Reading the Bible While Black

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. We are gonna talk today about a much anticipated review of a book by Esau McCulley called

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Reading While Black. I've told people who have asked me if I'm gonna review this book that I was planning on it, but it's been maybe even a month or two in some scenarios.

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And I've said, I'm getting to it. I'll try to get to it. And so I finally did read it. And I wanna share with you some of my thoughts.

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I am concerned about this book. I do think it is dangerous. I do wanna talk about the why it might be popular because it is, it is popular.

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It's gotten into places some of the other social justice books might not go.

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The more hard left social justice type of books. I believe

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I saw this at Liberty University when I walked into the bookstore. I know I saw someone sent me the library at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary was promoting this book.

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And I can't remember all the places, but it is everywhere. It is a book that's gotten into all kinds of places.

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And Esau McCulley, the only thing I knew really about him was he had stirred up some controversy probably a year ago, year and a half ago, something like that.

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He had talked about it. And I think I actually write about this in my book, Christianity and Social Justice Religions in Conflict.

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I write about it in this book here that he had made a post about biblical interpretation and how it needed to be diversified essentially.

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And this just created all kinds of pushback from people who said, don't you just want people who know

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Greek and Hebrew and the original languages? And why do you need a diverse panel to interpret the

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Bible? And so that was kind of my understanding of Esau McCulley. And I will say his book is consistent with my understanding of him.

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So we're gonna talk about the book though. I wanna make this a self -contained podcast.

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We're not gonna try to bring in other things that he said on social media or other political concerns.

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I just really wanna focus on the book itself because, and here's the reason, I know many of you are going to churches or you're part of Bible studies or Christian institutions where these kinds of materials are being passed around and there's studies that are using these books.

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It's one of the ones that's making the rounds. So there's this one, there's Be the Bridge, there's

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Color of Compromise. There's like a number of social justice books that are very common for evangelicals to use in small group settings.

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And this is one of them. So I want it to be a helpful tool for you. Well, we can call it a useful analytical tool for people trying to understand this book.

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And for those who aren't gonna read the book, I've done it so you don't have to. So there you go. You have these resources.

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And if you're a patron, you'd be able to download this PowerPoint. I'll try to remember to put the link in the info section, but it will be posted on Patreon.

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And if you're not a patron, though you can go through the video yourself and screenshot. And I don't mind if people do that.

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This resource is for you. So that's why we're doing this. A few announcements before we get started here.

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I wanna just let everyone know that if you want to schedule me to come out and present on social justice or other topics as well, but that's the main one

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I've been presenting on is the topic of my book, Christianity and Social Justice. You can go to the website. You can go to worldviewconversation .com

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and go to the top and the tabs, Book of John.

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You can click that and there's a whole form there. I wanted you to, I don't know if I've updated this.

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Let's see if I have. I think I have. Yes, yeah. So there's some outstanding dates that are gonna be added to this, but I'm gonna be in Shelbyville, Kentucky for, and I think this is a war room.

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It's like a men's group, I think, called War Room, but that's January 29th.

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And then March 18th through 19th, I'm gonna be in Idaho at a Biblical Worldview Conference.

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I'll announce more about that. And then June 8th through 11th in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Now, as you can see, not a whole lot in the deep south there.

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So going to the Midwest, going to, I guess you can consider Kentucky, right? That's the south. And then to Idaho, the northwest.

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But I would love to schedule, especially if I'm going to somewhere like Idaho, right?

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I'd love to find churches along the way. I'm coming from upstate New York, so I'm probably gonna be driving.

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I'm not big on flying these days, I'll be honest, with all the restrictions. So let me know.

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Put, go to bookjohn on the worldviewconversation .com website. And if you want, if it would be helpful to you,

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I don't really ask for much. I just say, hey, if you're willing to cover travel expenses, that would be awesome.

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You don't even have to do that. I would just love the opportunity to speak and set up my table. And that's usually what

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I ask, is can I set up my table, have my books there and sell those, and take up an offering or cover my travel expenses, whatever those are.

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And if they're shared, it's even cheaper. So my main goal is just to get the word out, to help churches, to equip churches against this threat and to be a real immunization, right?

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A real inoculation, not the kind we're hearing about today, but a real one against this virus of social justice.

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So that's the idea here. Other thing I wanna let you know about, some people

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I know do know about this already, but discerningchristians .com, people were saying online, because I posted about a certain feature, which

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I'm about to show you. They said, well, I can't see it. Well, you have to create an account. So if you log in, I'm gonna log in, and here's my account.

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And so you can go through, you can make it look however you wanna make it look.

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You can put whether you're a layman, a deacon, a pastor or a pastoral candidate. And if you're a pastoral candidate, that may,

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I think that's what actually, let's see, if you put searching for employment, that's going to put you in a tab up here, candidates.

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I'm gonna click on that. And you can see all the different candidates. You have a number of candidates up here that are looking for churches.

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They want a church that they can pastor at, whether that's a youth pastor or just a senior pastor, or I don't know, whatever.

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I know there's different ministries, but they're looking for ministry opportunities. And you can click on these links and you'll find the email address, you'll find where they live, and you can message them.

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And I've told churches looking for candidates, why don't you just get all these email addresses and just send a mass mailing and say, here's what we're looking for.

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Send resumes if you're interested and just see what you get, because they're already vetted, at least to some extent.

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They've signed the statement of faith. They're probably fans of this podcast or else they wouldn't know about this. So just check it out, discerningchristians .com.

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You have to create an account. And the other thing is your browser has to, it can't be in private browser mode. It's gotta be a browser where you're allowing the browser to read your location, because that's how the map works here.

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And that's how the Candidates tab also works. So if you have a map, it's going to show you, let's see,

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Refresh Church Results. So you can see where people are, where people live, where there might be a potential church available, all that kind of stuff.

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So there you go. I hope that's helpful to you. And let's see if,

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I think that's all I had to say about that. All right, let's get into the podcast now. We're gonna talk about this book,

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Reading While Black. And I'm gonna blow this up for everyone so they can see exactly what we're looking at here.

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Now the obvious question everyone asks, right, today in this period, it might not be that way in a few months, probably will still be that way, but people wanna know, is this a critical race theory book?

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Is this a CRT book? And so I wanna answer that question the best way I possibly can. The answer is yes and no.

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No in the sense that this wasn't written as, at least it's not self -aware of being pro -critical race theory.

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The term, I don't even think, comes up in the book. It's not a book that is self -consciously pushing that.

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It's not even really about that topic per se, although you can see elements of critical race theory clearly come out.

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And there's five elements that I located in the book that are identified as critical race theory by, in Delgado's critical race theory, and they come out.

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So I'll just go through this real quick. Racism is normative is an assumption of critical race theory. And so you see in the personal story of Issa Macaulay that he calls, it's kind of, in my mind, it was a little dramatic, but he says he was briefly terrorized by police officers who had essentially pulled him over at a gas station where a lot of drugs had been dealt.

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And they thought that maybe he was involved in that, but they let him go in like less than 20 minutes.

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It wasn't a long ordeal, but they were investigating him. Now, look, here's the thing.

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I've had this happen to me many times. Like the story he described, I've had it much worse than him many times.

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So when I was reading this, I thought, you know, this is interesting. I used to drive for a living, so that I've had some incidences with that.

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But I also used to go late at night when I was dating my wife to a town in New York that was a college town that had a lot of drugs problems.

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And I would get pulled over constantly with officers coming up with lame excuses to search me.

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Sometimes they would literally search me, search my person, search my vehicle, say that, and come up with excuses like they smelled drugs in the car, they,

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I was swerving when I wasn't. I mean, all this kind of stuff has happened. I don't talk about it, but I just consider the circumstances.

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I don't think, I mean, I had a Second Amendment bumper sticker at the time. Maybe that's what they saw. You know, I could start to read into it.

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They're profiling me or something, but, you know, it's just normal life stuff. And that's, you know,

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I was at in this college town at a certain place at a certain time, and that's what happened. Now, are there racist cops?

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Cops that do profile, and they're out to get certain people because of some external quality?

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You know, there are. There's people who are, that do it all in every direction though. And so the idea that it's normative, that it's something that is against minorities, and this is a common practice, is that that's what

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CRT is about, that this is some systemic problem that is just, it's fundamental to what

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America is and living in America and this experience that black people and brown people and women and LGBTQ people have in the

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United States. So he talks about this situation that he was in, and he basically says that, insinuates the police were terrorists, just for investigating him because he was at a place where a lot of drugs deals had gone down, and they were curious about it.

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So you see that assumption. So does he come out and say racism is normative? No, but you see that assumption's already there.

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White privilege maintains white dominance, another feature of CRT. Well, he says this in the book. He says, womenist scholars critiqued white feminism for its failure to examine its own privilege and for its neglected issues of race.

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And he talks about how this is a good thing. So you see that there is an assumption here of some form of white privilege or a lack of self -awareness, that there's issues with white people that they don't possibly see, and that this is good for biblical interpretation.

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And in the broader context, you can go to that page 180 where he talks about this. Now, is that full blown saying white privilege maintains white dominance?

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No, he's not full blown saying that. He's just, but there is, you can see that there's a hint of this thinking, a hint of that there is some kind of problem with white people.

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There is some kind of blindness they have to their own oppressive tendencies and these kinds of things.

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Then you have colorblindness keeps minorities in subordinate positions, another feature of CRT. And he says colorblindness is sub -biblical and falls short of the glory of God.

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In fact, he talks about Martin Luther King Jr. and how he didn't believe in colorblindness either. And people trying to take his,

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I have a dream speech out of context are wrong. And to some extent, he's probably right about that.

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MLK, I mean, I love that speech in many ways. That's a great speech. But if you read fuller, what more of what

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MLK thought in his writings, he wasn't totally consistent perhaps with that sentiment that we would appreciate from that speech.

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And then of course, voices of color have access to special knowledge. This is the main thing we're gonna be focusing on because this is really what the book is about.

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And this predates critical race theory. This is just an aspect of critical race theory that critical race theory adopted. But the standpoint theory or this subjectivity that social location determines meaning, you find this all throughout the book.

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That's the main problem with this book. So here's some quotes and I'll give you more later. What did I do in a world in which so few black voices are prominent and the questions of my people were ignored?

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I began to look for anybody black. I began to search for theologians who could help me make sense of what it means to be black and Christian.

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And then he says, the black ecclesial interpretation is, oh, I'm sorry, this is my commentary. The black ecclesial interpretation is arbitrarily free to reject other interpretations.

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So he says this, if black biblical interpretation is to be free to chart its own path, it is also free to reject the thoroughgoing skepticism that stands as one legacy of the

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European dominance of biblical studies. So there's this idea that voices of color don't have to abide by the same rules.

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They don't have to take the knowledge stemming from European dominated biblical studies.

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That's not something that they have to incorporate into their tradition or their teaching. They can chart their own path and it's important to find people who are black and interpret the

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Bible. And this is what you're gonna see. This is sort of the problem. This is the Achilles heel for this whole book. And then here's another aspect of CRT that I see in this.

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History should be reinterpreted according to minority experience. Macaulay says either some

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Westerners have whitewashed Egyptian history by turning many of its characters into Europeans or they have not. And he goes on and I'll read you the fuller quote where he talks about the truth of history and how

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African theology, African history is ancient. And he's really trying to go back to Augustine and Hippo and Alexandria and these kinds of things.

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So it doesn't really hold much water though and I'll show you why, but it's a reinterpretation.

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It's some would call it revisionism. I think memory studies is fine. You can use that term. Now, here's the other question.

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This might be a lesser question people would have before we really get started into this, but is it a liberation theology book,

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John? You've shown me it's got some connection to critical race theory, but is it a liberation theology book? And I would say this is probably closer to what the book is actually, as far as hermeneutics are concerned.

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This would be very much, I would say supportive and just in an agreement with liberation theology.

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The way that liberation theologians read the Bible is very similar to what Esau McCulley does. Now, McCulley tries to kind of hold on to an evangelical interpretation while at the same time adopting liberation theology hermeneutics.

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It's interesting, but it really ends up being the same thing. It's a liberation theology type of approach.

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So he says, what is God's first answer to black suffering and the wider human suffering and the rage that comes alongside it?

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It is to enter that suffering alongside us as a friend and redeemer. That sounds very nice. In some ways, this is like the footprints poem, right?

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But if you understand liberation theology, and if you know that he's also quoting people like Justo Gonzales and James Cone, and he quotes

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Cone quite a bit, you'll know that the language that you're reading is a little different than the footprints poem.

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It's this idea that Jesus came and his mission was, at least the primary emphasis of his mission, one of them, is to suffer and to be a voice of the oppressed and to be relatable to those who are going through oppression.

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So it takes the actual purpose of Jesus coming, right? To seek and save the lost, to please his father by saving individuals who repented.

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It takes that and it kind of de -emphasizes that and instead tries to focus on the fact that he suffered and that that's something that we're supposed to, those who are suffering can relate to.

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And there's some, here's the thing though, there's a kernel of truth here, is there not? Hebrews talks about this.

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I mean, he can relate to our sufferings, yet he was without sin. So there is this kernel of truth there.

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The problem is when you make that the primary or the mission of Jesus, that that was why he came, this man -centered mission.

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And then liberation theology gets mystical on this element, that Jesus is kind of, he's there with you in the suffering.

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It's almost, you get the impression, it's almost like the Eucharist, the suffering and communion, the communion table almost become the same kind of thing.

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So he doesn't go deep into that, but you see that language. I, when I listened to it, I thought this is a yellow flag to say the least.

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Now what's a red flag is quoting James Cone. And he does this quite a bit. I'm gonna give you the one that stood out to me the most.

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He says, Cone rightly argues that all theology is socially located. That's it right there.

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Cone argues that all theology is socially located. That's gives away the farm. That's the liberation theology right there that comes into the hermeneutic.

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So what's the point of this book? Let's get into the book. I'm gonna read for you a longer quote. He says, I love hip hop, loved when he was younger,

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I loved hip hop because sometimes it felt as if only the rappers truly understood what it was like to experience the heady mix of danger, drama, and temptation that marked black life in the

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South. They spoke of the drugs, the violence, the encounters with the police, and even God. They did not so much offer solutions as much as they reflected on the life forced on them.

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But I also love my mother's gospel music because it filled me with hope and it connected me to something old and immovable.

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If hip hop tended towards nihilism and utilitarian ethics, the game is the game, so we do what we must to survive.

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Then my mother's music rooted in biblical texts and ideas offered a vision of something bigger and wider. The struggle

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I speak of is not merely between two genres of music. I am referring to the struggle between black nihilism and black hope.

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I am speaking of the ways in which the Christian tradition fights for and makes room for hope in a world that tempts us toward despair.

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I contend that a key element in this fight for hope in our community has been the practice of Bible reading and interpretation coming out of the black church, what

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I am calling black ecclesial interpretation. This gives you a real window into who

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Esau McCulley is, why he's writing this. There's a conflict almost going on. There's a, he's attracted to both these things, that there's the dark side, there's the rap music, and then there's his mother's gospel music, there's this light side.

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And that both of these things are kind of encapsulated in this black ecclesial interpretation, that it can make sense of the evils of the world, especially the evils of racism and slavery that he feels that he's encountered and that his ancestors have encountered.

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And then it makes, so it makes sense of those. It doesn't whitewash those. It doesn't diminish those, but at the same time, it's also gonna be orthodox and rock solid.

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That's kind of his goal. And so Amash, and my sequence is a little off here, but we'll go over this now.

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He talks about, he's very proud of the black church tradition. And so he talks about it's largely orthodox.

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It's reflected in the statements of faith of the three large black denominations, National Baptist Convention, Church of God and Christ, and African Methodist Episcopal Church.

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Now I looked at these faith statements. I'm not an expert on these denominations and what they believe in total.

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I did, something did jump out at me though. The Church of God and Christ statement of faith seems to indicate that they believe in baptismal regeneration.

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It says, we do not believe that water baptism. And then it says the word alone is a means of salvation, which means they do think that it is a means of salvation.

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It's just not alone. That's a big red flag. That's not orthodox. So his statement here is not even quite correct, but he wants to try to prove that there is this tradition, this tradition that hasn't been written down much.

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It's not, they didn't do a lot of theological work as far as a scholarly work, but they have songs and they have traditions and they have, going back years, they have churches and denominations and institutions and preachers.

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And so this is what he's trying to say is that, there's been this all along, there's this black church tradition, that's what he calls it, that's orthodox.

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And it answers this question. It fills this need. It brings together the understanding of darkness in the world and sin and evil, and then also a rootedness in orthodox theology.

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Now, I'm just saying he's not quite correct on this. At least, his statement here isn't 100 % accurate, but I'm willing to grant that there certainly are historic black denominations that have, and churches that have kept held to an orthodox theology.

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I'm sure there are. God has his people everywhere. So in every tribe, tongue, nation.

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So that's not like a big wart on the book or anything.

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The only reason I'm pointing it out is it shows that Macaulay might lack a little discernment here.

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And he's also striving for something. He's also trying to prove something, and he might be trying a little too hard.

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That this is where to find it. We're gonna find it in this tradition, in these tradition, these denominations are gonna provide the answer.

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And that's not really where the answer, I don't think is. And I'll talk about that more if I remember at the end.

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So he locates this problem. Let's talk about the problem more. He believed the liberals in seminary who told him that fundamentalists oppressed black people, yet rejected the way they downplayed the

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Bible. That's his issue. He goes to seminary, he knocks, he rubbed shoulders with a bunch of liberal professors, and he really appreciates some things about them.

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He understands that they're right about the fundamentalists. And yeah, those people are racist, but hey, you're downplaying the

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Bible. You're saying it's not even true. And he doesn't like that. He identified with evangelicals, but felt left out that they were racist and had an incorrect view of American history.

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So he felt alienated like that. Well, they just believe America's, it's the Christian nationalist thing really is what we're talking about here.

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And then he says, while I appreciated the doctrinal emphasis on scripture within evangelicalism, I needed more, he says, to feel whole and complete as a

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Christian. Now, this is interesting to me. This is a very, it illustrates my point earlier that there's a conflict in him.

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There's a need he's trying to fill. There's something that's missing. And I think this is the appeal of the book.

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We all have that. All self -help books are this way. You're missing something. You need something.

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If you just did this, if you just had this, if you were just part of this group, and we as humans go on an ever never -ending search for whatever that is.

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And I'm here to tell you that there's nothing that ultimately fulfills you in this life in an ultimate sense.

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The best, most satisfied life you can have is if you come to terms with that and you realize that true satisfaction comes in the next life.

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And there's so many great blessings God has given us in this life that we don't deserve and we enjoy them. And so anyway, he wants, he's looking on this, he's on this quest to feel complete.

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And he doesn't find evangelicalism. And he says, enslaved black people, even those who remained illiterate in effect questioned white exegesis, that there's this problem that white people, evangelicals, white people, they, you know, their interpretation of the scripture isn't correct.

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That might be what it is. That might be what he's lacking and he needs to search. So the quest is, he begins to search for theologians who could help make sense of what it means to be black and Christian.

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He says, I was asked where one could go that shares their social concerns and take seriously their belief that scripture, all scriptures are

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God's word to us for our good. Who could they read that combined both? And he's saying both in the context here, both this social concern, this is really social justice and believes the

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Bible is God's word. How do we find both? And then he realizes something.

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This is the realization. Page 17, he says, the social location of enslaved persons caused them to read the

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Bible differently. This unabashedly located reading has marked African -American interpretation since.

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Did this social location mean blacks rejected biblical texts that did not match their understanding of God?

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Did blacks create a canon within a canon? And he also says on page 20, everybody has been reading the

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Bible from their locations, but we are honest about it. What makes black interpretation black then are the collective experiences, customs, and habits of black people in this country.

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So he's saying, this is the eureka moment. This is what I'm lacking. This is what I'm looking for.

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This is the balance. This is the reconciliation of these two sides of me. We can have this tradition answers the question that we can have the biblical text.

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We can have the canon. We can have the Bible. We can also have social justice.

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We can, and it's found in this perspective, this experience that traces back to even enslaved persons.

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They were able to read the Bible differently. That's what he says, differently than other people. And in so doing, they found the key.

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Now you're already seeing the Gnostic language come out here. They found the key because of how they read it, because of their experience, because they were enslaved.

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And it gave them this balance. It was the key that fit the keyhole that Esau Macaulay needs filled, a door he needs open.

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So hermeneutics, let's talk about it. Interpreting the Bible. Biblical interpretation is not a one -sided monologue, he says.

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Oh, really? So it's not just the Bible speaking to you. It's not one -sided. Says the tradition of biblical interpretation is dialogical, clearly beginning with the concern of black

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Christians. Okay, wait, hold on, stop. That's where it begins. So it begins, it doesn't begin with God has spoken, authors have written, inspired by him, and text is there for us to glean the information that's objectively there.

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It starts instead with the concerns of black Christians. But being willing to listen to the scriptures as God speaks back to us.

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So then God speaks back to the concerns of black Christians. We have a patience with the biblical text born of its use against us.

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We have had to wrestle like Jacob until the text delivered its blessing. And so he's saying there's a unique experience.

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Black people have suffered. Therefore, if you start with them, with black people, because of their suffering, then you'll get a more correct reading of scripture.

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That's the point of the book. And so the interpretation takes into account some assumptions.

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One is that there's power dynamics at play. And I'll give you some concrete examples here of how this works.

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Paul does not focus on individual actions, he says in Romans 13, but on power structures. So submitting to government, that's about power structures.

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You see, even though in the context of the passage is actually, it is about individual actions. That is the subject.

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He was recognizing that there is institution that God has created, but that Esau McCulley is trying to take passages, he's finding passages that will support his metaphysic, the way he views the world.

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And power structures, so ideologues tend to reduce things down to power structures and oppression levels and these kinds of things.

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And so he's looking for passages that will kind of support this. He compares the Israelites and Babylonians to black and whites in the book.

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So he's looking in the Bible and trying to take this, at least what he thinks of, what he's been really, in some ways, perhaps conditioned to think of as the

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American experience. And he's imposing that on the biblical text. And so this is how he's reading the

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Bible. And this is part of the black interpretation, as he calls it. And the long and short of it is this interpretation renders activism.

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That's the result of it. People need to get busy. We have never had the luxury of separating our faith from political action, he says.

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The present evil age, he states in Galatians 1 .4, can be understood to include the demonic evil of slavery in Rome and economic exploitation of the populace, both of which existed because of the policies of Roman leadership as dictated by spiritual forces.

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So he's reads into Paul, that when Paul talks about the present evil age, he's talking about, he must be talking about slavery in the

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Roman Empire. Treating women equally, as called for in Galatians 3 .28,

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would be a political act in an empire that had certain views about what a woman's place might be.

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So he's turning Paul into this social justice crusader, that when he says, hey, there's neither Jew nor Greek nor male nor female.

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Well, that's about treating women equally. That's an egalitarian call Paul's making there. Now we know it's not.

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We know that's not what he's saying. But that's the interpretation that Esau Macaulay's putting on it because of the black interpretive ecclesial interpretation.

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The testimony of Mary in Luke 1 is that even in the shadow of the empire, there is a space for hope.

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And that sometimes in that space, God calls us from the shadows to join him in his great work of salvation and liberation.

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And he calls Mary at one point, the patron saint of black interpretation.

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It's interesting what he does with Mary. So this becomes a political, he inserts political messages and activism into all these texts that are primarily concerned with spiritual realities when they were written in their presence and the circumstances in which they took place.

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In the Exodus, so this is the Exodus story, God acted to free a people from slavery, not as an end of itself, but so that the newly liberated people might testify to a different way of being human.

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So you see how the primary purpose becomes activism. It's about a different way of being human.

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It's about scaling back political oppression. And we can't just look at these passages and think

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Paul is just talking about a present spiritual evil age. We can't look at Galatians and think that, well, it's just saying that the salvation comes to all people without barriers because of gender or ethnicity or these things.

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We have to look at it differently. We have to impose this activist understanding.

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And that's what the black ecclesial interpretation essentially is. Now, slavery is one of the big things he talks about in the book.

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And it's very interesting to me how he does this. And I wanna give him kudos for this. I wanna say something positive about the book. And that's this,

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Esau McCulley actually tries to grapple with this. And I think he is wrong. I think he comes down in the wrong place, but he gives it an attempt.

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And what I've seen from so many evangelical, not just social justice activists, those on our side of this issue of social justice, those who are against the social justice movement, say they are, they do not know how to handle this.

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They have a hard time. A lot of the time, I've seen this. When I used to be on Twitter, I'm not anymore.

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I saw this all the time, that they would do like bend over backwards to make the text say something it doesn't say in scripture because they wanted to get away from the

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Bible, endorsing slavery, or an atheist, of course, bring this up all the time, or somehow the

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Bible's pro all kinds of horrible things, genocide and oppressing women, and then slavery being one of them.

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It regulates it instead of does away with it and abolishes it.

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How do we deal with this? Well, we have to then twist scriptures to make them say things they don't say. We have to read into scriptures.

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And I see conservatives, so -called conservatives today, doing this very same thing. I have this quaint idea as a

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Christian that the saints for thousands of years have believed that I don't think we should apologize for what scripture says.

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We need to conform our own lives and our own thinking to what scripture says. And no, scripture is not as bad as the atheists portray it to be.

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It's not bad at all, actually. It's very good. The character of God is manifested in his moral precepts.

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But it's not this harsh thing that atheists try to make out. And so I think we can have some nuance and some complexity and we can explain what biblical slavery, if you wanna call it that, from Hebrew times was.

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We can try to flesh out what Paul's regulations in a Roman slave system, which in many ways was even worse, much worse than the

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American slave system because they had normalized sex slavery in gladiatorial arenas and man capture was pretty, it was permitted on the borders.

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By the time the federal period rolls around in the United States, that's not even, that's looked down upon.

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You don't, man capture's forbidden. It's more, it never happens.

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There's smuggling that happens, but Rome, it was more normalized. I'll just put it that way.

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So anyway, all that to say, Paul has regulations in that kind of an environment for how masters and slaves should react in that labor relationship.

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And I don't apologize for what the Bible teaches, for what Paul said, what Jesus said, what Moses said.

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We just, we should not apologize for it. That is my stand. So here's what Esau McCulley says about this.

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Here's how he tries to deal with this topic. He says, old Testament slavery regulations were permitted because of the hardness of heart.

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Now, so he's taking what Jesus said about divorce and he's imposing that onto slavery and saying, well, it's the same thing with slavery.

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Now, could that be that there was a hardness of heart? Yeah, I guess. I mean, but you're not getting this from the text.

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This is assumption. And we need to be clear on that. And Esau McCulley needs to be clear on that. But because he's operating out of this black ecclesial interpretation, he doesn't have to treat assumptions like assumptions.

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He can treat them like they're, that's just the truth. That's just the way it is. And that's dangerous, that's wrong.

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And that's the recipe for making the text say anything you want it to say. McCulley uses the overall narrative to override specific passages.

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So he says that the Exodus, he uses the Exodus story to interpret the rest of the passages on the subject of slavery.

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So look at the Exodus. God freed the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt and heard their cry.

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And therefore the regulations on slavery in the Hebrew nation, those cannot now somehow be thought of as legitimate moral guides for normative moral guides or something like that, because that's not really what

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God's heart is that he doesn't like slavery, he thinks it's wrong. It's a sin, in fact,

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McCulley goes that far, it's a sin. But because of hardness of heart, because they're gonna sin anyway, God decides, well, let's regulate it, right?

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That's kind of his interpretation. So he says the black interpretive tradition was canonical. When faced with difficult passages like 1

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Timothy 6, one through three, which talks about the master -slave relationships, they turned to the wider testimony of the scripture and read individual texts in light of the whole biblical narrative.

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So here's the key to it. And this is how, this is a really good way of showing how this black ecclesial interpretation is supposed to work.

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The, you're supposed to start with these broad, and by the way, this is how liberalism works. You start with these very broad,

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God's about love, God's about justice. And you can impose on those terms, whatever you want, means wearing a mask, right?

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It means whatever. It's about this. I mean, look, the Nazis could do this. Anyone could do this.

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And then fitting underneath that umbrella that of justice or love or whatever, you fit the specific passages and you interpret them by that.

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So God wouldn't contradict his heart of love. Therefore, when he talks about slavery here, or you could take other things that are not politically correct, is the treatment of women.

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What he's, he's not contradicting what he, what we all know he really feels about this subject.

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What he's trying to do is he's just trying to, because people are gonna sin anyway, regulate it.

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That's, so there's this assumption that's unfounded, that's unargued for, that just gets inserted.

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And it just, it can be used by anyone, but he's saying, well, no, it's our critique. It's our critique of the status quo that should be the one that we impose on God's character, apparently.

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Now, a little note about the Exodus here. If you use the Exodus to interpret the rest of the Old Testament, which is, that's true.

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That's what a lot of the social justice activists do. They take stories like that, which are narrative, and then they try to make them out to be some moral teachings.

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And they take something that is descriptive and they make it prescriptive. And then they overturn actual commands of God that are prescriptive.

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They have to ignore certain things. And I'll tell you one of them. In the Exodus story, while the children of Israel are about to embark on their journey outside of Egypt, they have the

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Passover. And if you recall, in celebrating the Passover, what are they to do? They are to, they have a command right then and there to administer the

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Passover to their slaves. This is part of the Exodus story, includes the assumption that Hebrew slavery is going to exist.

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As they're being freed from Egyptian slavery, there's an assumption that there's going to be Hebrew slavery. Now, you have to make sense of that.

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I don't have a problem making sense of that in my mind. And I just don't wanna let the text speak for itself.

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The slavery of Egypt was harsh. It was unjust. It was a evil labor relationship. The slavery of the

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Hebrews was regulated by God's law. And there's a big difference there. And we can show how the

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Roman slave system and how even the American slave system fell short of God's law in certain respects.

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But what you can't do is override Paul's commands and his instructions to slave masters in, and slaves in pagan systems.

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You can't just say that, well, you know, that Paul didn't mean it.

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Or Paul was trying to secretly, I mean, Esau McCulloch ties himself up in knots trying to say that Paul was really trying to somehow end the practice through his teaching.

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And what Paul seems to be doing, and I don't contest the idea that the gospel, people treating slaves as brothers in Christ and even giving them a place in the church and positions in the church will lead to a social upheaval that will end slavery.

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I don't contest that, but I, or could end slavery. What I contest though, is the hard and fast rule that McCulloch tries to make that it's always evil.

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It's always wrong. It's always sin. And that we can't, when the Bible has passages that regulate it or talk about slave master relationships in positive terms, that we just can't really believe those.

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We have to like subvert our common sense and adopt the black ecclesial interpretation.

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And what's to keep you from doing that with other things, right? You know, when the Bible talks about,

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I don't know, homosexuality, right? You know, you could start doing, going down the same road. That's part of the problem with this. So I, here's my takeaway that I want people to remember because certainly not a fan of slavery.

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And despite the fact that so many evangelical leftists wanna make me out to be that.

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And as I saw in one comment recently, I'm also apparently the sexist patriarchal, patriarchal sexist, misogynist.

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That was the word, I'm a misogynist. They try to paint me and other conservatives in these ways.

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But the reality is the reason we don't like some of these things, slavery being one of them, we don't like slavery for a whole host of reasons.

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We don't like it when it doesn't conform to God's laws, Christians. We don't like it though, because we want people to, it is the key thing to make their own choices, to be self -reliant, to be independent, self -governing, taking responsibility and able to fulfill the commands of God that he has given for parents and children and families.

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And it's really hard to do when you're a slave to someone else. And I will include debt slavery in that. I will include welfare, generational welfare in that.

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I will include, even to some extent, sweatshop labor in that. I will include the civil slavery that we're going through right now, which in some ways is much worse than other forms of slavery that have existed in some societies where we have an all -powerful state that gets to determine what our rights are and what we can and can't do and has total and complete control as if the state is

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God. There's no escape from that. That's, I mean, you're talking Soviet Union, China, and now we're going into that very same thing.

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We hate that. That's wrong. And we can stand against that, especially civil slavery, we can stand against that on biblical grounds.

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You're outside of the role of the state. The kind of slavery Paul's talking about is within the realm of the family.

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It's not within the realm of the state. And this is where Paul regulates it. And this is where Christians who are gonna be honest with the text have to then say, we have to go with Paul.

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We have to say that in a society that permits this thing that we don't like, but in a society that has this as a factor, and you can't really necessarily end it immediately or else you'll have all kinds of problems, then the best way, the best thing to do is to be reformational.

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Not revolutionary, reformational, do what Paul did. Slave and master relationships need to be good.

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Slaves need to honor their masters and masters need to treat their slaves well.

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And there should be penalties, certainly, for not doing that, right? This is, and this is the position that gets me in so much trouble with some people, but that's the position

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I hold on this. And I have to, because this is what the biblical text I think demands of me. And I'm open to hearing from others.

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But Esau McCulley, his way of dealing with this is just to basically put the biblical text on the side, where we don't deal with it.

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We're not gonna talk about it. He believes slavery is always a sin. And he points, it gets ridiculous.

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There are three regulations that prove slavery is wrong. The practice of manumitting Hebrew slaves. Okay, well, that creates a real problem.

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Manumitting Hebrew slaves, but not foreign slaves. Oh boy. Okay, so is this racist now? I mean, you tie yourself up in more knots if you go down this road.

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Some rules around mistreatment of slaves. Yeah, it was regulated. That's right. And guess what?

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Even in American slavery, I'm not saying that weren't people, slave masters that got away with horrible things.

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There's even bosses today that get away with horrible things with their employees. But there were laws on the books that defended, there were even slaves.

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I have examples of this. Marshall DeRosa talks about this in some of his books. I believe it's Marshall DeRosa. He talks about slaves that took their masters to court.

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So you even have some of that in American slavery. But he would say, well, that means they say it's a sin, which doesn't really hold water.

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And then some rules around the mistreatment of slaves. I'm sorry, I already read that.

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And then the sanctuary given to runaway slaves. And this sanctuary though, the problem with Macaulay's interpretation is that it wasn't like every runaway slave should be given a safe haven.

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It was specifically runaway slaves from pagan nations that came to the true God, the God of Israel.

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It wasn't within Israel. So this is another problem with his interpretation. Macaulay thinks that Onesimus in the

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Book of Philemon wasn't a runaway slave. He escaped. So he's just parsing. He's trying to split hairs to make his narrative work because he thinks if you say runaway slave you're centering the master and you can't do that.

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And he says, Paul, this is the kicker. This is what everyone who, if you haven't agreed with anything I've said, that's fine. But this is something you need to take into account.

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Paul does not go all the way and say, let's actualize what the gospel implies. Instead, he says that even in this changed circumstance, we still owe them love and respect as the church begins to fully implement the realities of the gospel.

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So this, so in Macaulay's world, using the black ecclesial interpretation, the apostle

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Paul does not actually go as far as the gospel goes. You really wanna believe that.

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You really wanna follow half of the New Testament written by a guy that would not dare go as far as the gospel goes.

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Because the gospel apparently is about liberating people from human slavery.

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And that's where you're starting to see the heresy creep in. This is why you can't separate the social justice stuff from false teaching.

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It's not just a political thing, it is theological. And there's false teaching right there.

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And it gets worse. I'll show you more statements, but I'm just trying to help people understand when you see statements like this,

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Paul does not go all the way and say, let's actualize what the gospel implies. Then there's an assumption here that the gospel somehow teaches that labor relationships, it gets into the details of labor relationships and what's right and what's wrong.

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And it becomes an ethical guide for those kinds of things. That's law, we're in law, that's not gospel. So let's keep going here.

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Overcoming inadequacies. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time here, I don't think, but there seems to be a motivation with Esau Macaulay.

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He really stretches things, really tries hard to, I guess, make the, in his mind, black heritage, this really important and noble thing that, and here's the thing, the problem is it is.

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That's the thing that I was thinking. I'm like, this is so sad because there are heroes of African lineage, sub -Saharan

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African lineage, that you can point to and say, hey, that guy right there, yeah, he's a hero. We can look at that person and say, look, for me,

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Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver were heroes growing up. I can look at them, I can emulate them, I can admire them.

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But Esau Macaulay seems to want, it's not enough for him. He has got to try to change history somehow.

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So he talks about how basically because in Northern Egypt, there were theologians and there was,

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I mean, look, this was when Egypt, it was controlled by the Romans, okay? This isn't sub -Saharan

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Africa, but he tries to make out like, well, it's on the same continent as Africa, therefore, that's part of our history.

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And that, and he really castigates white people who he says whitewashed this era of the early church.

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And we can claim this as our heritage. He talks about in almost a way that sounds like the

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Hebrew Israelites today, like you find in like Times Square, he says, as it relates to the 12 tribes, then there was never a biologically pure Israel.

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Israel was always multiethnic and multinational as a black man. When I look to the biblical story, I do not see story of someone else in which

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I find my place only by some feat of imagination. Instead, God's purposes include me as an irreplaceable feature along with my

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African ancestors. We are the first of those joined to Abraham's family in anticipation of the rest of the nations of the earth.

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Let me ask you this. What if you're Chinese? Yeah, what if you're Chinese? Are you then left in this position of, man,

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I can't see myself in the story, someone else's story, because you weren't part of the

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Exodus? He tries to stretch and make out like, well, they're Africans were part of the Exodus because it's coming from Egypt, therefore, his people are part of this, which

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I think that's a stretch, but let's say that's true. What about the people that can't share that story? Why is that so significant that he must have this?

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The diverse gatherings of black and brown during the Exodus bodies, newly liberated from slavery, is directly connected to God's promise to Abraham that he would make him a father of many nations.

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I mean, it could be that there were people that came out with the Israelites. But again, there's so much speculation.

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There's so much assumption here. And, but he has to have it. There's so much of a pressure. He's gotta have this.

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The Ethiopian eunuch. He says, if the Ethiopian eunuch did not connect with Jesus as the one who suffered injustice, then he would be the starting point of an unending stream of black believers who found their own dignity and self -worth through the dignity and power that Christ received at his resurrection.

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So much speculation that the Ethiopian eunuch is reading and connecting with Jesus because Jesus suffered and he suffered.

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And this is just imposing Esau Macaulay's own, what

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I read in the beginning is that the darkness and the suffering that with rap music and the way that he thinks of his own history of his people, it's him imposing that onto the biblical text.

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And this is somehow part of the black ecclesial interpretation. And so what are some wrong interpretations?

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If this is the right way to interpret scripture, what are some wrong ones? Well, he says, Professor Alan Dwight Callahan quotes an early catechism used to teach slaves.

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It reads, who gave you a master and a mistress? God gave them to me. Who says that you must obey them?

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God says, I must. What book tells you these things? The Bible. And then he says early black conversion entailed finding the real

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Jesus among the false alternatives contending for power in the church culture. So this is false. He says, this is wrong.

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This is evil. This is not right. This isn't biblical. And so this would be a wrong interpretation of scripture, except that scripture actually does say this.

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Now, the thing is, I've done some study on this topic of what churches specifically preached to masters and slaves in relation to their relationships, their labor relationship.

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And you actually don't find as much of this as we would be led to believe today. It's actually, it's like,

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I think I was reading in one book that was saying that the author had estimated,

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I think it might've been John Blassingame, but he was saying that it was like 15 % of the biblical instruction given to slaves was about submission.

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It was something like that. So it's, yeah, does it happen? Well, the Bible talks about it. So yeah, I mean, it happens, but he's just so offended by this that this would even be, how dare we have slaves quote and say what the

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Bible says. The social location of the enslavers looking for justification for sin distorted the plain meaning of the text.

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The social location of African peoples who came to us to the text, asking whether there was a place for us in the story gave them the eyes to see

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Genesis's true meaning. You can't see the true meaning of the text unless apparently you have a social location.

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And this is where it's postmodern. There, this is destroying objective truth. This is Gnosticism.

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This is you can't know the text unless you come to me first. And I will tell you what it means. Well, how is that any different than the supposed slave masters that he is arguing against?

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And there were slave masters like this. There was evil slave masters who they didn't, and by the way, in some of the

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Southern states, there were laws passed because they wanted, they did not want their slaves reading abolitionist literature that encouraged them to kill their masters and have big rebellions and insurrections.

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And they had some bad experiences with that. Nat Turner was one of them. And there were some smaller ones. And there was some really bad ones in the

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Caribbean. And so they, some of these states passed laws that, you know, you can't teach your slave to read because if they read, they'll become, they'll have their own, they'll read these tracts.

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And then it was through these churches, these black churches, that some of these insurrections or not,

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I guess, yeah, insurrections would be the proper word, would start. And so they made these laws.

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These were wrong laws. These were evil laws, in my opinion. And I understand why, you go to the context of the time, you can understand why people were afraid of that kind of thing, but it was wrong.

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They need to be able to know the scripture. They need to be able to understand what it says. And that's,

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I think I can, I'm on solid ground in saying this. And so putting a barrier between someone in the

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Bible would be wrong. So there were slave masters who would do that. You gotta come to me to understand the text and stuff.

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But that's what Esau Macaulay's doing. That's my point. He's saying, yeah, you gotta come to us if you wanna understand.

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Where do you find this in scripture? You don't. We do not hold to some broken and distorted application of Joseph's story in Genesis.

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No, what happened to the enslaved and their descendants in this country was and remains an unmitigated evil. Jesus' interpreted method allows us to state plainly that God didn't intend our slavery.

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What he's saying is that he is denying providence here. Esau Macaulay's denying the providence.

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He's saying you can't do, Joseph was mistreated and stuff. And people will point to that and say, look, what man intended for evil,

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God intended for good. I see that with things like even the transatlantic slave trade.

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And you had some people that, and according to Esau Macaulay, I guess, because of Egypt, you would have the gospel went to Africa first.

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But look, Sub -Saharan Africa, it was dark. They didn't have the gospel. And many of them were saved out of spiritual bondage because they came to the

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United States and other places where they met Christians and they heard the true story of Jesus.

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And this is something that we can certainly look at and say, just like Joseph did, that what you intended for evil,

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God intended for good. But Esau Macaulay says, no, we can't do that. And he said, and look, the subtitle for the book, this is the thing.

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The subtitle for his book is, An Exercise in Hope. How does that give you any hope?

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Look, if evil, if there's a purposeless evil out there, I don't know, like, give up, right?

56:29

Just give up. He maintains there's a conspiracy. He says, the question that ought to keep

56:34

Christians up at night, right? It's very serious. Christians up at night is not the political activism of black

56:39

Christians. So he thinks that keeps us up at night. I mean, I can be honest with you.

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I've never been up at night late, one night, not in my entire life because of the political activism of black Christians, not once.

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He says, the question though should be how 1 Timothy 2, 1 -4 came to dominate the conversation about the

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Christian's responsibility to the state. How did we manage to ignore the clearly political implications of Paul's casual remarks about the evil age and Galatians and his wider reflections on the links between evil powers and politicians?

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How did John's condemnation of Rome and Revelation fall from view? Why did Jesus' public rebuke of Herod get lost to history?

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It may have been because it was in the best interest of those in power to silence black voices.

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This is stupid. I don't use that word much, but this is stupid. He is saying that, he's insinuating here, there's a big conspiracy to silence black voices, to try to interpret the

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Bible in ways that are wrong, to keep them subservient, to keep them dominated.

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When Paul talks about the evil age we're in, it's not spiritual, that's about Roman slavery.

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And we need to recognize that. And if we don't recognize that, we're just trying to keep, we're gonna try to silence black voices, trying to keep our power.

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Look at the accusation he's making. This is serious. This is a serious accusation he's making about other

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Christians. He can't back it up. It's just, it's in his head.

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How about the gospel? And this is where, if so far the whole thing, you think, well, John, you're just a conservative, right wing, blah, blah, blah.

58:25

Okay, put that all on the shelf for one moment and let me talk to you about the gospel. Let me read for you some quotes that Esau McCulley talks about in regards to the gospel.

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He says, black Christians who came to Christ surrounded by the false gospel given to them by their slave masters were right to see in the

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Exodus narratives, a God worthy of their trust. So I guess God has to become worthy of someone's trust.

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And he's worthy of their trust because of the Exodus story. And they were surrounded though by a false gospel.

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So you mean to tell me these black Christians who became saved in this country because of the work of Christians, some of them would have been slave masters, some of them would not have been, but because of Christians in this country, that they had a false gospel and somehow it was these black

59:15

Christians because of their social location were able to somehow discern the false gospel and from the false gospel, construct a true gospel.

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And I mean, look at the position that's puts, I mean, it's so arrogant that you couldn't have possibly had the true gospel.

59:31

I guess Philemon couldn't have had the true gospel then. Because if you do something against, if you participate in slavery in any way, even if it's something outside of your control,

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I guess you inherit slaves, you're good to them. You try to do what the Bible says and you're in a society that has that as a feature in the society.

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You can't be a Christian. So what does this do to all the patriarchs? Well, I mean, you really wanna destroy the

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Bible? This is a good way to start doing it. That they had a false gospel. They just all had a false gospel if they were, if you had slaves or you're in a society that had them, you must have a false gospel.

01:00:10

He says, for the African -American Christian, the Mirage is the black church born of a truly miraculous circumstance and whose witness to Jesus has served as something of a forerunner preparing

01:00:19

America to accept a truer and fuller gospel. So America doesn't have a true and full gospel because they need the black church to tell them about that.

01:00:28

They don't have that yet. These tools, if I have read the tradition correctly, allow early black believers, talking about tools of interpretation, interpreting the

01:00:37

Bible, have allowed early black believers to argue that there was a difference between true Christianity and its distortion.

01:00:44

So yeah, there was a distorted Christianity. Look at these accusations. You don't have the true gospel.

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You had a distorted Christianity. You were worshiping a God that wasn't worthy of the trust of black people.

01:00:56

He's accusing people of not being Christians. That's what he's saying. He said, if you're involved in oppression in the mind of Esau Macaulay, then you weren't a true

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Christian. He is strapping this law, the social justice -derived law to the gospel.

01:01:14

That's what he's doing. And saying you can't have the gospel unless you follow these laws. This is false teaching, my friend.

01:01:22

And all the evangelical institutions that are importing this, they're compromised.

01:01:29

They are compromised. There's no way that they should ever have gotten through a book review process in a bookshop or a library at any evangelical institution, but somehow it's everywhere.

01:01:42

And last but not least, I wanted to read for you this. This kind of justifies all of it. This is the thing, by the way, that no matter what errors are in the book, this is the thing that is going to keep people in the evangelical world who want to import this kind of thing, this will keep them doing it.

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And even those who don't, this will keep their mouth shut. This is what Esau Macaulay says on page 67.

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Righteousness, or justice then, is inescapably political. Hungering for justice is hungering for the kingdom.

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And this is the posturing. If you don't hunger for justice in the way Esau Macaulay does, if you don't wanna get political in the way

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Esau Macaulay wants you to get political, you aren't hungering for the kingdom. You're against the kingdom of God.

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And that is the thing that the evangelicals don't wanna do. They have suckered into this idea that the kingdom of God is left -wing political activism somehow.

01:02:45

So that's reading the Bible while black by Esau Macaulay. And that's my review of it.

01:02:53

Obviously, I'm not in favor of the book. And some of you might not agree with some of my assessment here, but I'm trying to be as honest as I possibly can.

01:03:01

I'm trying to help you. So just to wrap everything up here, you see elements of critical race theory.

01:03:07

You certainly see liberation theology. You see post -modernism in the way that he interprets scripture. Because you can't have a meaning that's objective, that's in the text, that's just the text is the meaning.

01:03:19

It's gotta be some interplay between a social location and people living in that social location and taking their experiences of suffering and bringing them to the test and asking questions of the text.

01:03:29

It's gotta be that. And I write about this in my book, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict. This is something

01:03:35

I tackled directly in the chapter on social justice epistemology. But for those reasons,

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I can't endorse this book and I have to say that if you see it, you should say something probably.

01:03:50

If you have any power whatsoever in a church or an institution and you see this book being promoted, you probably should say something about this because this is a dangerous book.

01:04:00

And I would go, especially if they're generally people who would respond to Orthodox theology,

01:04:05

I would go to those sections on the gospel and then start asking good questions about them because they really show a

01:04:11

Galatian heresy type gospel. And I think the

01:04:16

Bible's better. I think the Bible gives us a better ethic than Esau McCulley's, whether he knows it or not.

01:04:23

It does give a basis for the black dignity that he wants to feel a sense of belonging and to feel a sense of respect for and gratitude for his own culture and his own people.

01:04:38

The Bible gives a basis for this. God is the one that created languages and divided people up and set boundaries and move people around and punishes them for time sometimes and then rewards them and empires rise and empires fall.

01:04:54

And this is all God's doing. And he puts you in a family and he gives you traditions and it's for such a time as this.

01:05:00

He didn't make a mistake in where he puts you. So that's what I'd emphasize. And you can certainly go back in the historical record and find people really just about no matter what tradition you're part of or what people you're part of, even if you're part of some tribe that's never heard the gospel and you're the first one, you can certainly even point to things in those cultures that you can say, okay, you know what?

01:05:22

This is grandma's recipe, right? You can, there's things you can take pride in, so to speak that are good, that God's made.

01:05:29

You don't have to stretch things. You don't have to try to, hey, my dad can beat up your dad.

01:05:35

That's kind of how Esau McCulley comes across a little like, hey, my people, you know, we're better because look, we were able to interpret the

01:05:42

Bible better than you. We were able to this and that and the other thing. And you don't have to stretch it.

01:05:48

Just say your people overcame slavery. Your people, you know, my ancestors, you know, here's what they're doing now.

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And in here, look what the Lord has done in my life and how he's brought me to a place where I know the gospel.

01:06:01

And I don't know, it's just, to me, this is sad. This doesn't lead to hope.

01:06:07

This leads to despair ultimately. And so that's my take on it. I hope that was helpful.

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Link is in the info section. I'll put the Patreon link there as well. If you wanna get the PDF or the

01:06:21

PowerPoint of this, it will help you. I have page numbers as well if you need that resource.