Toward Decentering the New Testament

A Reintroduction

Mitzi J. Smith, Yung Suk Kim

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532604669
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Bibelkritik & -auslegung

Toward Decentering the New Testament is the first introductory text to the New Testament written by an African American woman biblical scholar and an Asian-American male biblical scholar. This text privileges the voices, scholarship, and concerns of minoritized nonwhite peoples and communities. It is written from the perspectives of minoritized voices. The first few chapters cover issues such as biblical interpretation, immigration, Roman slavery, intersectionality, and other topics. Questions raised throughout the text focus readers on relevant contemporary issues and encourage critical reflection and dialogue between student-teachers and teacher-students.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Ad astra per aspera! [To the stars through difficulties!]

—Cain Hope Felder1

The Bible is too important to be left solely in the hands of the ignorant and the powerful, and after Auschwitz we should know better than to do so.

—Peter J. Gomes2

A few years ago, sitting in an Association of Theological Schools (ATS) working group of mid-career scholars in religion, I (Mitzi) shared with my colleagues that I no longer use an introductory text for teaching core New Testament and Old Testament courses (although I am a NT scholar, I teach both testaments at a satellite campus). I am an African American woman and NT scholar/professor whose students are primarily (but not exclusively) African American women and men. I am frustrated when opening an introductory text of the Testaments that either excludes or trivializes the voices of minoritized, nonwhite biblical scholars. I am annoyed and weary of texts on biblical interpretation that misrepresent African American biblical interpretation and ignore and marginalize womanist scholarship. As African American NT scholar Vincent Wimbush aptly states, “In the latter-day empire that is the United States . . . the views, sentiments, passions, testimonies, and interpretations of nonwhites, especially black peoples, are devalued. Their ‘readings’ within this racialized society are always necessarily understood by the ‘white’ mind/ear/eyes—in the complex effects of empire, attached to any color of body!—as a ‘lack,’ a ‘misreading’ of a different kind.”3 I remember feeling violated (not unlike how I felt when I arrived home one night from church to find my front door cracked and that I had been burglarized) as I peeled open a textbook that the majority of my department colleagues voted to use as a common primary text for a core course in biblical interpretation only to find a brief section on African American biblical interpretation that did not mention a single work by an African American biblical scholar but instead peddled Henry Louis Gates’s Signifying Monkey as the foundation and paradigm for doing African American interpretation. And the chapter was not even written by an African American biblical scholar! One black body was as good as the next, I suppose; we are all equally substitutable to some. As postcolonial biblical scholar R. S. Sugirtharajah has correctly observed, the hermeneutical work of minoritized scholars has, in many cases, been systematically edited out, constituting a “hermeneutical strategy of negation.”4 In introductory texts our words are too often whited-out (I first learned to type on a manual Underwood typewriter when the only method for correcting mistakes or deleting text was a solution or tape called “white out”). As biblical scholar Renita Weems states, “It is not just a matter of whose reading is ‘accurate,’ but whose reading is legitimated and enforced by the dominant culture.”5 I would never again allow my freedom in the classroom to be usurped, especially not in the matter of textbook selection. A white female colleague in the aforementioned ATS mid-career group said to me, “If you want to write a text, just do it.” I never forgot her words. I apologize for not remembering her name, but if she should read this introduction and remember that moment, thank you! Three or four years later I am just doing it, in collaboration with my colleague Dr. Yung Suk Kim who also realizes the need for such a textbook. We both currently teach in spaces where the student body is primarily African American; however, this text is not just for nonwhite minoritized students.

We find that nonwhite students are also socialized and indoctrinated to view texts that are not introductory texts as less authoritative. And sometimes they shun their own voices or the voices of scholars from their own communities. Sometimes minoritized students passively and silently accept the silencing of their voices and concerns out of fear of authority and/or being accused or perceived as introducing race and racism into the classroom or space. They have been taught in too many churches and seminaries that all they need is Jesus, and Jesus is supposedly color-blind. But often race, ethnicity, and gender are not just the elephant in the room; it built the room. Minoritized students are conditioned to view the white male voice as the authoritative voice and the white male body as the most legitimate presence in the classroom, which are also presented as the norm through textbook selections and the lack of real representative diversity among faculties. But as postcolonial biblical scholar Fernando F. Segovia asserts, “Ethnic and racial minorities [scholars] insist on reading with their own eyes [and in their own skin] and making their own voices heard, while challenging their colleagues in the West to do the same, in an explicit and public fashion.”6

It is necessary that minoritized scholars produce authoritative texts too, not as the authoritative or legitimate voice, but as one among other introductory texts. This text, Toward Decentering the New Testament: A Reintroduction, is a step in the direction of creating an introductory text that focuses on and prioritizes diverse and nonwhite readers and contemporary issues that affect real flesh-and-blood minoritized readers and our sisters and brothers as allies. It is presumed that what impacts and concerns the least of these among us and/or oppressed communities, effects all of us. This text attempts to honor and give space to the voices of minoritized scholars; as an aggregate, we majoritize our work and perspectives as authoritative voices and resources for understanding the New Testament and for further study. Of course, we do not exclude the expertise and foundational work of majority or dominant scholarship, but in this text such contributions are presented alongside perspectives of the authors (an African American woman and an Asian male, both NT biblical scholars) and other minoritized scholars as equally legitimate and authoritative. At times, we may unknowingly slip into a dominant mode of reading or we may oscillate (like a newborn taking her first steps), but this is our attempt to move in the direction of a decentered introduction to the New Testament that privileges many voices, concerns, and scholarship of minoritized communities. We acknowledge the difficulty and the struggle of constructing this text as a decentering project, given that we have been trained in the academy predominated by white males with scholarship produced mainly by white males from the perspective of white males. A white male perspective is presented as objective, value-free, and culturally and ideologically neutral, but it is not. As feminist biblical scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza asserts, “Interpretation is intrinsically interested and value-laden . . . [but an] ethics of communication assesses interpretive practices as to whether they do justice not only to the text and its interpretations but also to contemporary readers.”7

Toward Decentering the New Testament constitutes our attempt to do justice and our due diligence to students of the biblical text and to produce the work that our souls call us to do. This book is both speaking out and talking back; it is about agency and creativity and resistance to a status quo that systematically or routinely silences the concerns of nonwhite communities and the scholarship they produce. This introductory text constitutes a cultural, spiritual, and political endeavor. The act of raising one’s voice in the public sphere, to exercise one’s freedoms for or against a cause and the production and dissemination of resources and knowledge, are political acts. It is political to attempt to assist in the cause of freedom in education and to ultimately impact not just individuals and religious institutions, but society at large; we are connected to each other, to the wider world. As Paulo Freire has asserted, “[E]ducation as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that [humanity] is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people.”8 It is a political act to say nothing to address a problem or issue that adversely impacts people’s lives, or to teach and write under the guise that only what “dead (or living) white men” have to say is most significant; it goes to who are viewed and treated as the legitimate producers of knowledge and what knowledge can be disseminated as authoritative. A decision to exclude certain contemporary issues or to altogether refuse to address policies, practices, and abuses that impact nonwhite minoritized communities is a subjective choice that reflects individual, communal, cultural, and ideological interests of the dominating group. But an ethics of accountability requires that we act responsibly in choosing theoretical interpretive paradigms and addressing and illuminating “the ethical consequences and political functions of biblical texts in their historical as well as in their contemporary sociopolitical contexts.”9 This contemporary sociopolitical context includes the classroom and religious institutions. Toward Decentering the New Testament is overtly interested in contemporary social and justice issues; like all human-produced texts, it is ideological and cultural (all people have cultural contexts). We have attempted to make Toward Decentering the New Testament accessible to a broad audience. We have written it with seminary and divinity school students in mind, but we also hope that undergraduate schools and other religious institutions like churches will find the text useful and accessible for their students, parishioners, or congregants. And we write this text for people who are interested in reading the biblical text but who choose not to occupy a pew in a church. I have not been able to spend much time on Twitter recently, but I have a Twitter follower, a young African American female, who shared that she found her people, her church on Twitter!

This introductory text is cultural, theological, and thematic, and in it we raise critical questions and issues that are relevant to minoritized communities and their allies. We have strategically inserted questions throughout each chapter that introduce a biblical book in order to focus readers’ attentions on contemporary concerns and interests in dialogue with biblical texts. We have also placed epigraphs or quotations at the beginning of most chapters, primarily from nonwhite, minoritized peoples. This project is intentionally designed to encourage and center an interpretativ...