Reading While Black

African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

Esau McCaulley

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780830854875
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Growing up in the American South, Esau McCaulley knew firsthand the ongoing struggle between despair and hope that marks the lives of some in the African American context. A key element in the fight for hope, he discovered, has long been the practice of Bible reading and interpretation that comes out of traditional Black churches. This ecclesial tradition is often disregarded or viewed with suspicion by much of the wider church and academy, but it has something vital to say.Reading While Black is a personal and scholarly testament to the power and hope of Black biblical interpretation. At a time in which some within the African American community are questioning the place of the Christian faith in the struggle for justice, New Testament scholar McCaulley argues that reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition is invaluable for connecting with a rich faith history and addressing the urgent issues of our times. He advocates for a model of interpretation that involves an ongoing conversation between the collective Black experience and the Bible, in which the particular questions coming out of Black communities are given pride of place and the Bible is given space to respond by affirming, challenging, and, at times, reshaping Black concerns. McCaulley demonstrates this model with studies on how Scripture speaks to topics often overlooked by white interpreters, such as ethnicity, political protest, policing, and slavery.Ultimately McCaulley calls the church to a dynamic theological engagement with Scripture, in which Christians of diverse backgrounds dialogue with their own social location as well as the cultures of others. Reading While Black moves the conversation forward.

ONE

THE SOUTH GOT
SOMETHIN’ TO SAY

MAKING SPACE FOR BLACK
ECCLESIAL INTERPRETATION

But just as we have the same spirit of faith that is in accordance with scripture—“I believed, and so I spoke”—we also believe, and so we speak.

2 CORINTHIANS 4:13

But it’s like this, though. . . . I’m tired of folks—you know what I’m sayin’—closed minded folks. It’s like we got a demo tape and don’t nobody wanna hear it. But it’s like this. The South got somethin’ to say.

ANDRÉ 3000

MY MOTHER TRIED HER BEST to immerse her children in the gospel. Most Sundays there was no question where we would be. The McCaulleys would be safely ensconced in our pew at Union Hill Primitive Baptist church in Huntsville, Alabama, from 10:00 a.m. until the Spirit had finished his work. There was, however, always a chance that my mother would be too tired from working at the Chrysler factory to drag her four unruly children to the house of the Lord. To encourage this fatigue to do its work, we would stay in our rooms as quiet as church mice hoping not to rouse her from her slumber. The signal that our plan had failed was the sound of Mahalia Jackson on the radio. Once Mahalia started in on “Amazing Grace,” the jig was up.

Our home knew Gospel music. In addition to Mahalia we received a steady stream of Shirley Caesar telling us to hold her mule and James Cleveland reminding us that he didn’t feel no ways tired. Gospel music filled our home and shaped our imaginations even when we rebelled against it.

The second witness continually brought to bear upon the hopes and dreams of her four children was the large King James Bible that lived on a shelf in the living room. The King functioned more like a talisman than a book to be read. Whenever my mother wanted to wring the truth out of us, she would have us place our hands on the KJV and declare that what we had told her was the truth. Only the most brazen of sinners among us would dare speak falsehood in the presence of mom, Jesus, and King James. We also watched Christian cartoons (Superbook) and went to midweek Bible studies and as many Vacation Bible Schools as we could manage. The Scriptures were everywhere.

But I was also a child of my environment. I was a southern Black boy from Alabama in love with hip hop. As soon as my mother pressed pause on Mahalia, I pressed play on Southern hip hop. OutKast, Goodie Mob, and the bass coming out of Miami boomed in the Delta 88 that I drove to and from the schools and parties of Northwest Huntsville. That music also helped me interpret the world that seemed to have its foot on the neck of Black and Brown bodies in my city.

Put simply, I knew the Lord and the culture. Both engaged in an endless battle for my affections. I loved hip hop because sometimes it felt as if only the rappers truly understood what it was like to experience the heady mix of danger, drama, and temptation that marked Black life in the South. They spoke of the drugs, the violence, the encounters with the police—and even God. They did not so much offer solutions as much as they reflected on the life forced on them. But I also loved my mother’s Gospel music because it filled me with hope, and it connected me to something old and immovable. If hip hop tended toward nihilism and utilitarian ethics (the game is the game so we do what we must to survive), then my mother’s music, rooted in biblical texts and ideas, offered a vision of something bigger and wider. The struggle I speak of is not merely between two genres of music. I am referring to the struggle between Black nihilism and Black hope. I am speaking of the ways in which the Christian tradition fights for and makes room for hope in a world that tempts us toward despair. I contend that a key element in this fight for hope in our community has been the practice of Bible reading and interpretation coming out of the Black church, what I am calling Black ecclesial interpretation.

The nineties were a time of hip hop controversy with the two coasts—East and West—at war with one another. A record company called Death Row, which specialized in the gangster rap music that chronicled life on the streets of California, led the way out West. Bad Boy records, on the East coast, represented a tradition that valued lyrical dexterity and Black celebration. The struggle at the center of their conflict was the nature of rap music itself. What was the correct demeanor, tone, and focus?

The brewing hostility came to a head in 1995 at the second annual Source awards. This gathering was the celebratory event of a magazine that was the arbiter of Black hip hop culture in the 1990s. In 1995, it was held in New York. Thus, the crowd was decidedly in favor of all things East. Whenever a West Coast artist won, the boos came in full force. Eventually, the show made its way to the award for the best new artist. Neither an East Coast or West Coast artist won. Instead, OutKast, a group from the South with no particular ties to either coast, emerged victorious. But the times were what the times were, and since they weren’t from the East, they were jeered at what should have been their moment of victory.

In response, André 3000, the more outlandish member of the duo, stood before the crowd and spoke the quote that opened this chapter:

But it’s like this, though. . . . I’m tired of folks—you know what I’m sayin’—closed minded folks. It’s like we got a demo tape and don’t nobody wanna hear it. But it’s like this. The South got somethin’ to say.1

André declared that he would not apologize for being Southern, Black, and different. While he appreciated what the West and East had to offer to the culture, the South was a third thing worthy of respect in its own right. The pressure and the criticism, then, didn’t break them. It sent them back to the studio. The result was an album titled Aquemini, recognized by many as one of the most influential hip hop records ever written. It remains a strange album, unapologetically Southern, but also influenced by elements of the East and the West. Freed from the strictures of coastal allegiance, they had space to be creative. I have often thought that Black ecclesial interpreters need the freedom to be Aquemini, some other thing that is truly our own.

What do I mean when I refer to Black ecclesial interpreters? I have in mind Black scholars and pastors formed by the faith found in the foundational and ongoing doctrinal commitments, sermons, public witness, and ethos of the Black church. For a variety of reasons, this ecclesial tradition rarely appears in print. It lives in the pulpits, sermon manuscripts, CDs, tape ministries, and videos of the African American Christian tradition.

Let’s be clear. The Black Christian tradition is not and has never been a monolith, but it is fair to say that the Black church tradition is largely orthodox in its theology in the sense that it holds to many of the things that all Christians have generally believed. This orthodoxy is reflected in the statements of faith of three of the larger Black denominations: the National Baptist Convention, the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), and African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME).2 Nonetheless, Black theologians and writers who share these views sometimes find themselves in the place of OutKast during the Source awards. We 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.3 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.

I want to make a case that this fourth thing, this unapologetically Black and orthodox reading of the Bible can speak a relevant word to Black Christians today. I want to contend 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. This is a work against the cynicism of some who doubt that the Bible has something to say; it is a work contending for hope.

To explain how I concluded that the Black ecclesial tradition has a word for our day, I would like to take you on something of a whirlwind tour of the exegetical communities that I have known. My discussion may appear to be anecdotal, but it is nonetheless rooted in a long engagement with scholars and pastors from each tradition. A full and nuanced discussion would occupy the entire book, but I do hope, even when I am critical, to have avoided caricature. This introduction will set the stage for the more constructive work that will occupy the majority of this book.

PROGRESSIVES, EVANGELICALS, AND BLACK STUDENTS

The first day of college introduced me to the white classroom. Before then everything had been Black: church, neighborhood, school, and sports teams. My university, by contrast, felt like it was 98 percent white. I knew when I agreed to attend that it was largely white. The recruiters, however, told me that the cultural discomfort was a small price to pay for a quality education. What did I know? I was a teenager trying my best to navigate the unfamiliar world of higher education.

I decided to double major in history and religion because those two topics, the history of my people and my Christian faith, stood at the center of my identity. I had read on my own about the middle passage, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and the crack epidemic. But I wanted to know more. I needed to know how we got to where we were, and then discern how the lessons of history might help me chart a way forward. More urgently, I thought it was a story that needed telling. But I was also a Christian having been raised to love Jesus and the Scriptures. I wanted to go beyond simple answers to difficult questions. I wanted to be challenged and stretched to understand my beliefs as well as those of others. Rather than choose, I decided to pursue the best of both worlds. I would study the Bible and history. But by the end of my second year of college, only one of those majors would remain.

Every devout student who experiences higher biblical criticism for the first time is inevitably a bit bewildered. Things that were once simple become much more complicated. How do we reconcile the two creation accounts in Genesis? How do we deal with differences in the Gospels? How do we bring Paul and James into conversation with one another in a way that allows both voices to be heard? What should we do with the book of Revelation? What about the violence in the Old and New Testaments and the passages that make our ears tingle?

Learning about the Bible changes our faith (and hopefully it matures and deepens it). Much depends on what the professor in the class attempts to do. He or she is not our pastor; it is not their job to be safe. Some skirt the problems saying that difficulties are not so difficult. Others face those problems head on and chart a different path through them to the other side. Some leave the students to wrestle with these questions on their own. Others still have a particular agenda: their goal is deconstruction.

When I walked into my first Bible class, I unknowingly entered the hundred years’ war between white evangelicals and white mainline Protestants. My professors displayed sympathy for the latter. Their goal was to rid their students of the white fundamentalism that they believed was the cause of every ill that beset the South. A better South was the progressive South of the white mainline church. It seems that in their minds, a progressive South was only possible when we rejected the centrality of the Bible for something more fundamental, namely the white mainline Protestant consensus on politics, economics, and religion. I got the feeling that they believed that “the older stories” and “the older gods” were profitable as tales to spur reflection, but could not compete with the new insights bequeathed to us by the latest declarations of Western intellectuals. In this story, Black students do not really enter in as actors. We are acted upon, our suffering functioning as examples of the evils of white fundamentalism.

My professors had a point. One does not have to dig very far into history to see that fundamentalist Christians in the South (and the North) have indeed inflicted untold harm on Black people. They have used the Bible as justification for their sins, personal and corporate. But there is a second testimony possibly more important than the first. That is the testimony of Black Christians who saw in that same Bible the basis for their dignity and hope in a culture that often denied them both. In my professor’s attempt to take the Bible away from the fundamentalists, he also robbed the Black Christian of the rock on which they stood.4

There was something broken about this to me. If the Scriptures were fundamentally flawed and largely useless apart from mainline revision of the text, then Christianity is truly a white man’s religion. They were reconstructing it without my consent. Moreover, the form of this reconstructed religion bore the image of the twentieth-century European intellectual.

If the Bible needs to be rejected to free Black Christians, then such a view seems to entail that the fundamentalists had interpreted the Bible correctly. All the things that racists had done to us, then, had strong biblical warrant. My professor’s victory felt too much like my mother’s defeat. She had always told me that the racists were the poor interpreters and that we were reading correctly when we saw in biblical texts describing the worth of all people an affirmation of Black dignity. This entire debate had been crafted and carried on without any regard for the Black testimony. I was a casualty of someone else’s war.

In the end this war was not terribly interesting to me, and I decided that I would focus my efforts on history. I dropped my religion major, not because it challenged my faith with hard questions, but because it didn’t ask the right hard questions.5 Nonetheless, the questions raised in those classe...