Then there’s a chapter on the prophets, and there’s a chapter on the Gospels. Then there’s a chapter on Paul and the wider New Testament. There’s also a chapter on the racial. biblical interpretation that was happening at the time. Because we often separate the racist ideology that they use to justify chattel-based slavery. In other words, we often say, well, how did they make sense of these Pauline passages? But those Pauline passages were never alone. They’re always linked to other interpretations which they were saying that African American peoples often weren’t fully human and those kinds of things.
The book itself is an attempt to look at the entire scriptural case, along with some of the racial ideology that was also justified biblically, in the way that abolitionists also responded to those things. And so that’s the wider project. In this lecture, I’m just going to tackle the Gospels
David Capes
Paul and the Torah and the prophets wont’ be discussed. This time is just the Gospels. And I’m looking forward to talking about it, because there’s a lot of things that people don’t often know about as it relates to the arguments of the abolitionists.
Esau McCaulley
Interestingly enough, I’m sitting in Wheaton College, right across from Blanchard Hall. I was blessed to be given a Jonathan Blanchard Chair. Jonathan Blanchard actually published a book that I cite in my book on making an argument for abolition based upon the Bible. So, it’s relevant not just to my Chair, but to the legacy of Wheaton itself.
David Capes
Well, that’s going to be an important lecture. It’s very timely because it seems to me that not only are we dealing with the racial aspects, but we’re looking at a lot of other cultural moments right now where people are citing the Bible, looking at the Bible, saying that the Bible is not really a moral book, after all. So yes, it’s about the racial issues, about the slavery issue, but it seems it’s about broader issues as well.
Esau McCaulley
It’s really an exercise in hermeneutics. You know, that’s been a hobby horse of mine since I’ve gotten into the guild, much to my surprise. And what happens is we tend to go, hey, we know that people use the Bible to justify slavery, therefore we know that we can’t trust the Bible on contemporary issues. And I think that way of thinking is a little bit simplistic, and it doesn’t take seriously the abolitionist claim that was also a self-reader from scripture. And it wasn’t just two random groups of people who are making biblical arguments side by side. There’s a justifiable case that the argument that the abolitionists made were better and more probative.
And one of the things that was always a part of my own background as someone who grew up in the African American church, and we’ve always believed that the Bible read properly, not in a skeptical manner, not with a hermeneutic or suspicion, with a hermeneutic of trust. We always said that this book is a book in which God stands on the side of the people who’ve been ignored and pushed to the side. And it wasn’t really until I got into the academy that I was taught to see this book as oppressive. And I’ve read those arguments, and I understand them, and they raise important questions. But I think that my ancestors and the people who continued in that tradition were no fools from looking in this text to seeing a guy who’s a friend and not an enemy. And so this project, this lecture too is a way of returning to some of those arguments and giving them a fresh hearing.
David Capes
Is this a United States only kind of phenomena?
Esau McCaulley
As you know, in any project, one of the questions that you always have to answer is scope. Because as you look at the slavery-abolitionist debate, it’s not just happening in North America, it’s also happening in different ways in Europe, particularly in England. It’s not just happening in the Protestant tradition. It’s also happening amongst Catholics. That’s a pretty global, complicated phenomenon. And how much of that I’m going to address in this lecture is mostly, forgive me, North American Protestants.
David Capes
Well, that’s likely most of the people who will be present and a lot of the people who are listening,
Esau McCaulley
Because there’s a particular form of biblicism that took hold of the United States. One of the things that I say is, if you know anything about New Testament scholarship, you know of the influences of the new perspective, especially in Europe, in England with N.T. Wright, and with James Dunn. And one of the things you notice when you go to England is that while America participated in World War II, it wasn’t on their soil. We flew there. But you see in every small town in England, a memorial to World War II. You see the physical legacy of World War II and the Holocaust. In some sense, the Jewish question dominates biblical studies coming out of England in particular. Because I think they recognize the roles in which antisemitic, biblical interpretation damaged the church’s witness and led to real harm. And so the reexamination of Paul and Judaism and the influence of that coming out of Europe makes some sense in that context.
Now in America, I would say, because of the particular way that the Civil War occurred, and the aftermath of the Civil War, the legacy of slavery has a particular footprint in the United States that isn’t the exact same thing as you see in parts of England. It’s not that they weren’t talking about slavery in England, but the role of the Bible in the United States and the role of the Bible in Europe are a little bit different. And there is something distinctive about how we deal with slavery in this aftermath, in this country, similar to how antisemitism and the relationship between Christianity and Judaism has a particular strong resonance in Germany and in England, because of what happened there. I’m not saying that we don’t care about what happened with the Jewish people and antisemitism, and biblical interpretation in America. I’m talking about how it’s felt.
David Capes
It’s interesting how you mentioned earlier that it’s in the soil. You know, it’s in the soil there, in a way. And I know you’ve thought a lot about theology of location and geography. And you’re right. It’s in the soil here in a way that it’s different than in other parts of the world,
Esau McCaulley
For instance, Texas, where the Lanier Theological Library is and Alabama aren’t the same, right? It’s different there. Texas is different than Alabama which is different than New England. The topography, the cultural memory varies in different parts of the country.
David Capes
Yes! Well, it’s going to be great lecture. The lecture is October 12th, 2024. You can log on to our website and get information about that. It will be in the show notes as well. And for those of you who can’t be present for the lecture you can stream it live on our You Tube channel or go back later and view it as well. Dr. Esau McCauley, thanks for being with us today on The Stone Chapel Podcast.
Esau McCaulley
Thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to seeing you in person in about a month or two.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
