Theologian Esau McCaulley joins the show to talk about his new book Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope.

TRANSCRIPT

0:01

Welcome to Jessup think I'm your host, Mark Moore. And I'm so excited to be able to sit down with Dr. Esau McCauley professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, and author of reading while black, African American biblical interpretation as an exercise in hope. It is such a powerful book. And in Dr. McCoy has such a powerful voice in this conversation. I hope you enjoy the show.

0:35

Dr. McCauley, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Really excited to have you on the show and excited to kind of continue this conversation on on race and particularly with your book. Yeah, through the lens of biblical interpretation. And what the Bible has to say to us and I, I love at the beginning of your book, and in that initial chapter, your your nod to 90s hip hop, so so I'm, I'm a product of the 90s as well, I felt well as I was reading it. I was like, I think we had some similar, you know, similar music tastes happening in the 90s. And I loved how you weave that in So, so I thought I'd kind of start with a question. What did 90s hip hop teach you about? biblical interpretation? the black community?

1:23

Yeah, what what Thank you. I mean, what I wanted to do, I began to book that way intentionally, because I wanted people to think this is a different kind of theology book. Yeah, I wanted to kind of give myself space to do my own, do the work that I felt like God had called me to do. And so when I talk about what, like 90s hip hop did is that it was a soundtrack that reflected that things were going on in my community. And so it helped me to put voice to the kinds of questions I was trying to answer. And what I mean by that is, is sometimes we think about, well, what does Christianity mean? If I am raising a family? What does Christianity mean? If I'm single, and I want a spouse? What does Christianity mean? If for my job, and you know, climbing the corporate ladder? And I said, Well, what does Christianity mean? If you're young, black and southern, and you try to make sense of what it means to be a follower of Jesus in the world. And so for me, the conversation partners that I dealt with rare forms of sometimes nihilism, or hopelessness, and sometimes music reflected that. Sometimes it was about real critique what was going on in society, and the music reflect get that. And so what I wanted to say is, though, that portion of the black community, we're in part, a dialogue partner that oftentimes isn't taken seriously, in the wider kind of Christian world, as people were asking important questions that deserve answers.

2:51

Yeah, definitely, as I did a Grammy, right from the title of that first chapter, I was like, okay, Hey, where are we going with this? And it was it, I think, a great beginning, because like you're saying it was starting a theology book in a different way.

3:04

Yeah. That was one of the first things that I wrote, I actually wrote, I knew that I wanted to start this book off with that story. And with that analogy, now, I wrote it much later, the first chapter that I actually wrote was a chapter on policing. But that idea of starting with the sounds got something to say, was something like, my own personal declaration of scholarly independence.

3:29

Yeah. Oh, my God, I was hearing loud and clear like that. And so in the book, here, you're looking at the tradition, the black ecclesial interpretation, tradition. And so just wondering, like, how do you understand that tradition? And how, how does that tradition help us read the Bible better?

3:48

Yeah, I think it's really important to put that tradition into conversation with the other communities that are kind of out lots of people understand what I mean. So when I talk about ecclesia, that's just a fancy word for for church, right? You know, that I