Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 177:707 (Jul 2020)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Matthew S. DeMoss

BSac 177:707 (July-September 2020) p. 364

Book Reviews

By The Faculty And Staff Of Dallas Theological Seminary

Matthew S. DeMoss

Editor

Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. By Esau McCaulley. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2020. ix + 198 pp. $20.00.

McCaulley is assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. This book “is a personal and scholarly testament to the power and hope of Black biblical interpretation. . . . 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” (backcover).

The author explains that “Black ecclesial interpreters,” by which he means “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,” are often overlooked in the academy and majority culture. Among the reasons are “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” (4–5). Lest anyone think he intends to speak for all Black people, McCaulley continues, “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” (5).

He argues for a “fourth thing,” not white progressive or white evangelical or African American progressive, but an “unapologetically Black and orthodox reading of the Bible [that] 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” (5–6). This Black tradition is rooted in American slavery; “I contend that the enslaved person’s biblical interpretation, which gave birth to early Black biblical interpretation, was canonical from its inception. It placed Scripture’s dominant themes in conversation with the hopes and dreams of Black folks. It was also unabashedly theological, in that particular texts were read in light of their doctrine of God, their beliefs

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