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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 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Black and Proud”
McCaulley maintains that Christianity has always included Black people because God’s glory lies in a diverse group of worshippers. McCaulley refutes the idea that Christianity is a white religion. Accordingly, he utilizes African locations and figures as examples of early Black Christianity. He identifies Alexandria, Egypt as one of the three major centers of early Christianity and notes that Christianity spread rapidly in Ethiopia and Nubia in the fourth and sixth centuries, respectively.
He identifies God’s vision of a multiethnic community in the Genesis narrative and God’s promise to make Abraham a father of many nations. Other important African figures that McCaulley identifies are Ephraim and Manasseh. Accordingly, he finds that Genesis 48:3-5 communicates that the reason underlying Jacob’s embrace of his half-Egyptian grandsons is that Jacob considers them evidence of God fulfilling the Abrahamic promises. Relatedly, David’s prayer in Psalm 72 envisions a just and multiethnic kingdom informed by the Abrahamic promise. Because blessing all the nations of the Earth happens through the descendants of Abraham, David’s prayer for the impending rule of Solomon takes on a special significance. Psalm 72 mirrors the language of the Abrahamic promises and hope for a just kingdom over the whole earth through the rule of Davidic kings. The fulfillment of this just kingdom is in the coming of Jesus, suggesting that God always intended to bring about a multiethnic community united by faith in Jesus.
McCaulley is clear, however, that the multiethnic community of God’s eschatological vision is not flattened into “a colorblind uniformity of sanctified blandness” (106). He notes that God’s eschatological kingdom in Revelation is characterized by diversity and distinction among different peoples, languages, cultures, and nations. The ethnic and cultural differences must be seen and celebrated to indicate the expansiveness of God’s grace and God’s power to bring about the same spirit of holiness in different people. To support his argument that Christian faith and practice do not require flattening multiethnic differences, McCaulley pushes back against colorblind readings of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and Galatians 3:28. According to McCaulley, King and Paul are not saying that bringing an end to discrimination—whether in law or religion—requires that people ignore their ethnic differences, but rather that the differences should not be the cause of discrimination in the application of law or the inheritance of the Abrahamic promises.
Specifically, people of African descent are drawn to Jesus’s ministry through encounters with the cross, so suffering injustice and indignity is a key consideration of BEI. Simon of Cyrene is an example of an early African believer, and his carrying of the cross in Mark illustrates that “Christian discipleship involves the embrace of suffering” (108). Acts relays the story of Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch who asks Philip to explain a passage from Isaiah on the fate of a suffering servant. Simon of Cyrene and the Ethiopian eunuch illustrate that Africanity and Christianity are not mutually exclusive, and identification with Jesus’s suffering and a belief in vindication by God are crucial aspects of the African faith.
McCaulley’s final claims to God’s multiethnic vision lie in Galatians 3:28 and Revelation. In answering the question of the rightful heirs to the Abrahamic promises, Paul makes the point that inheritance is not about ethnicity but rather faith. John’s vision of the apocalypse contains a vision of ethnic diversity in the end, exemplified by his use of the word “multitude” in Revelation 7:9-10. The “multitude” is linked to the fulfillment of the Abrahamic and Davidic promises, and John references aspects of the multitude—namely, nation, tribe, people, and language. Therefore, diversity is not flattened in God’s kingdom, and Blackness is required for the fulfillment of God’s vision.
Chapter 5 Analysis
McCaulley’s interpretation in Chapter 5 addresses the fundamental question of whether Christianity is intended for Black people. A popular criticism is that Black Christianity is a white religion imposed through slavery, so McCaulley locates Black Christianity in an era before slavery and colonization to show that Christianity is not merely an imposition. This requires that McCaulley adopt a pan-African lens and consider an “African past as the basis for Black identity now” (97). This is one example of the way he collapses the temporal distance between “now” and the time recorded in the Bible, making his reading of scripture appear urgent.
Simon of Cyrene and the Ethiopian eunuch are key examples of early African Christians who were brought to the Christian faith through encounters with the cross. McCaulley sees Simon of Cyrene’s carrying of the cross as the picture of discipleship that defines early Christianity in Matthew 10:38 and Matthew 16:24. Because the Ethiopian eunuch asked Phillip to explain a passage from Isaiah, this indicates for McCaulley an African familiarity with the God of Israel, therefore setting a critical precedent for the eunuch’s conversion. Furthermore, the Isaiah passage that the eunuch was reading was about a suffering servant, which early Christians understood as a reference to the crucified Jesus. McCaulley argues that what lies at the center of these encounters with the cross is an identification with Jesus’s suffering and the recovery of dignity through the vindication offered by God. This is a significant precursor for Chapter 6 which focuses on Black suffering.
McCaulley points out that most people read the Genesis narrative as “inscribing blackness as cursed” (100). However, he reads the Genesis narrative as evidence of God’s multiethnic vision because of the Abrahamic promises. According to McCaulley, it follows that Black people have been included in God’s vision. By refuting this prevailing reading and presenting a new interpretation, McCaulley highlights the Contribution of Black Theological Perspectives to Broader Christian Thought. His interpretation encompasses the Christian embrace of all ethnicities, suggesting that Black theological perspectives benefit everyone.
