The story of the relationship of Euro-Western biblical scholarship to the plight of a people of African descent in North America is in many ways a sad and sordid tale. Biblical interpretations produced in the matrix of Euro-Western cultural and ideological domination have often justified and even facilitated the horrors of violent exploitation and subjugation that have characterized African peoples' collective sojourn in America.
Well-known and lesser known examples are numerous of the use of the Bible to legitimize oppression. The near exclusion of African Americans and their perspectives from Euro-American biblical academies has helped to maintain a Euro-Western hegemony in North American biblical studies, producing just such translational and interpretive travesties. (As of this writing, there are less than 35 African-American biblical scholars who, collectively, constitute just one-fifth of one percent of all North American biblical scholars with doctorates.)
Stony the Road We Trod, which is the collective effort of 11 of these African-American biblical scholars, is the first such joint work to appear. It was written to contest the Euro-Western hegemony in biblical studies that has proven to be anathema to the interests of African Americans. In this sense, the book is a contemporary resistance text. While its overall tone is impassioned, it is not an exercise in polemics or stridency. Rather, its 11 studies are works of responsible and studied biblical scholarship.
Cain Hope Felder's introduction sets the almost religiously zealous tone of struggle against racist Euro-American domination of biblical studies that permeates the book. He relates anecdotes from the authors (without attribution) about their struggles as African Americans in general and African-American biblical scholars in particular, including one contributor's account of being a near-victim of a lynch mob in his youth.
In the first of four topical sections of Stony, "The Relevance of Biblical Scholarship and the Authority of the Bible," contributors Thomas Hoyt Jr., William H. Myers, and Renita Weems lay out the methodological and hermeneutical terrain of the book. Myers alerts the reader to some of the ideological and cultural biases inherent to traditional Euro-Western biblical scholarship.
Weems examines the hermeneutic by which African-American women, "marginalized by gender and ethnicity, and often class," continue to cull life-sustaining meaning from androcentric biblical texts overlaid by centuries of self-gratifying male bias. Both Myers and Weems challenge African-American men and women to shift the locus of biblical authority from the perspectives of the dominant Euro-American culture to the salvation drama inscribed in their own experiences of God.
In "African American Sources for Enhancing Biblical Interpretation," Vincent L. Wimbush offers a taxonomy for the history of biblical interpretation in the black church. David T. Shannon uses a famous sermon-in-verse to discuss what he contends to be the major issues and considerations historically underlying an African-American biblical hermeneutic.
THE ESSAYS THAT most directly refute racist biblical interpretations appear as the third section under the heading "Race and Ancient Black Africa in the Bible." Here authors Felder, Randall Bailey, and Charles Copher confront particular misreadings of the presence and legacy of African peoples in the Bible. They expose the specter of racism looming behind those readings.
Felder identifies the processes of sacralization and secularization as the principal means through which racial discourse has been injected into biblical discourse. Bailey offers a penetrating study of the symbolic significance that African peoples held for the Old Testament writers. He convincingly concludes, "They symbolized military might, political stability, and wealth. Their wisdom was highly regarded. These nations were utilized as a standard of measurement for Israel." Copher, the dean of contemporary African-American biblical scholars, provides a lively survey of the considerable presence and participation of Africans in Israel's salvation history.
In the final section, "Reinterpreting Biblical Texts," the authors address particular instances of social subordinationism that appear to have biblical sanction. Through source-critical analysis of Genesis chapters 16 and 21, John Waters challenges the traditional view that Hagar, the Egyptian mother of Abraham's son, Ishmael, was a slave.
Clarice Martin's careful study of the subordinationist Pauline and deutero-Pauline Hausetafeln ("household codes") examines the social origins and functions of those codes and surveys the various dominationist readings of them and their social and juridical results. Her critical gaze includes gender domination of black women by black men.
Lloyd Lewis examines Paul's use of "familial language." He argues that while Paul's theology is neither patently pro- nor anti-slavery (white and black scholars have argued both positions strongly), Paul's "unwillingness to canonize the social roles found in his environment" suggests an ultimate Pauline rejection of slavery.
Although generally well-written and researched, Stony the Road We Trod seems unsure of its audience. Hoyt's essay is clearly for the layperson, but Water's use of source criticism, the basic tenets of which he never explains, seems intended for seminarians and graduate students. Further, Water's argument is circuitous and lacking in focus and, thus, ultimately unconvincing.
In addition, the scope of the book is too broad (although this is understandable for a text that has waited generations to be written). Both the generalities of Wimbush's interpretive history and the particulars of Shannon's sermonic case study seem out of place in a collection that has the analysis of biblical texts and themes as its primary focus.
In a text seeking to reorder the terrain of interpretive authority for an oppressed people, one would like to see more attention paid to the biblical anti-dominationist themes and texts. Such themes include the ancient Hebrew anti-dominationist underpinnings of the "kingdom of God" (hamalkuth shama-yim) and the excoriation of brutal Roman domination that is a subtext of the Book of Revelation. In addition, a wider methodological variety would be welcome, including at least a nod to historical materialist sensibilities.
Despite its shortcomings, however, after encountering this book only the most myopic will continue to accept Euro-Western interpretations and definitions as normative for biblical studies. Stony the Road We Trod constitutes an important first step in the ongoing struggle to challenge the Euro-Western hegemony in biblical interpretation and to transform the Bible from a tool of domination to a key to the liberation of oppressed peoples everywhere.
Osayande Obery Hendricks was executive minister at St. James AME Church in Newark, New Jersey, and a doctoral candidate at Princeton University when this review appeared.
Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation. Edited by Cain Hope Felder. Fortress Press, 1991. $15.95 (paper).
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