Reading While Black Quotes

“The question isn’t always which account of Christianity uses the Bible. The question is which does justice to as much of the biblical witness as possible. There are uses of Scripture that utter a false testimony about God. This is what we see in Satan’s use of Scripture in the wilderness. The problem isn’t that the Scriptures that Satan quoted were untrue, but when made to do the work that he wanted them to do, they distorted the biblical witness. This is my claim about the slave master exegesis of the antebellum South. The slave master arrangement of biblical material bore false witness about God. This remains true of quotations of the Bible in our own day that challenge our commitment to the refugee, the poor, and the disinherited.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“Euro-American scholars, ministers, and lay folk . . . have, over the centuries, used their economic, academic, religious, and political dominance to create the illusion that the Bible, read through their experience, is the Bible read correctly.”12 Stated differently, everybody has been reading the Bible from their locations, but we are honest about it.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“God’s vision for his people is not for the elimination of ethnicity to form a colorblind uniformity of sanctified blandness. Instead God sees the creation of a community of different cultures united by faith in his Son as a manifestation of the expansive nature of his grace. This expansiveness is unfulfilled unless the differences are seen and celebrated, not as ends unto themselves, but as particular manifestations of the power of the Spirit to bring forth the same holiness among different peoples and cultures for the glory of God.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“But if we all read the biblical text assuming that God is able to speak a coherent word to us through it, then we can discuss the meanings our varied cultures have gleaned from the Scriptures. What I have in mind then is a unified mission in which our varied cultures turn to the text in dialogue with one another to discern the mind of Christ.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“I suggest that Paul’s words about submission to governing authorities must be read in light of four realities: (1) Paul’s use of Pharaoh in Romans as an example of God removing authorities through human agents shows that his prohibition against resistance is not absolute; (2) the wider Old Testament testifies to God’s use of human agents to take down corrupt governments; (3) in light of the first two propositions, we can affirm that God is active through human beings even when we can’t discern the exact role we play; (4) therefore, Paul’s words should be seen as more of a limit on our discernment than on God’s activities.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“Peacemaking, then, cannot be separated from truth telling. The church’s witness does not involve simply denouncing the excesses of both sides and making moral equivalencies. It involves calling injustice by its name. If the church is going to be on the side of peace in the United States, then there has to be an honest accounting of what this country has done and continues to do to Black and Brown people. Moderation or the middle ground is not always the loci of righteousness.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“According to Isaiah, true practice of religion ought to result in concrete change, the breaking of yokes. He does not mean the occasional private act of liberation, but “to break the chains of injustice.” What could this mean other than a transformation of the structures of societies that trap people in hopelessness? Jesus has in mind the creation of a different type of world.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“While I was at home with much of the theology in evangelicalism, there were real disconnects. First, there was the portrayal of the Black church in these circles. I was told that the social gospel had corrupted Black Christianity. Rather than placing my hope there, I should look to the golden age of theology, either at the early years of this country or during the postwar boom of American Protestantism. But the historian in me couldn't help but realize that these apexes of theological faithfulness coincided with the nadirs of Black freedom.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“If the Scriptures were fundamentally flawed and largely useless apart from mainline revision of the text, then Christianity is truly a white man's religion.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“If the church is going to be on the side of peace in the United States, then there has to be an honest accounting of what this country has done and continues to do to Black and Brown people.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“Protest is not unbiblical; it is a manifestation of our analysis of the human condition in light of God’s own word and vision for the future.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“Ethnic identity and the Christian community, a question asked and answered a generation ago must be addressed again in our day so that our people know that God glories in the distinctive gifts we all bring into the kingdom.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“Prayer for leaders and criticism of their practices are not mutually exclusive ideas. Both have biblical warrant in the same letter.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“God’s vision for his people is not for the elimination of ethnicity to form a colorblind uniformity of sanctified blandness. Instead God sees the creation of a community of different cultures united by faith in his Son as a manifestation of the expansive nature of his grace. This expansiveness is unfulfilled unless the differences are seen and celebrated, not as ends unto themselves, but as”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference. . . . I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“First, it can treat the poor as mere bodies that need food and not the transforming love of God. Second, it can view them as souls whose experience of the here and now should not trouble us.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“God’s vision for his people is not for the elimination of ethnicity to form a colorblind uniformity of sanctified blandness. Instead God sees the creation of a community of different cultures united by faith in his Son as a manifestation of the expansive nature of his grace.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“They put their lust for power and material wealth in front of the text and read the Bible from that perspective.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“Slave masters’ fear of the Bible must bear some indirect testimony to what the slave masters thought it said.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“Others must own their skepticism and I my trust, both of which arise out of deeply held convictions about the nature of reality.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“Jesus also cared about the spiritual lives of the poor. He saw them as bodies and souls. His call to repent acknowledges the fact that their poverty doesn’t remove their agency.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“To think that more is possible is an act of political resistance in a world that wants us to believe that consumption is all there is.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“the Bible had been reduced to the arena on which we fought an endless war about the finer points of Paul’s doctrine of justification”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“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.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“The problem isn’t that the Scriptures that Satan quoted were untrue, but when made to do the work that he wanted them to do, they distorted the biblical witness. This is my claim about the slave master exegesis of the antebellum South.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“Peacemaking can be evangelistic. Through our efforts to bring peace we show the world the kind of king and kingdom we represent.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“God’s eschatological vision is one of reconciliation.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

“The state has duties, and we can hold them accountable even if it means that we suffer for doing so peacefully. This suffering is only futile if the resurrection is a lie. If the resurrection is true, and the Christian stakes his or her entire existence on its truthfulness, then our peaceful witness testifies to a new and better way of being human that transcends the endless cycle of violence.”
― Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope