If God Still Breathes, Why Can't I?

Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority

Angela N. Parker

• Editorial: Eerdmans
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467462532
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Religion

A challenge to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy that calls into question how Christians are taught more about the way of Whiteness than the way of Jesus Angela Parker wasn't just trained to be a biblical scholar; she was trained to be a White male biblical scholar.

She is neither White nor male.

Dr. Parker's experience of being taught to forsake her embodied identity in order to contort herself into the stifling construct of Whiteness is common among American Christians, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. This book calls the power structure behind this experience what it is: White supremacist authoritarianism.

Drawing from her perspective as a Womanist New Testament scholar, Dr. Parker describes how she learned to deconstruct one of White Christianity's most pernicious lies: the conflation of biblical authority with the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility. As Dr. Parker shows, these doctrines are less about the text of the Bible itself and more about the arbiters of its interpretation—historically, White males in positions of power who have used Scripture to justify control over marginalized groups.

This oppressive use of the Bible has been suffocating. To learn to breathe again, Dr. Parker says, we must "let God breathe in us." We must read the Bible as authoritative, but not authoritarian. We must become conscious of the particularity of our identities, as we also become conscious of the particular identities of the biblical authors from whom we draw inspiration. And we must trust and remember that as long as God still breathes, we can too.

Chapter 1

STIFLED BREATHING: TRAINED TO BE A WHITE MALE BIBLICAL SCHOLAR

Every year in November (pre–COVID era) I would attend the Society of Biblical Literature’s Annual Meeting with approximately nine thousand of my friends and colleagues in the field of biblical studies. What is always interesting about the Annual Meeting is the sheer number of bodies that can converge upon one city for five days of conferencing. I remember my first time attending as a graduate student in 2009. The city was New Orleans, and I was able to room for two nights with my favorite Hebrew Bible professor, Ellen Davis.

As an African American female graduate student in a master’s program, I did not have any ties to the already-connected groups of African American, Hispanic, or Asian American doctoral students within the academy. I felt my first feelings of being adrift as I navigated conference rooms, meeting halls, and book tables alone. And what really astounded me was the number of people who did not look like me. I could walk into a room of hundreds of people and be the only Black or Brown face in there. White male scholars are what most of us are used to seeing in various positions across these United States of America, and when I look back on my academic training, I am forced to acknowledge that the bulk of it was trying to prepare me to act as a White male biblical scholar.

Racial and Gender Dynamics in My Seminary Experience

I’m not sure why I was so surprised by the magnitude of White people at my field’s flagship conference. I experienced the same thing in many of my classes at Duke Divinity School. I lobbied twice to be “allowed” into classes taught by Drs. Joel Marcus and Richard Hays but was rebuffed twice because they were “advanced” classes, and apparently I was not advanced enough. I do not remember Dr. Marcus’s class title, but the title of Dr. Hays’s class remains seared in my brain: “The Old Testament in the New Testament.” Oh, how I wanted to take that class. I will never forget the time I peeped in on the class proceedings one day, just to see who was there. I was shocked to find there were only White-looking folks in the class and often wondered what my Black body would have felt and experienced if I had been permitted to join.

I got to find out in different classes with these professors, as I took “Greek Exegesis of the Gospel of Matthew” with Dr. Marcus and “Greek Exegesis of 1 Corinthians” with Dr. Hays in spring 2010. In both, I was the only African American and the only woman. Why do I recall these experiences? Because they were the beginning of professors training me to read as a White male biblical scholar.

Specifically, during a group discussion one day someone mentioned “feeding” parishioners, and I wondered aloud what we as ministers receive from those we serve. I remember my colleagues, many of whom would go on in life to be productive and caring United Methodist pastors, pushing back about receiving anything from parishioners. The mentality was that ministers do not receive from their congregants—nor from the poor folks in the neighborhood to whom they may distribute canned goods. No, ministers give and receive nothing back from congregants and neighborhood members. I specifically remember thinking that I am always ministered to when I least expect it, even as I am ministering. Most assuredly, I was reading Paul correctly when I remarked on mutuality in ministry. But I realized my colleagues did not necessarily see the same ideas in Paul. Was it my race or my gender that made me ask these questions, that made me see differently in the Corinthians text? I continue to ponder these questions years later as I teach my own seminary classes.

Specialized Training in Crap No One Cares About

What I experienced at Duke Divinity School were the abstract and heady ways in which many of my colleagues in the classroom engaged the biblical text. I remember specifically a class where we were discussing 1 Corinthians and the progression of the Jesus movement from particularized Judaism to a “universal” religion. Such scholarship stems from the work of Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), a church historian and theologian who argued that early Christianity was a Hegelian synthesis of Jewish (Petrine) Christianity and Gentile (Pauline) Christianity. At the time I did not understand (nor particularly care) why the work of Baur is important for New Testament studies. Since discovering Womanism as an undergraduate student, I have had difficulty thinking in abstract terms that are set apart from lived experiences. In my mind, Baur is apart from lived experience and cannot speak to the Black church tradition. How would I even engage Baur in a church setting? Oftentimes I think that some of my seminary experiences were specialized training in crap no one cares about.

The work of scholars such as David Horrell and Shawn Kelley comes to mind as I write these words.¹ In my Gospels classes, we would often debate the Jesus of history versus the Jesus of faith. When I entered seminary, I had a difficult time wrapping my head around historical Jesus studies—and truth be told, sometimes I still do! However, what scholars of Jesus and the historical Jesus find is that language centered on the Jesus of history and on the glorified Jesus actually convey ideas rooted in ethnic identities and nationalism, doing harm to those who do not possess Aryan lineage or come from a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant background. Baur was under the influence of German idealists like G. W. F. Hegel, who believed there was a pure, authentic culture that could be found not only within the biblical text but also in Europe.

Hegel understood the history of the world through the lens of progress. For Hegel, a pure, authentic culture is a culture that progresses toward consciousness of freedom. He believed the “Spirit” directed history through phases, beginning with “the Oriental World,” then moving into the Greek and Roman worlds, and finally culminating in the “Germanic” age with Christianity. Both Horrell and Kelly stress that Hegel’s philosophy of history and progress is a racialized one that promotes a narrative of western European (specifically German) cultural, religious, and racial superiority.² Other cultures (whether Jewish, Black, Asian, etc.), by default, cannot exert such a superiority. Purity and superiority were extended from western European culture to White people themselves, who felt it their duty to expel the racially “alien” (the Jew, the “Oriental,” the African, the non-European) from multiple areas of knowledge and from the narrative of world history.³

Moreover, as nationalism arose in European academic thinking, the Hegelian logic of moving from lower to higher levels of consciousness began to take root. Hegel espoused consciousness as developing geographically and racially, assigning levels of consciousness to particular races and peoples. For Hegel, lower levels of consciousness belong to lesser, backward cultures. On the other hand, Europeans, particularly Germans, are capable of higher levels of consciousness. It is the Germanic Europeans who possess the potential for authentic culture and real freedom. Hegel developed a narrative of history that denied humanity to Africans and denied the consciousness of freedom to Jews and “Orientals.”

As I think about my training in asking the “right” questions about the biblical text, I realize that asking proper questions was connected to how the professors who were training me were steeped in Western thought that considered anything “other” as alien or corrupt. So when I asked questions about lived experience related to my identity as an African American woman, my questions needed to be expelled from the classroom setting. In essence, my professors wanted me to learn European philosophical thought so that I could continue to ask questions of the biblical text from a European philosophical viewpoint.

Turning Crap into Womanist Bursts of Air

I did not realize at the time that taking classes on the apostle Paul would actually be a source of transformation of proverbial lead into gold. Many courses on Pauline literature have been relegated to pondering issues of justification and righteousness and what they mean for salvation purposes. What I came to see in my Pauline classes was that even if my professors did not want to allow me the imagination to ask different questions of Paul than what they were attempting to force upon me, there were actually others who may have thought of similar questions to mine but never thought to ask them in ways that I began to formulate.

The inability to give full-throated voice to your own questions based on lived experience is what I characterize as “stifled breath.” And I believe that transformation from stifled breath to full Womanist breath is important. So, like the medieval alchemists who sought to make gold out of lead, I am seeking to transform interpretations of Paul from oppressive to liberating, especially for women.

In 2018 it was a surreal moment when the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion notified me that I would receive the second-place Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholars Award, given annually to early-career scholars whose research and insights will shape the future of feminist studies in religion. What I had not realized at the time was that for me to ask new questions of Pauline literature, specifically questions related to the bodies of enslaved Black women in the colonial United States and their relationship to Paul’s metaphorical use of slavery language, would actually provide avenues of liberation for actual women in contemporary churches.

As I lecture in various venues, I receive interesting and sometimes disheartening feedback on my readings of Paul. Specifically, I remember a gentleman taking issue with my questioning Paul’s language in Galatians and subsequently asking me what I would advise Paul to say today. As I ponder that question, I think I would say to Paul what I say to any man who uncritically uses the bodies of women to make a point: STOP! There is something divine in the ability to tell someone to stop, whether it be Paul himself or a male pastor who arrogates power to himself in the name of Paul. My conversations with women after such lectures are often transformative for me.

Women often see themselves as second-class citizens. Yes, we may serve meals, take care of children, and teach women’s Bible studies, but all these duties are usually subsumed under the authority of male headship. Alchemy occurs when women begin to breathe in larger bursts of air instead of constantly holding their breaths because some man (Paul or Pastor) has not allowed full breathing.

From Stifled Breath to Full-Breathed Authority

As I think about my time learning specialized crap no one cares about in the form of European philosophical thought and its relationship to biblical studies, I realize I actually had to care about it because it stifled my breath. I also began to realize that these ideas around “pure” culture and the subordination of women in leadership were stifling not only my breath but also that of the students I was coming into contact with during my first few years of seminary teaching.

White male biblical scholarship is linked to the idea of objectivity in the academic study of the Bible. For generations biblical scholars studied under the belief that “objective” inquiry was the prime way to do biblical scholarship—that is, keeping one’s personal thoughts and feelings away from any inquiry into the biblical text. Objective reality as a stance for biblical interpretation is, I argue, one of the systemic evils of academic biblical studies. Renita Weems begins her seminal article on Womanist hermeneutics by stating that scholarship is now beginning to assert the “inherent biases and limitation of the historical-critical method as an objective, scientific approach to the Bible.”⁴

I call stifled breath in the form of objectivity “evil” because I, as a Black woman in biblical studies, was not being trained to be my fully authentic, God-ordained self. Actively engaging issues of identity to confront objectivity in biblical interpretation has helped me “catch my breath” as I construct ways and means of reading biblical texts that are relevant in the halls of the academy, in the pulpits of churches, and on the sidewalks of society where lived experience occurs. Relationship across identity lines is important in this task. I contend that a turn to identity coupled with relationality can help us all begin to breathe. My Womanist identity is important to my particular constructive process that aims to transform stifled breath into full embodied breathing in regard to engaging the biblical text.

Fully Breathed Womanist Identity

Linda Martin Alcoff defines identities as “embodied horizons from which we each must confront and negotiate our shared world and specific life condition.”⁵ These embodied horizons reflect the historical asymmetries of power and well-being that inhere in the categories of race, gender, sexuality, and class. The starting point for my understanding of Womanist identity is consciousness of these felt and lived inequities as well as determination to disrupt them. ...