FOREWORD

Liberation for all people has been the central political debate in the development of the democratic nation formed as the United States. African American agency has been key to this discussion from the beginning, even if this part of the story is less reported and less well known in the country’s central myths. Since the civil rights movement, scholarly efforts have been directed more intentionally toward the original sources of the formidable black thinkers from the eighteenth century onward. In the treatment of this literature, scholars of religion have often divided many of the early African American sources into two categories, those interested in political liberation and those engaged in spiritual liberation. Lisa Bowens has discovered an odd—but significant—link between these two prominent understandings of freedom: the words and writings of the first-century Jew Paul of Tarsus. The author provides a wide-ranging study guiding the reader through a variety of genres—political speeches, essays, sermons, autobiographies, and conversion stories—in order to make her case that most, if not all, of these interpreters saw themselves—along with and through the words of Paul—as “divine mouthpieces bridging the gap between the divine and human.”

African American Readings of Paul makes the case that reading Scripture as identity formation, group enhancement, survival literature, and world construction was part of early African American thinking, even while religious and political institutions opposed to the humanity of black folks utilized the same collection of sacred texts.

Readers will be pleased to discover many gems within this volume. Let me mention only four:

• The use of early (eighteenth-century) petitions: Bowens demonstrates that during the American Revolutionary period, many such petitions rhetorically negotiated “Pauline” texts to enhance their arguments for claims for freedom. Bowens is to be commended for locating these petitions and analyzing them for their use of biblical passages as excellent early resources for African American interpretation. Outside of traditional sources (e.g., sermons), these “petitions” represent early oral expression within these communities.
• Recognition of the historical backdrop to the myth of white superiority: with the use of Josiah Priest and many others (including leading white biblical theologians such as Samuel May and Charles Hodge), Bowens provides key discussions on select writers and their arguments in support of the myth of white superiority as instrumental to the prominent ideologies of the time. While many white abolitionists argued for the freedom of blacks, the same abolitionists were developing plans to establish separate communities for the formerly enslaved in colonized spaces. Even as African Americans argued for their civil rights one century after formal emancipation, many white religious communities called for patience, not believing wholeheartedly in the full humanity of their fellow citizens of a darker hue.
• The hermeneutical appeal to the Spirit: the author includes several stories in which it is claimed that the Spirit spoke to empower and to instruct when legal stipulations were in place to hinder literacy and leadership. There are a number of striking accounts herein, including John Jea’s vision of an angelic figure with a big Bible in its hands—as the Spirit spoke to him, even when the Bible did not!—or Jarena Lee’s vision of a pulpit with a Bible on it, or Zilpha Elaw’s vision confirmed by a milking cow. As Bowens emphasizes from these (final two) accounts, black women were doubly criticized for their race in a white supremacist society and for their gender in a patriarchal ecclesial setting. They utilized these “visions” to interpret their Bibles, and not the other way around; an emphasis on the Spirit who allows them necessary agency to become critical interpreters of their contexts despite institutional constraints. As Bowens puts it succinctly: “Although they may have been denied access to education, they did have access to God and God had access to them, access that no law could contravene.”
• The emphasis on a “body hermeneutic”: Bowens shows repeatedly that the “body” is a contested site throughout these investigations. During the early period, black bodies were oftentimes enslaved bodies, under the control of someone else, yet blacks read with their bodies and, as Bowens’s insightfully argues, used their bodies as a way to interpret Paul. During the civil rights period of the mid-twentieth century, they offered their bodies—in King’s words, following Romans 12:1—“as a sacrifice” for others. They employed a sophisticated theology of the body (and the embodied) in order to reread and reclaim Paul and to expose the Spirit’s infusion of their bodies as fully human in the sight of God. They were writing and speaking their fleshly, black bodies into existence.

These pro-Paul interpreters did not utilize his words to accept the status quo. Rather, as Bowens has carefully shown, these engaged interpreters have called many things into question: white supremacy, human bondage, trading in human bodies, black dehumanization, and patriarchal leadership roles within black ecclesial circles. These folks used Paul to make change within their surroundings rather than accept a socially conservative reading of the ancient apostle—still common today in many African American settings.

Readers will also discover extensive citations of many primary sources. Though necessarily selective in its referencing to representative texts, African American Readings of Paul does not shy away from those individuals whose interpretation of Paul would have clashed with others, even while fighting on the same side for black human dignity. Bowens recognizes the significance, for example, of Howard Thurman’s and Albert Cleage’s preference for Jesus (over against Paul). Despite these outliers, the project reveals an extensive African American (and proto-womanist) tradition engaged in the practice of reclaiming Paul from white supremacist and black patriarchal discursive modes.

EMERSON B. POWERY