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Esau McCaulleyA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
McCaulley summarizes his advocacy for BEI in the wider biblical interpretation enterprise. BEI has a unique message of hope that provides a path forward for contemporary believers who seek guidance in biblical scripture. BEI is canonical and theological, located in the concerns of Black Christians, dialogical, and patient. It exists in songs, prayers, sermons, prayer meetings, around dinner tables, at gravesides, and in speeches.
To illustrate BEI’s ability to address pressing contemporary issues, McCaulley probes questions about how the Bible speaks to injustice, policing, ethnic identity, rage and suffering, and slavery. BEI demonstrates that not only is the Bible a source of comfort for Black Christians, but it also inspires action to transform unfavorable circumstances. McCaulley notes that his questions deserve greater scrutiny, so he hopes that he has provided a path for further engagement and charted the path forward for using the BEI method.
McCaulley provides an overview of Black biblical interpretation to ground his proposals in a historical and theological framework. He locates the mass conversion of enslaved Black people to Christianity in the Great Awakening of the mid-18th century. The formation of early Black churches reflected alternative readings of the Bible that stood counter to enslaved enslaver interpretations, and early Black Christians combined the need for personal salvation with social action and resistance. For example, the doctrine of the AME Church maintained the belief of the wider Methodist Church that the scriptures “contain all things necessary for life and salvation” (173), but the AME Church also explicitly denied membership to enslavers and refused to emancipate those whom they enslaved. Similarly, the Black Baptists maintained traditional theology and emphasized social action, and Black Pentecostals—although not separated from the white denomination—sought to combine Christian doctrine with social practice. Through the examples of the AME, Black Baptist, and Black Pentecostal churches, McCaulley illustrates that early Black Christians did not see a problem with the Bible itself, but rather with the interpretations of those who read the Bible from the perspective of “their lust for power and material wealth” (172). It is out of the precedents set by early Black Christians and churches that BEI emerges. Three dominant streams of thought arose out of this initial period of Black biblical interpretation: the revolutionary/nationalistic, the conformist, and the reformist/transformist.
Black academic study of the Bible began in the mid-20th century. The first generation of scholars focused on correcting Eurocentric accounts of the Bible by elucidating the presence of Black people, and their interpretative methods were informed by liberation theology. McCaulley highlights Charles Copher and Cain Hope Felder among the first generation of scholars who focused on correcting Eurocentric accounts of biblical history (176). He asserts that they “wanted to make clear that African peoples had been a part of God’s redemptive purposes from the beginning” (176).
The next generation of scholars turned their attention to Black agency, and they focused on the perspectives found in Black primary sources, such as early preachers, teachers, evangelists, and fiction writers. Two recent trends in Black biblical interpretation are the emergence of womanist biblical interpretation and problematization of the biblical text. McCaulley notes that this generation drew significantly on liberation theologies of the 1960s and 1970s, and he identifies James Cone as a key figure in Black liberation theology. While McCaulley agrees with Cone’s assertion that all theology is socially located—as this is one of the characteristics that McCaulley ascribes to BEI—he is critical of Cone’s claim that political liberation is the crux of Jesus’s gospel (178). McCaulley has a similar contention with the more recent trend of problematizing the biblical text, and he cites Mitzi J. Smith in the long tradition of Black American criticism of the Bible.
McCaulley asserts that it is the responsibility of biblical scholars to challenge simplistic readings of the Bible from a socially located perspective. However, he warns against letting the social location obscure the text itself. Instead, he advocates for the dialogue between the interpreter and the text, meaning that the Bible also functions normatively to shape Black Christian thought. Furthermore, there must be ongoing dialogue between different interpreters. McCaulley places BEI squarely within the reformist/transformist strand, asserting that it answers questions posed by both white progressives and Black secularists and uses specific tools to distinguish the truth of Christianity from its distortion.
McCaulley uses the final two chapters to reiterate his initial claims about BEI and contextualize them within the Black religious and academic study of the Bible. In the Conclusion, McCaulley writes, “This book is not successful if it has been innovative” (164), and this is a callback to Chapter 1 where McCaulley states that he is not creating a new method of interpretation but rather articulating and applying a method that already existed. As McCaulley addresses the topics of Chapters 2 through 7, he refers to Black Christian denominations and figures who have paved the path for him; therefore, a critical component of his exegesis is drawing on the alternative readings of scripture encapsulated in Black Christianity. What is new about McCaulley’s text is that he has written that which mainly previously existed in oral tradition. He introduces the oral character of the Black ecclesial tradition in Chapter 1, and he underscores the point in the Conclusion, as well as in the Bonus Track.
As a theologian, McCaulley also looks to the academic realm to inform his analyses. The first generation of Black theological scholars he discusses is the obvious inspiration for his analysis in Chapter 5. He uses the Bonus Track to provide a full literature review of these scholars. While usually this kind of review is placed at the beginning of a book, placing it at the end has two effects: Firstly, it means that Biblical readings have been the most central aspect of the book, reflecting his final argument that BEI should prioritize dialogue between the interpreter and the text; secondly, it celebrates the Black scholars discussed by giving the review a tone of final acknowledgments. McCaulley acknowledges the scholarship that has laid the foundation for his own.