“Honey, it ’pears when I can read dis good book I shall be nearer to God…. I only wants to read dis book, dat I may know how to live; den I hab no fear ’bout dying.”1
God will not suffer us, always to be oppressed. Our sufferings will come to an end.2
In his work, Martin Mittelstadt distinguishes between historical criticism, literary criticism, and reception history in the field of biblical studies. He writes that historical criticism attempts to re-create the world behind the text, whereas literary criticism strives to encounter the Bible as story. Reception history focuses on what the text has meant and “revisit[s] stories of the Scriptures read, interpreted, viewed, and performed through the centuries.” In fact, as Mittelstadt states, those engaged in reception history “search for lost voices, interpreters both new and old, and place these voices in the grand symphony of interpretations, a never-ending succession of performances on the biblical story.”3 The analysis in the previous chapters has accomplished all the aspects that Mittelstadt recognizes as important to the task of reception history. The previous investigation has revisited Pauline Scripture as read, interpreted, viewed, and performed through the centuries by black interpreters. It has also explored black hermeneuts—some well known, others not so well known—and attempted to highlight their voices as significant for black interpretive history of Scripture in regard to Paul. Their voices deserve placement in the “grand symphony” of biblical hermeneutics overall, and especially in relation to black understandings and appropriations of Pauline Scripture. Indeed, as the previous study has shown, the Nachleben (afterlife, posthistory) of Pauline Scripture has overwhelmingly positive dimensions in black scriptural interpretive history.4
Vincent Wimbush once asked, “How might putting African Americans at the center of the study of the Bible affect the study of the Bible?”5 This study has reframed his question slightly by exploring how putting African Americans’ reception of Paul at the center of Pauline hermeneutics might affect the study of Paul. What happens when African Americans are at the center of Pauline interpretation? What might be the implications and ramifications of construing the study of Paul through African American lenses?
These questions inevitably lead us back to the extensive analysis in the previous chapters and to the primary question that began this volume: How have African Americans from the 1700s to the mid-twentieth century interpreted Paul and his letters? As demonstrated by the survey of the black hermeneuts in this monograph, this question, along with the other questions—how might putting African Americans’ reception of Paul at the center of Pauline hermeneutics affect the study of Paul? what happens when African Americans are at the center of Pauline interpretation? and what might be the implications of such a reading?—can be answered in numerous ways. African American Pauline hermeneutics is not monolithic. Interpreters employ a variety of Pauline passages and read them in different ways. Yet their aim is consistent in that they utilize Scripture to speak to their contexts and to the larger issues of society. This chapter will offer brief commentary on several recurring themes that permeate the above investigation, and how these themes engage these questions and the larger topic of biblical interpretation. The themes in this chapter do not portend to be comprehensive and to include every aspect of the analyses above, but instead will highlight some persistent motifs. The chapter will conclude with some epigrammatic comments regarding possible areas of future research in African American Pauline hermeneutics.
As early as 1774, African American petitioners utilized Paul to argue against slavery and its repeated practice of separating black families. In fact, the apostle’s admonitions for husbands to love their wives and children to obey their parents as well as the imperative to bear one another’s burdens were central to petitioners’ requests early on. In addition, the Paul of Acts 17:26, who declared that God has made of one blood all the nations of the earth, was a central figure for black resistance to white supremacist readings of Paul. Additional examples could be cited, but the overwhelming reality is that for numerous black interpreters, Paul was an advocate for freedom, not for slavery, an advocate for racial justice, not for segregation. His words became a means to critique and call for the overthrow of unjust systems. Black female preachers employed his words about his female colaborers who were preachers, prophets, and ministers in the early church to speak of their own rightful place as preachers. In this volume we have seen that black interpreters employed Paul to protest slavery, the slave trade, racism, sexism, lynching, segregation, war, unequal job and education opportunities, sexual violence, and rape. For these interpreters, Paul’s voice mattered in the struggle for justice, equality, and freedom. He becomes their companion in the liberation fight.
What does the idea of Paul as a figure of liberation and equality mean for biblical interpretation? Such a trajectory raises awareness of Scripture, including Pauline Scripture, as a resource for justice, equality, and liberation. It also underscores the possibility of liberative readings of what may seem like difficult figures in the text or difficult texts themselves. Many of these interpreters, who had every right to reject Paul and Pauline Scripture, by and large did not do so. Instead they demonstrate that Pauline Scripture can bring life and healing as well as become a source for resistance to injustice. They also demonstrate that Scripture can speak to current issues and debates, as they utilized Paul to critique slavery, white supremacy, and racism in their own contexts.
To be sure, Howard Thurman and Albert Cleage Jr. did not see Paul as a figure useful for the struggle of liberation and equality. Therefore, they chose to focus on Jesus and Jesus’s teaching in the Gospels. Although Thurman acknowledged that Paul did speak for liberation at times, for him Paul’s Roman citizenship made him irrelevant to the black struggle and made the apostle more susceptible to oppressive interpretations by whites. For Cleage, Paul’s individualization of the gospel made him irrelevant to the project of black nation building. Thurman’s and Cleage’s readings of Paul raise the issue of how to think about issues of privilege when reading Scripture. Their readings of Paul highlight what it means to think about the apostle as one with privilege and in ways that see him as not so liberative. Their interpretations of Paul were also reactions to how Paul was used against black people throughout history. Hence, their rejection of Paul is another response to white interpretations of the apostle that sought to erase his liberative possibilities. These voices illustrate the complex and complicated layers within African American reception of Paul and reveal that while many blacks gravitated toward Paul as a figure for black liberation, some did not.
Although for Thurman and Cleage Jesus and Jesus’s life were more akin to African American experiences than Paul, many blacks maintained that Paul, too, shared their realities. One theme that reappears continuously in the autobiographies, sermons, and essays surveyed above is that Paul shares and gives voice to the various facets of African American existence.6 Of course, different authors narrate this sharing in different ways. In some instances, the sharing takes place in the realm of divine encounters, such as for Jarena Lee, who, like Paul, during her divine encounter heard words that could not be repeated, and Zilpha Elaw, whose transport to the divine realm was so similar to Paul’s that she could not, like him, tell whether she was in or outside of the body when it happened. In the conversion narratives examined above, the enslaved were taken to the third heaven, saw God and the heavenly throne, and had other supernatural episodes. These shared divine occurrences, through conversion, sanctification, and journeys into the supernatural realm, illustrate that the Pauline experiences of such divine events transcend time, space, and gender. Likewise, the apostle’s focus on the Spirit and spiritual gifts such as glossolalia, healing, and prophecy was central to the Pentecostal movement and its leaders, who saw the Spirit’s presence as one that fostered racial unity and transmitted power to transform society. Indeed, for many of the black interpreters in this volume, the apostle was a figure that shared their divine encounters and upheld their call for social transformation.
In addition, shared ministerial experience provided some African Americans with a means to connect to the apostle. Just like the apostle, who chose to work with his hands so that he would not be burdensome to his congregations, John Jea chose to work with his hands during his preaching tours so that he would not be a financial weight to the church either. Martin Luther King Jr. likens himself and his ministry to Paul, who answers the Macedonians’ call for aid, when he answers Birmingham’s call for help against segregation in their city.
Furthermore, the suffering that Paul undergoes for the sake of the gospel becomes a shared experience for many African Americans. For example, Jupiter Hammon takes up Paul’s lament over his fellow Jews in Romans 9:1–3 and 10:1 to mourn over the plight of his fellow enslaved Africans. David Walker uses the apostle’s farewell discourse in Acts to forecast his own untimely death, a death that some believe was brought about because he dared to proclaim judgment upon America and to speak out against its racist ways. Martin Luther King Jr. characterizes the suffering that he and other civil rights workers undergo as similar to what Paul had to endure because he preached a gospel of liberation. The apostle’s peristasis catalogues, also known as hardship lists, become a means by which King interprets the many vicissitudes of a life lived to insure the freedom of others. In his commentary on 2 Corinthians, Guy Nave writes about Paul’s emphasis on his sufferings, and he also sees the intersection King makes between the apostle’s suffering and that of King and the civil rights workers. “Paul does not expect his believers to play the part of passive victims. The sufferer is an active agent of justice. Those who suffered during the Civil Rights Movement were not passive victims; they were agents for justice…. The suffering that Paul refers to is ‘redemptive suffering’—suffering that the sufferer chooses to endure as a result of his or her actions for the redemption, liberation, and well-being of others. Paul chooses—and even welcomes—this type of suffering (2 Cor 12:10; cf. Rom 5:3).”7 To be sure, many of the black interpreters in this monograph saw in Paul’s suffering experiences a connection with their own experiences of affliction. They shared a bond with him, for he reflected their experiences and they in turn reflected his experiences.
When these black interpreters merge Paul’s divine encounters and sufferings with their own lives, however, they go beyond the idea of adoption and adaptation of Pauline language, although this is certainly part of what is taking place. What this merge signifies is the fusion of black history with sacred history, for African Americans who were repeatedly told that they had no god and that they were not created by God but by the devil, have lives whose divine encounters and physical sufferings coalesce with the apostle’s own life story, demonstrating a sacred confluence in which black lives are seen as part of God’s history with the world. This sacred confluence, however, is not in the sense that some white supremacist interpreters, like Josiah Priest, argued, in that God ordained blacks for slavery, but is rather to the contrary, that African Americans participate in the divine life of God, whose power delivers them, speaks to and through them, and frees them from both physical and spiritual oppression. Their participation in this divine life demonstrates their humanity and their significance in the divine economy.
These explicators interpret Paul with a dialectic of experience, that is, they bring their experiences as African Americans to the text while at the same time allowing the text, specifically Paul’s words, to interpret their experiences. There is a dynamic interplay between black lives and the biblical text. Accordingly, this dialectic of experience enables black interpreters to critique their oppressive experiences as not in line with God’s will for humanity. For example, Charlie, whose conversion narrative is explored above, recognizes that although he witnesses his enslaver worshiping and going to church, the slaveholder “ain’t right” and does not worship the same “God of love” that Charlie does. In another instance, Paul’s words about the Fatherhood of God and the unity of humanity enable Ida Robinson to address the real experience of lynching taking place in America and to critique the nation’s silence regarding it. These interpreters demonstrate that experience can play a role in biblical interpretation when interpreters bring their experiences to the text and at the same time allow the text to interpret their experience.
An overwhelming number of the interpreters discussed in this volume employed Paul in a hermeneutic of trust; that is, these interpreters saw Scripture as God’s sacred word and believed that it mattered for them, for their communities, and for the nation. Interestingly, they applied a hermeneutic of suspicion to the white interpreters of the text, such as the slaveholders, proponents of slavery, and advocates of segregation, and not to the text itself. They did not allow the way Paul was preached or explained to them to make them suspicious of Paul, but rather, more often than not, such interpretations made them suspicious of the white interpreter, as indicated by the following quote from Frederick Douglass.
For in the United States men have interpreted the Bible against liberty. They have declared that Paul’s epistle to Philemon is a full proof for the enactment of that hell-black Fugitive Slave Bill which has desolated my people for the last ten years in that country. They have declared that the Bible sanctions slavery. What do we do in such a case? What do you do when you are told by the slaveholders of America that the Bible sanctions slavery? Do you go and throw your Bible into the fire? Do you sing out, “No union with the Bible!” Do you declare that a thing is bad because it has been misused, abused, and made bad use of? Do you throw it away on that account? No! You press it to your bosom all the more closely; you read it all the more diligently; and prove from its pages that it is on the side of liberty—and not on the side of slavery.8
In revisiting Frederick Douglass’s words from chapter 2, one finds an example of such trust toward Scripture in his denouncement of the misuse of the Bible to justify slavery. Since many black hermeneuts believed God authored the biblical text, they saw the text as life giving and affirming of their value, worth, and dignity. Correspondingly, they believed that Paul’s voice spoke to their current context because for them Scripture was a living and breathing document with relevance for their lives. Even Thurman and Cleage, who did exhibit a hermeneutic of suspicion toward Paul, showed a hermeneutic of trust toward other parts of the scriptural text. For them Scripture was an integral part of the black struggle for justice and equality.9
Many of these interpreters considered the cosmological feature of Paul’s theology to be important because they, like Paul, believed in a supernatural world filled with God, angels, Satan, satanic beings, and the Holy Spirit. For instance, Zilpha Elaw and Maria Stewart discuss the supernatural realm in terms of opposition to their preaching and to their speaking out against the injustices of their time. Stewart takes up Paul’s language regarding weapons for this spiritual warfare and depicts herself as a woman warrior fighting for truth and freedom.
In addition, the apostle’s emphasis on sin as a power resonates with some of the interpreters covered in this monograph, for they see the cosmic nature of sin creating systemic injustices in the nation. Against one of the dominant understandings of their time, in which sin was seen as merely personal, between an individual and God, these interpreters recognized that sin was not just individual but social as well. James Pennington takes a classic Pauline text, Romans 7:21, understood to be about an individual wrestling with sin in his inner nature, and expands the interpretive range of the verse to include systems of evil, writing that for the enslaved African this text means “How, when he [the slave] would do good, evil is thrust upon him.”10 Pennington takes the text and broadens it from one in which evil is present within the self to one in which evil comes from outside the self, and for him this evil is the system of slavery. Likewise, for Reverdy Ransom, Paul’s emphasis on the cross as the center of the gospel becomes the basis for the reconstruction of society, that is, the concrete program of social salvation. Ransom maintained that Christian faith links the individual and the social, for a person’s individual experience of salvation will have societal implications, which include the transformation of unjust power structures and systems. For Ransom, salvation liberates not just the individual but also the social—the community, the society, and the nation—since prejudice and oppression permeate all these entities.
While they take up a cosmic understanding of sin and evil, these interpreters do not allow it to negate human agency in the struggle for liberation. God and Satan are powers, albeit unequal, but human beings still have agency and will have to give account for their actions in this life. Walker, Pennington, and Stewart utilize judgment language in their writings and proclaim that human beings, including slaveholders, will be held accountable for their behavior. King also includes judgment language in his work. And similar to Walker, King emphasizes divine and human agency, adopting the Pauline language of partnering with God, and so views human beings as coworkers with God, working together with the Divine to create a more just society.
Many of these interpreters dared to read Paul as a figure of reconciliation and not as a figure of division and separation. As we have seen time and again in the above analysis, Acts 17:26, in which Paul states that God has made of one blood all the nations of the earth, is the sine qua non for many African Americans in their understanding of who Paul is and what he believes. Similarly, his words in Ephesians regarding the abolishment of the dividing wall between Jews and gentiles become a paradigm for black hermeneuts to speak of Christ’s destruction of the dividing wall between whites and blacks (Eph. 2:14).
Yet this reconciliation does not happen without repentance. James Pennington, in his letter to his former enslaver, urges him to repent for all that he has done; this repentance is integral to Pennington’s understanding of judgment and reconciliation. Echoing Ephesians 2:14 and 2 Corinthians 5:20–21, Pennington contends that reconciliation happens through Jesus’s blood but is absent without judgment and repentance, which he calls for throughout his correspondence to the slaveholder. For him, for reconciliation to occur there must be justice, an admission of sin, and an accounting for past wrongs. Judgment, repentance, and reconciliation go hand in hand for Pennington and are deeply intertwined.
Another important theme that appears throughout the foregoing analysis is that these interpreters read Paul as he appeared in Scripture to them, whether he was a character in the book of Acts or was the writer of Ephesians, Colossians, and Hebrews. Although demarcations exist in modern biblical scholarship between the undisputed Pauline letters, the deutero-Paulines, and the Paul of Acts, the all-embracing approach that these interpreters utilized in biblical interpretation raises the question of what it means to read Scripture canonically, that is, to read Scripture holistically. These black interpreters insisted that there was a depth and richness to Paul’s words that could not be consigned to certain sections of Ephesians, Colossians, or 1 Timothy. As Abraham Smith observes, early black interpreters understood that “the pro-slavers’ use of Paul did not entail a comprehensive accounting of ‘Paul’s’ own views”11 and that “The goal for the pro-slavers was not to produce a fuller picture of ‘Paul’ in which ‘Paul’ might speak to a variety of challenges and concerns in antebellum times. Rather, the goal for them was to bring premature closure to ‘Paul’ as an endorser of slavery.”12 These black hermeneuts insisted on looking at and discussing other parts of Paul’s writings, thereby demonstrating the significance of the entire “canon” of Paul, and by extension, the importance of reading Scripture comprehensively.13 Their interpretive approach raises the question for biblical interpretation of whether readings of Paul “bring premature closure to Paul” if they do not take into account all the “Pauline” writings. These interpreters insist that Scripture needs to be in conversation with all of Scripture.
Early on, the Spirit language that resides in Paul’s letters resonated with black interpreters. Hammon emphasizes to his audience that “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God” (Rom. 8:14), to illustrate that God’s Spirit, which lives within them, provides his hearers with a new existence; their identities do not derive from slaveholders but from God. Black women preachers, like Elaw, embraced the apostle’s “Spirit of adoption” language because their own intimate experiences with the Spirit demonstrated that they were loved by God. The Holy Spirit, which adopted them, also led them to affirm their divine right to proclaim the gospel. Walker, in article 4 of his Appeal, repeatedly informs his readers that the enslaved “belong to the Holy Ghost” and are the “property of the Holy Ghost.” Since the Holy Spirit is their “rightful owner,” they should not be enslaved to any white person, for they have the divine and natural right of freedom. In the opening of his narrative, Jea merges the Spirit’s intercession with the groans of the enslaved, fusing the Spirit’s voice with that of the oppressed slave. And for the leaders of the Pentecostal movement covered in this volume, the Spirit’s presence meant individual and communal empowerment for service, protest, and unity.
The apostle’s words about the Spirit, spiritual gifts, and the social implications of the Spirit’s presence represented significant counternarratives to the dominant culture. God’s Spirit is a transformative power that breaks down barriers, unifies what society deems separate, and bestows upon believers a different way to see the world. For African American interpreters to be adopted by God’s Spirit and called God’s own children meant that black lives mattered.
To use Paul to speak the language of unity in the midst of a nation filled with racial division was in a sense to speak another language, a type of glossolalia, speech that contradicted the racist and segregationist discourses of the time periods in which these hermeneuts lived. Paul’s words were sacred to these interpreters, and as such they needed to be engaged, interpreted, and proclaimed in a way that brought liberation, not enslavement; social transformation, not the social status quo; and racial unity, not division. Interpreting Paul rightly mattered to the faith of these African American interpreters, for they knew the power of Paul’s words to shape reality and to give voice to the voiceless. And hermeneuts like Seymour interpreted his language about the power of the Holy Spirit as a “powerful empire” to speak of the location of real power in this world. Real power does not lie with the American empire but lies within the believer and has the capacity to transform and liberate.
Throughout this monograph we have traced the importance of a body hermeneutic to an African American Pauline hermeneutic and discussed how this body hermeneutic appears in various ways in the writings of these interpreters. This body hermeneutic rests upon two questions that these interpreters bring to Paul, which are: Can my black body interpret Paul, and can Paul interpret my black body? As we have seen, these questions resulted in a myriad of answers, some of which follow. In a context in which enslaved persons were consistently told that their salvation rested upon obedience to the slaveholders, Hammon insisted in one of his uses of Paul that African Americans work out their own salvation (Phil. 2:12) and use their bodies—their mouths to “confess the Lord Jesus” and their “hearts to believe unto righteousness” (Rom. 10:9–10). In this insistence Hammon emphasized black agency and the importance of black bodies in the salvific process. Moreover, the fact that God includes African Americans in his language of resurrection, “we shall all be changed” (1 Cor. 15:51), indicates that black bodies belong to God and that these bodies too are worthy of divine transformation.
Walker employs Pauline body language to emphasize black unity, noting that all must work together for the salvation of the whole body (1 Cor. 12:12–27), and Jacobs uses Acts 17:26 to critique the sexual violence done to female black bodies. Elaw takes up Paul’s maternal imagery regarding being in labor for the Galatians (Gal. 4:19) to speak of her own labor for unbelievers, thereby speaking to the painful bodily reality of giving birth and applying it to the hard labor required to give birth to spiritual transformation. In addition, the Azusa Street revival’s emphasis on being one body of Christ, so much so that one participant stated that the physical color line was washed away in the blood, provides another glimpse into an African American Pauline hermeneutic in which Paul’s body language signifies the incorporation of black and white into one body of Christ. For Ransom and Robinson, this body hermeneutic included utilizing Paul to protest lynchings of blacks, and for Mason it included protecting black bodies from dying in war. And finally, the repeated emphasis throughout these writings on God and the Holy Spirit’s work upon black bodies, causing African Americans to see into the divine realms, hear divine speech, speak in unknown languages, and experience Christ washing their bodies in baptismal waters, demonstrates also that they are daughters and sons of God, bodies touching and being touched by the Holy.
This book is an attempt to delve deeply into African American reception and interpretations of Pauline texts. One of the primary outcomes of this investigation is that the text matters. The following statement by a formerly enslaved African American woman, Jenny Proctor, will highlight this important element.
Dey wasn’t no church for de slaves but we goes to de white folks arbor on Sunday evenin’ and a white man he gits up dere to preach to de [n——]. He say, “Now I takes my text, which is ‘[n——] obey your marster and your mistress,’ ’cause what you git from dem in here in dis world am all you ev’r goin’ to git, ’cause you jes’ like de hogs and de other animals, when you dies you ain’t no more, after you been throwed in dat hole.’ I guess we believed dat for a while ’cause we didn’ have no way findin’ out different. We didn’ see no Bibles.14
Jenny acknowledges that for a time she and the other enslaved Africans believed what the white man said because they “didn’ see no Bibles.” The implication is that if they had Bibles, there would have been an opportunity of “findin’ out different” than what was being taught to them. By extrapolation, this quote underscores how important the text was to the enslaved and to African Americans in general, including the interpreters in this volume, for the text was the means of “findin’ out different” and unmasking the hypocritical nature of a white supremacist Christianity. The biblical text, including Pauline texts, enabled African Americans to refute such words as proclaimed by this white preacher and facilitated a vision of themselves as connected to the divine life of God.
As stated above, reception history is about recovering “lost voices, interpreters new and old,” and so this monograph has sought to do that and to allow interpreters to speak in their own voices about their understandings of Paul. This exploration is an exercise in investigating the many layers of black interpretations of Paul and to demonstrate the variety of ways in which Paul was used and understood throughout American history. Whereas some white interpreters used Paul to say black bodies did not matter and were relegated to slavery and segregation, most of the black interpreters covered in this book used Paul to proclaim that the bodies and lives of black people did matter. For example, Charles Mason used the apostles’ words to speak out against a war that would conscript black bodies to fight for freedom in another country when they were denied such freedoms in their own country.
Audrey Lorde, renowned writer and activist, once stated, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”15 This true and powerful statement speaks to the difficult struggles of the oppressed and sheds light on earlier chapters in this book. One of the important lessons the black interpreters in this book teach us is that the Bible, specifically Paul and Pauline Scripture, never belonged to the master or the “master’s minister,”16 although many white proponents of slavery and segregation insisted that it did. The fact that these black interpreters utilize the apostle so extensively in their petitions, sermons, writings, essays, and autobiographies indicates that Paul did not belong to white interpreters who employed him for their own agendas.
Although white preachers and ministers utilized Paul for their own racist and immoral aims, these black hermeneuts argued that Paul belonged to a higher authority, the God of liberation and freedom, and so should be interpreted with this hermeneutical posture. Many of these African American interpreters refused to believe that Paul advocated white supremacy and enslavement of black bodies; they demonstrated instead that such racist interpretations of the apostle could not and should not be the final word. In doing so, their works make possible the dismantling of the white supremacist house of Pauline interpretation. These hermeneuts have left a rich legacy, which chronicles the importance of Paul for a protest and resistance biblical hermeneutic aimed toward liberation.17
Our journey in this volume has allowed us to see how Paul was used and interpreted in a white supremacist manner, in order to dehumanize and oppress. One way to think about African American reception history, particularly of Paul and his writings, is in terms of reclaiming or rescuing Paul, if you will, from the ways in which he was erroneously preached and proclaimed by some white Christians.18 Another way to think about it is that many blacks were engaged in a method of counterreception in their use of Paul. They did not allow the way Paul was presented to them by whites to be the way they received the apostle, so they engaged in their own counterreception. While Thurman and Cleage’s counterreception of Paul included dismissing the apostle to a great extent, a majority of African American interpreters saw Paul as a figure of unity and as a figure whose words led to empowerment, not dehumanization.
These “hidden figures,” so often overlooked and neglected when talking about Christian history and Pauline hermeneutics, deserve to be heard, for they offer strategies on how believers can continue to utilize resistance hermeneutics to protest injustice. They offer powerful legacies of what true faith entails. All of these African American interpreters provide a glimpse of the many ways African Americans have utilized Paul in their petitions, autobiographies, speeches, and sermons to address their context, their time, and their historical situation.
One of the questions this volume raises is, “How can we learn from the past?”19 This is an important question for American Christianity and American churches, since in many ways both have been complicit in supporting racist structures and systems. Another way to ask this question is, “What can these previous Pauline interpreters teach Pauline interpreters today?” They can teach a modern hermeneut quite a lot, if one is open to use Jenny’s phrase, to “findin’ out different.” Their use of Paul can inspire readings of the apostle in the present that appropriate him in ways that speak to present contexts.
Numerous African Americans utilize Paul in their work, so many that all of them could not be included in this volume. This reality means that the need for further research in this area exists. Which additional interpreters employ Paul in a resistance and protest hermeneutic? Where else can one turn to find subversive uses of Paul that speak against racism and oppression of women? Exploration of additional African American texts, such as autobiographies, essays, sermons, and political speeches, will provide further understanding of Pauline reception among African Americans. Such explorations can also examine blacks’ use of Paul in literature and music, including black spirituals. The interdisciplinary nature of this field would foster important conversations around the intersections of Scripture, history, theology, literature, and music.
The apostle plays a huge role in the theological, political, and social discourses of African Americans throughout history, and further explorations of his role will add to an understanding of his lasting influence. Connected to these possible areas of more research is investigating how interpreters utilize Paul in relation to other scriptural texts. Are there scriptural texts in the primary sources that appear alongside Pauline texts more frequently than others? All such studies are significant for gaining understanding of how the words of this “apostle to the Gentiles” (Rom. 11:13; Gal. 2:8) achieved influence in African American communities and how he continues to influence these communities. Additionally, more research is important for documenting black religious life within American religiosity, because black religious life and experience are integral to the American landscape.
1. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, ed. L. Maria Child (Boston: Published for the author, 1861), reprinted in I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives, vol. 2, 1849–1866, ed. Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 591.
2. David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, In Four Articles, Together with A Preamble To The Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular and Very Expressly, to Those of The United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829 (Boston: Revised and published by David Walker, 1830), reprinted in David Walker’s Appeal: In Four Articles (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2015), 15.
3. Martin W. Mittelstadt, “Receiving Luke-Acts: The Rise of Reception History and a Call to Pentecostal Scholars,” Pneuma 40, no. 3 (2018): 367.
4. Mittelstadt, “Receiving Luke-Acts,” 367.
5. Vincent Wimbush, ed., African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Structures (New York: Continuum, 2000), 2.
6. Abraham Smith calls this identification with Paul a typological correlation. See his “Paul and African American Biblical Interpretation,” in True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, ed. Brian Blount et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 31–42, and “Putting ‘Paul’ Back Together Again: William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Black Abolitionist Approaches to Paul,” Semeia 83–84 (1998): 251–62.
7. Guy Nave, “2 Corinthians,” in Blount, True to Our Native Land, 326.
8. Frederick Douglass, “The American Constitution and the Slave: An Address Delivered in Glasgow, Scotland, on 26 March 1860,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 3, 1855–63, ed. John Blassingame (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 362–63. Also quoted in J. Albert Harrill, “The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 10, no. 2 (2000): 161.
9. For more on the hermeneutic of trust in interpreting Scripture, see Richard B. Hays, “Salvation by Trust? Reading the Bible Faithfully,” Christian Century 114 (February 1997): 218–23.
10. James Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, Pastor of Presbyterian Church, New York, Formerly A Slave in the State of Maryland, United States (London: Charles Gilpin, 1850; reprint, Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1971), 30.
11. Smith, “Putting ‘Paul’ Back Together,” 257.
12. Smith, “Putting ‘Paul’ Back Together,” 260.
13. I am not suggesting that modern biblical criticism abandon the categories of disputed Paul, undisputed Paul, and the Paul of Acts. What I am raising, however, is the larger question that these black hermeneuts raise for biblical interpretation in their reading of Paul: What perspectives, ideas, or understandings of Scripture do we miss if we concentrate only on one section of Scripture and do not explore others? Are there opportunities for liberative readings that get overlooked?
14. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 41 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), Texas Narratives, vol. 5, pt. 3 (213).
15. Audrey Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing, 1984, 2007), 110–14.
16. The phrase “master’s minister” comes from Howard Thurman’s grandmother and her description of the preacher that the slaveholder would often get to preach to the slaves whose text would always be, “Slaves, obey your master.” See the introduction to this volume.
17. These interpreters foreground what Brian Blount, Then the Whisper Put on Flesh: New Testament Ethics in an African American Context (Nashville: Abingdon, 2001), calls the “boundary-breaking intentions” of Paul (129), and they demonstrate that “the liberative benefits that can be gleaned from his counsel are legion” (156).
18. C. Michelle Venable-Ridley, “Paul and the African American Community,” in Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 214, says the objective of her work is not to “redeem but to reclaim the writings of Paul.” I think that many of the hermeneuts in this volume are engaging in this same project.
19. This section heading echoes the title of Martin Luther King Jr.’s final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), and places the same query to African American Pauline hermeneutics.