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Index
PART I
PART II
PART III
PART IV
Preface
Map
Introduction
1 Interpreting Biblical Scholarship for the Black Church Tradition 17
2 The Hermeneutical Dilemma of the African American Biblical Student 40
3 Reading Her Way through the Struggle: African American Women and the Bible 57
4 The Bible and African Americans: An Outline of an Interpretative History 81
5 "An Ante-bellum Sermon": A Resource for an African American Hermeneutic 98
6 Race, Racism, and the Biblical Narratives 127
7 The Black Presence in the Old Testament
8 Beyond Identification: The Use of Africans in Old Testament Poetry and Narratives 165
9 Who Was Hagar?
10 The Haustafeln (Household Codes) in African American Biblical Interpretation: "Free Slaves" and "
11 An African American Appraisal of the Philemon-Paul-Onesimus Triangle 232
Index of Ancient Sources
Index of Topics and Names
Contributors
We know that biblical writers were themselves interpreters, for the historical-critical method has s
The same point was made by Gerhard von Rad as he exercised his traditio-historical approach to Scrip
The wounded traveller is fallen man, half alive in his knowledge of God and half dead in his slavery
Even with the establishment of a canon the church has agreed to live by diverse norms since the same
But witnesses from the black church help us also. Black theologians have given consistent witness
Roberts (theme: reconciliation through liberation); Joseph Washington, Jr. (theme: blacks as God's c
Scripture gives reason to adopt a spirituality of obedience to the law, whether the law of Moses or
If my spirituality is drawn chiefly from a few passages of my own choosing, I short change myself. I
themes (Frank Kermode, Norman Peterson, Robert M. Fowler).9
The African was brought to a land where literacy was highly valued and where the presence and use of
This lack of reading and writing skills plus "exile in a foreign land" where a common language was i
After it was decided that blacks were worthy of conversion, they were taught the Bible in Sunday sch
A. To serve them with a good will heartily and not with eye-service.13
Long before theological institutions in the South increasingly appreciated the historical elements i
Blacks read the Bible historically and concretely.15
It was the black preacher who told the stories of Israel liberated from the bondage of Egypt; of t
Just as Israel, as a community, became liberated from bondage and oppression, God's work in the worl
The Evangelical recognizes that the world system is in the lap of the devil, and that injustice, war
Perhaps it is the mythic component that has the deepest implications for the black theological enter
folklore, folk music, oral traditions, literature, cultural linguistics within the African languages
To use the imagination means that we must allow the verbal images of the text to evoke mental images
11. Then wait for God to speak.22
If Scripture addresses the whole person, then intellect alone is not enough. The imagination, in con
Wilder argues that religious communication has been addicted too long to the "discursive, the ration
He makes a plea for "the role of the symbolic and the pre-rational in the way we deal with experie
Recognizing that "imagination is a necessary component of all profound knowing and celebration"26
and that "when imagination fails doctrines become ossified, consolations hollow, and ethics legali
he states, "it is at the level of the imagination that any full engagement with life takes place."
All theologians and biblical scholars, black and white, need to hear Wilder's admonition and veile
The tendency to read whatever we want into the text is a problem. Hence, we must begin to train scho
the names of Elvis, Felipe, and Donald, young men frequently quoted in the text.31
The amount of literature written on biblical interpretation during the last quarter century alone is
while others are written on a more popular level and are directed at a wider audience.2
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