Here in my fourth and final post on Esau McCaulley’s book, Reading While Black, I am going to give a very brief overview of the final two chapters in the books and then give some final thoughts.
Chapter 6: What Shall We Do with This Rage?
As the title suggests, McCaulley begins this chapter by highlighting the inner rage many black people, particularly black men, feel, given America’s history of slavery, racism, and discrimination. McCaulley recalls the first time, as an 8-year-old boy, he heard a white guy call him a “nigger,” and how that affected him. He then notes how even though the emancipation in 1865 and the subsequent Reconstruction held so much promise, the effective end of Reconstruction in 1877 just opened black people in America to a whole new chapter of a “litany of suffering.” Given all that, it is understandable why there is so much rage among black Americans. It is simply the cultural reality that they, and those over the past few centuries, have lived with. Therefore, McCaulley asks the question that is the focus of the chapter: “What are black people to do with so much deep-seated rage?”
The first thing McCaulley does to address that is turn our attention to Psalm 137, which reflects the very same kind of frustration and rage. Based on that psalm, he then makes the three following points: (1) Black people need to insist on telling the truth about their suffering, (2) They need to offer (and vent) their frustrations to God, and (3) They need to move beyond mere venting and do the “costly and painful work of imagining a world beyond our grievances” (128). He then makes what I feel is one of the most profound statements in the book, when he writes, “What brings the warring parties of the world together is not the emergence of a new philosophy of government; it is not free market capitalism, communism, socialism, or democracy. It is a person: the root of Jesse. Isaiah then calls for Black people, in the midst of their pain, to begin to envision a world not defined by our anger” (129).
In the rest of the chapter, McCaulley makes the point that it is the message of the cross—the message that God has entered into human suffering and knows what it is like to be at the mercy of the state—that has the power to break the wheel of racism and hatred. And since Christ suffered at the hands of the Roman state and then resurrected, McCaulley states, “If death gives way to the power of God, so does my hate” (134).
Chapter 7: The Freedom of the Slaves
In his final chapter, McCaulley addresses various biblical texts that specifically talk about slavery to show that, even though, as McCaulley puts it, the Bible was used as a tool of oppression in the hands of white slave owners, the Bible itself—particularly the passage he discusses in this chapter—tells a whole different story. The first thing he points out is that the Bible is pretty clear that slavery, be it in the form of the ancient institution of slavery or the modern, race-based slavery of the pre-Civil War period, was never God’s will. In fact, the very message of the Bible lays the groundwork to defeat all types of slavery. As McCaulley puts it, “God created a people who could theologically deconstruct slavery” (142). That is precisely what we see in the biblical texts McCaulley discusses.
He first points out Deuteronomy 15:12-15, which speaks of freeing Hebrew slaves after six years of service. In the long run, such a law abolishes slavery. McCaulley reminds us that the purpose of God’s covenant with Israel was for Israel to be the kind of nation that other nations would want to emulate. Therefore, if Israel had stayed faithful to the covenant, they would have been blessed, and then other nations would want that for themselves. McCaulley also talks about the various passages that speak of slaves being give restitution for wrongs their masters might inflict upon them. McCaulley notes that no one else in the entire ancient Near East had any kind of legislation like this, where enslaved people were acknowledged to be an agent capable of being wronged.
McCaulley also talks about Paul’s letter to Philemon, where he encourages Philemon to accept and welcome back his runaway slave Onesimus, no longer as a slave, but as a Christian brother. Even in I Timothy 6:1-2 (and elsewhere), where Paul tells slaves to serve their masters, he also says that masters shouldn’t look down on their slaves and should treat them as brothers—McCaulley points out that Paul was not in any kind of position to abolish slavery. He was just a pastor trying to make pastoral sense of a difficult situation that was simply a cultural reality at the time. One can see this at work, not only in Paul’s comments about masters and slaves, but also his comments about husbands and wives. Give the cultural realities of the Roman Empire of the time, Paul’s comments planted the seeds of liberation and equality that eventually grew up and bore fruit, to where, by the end of the fourth century, due primarily to Christianity, the ancient institution of slavery throughout the Roman Empire had largely been abolished. (It wasn’t until the discovery of the “new world” that slavery was revived to serve the financial aspirations of southern colonists).
Conclusion (and Some Thoughts)
Obviously, a lot more can be said about the specifics of McCaulley’s book, but hopefully I’ve given enough of an overview to inspire anyone to read it for themselves. The thing I like most about the book is how McCaulley takes the time to go through all those specific portions of the Bible that are often pointed to as somehow “endorsing” slavery and even racism. As everyone knows, pre-Civil War slave-owners pointed to those passages to justify their racism and slavery. Also, though, a lot of present day “secular” activists point to those same passages in an attempt to argue that Christianity is inherently racist, and that the Bible cannot be kept as a moral guide. McCaulley’s clear explanation of those passages should convince everyone to reject either of those two positions.
I also appreciated the measured, but forceful way McCaulley went about addressing the present-day racial challenges without letting himself get roped into the divisive political debates that just make things worse. Granted, McCaulley doesn’t really even attempt to put forth any specific “solutions” to the challenges that still face America today, but he does, in my opinion, help clear away a lot of the noise and provides a little bit of space to really contemplate what confronts us today.
As he mentions occasionally in the course of his book, McCaulley clearly has some reservations as to the way some activists today are going about trying to deal with racism and social justice. In a “bonus chapter” at the end of the book, he specifically mentions some black social justice theologians like James Cone and briefly states his misgivings about those like Cone. In McCaulley’s opinion, he feels that Cone’s attempt to reduce the entirety of the Gospel to social justice and political liberation is to, in actuality, run completely contrary to the actual Gospel message and biblical narrative. Yes, the Gospel impels us to speak out against oppression and work towards ways to ending it, but it also presents us with the direct challenge of the individual transformation of our individual character. Or if I could put it another way, if all you focus on is “changing the system,” without giving a thought to changing one’s heart, then whatever “system” you come up with is bound to become an instrument for oppression eventually.
A number of years ago, at a Society of Biblical Literature conference, I attended a session devoted to James’ Cone recent book at the time, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. He’s probably most famous for this book, A Black Theology of Liberation. I left feeling quite uneasy about what Cone’s “brand” of Christianity and activism seemed to be. He seemed to be applauding more the militancy of Malcom X than the work of Martin Luther King Jr. And over this past year, with all the social unrest we’ve witnessed in America, I’ve seen a lot of that same sentiment, where people were using the very real instances of racism and oppression that need to be addressed as excuses to just rage and be violent. In short, it seems to me that a lot (though of course not all) of the current “social justice” movement isn’t so much a push for justice as it is a push for vengeance and trying to gain the levers of political power to further that vengeance.
But as McCaulley makes clear in the one of the quotes I have above, the real answer to the racism and injustice in this country isn’t going to be found in any political system or political party. The answer is found in the person of Jesus Christ and his challenge to each person to not only recognize the reality of where we are today, not only tell the truth of that reality today, but also to change ourselves in how we try to address that reality. Obviously, our government has a hand in how we go about addressing those challenges, but the government doesn’t so much give the answer as it serves and implements the answer that transformed people are living out.
I don’t know if that really makes any sense, but I do know if people read McCaulley’s book, really took stock in their own reaction to race in America (be it from a more politically conservative or liberal point of view), and then took the time to contemplate what actual steps need to be taken to address the actual injustice—and not just devolve into partisan political wars that only further divide society—if more people did that, we’d have a lot more actual hope and change in America.
