These notes are not a book review. Rather, they are my short dialogue with his ideas. Nevertheless, if you have never read his book, I do recommend it. The faculty and staff of my alma mater, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, read it together. That encouraged me to pick it up; it took five years to find a cheap copy bc I'm a cheapie. Plus, I am very interested in looking at my faith through the eyes of non-white people.
Chapter One: The South got Somethin' to Say
McCaulley biographically introduces us to his subject. Early on, he talks about the division between evangelical scholasticism and the call of the black American experience for the gospel to say something meaningful to culture. He appreciates the scholarship of evangelicalism, but its papers and commentarites "displayed little concern for how biblical texts speak to the experiences of Black believers" (12). Application was made, where it did try and climb out of historical reportage, to white contexts. "To me, it was a sign of privilege to imprison Paul and Jesus in the first century. For Paul, his Scriptures were a fire that leaped the gap and spoke a word to his ethnically mixed churches about the nature of their life together. What an audacious thought! (13).
McCaulley also takes on a prejudice that black theology is concerned only with contemporary impact and doesn't care to get the exegesis right. This is incorrect. But black progressive theology hasn't exactly avoided the charge. Getting the exegesis right and whiteness it often sees as all of a piece. Wasn't exegesis the tool of the fundamentalism that sought to baptize slavery in the first place? McCaulley accedes the point but argues that the better was is to follow the earliest strate of Black ecclesial leadership and see in the Bible itself the dignity of Black people and basis of their liberation and freedom.
In this via media, McCaulley outlines a big part of his argument. God is a liberator. Liberation derives from God's very character. His expectation that his freed people live lives of holiness is an expectation that they live out their liberation before the world. Any reading of the Bible that says otherwise is in error. To read the Bible is to read in the context of one's culture, one's setting in the world. Thus, readers the world over need to partner with one another to discern the mind of Christ. And I completely agree. Theology is biography, and it is hermeneutics all the way down. Statements that do not relativize the hard work of understanding but cast ourselves into the community of the worldwide church of time and space. I think of Bonhoeffer's statement that we need to hear the gospel through the mouth of our brother.
Handpicking other points of interest
McCaulley has some reworking of key texts used to force Black Christians into submission and worse. A theology of policing. A theology of Christian obligations to human governments. And a theology of social justice. He covers a lot of ground. Eschatology is on his mind, but an eschatology that does not neuter present action. Instead, eschatology stimulates the church to act for justice and for liberation in the light of shalom. Speaking of the Sermon on the Mount, he says, "To mourn involves being saddened by the state of the world. To mourn is to care. It is an act of rebellion against one's own sins and the sins of the world. . . A theology of mourning never allows us the privilege of apathy. . . Mourning is intuition that things are not right--that more is possible. 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. Our politicians run on our desires by convincing us that utopia is possible here and they alone can provide it." (65) I do also like his emphasis that this mourning leads to a hope to see elements of the Kingdom of God come to be, its liberation unto justice. And that this involves telling truth. As Luther said, A theologian calls a thing what it is. "Peacemakoing is a sign of God's inbreaking kingdom. . . . Through our efforts to bring peace, we show the world the kind of king and kingdom we represent. . . . Therefore the work of justice, when understood as direct testimony to God's kingdom, is evangelistic from start to finish." (Ibid.)
I am caught by this: "For Zecharaiah and Elizabeth the miracle child is John. For the African American Christian the miracle is the Black Church born of truly miraculous circumstances and whose witness to Jesus has served as something of a forerunner preparing America to accept a truer and fuller gospel" (84). This fuller gospel is one that, while grounded in respectful and canonically comprehensive exegesis, includes the necessary hermeneutic to place those exegetic results in dialogue with the real person doing the exegesis. One might say that McCaulley's point is that preaching is central to gift of the Black Church.
McCaulley loves scripture. McCaulley commits himself to exegesis of several gotcha passages in scripture. What I like about his approach is that he does not settle for unconsidered solution. He reads deeply and considers much. He does the hard work necessary to perform real grammatical, historical, and critical consideration of each text. And he adds to this what he calls canonical interpretation, which is what goes by the perpescuity of scripture in classic Protestantism.
McCaully reads with the end in mind. His work is very eschatological. Not the dismissive eschatology of someday which is a denial of the Christian hope. Rather, an eschatology that properly orients today as one might orienteer using the position of the stars. He understands the Christian vision of the future, liberated, risen church as one that embraces difference--difference of skin, of language, of culture. "These distinct people, cultures, and languages are eschatological everlasting. At the end, we do not find the elimination of difference. Instead the very diversity of cultures is a manifestation of God's glory. . . . Our distinctive cultures represent the means by which we give honor to God. He is honoered through the diversity of tongues singing the same song." (118) Liberation does not lead to the removal of color, thinking of people who claim to not see color. That approach to difference is well-meant, perhaps, but incorrect. "The gospel does not cancel ethinic identities.(113)"
So when McCaully approaches a text of scripture, he considers it exegetically and eschatologically.[1] This weds the careful tools of the evangelicals with the social energy of the progressives.
Laws of restraint suggest an eschatological purpose
McCaully discusses a way of reading Biblical ethics that I found very helpful. Referencing Jesus's teaching on divorce, McCaully observes that Jesus brings Ethics back to creational intent. But, Jesus acknowledges that the law does exist to restrain error. Paul does the same when he says the law is the paidagogos. The law makes pastoral sense of difficult situations. The application to the Black experience here is that the Bible's teaching around slavery are the latter: they limit and even begin to subjugate slavery. They do this because the creational intent--the deeper ethic--is freedom. God made all human beings to be his imago in the world. So the limiting effort of the law serves its purpose and is guided by the deeper even-eschatological teaching of a free people worshiping the messiah together.
Scars suffered in the present do not prevent eschatological participation
The final point I was to highlight is McCaully's discussion of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. Christ is our reconciler, our liberator to shalom in the Kingdom of God. One would not have thought a eunuch could ever have been so liberated. Not only was he a Gentile, but he was impure by the nature of his injuries. As McCullay reminds his reader: eunuch's were despised. He suffered the injustice of castration from the community at large, and "in a culture with strictly defined gender roles, he would be seen as aberrant" (110). But the eunuch is liberated. He "found hope in the shamed Messiah whose resurrection lifts those with imposed indignities to places of honor." And "The eunuch [was always] an image bearer [of God]. Christ showed the eunuch who he truly was." McCaully's point is that blackness, like castration, did not prevent Jesus's liberating act from fully delivering black men and women to wholeness and dignity and value in the Kingdom of God, to "God's eschatological vision for the reconciliation of all things in his Son."
McCaully's reading of this episode with the eunuch is a treatment of the sufficiency of Christ's redemptive, liberating act for all people who suffer indignity and shame.
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