47 pages • 1 hour read
Esau McCaulleyReading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Reading While Black”
McCaulley asserts that the Bible outlines basic principles and critiques of power that equip Black Christians to handle their life and work in the United States. He locates some of these tools in the gospel of Luke and identifies Luke as the patron saint of BEI. McCaulley highlights the importance of Luke’s status as a Gentile to his testimony of God’s value and vision of a multiethnic group of believers. He compares Luke to Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, the founders of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, as well as other Black preachers who minister “to their congregations that they have a place in the kingdom of God” (76). McCaulley’s point is that Black people’s conversion to Christianity is not an accident of history or merely a tool of oppression, but rather a part of God’s wider purpose to establish his multiethnic community. However, given the ways that white evangelists and teachers have used the name of Christianity to justify Black oppression, Black people must find “the real Jesus among the false alternatives contending for power in the culture” (78). McCaulley compares Black Americans to Theophilus, to whom Luke speaks in order to correct misleading accounts of Jesus.
In Luke 1, Luke opens with the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth, who remained faithful to God while grappling with national and personal tragedy. The story highlights injustice as a central concern and illustrates that the deferment of justice is not God’s denial of justice, which therefore vindicates Black hope. The story of Mary in Luke 1 revolves around her answer to God’s call that she give herself over to bring Jesus into the world. McCaulley locates the reasoning behind Mary’s surrender to God’s call in Luke 1:46-54, where God’s character as a liberator in the Exodus narrative is foregrounded. Mary’s testimony, then, is that there is space for hope in the shadow of the empire, and God sometimes calls those under the rule of the empire to join him in the work of liberation and salvation.
Jesus does not enter the Luke gospel until Luke 3:21-22, when he is baptized by John at the Jordan River, which McCaulley sees as a deliberate reference to the exodus narrative. Luke 4:1-20, in which Jesus is led into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan, also offers space and direction for Black hope. In response to Satan, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy to indicate his faith in God’s promises and set the stage for his first sermon at Nazareth. In the sermon, he emphasizes God’s value of those who have been undervalued and alludes to their moral agency as well as care for their spiritual lives and their lived experiences. Therefore, Jesus’s ministry involves creating “a new world in which the marginalized are healed spiritually, economically, and psychologically” (94).
Chapter 4 Analysis
McCaulley builds his case in Chapter 4 through the identification of specific points of contact between Black Americans and biblical figures, as well as the establishment of the exodus narrative as a throughline of BEI. The former illustrates the dialogical relationship between the Bible and the Black experience, while the latter characterizes God as a liberator who vindicates Black hope.
McCaulley identifies Luke as the patron saint of BEI because it is in Luke’s gospel that McCaulley finds biblical figures who share meaningful commonalities with Black Americans. First, there is Luke himself, as well as Theophilus. This provides an important prelude to Chapter 5, in which he argues that Black people have always been a part of God’s plans. Likening Black Americans to Theophilus foreshadows McCaulley’s point about the construction of biblical canon.
McCaulley uses the example of Jesus being tested by Satan in the wilderness as a callback to Chapter 1, where he asserts that all theology is canonical. He shows that BEI employs a distinct canon that foregrounds the exodus narrative and reveals God’s character as liberator. In Jesus and Satan’s differential use of the scriptures, they are similar to BEI and enslaved enslaver exegesis, respectively, in that Satan’s arrangement of the biblical text distorts biblical witness, whereas Jesus quotes Deuteronomy’s “words for the formerly enslaved [Israel] on the verge of receiving God’s promises” (91). His quotation of scripture in this discussion of slavery and liberation reinforces the Power of Scripture in Addressing Contemporary Social Issues.
Earlier in the chapter, McCaulley centers the exodus narrative and locates trust in a liberating God in the stories of Zechariah, Elizabeth, and Mary. Zechariah and Elizabeth remained faithful to God because God’s “fundamental character as liberator marked him out as trustworthy, even when they had yet to experience it” (82). In that way, McCaulley compares Zechariah and Elizabeth to enslaved Black people who came to faith during slavery. Similarly, Mary trusted in the Exodus narrative when she sacrificed her body to God to give birth to Jesus. Consequently, McCaulley names Mary as “the patron saint of faithful activists who give their very bodies as witnesses to God’s saving work” (86), even when they do not know exactly what will come of their sacrifices or when it will come. He uses elevated and dramatized language—such as “very bodies”—when directly comparing Black people to biblical figures, thereby emphasizing the high stakes of activist work.
In finding the points of contact between biblical figures and Black Americans and demonstrating how the comparisons are rooted in the Exodus narrative, McCaulley elevates Black Christians as moral agents who are worthy of God’s love, even when a white supremacist society deems them second-class citizens. Jesus’s first sermon in Nazareth establishes that those who have been undervalued are prioritized in the kingdom of God. Moreover, it is not merely their spiritual lives with which Jesus is concerned, but the actual conditions and injustices of their lived experience. These are insights gleaned through the exegetical method that McCaulley presents, therefore supporting his claim in Chapter 1 that BEI is an exercise in hope and his elucidation in Chapters 2 and 3 of theologies of social justice in the Bible.
