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

McCaulley asserts that the Bible outlines basic principles and critiques of power that equip Black Christians to handle their life and work in the United States. He locates some of these tools in the gospel of Luke and identifies Luke as the patron saint of BEI. McCaulley highlights the importance of Luke’s status as a Gentile to his testimony of God’s value and vision of a multiethnic group of believers. He compares Luke to Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, the founders of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, as well as other Black preachers who minister “to their congregations that they have a place in the kingdom of God” (76). McCaulley’s point is that Black people’s conversion to Christianity is not an accident of history or merely a tool of oppression, but rather a part of God’s wider purpose to establish his multiethnic community. However, given the ways that white evangelists and teachers have used the name of Christianity to justify Black oppression, Black people must find “the real Jesus among the false alternatives contending for power in the culture” (78). McCaulley compares Black Americans to Theophilus, to whom Luke speaks in order to correct misleading accounts of Jesus.