Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

Content Warning: This section of the guide addresses enslavement, racism, violence, and oppression. The guide reproduces the terms “slave” and “slave master” only in quotation.

“Put simply, I knew the Lord and the culture. Both engaged in an endless battle for my affections.”

McCaulley highlights Christian identity and Black identity as his dual foundations. He juxtaposes the two to bring up the confrontation between Black hope and Black nihilism. However, as McCaulley demonstrates in the text, Christianity and Blackness are not inherently oppositional but rather mutually inform one another, thus allowing him to offer insights on Christian thought that comes out of the Black experience.

“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.”

McCaulley refers to the debate between white mainline Protestants and white fundamentalists, in which mainline Protestants have tried rejecting the Bible altogether because of the ways that fundamentalists have used scriptures to justify the subjugation of Black people. Underlying the acceptance of the fundamentalist interpretation is a dismissal of or lack of engagement with Black biblical interpretation. McCaulley presents the BEI method to demonstrate that an alternative interpretation is not only possible but also more accurately conveys biblical witness and reveals the character of God as a liberator.

“The social location of enslaved persons caused them to read the Bible differently. The unabashedly located reading has marked African American interpretation since.”

This passage highlights the text’s thesis about the Impact of Social Context on Religious Interpretation. McCaulley contends that all theology is socially located, and BEI is informed by the enslaved status of early Black Christians. The socially located reading allowed early Black Christians and subsequent generations of Black people to interpret the scriptures in a way that affirmed God as a liberator and stood in direct opposition to