Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

McCaulley reflects on Black people’s experience of policing. He discusses Romans 13:1-7 and John the Baptist in Luke 3 to demonstrate that the New Testament provides the beginning of a Christian theology of policing. The theology of policing is a theology of freedom that calls upon the state and its stewards to recognize the impact of their duties and their responsibilities to the people. McCaulley himself had an encounter with a police officer: The officer assumed that he and his friends were engaged in illegal activity, so McCaulley’s sense of anger and powerlessness arises out of his recognition that his actual crime was “being young and Black” (27).

Romans 13:1-2 is typically read and criticized as Paul advocating for unquestioned submission to government authority. However, McCaulley asserts that the passage is a statement about God’s sovereignty and the limits of human discernment about God’s use of human actors to undermine corrupt institutions. He considers the passage alongside Romans 9:17, in which Paul references God acting through Moses to remove the Pharaoh due to unjust and tyrannical rule (32). McCaulley then turns to Exodus 2:11-5, in which Moses responds to the Israelites’ oppression by killing an Egyptian, and Exodus 3:1-22, in which God brings liberation to the Israelites in his own time.