and wine, the comfort of good hope and the exhortation to spirited work. The innkeeper, dropping his incognito, is revealed as the Apostle Paul; and the two pence turn out to be the two commandments of love.3

The allegorizing here is so dense that one loses sight of the original text. To allegorize is to lose the reader in the game of “this means that” so that the reader completely forgets that God is speaking directly through the parable of the good Samaritan. The meaning of the parable for our daily moral, physical, and spiritual concerns is lost. It is on this account that allegorizing abuses the Scriptures; it misleads and distorts the Word.

Origen, in his use of the method, distinguishes between two levels of meaning in the text: the literal and spiritual. The literal meaning is that which the text had in its original context (the meaning one seeks to discover through exegesis). Origen realized that what the words meant was not always clear and, if clear, what they meant was not always meaningful to the contemporary situation. This reality led him to use “spiritual exegesis” to bridge the gap between the distant text and the present. Allegory made it possible to translate the text in a way that would be applicable to Origen’s situation. He held the conviction that the Scriptures were inspired and were meant to reveal; therefore, he believed the words must have some meaning for today. He knew that the spiritual and literal meanings neither were identical nor had any direct relationship. What validated the allegorical interpretation was not the literal sense but God’s desire to reveal.

As we shall see, with the rise of historical criticism, the demand for a correspondence between exegesis and interpretation became acute. Allegory did not have such a correspondence. Someone may rightly ask, “Who are we to suggest in the twentieth century that the church fathers’ method is obsolete and ours is more valid?”

The same question can be asked about those in the black tradition who did not adhere to the historical-critical method and, at many points, allegorized the text. One may have to conclude that for Origen and others in the tradition of allegory, the method is not wrong because they were true to their understanding of reality. With the rise of historical consciousness, the need to show a correlation between our time and that of the text became more important. Luther and Calvin rejected allegorizing both the Old and New Testaments. They argued rightly that it is the duty of the interpreter of the Bible to offer “the plain sense” of the text, presumably the meaning intended by the author.

The method of proof-texting involves taking a text completely out of context in order to validate one’s own subjective views (pretexts) or one’s understanding of doctrine, tradition, and the like. This method results from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Christian canon. It assumes, falsely, that the text exists chiefly to buttress, to support, to sanction one’s own point of view. Consequently it is used to judge or criticize an opponent. So the text becomes a weapon used to attack the opponent and to justify one’s own life and thought.

Even with the establishment of a canon, the church has agreed to live by diverse norms, since the same problems and conflicts may be dealt with differently in different biblical writings or even in different places within a writing. When the diversity of this canon is not obscured, we are reminded that the New Testament can help us recover a “catholicity” (a universal spirit) in diversity. Ernst Käsemann helps us here in his article on the canon. He contends that within the canon of the New Testament we find, side-by-side, doctrines and interpretations that not only are at variance with one another in essential points but are also irreconcilable with each other.4 But witnesses from the black church help us also. Black theologians have given consistent witness in their writings to the diversity inherent in scriptural texts, but they have also revealed that within that diversity there are universal themes. Who can deny James Cone’s insistence that “Christian theology is a theology of liberation”?5 He has consistently developed the biblical claim that God came in Christ to set the captive free. Before him, the theme of liberation as a sociopolitical factor was not often made the organizing principle of a systematic theology. Black scholars who developed similar themes include Martin Luther King Jr. (theme: love of God, Christ, and human beings), J. Deotis Roberts (theme: reconciliation through liberation), Joseph Washington Jr. (theme: blacks as God’s chosen people), Albert Cleage (theme: Jesus as the black Messiah), Major Jones (theme: freedom and salvation in the context of love), Cecil Cone (theme: an almighty sovereign). White scholars similarly stress various themes as organizing principles for their theological agendas.6 While it is important to understand that there are overarching themes within the Bible, it is also important not to succumb to proof-texting or manipulating texts so that they will support one’s theological agenda.

It is understandable that readers of Scripture would want to select certain writings that appeal to their special need; the diversity of the text invites such selectivity. Robert S. Bilheimer, in describing the various spiritualities in biblical texts, emphasizes the diversity of the text. He suggests that Scripture gives both a clear warrant for struggling against oppression and resources for meeting life’s doubts and sufferings. Furthermore, he writes,

Scripture gives reason to adopt a spirituality of obedience to the law, whether...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Introduction: Thirtieth Anniversary Expanded Edition
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Topics and Names