Reading the Bible from the Margins: A Short Reflection (May 2010)

As a rhetorically powerful and ideologically ambivalent document, the Bible — the Hebrew and Christian scriptures often cast together as a single and singular document — has served as a contested source of authority in the modern West, particularly in the United States. Such an understanding helps us to see, as Vincent Wimbush phrases, “the sheer breadth and depth, the imbeddedness, of the Bible in American culture, the interwovenness, of the Bible and American culture.” (1) The Bible has often offered itself up for oppositional readings that ironically sanctify liberative and oppressive projects, including liberative projects that fall short of their own visions and that ultimately end in the reproduction of oppression. The Bible has secured competing claims to American identity and the diverse national self-conceptions and myths that follow, some of which have portrayed America as “the promised land,” “the shinning City on a Hill,” God’s “New Israel,” and — interestingly enough — Egypt. (2) It has also been and continues to be a sourcebook for variegated racial formations, gender figurations, and cultural practices in the U.S. (3) Much scholarship, for example, has been devoted to analyzing biblical justifications that Europeans and Euro-Americans crafted to support slavery and Native American displacement and cultural genocide. Conversely, much scholarship has examined the oppositional hermeneutical strategies that various U.S. communities of color have developed to read the Bible in ways that challenge racial hegemonies, imperialistic projects, and genocidal formations initiated by Europeans and Euro-Americans. (4) Through the hermeneutically creative labor of many folk of color, the biblical text has come to authorize resistance to systems of violence also sanctified by particular readings of that same text.

Emancipatory reading strategies have also been employed by other marginalized communities, including those that have strategically read the biblical text through more than one vector of difference, that is, through various intersectionalities. For example, although many U.S. Black women have often shared reading strategies with many U.S. Black men, they have frequently read the biblical text in ways that contest various forms of sexism and have consequently affirmed their unique self-determination. Because of the lure of patriarchal power, however relative, many U.S. Black men have often advanced readings of the biblical text that sanctify Black male domination. (5) U.S. Black women have subsequently felt the sting of oppressive power as a multivocal phenomenon wielded by the most intimate of supposed allies. More often than most U.S. Black men, many U.S. Black women have read the biblical text with an aim to advocate a politics of wholeness, whereby holistic and multidimensional liberation becomes more possible. Many radical U.S. Black women have believed that their complete liberation necessarily means the liberation of other peoples oppressed by racial, class, and gender hierarchies. (6) Another example, many U.S. Black queer women and many U.S. Black heterosexual women have held hermeneutical lenses in common. However, U.S. Black heterosexual women have usually been less invested, if not wholly against, the sexual liberation of their queer counterparts. U.S. Black heterosexual women have frequently been seduced by the modicum of power to which they have been able to pretend, the power of heteronormativity. (7)

All of these systems of violence and subjugation are inter-reliant; therefore, any attempt of a subaltern group to claim power at the expense of another is self-defeating and ultimately self-oppressive. Reading the Bible from the margins is thus a tricky and complex process, often anti-oppressive in various ways, but not necessarily anti-hegemonic, if hegemony is thought to be a system ensemble, one that incorporates all structures and ideologies of domination. Indeed, this image of hegemony is a bit reductionistic and totalizing, but it could be nonetheless imaginatively and rhetorically powerful enough to provoke incisive introspective analyses. To contest one of the pillars upon which hegemony rests is to destabilize it, but not to abolish it. Resistance strategies that are not comprehensive and inclusive simply force hegemony to adapt to the new conditions over which it rules and to adopt new or to shore up old hierarchies in order to do so. The coping mechanisms of one subjugated group may be situated over against those of another marginalized group, but should we call such in-fighting real resistance if it does not fundamentally challenge hegemony?

Competing claims to the sacred transcendence that the biblical text is believed to “contain” demonstrate that the text itself is not inherently subjugating or intrinsically emancipatory, but both/and and/or neither. In other words, both imperial and anti-imperial sentiments run throughout the pages of the biblical narrative in ways that attest to the complex and at times seemingly contradictory interests of its authors and the communities to and from which they wrote. Indeed, the biblical text has its own agencies and voices, which it diversely impresses upon its readers. Yet, the intentions of its readers shape which voices from the text get heard and which voices are read into the text. The biblical text reads as it is read. The subjectivities of its readers shape and are shaped by their interpretations, an insight owing to postmodern and postcolonial perspectives. Readers may be able to liberate themselves partially from the tendencies of certain subjectivities to overdetermine interpretations — what people see and do not see and how they see it or how they do not — but they seem unable to free themselves completely from the shackles of time and space. Put differently, readers can attempt to inhabit multiple subjectivities and reading strategies, and if self-aware, they can (attempt to) prevent the totalizing influences of certain contexts on their readings. However, they cannot inhabit the mythical voice of a universally disembodied, objective self. There is little room for ideologically neutral positionalities in worlds whose social fabrics are so tightly woven together with overlapping and dissonant subjectivities.

The biblical text needs readers in order for it to perform cultural work in the world, to construct variegated conceptions of reality. Seemingly endless and yet limited possibilities reside within the linguistic corridors of its polyvocal wisdom. There are things that are possible within its narrative, just as there are things that are not. There are things to which it can uniquely give rise — things that set it apart from any other document, “religious” or otherwise — just as there are things that limit its claim to radical singularity and difference. Said differently, the text is an enclosing sphere of infinite interpretations, but it is not wholly boundless — without form and without some measure of definition. We might describe this circumscribed interpretive infinitude as embodying contextually shifting sets of possibilities and relative impossibilities. From this curtailed infinity, emancipatory possibilities are continually being created and called forth. How? Why? The biblical text is ambivalent precisely because of the many voices visible and invisible, overt and interstitial, speaking from and into its pages. It has been the task of subaltern communities to read into the text and to liberate from the text those voices that will advance their diverse and at times oppositional agendas. Indeed, there is no marginalized community that is not at the same time an oppressive one or that does not have the potential to become the representatives of hegemonic power. Most marginalized communities are internally fractured by competing interests and the prospects of various constituencies within them coming to power over against others. They also harbor tremendous possibilities for the unseating of colonial and neocolonial hegemonic narratives and the concomitant rise of radically democratic social power.

As already noted, African American hermeneutic communities have historically served as examples of the complexities of reading against the grain for communal and individual empowerment. African American biblical interpretations have marked the artistic impulses that run through the cultures of their creators. It is from the biblical text that many African Americans have drawn meaning and imagery with which to construct their conceptions of reality throughout their sojourn of 390 years in the metaphorical Egypt of North America. Many African Americans who have employed the biblical text in their meaning-making projects have self-identified as Christians, others have not. The Bible’s imagery and stories have been mobile, moving beyond the borders of traditional religious communities and their institutions into various overlapping publics. As Allen Callahan contends, “Biblical phrases and motifs have been manifest in African American life far beyond the boundaries that moderns have marked off with the word religion.” (8) Biblical language and imagery have found their way into disparate African American cultural forms like poetry, music, painting, and dance. For example, one would be hard-pressed not to find traces of biblical rhetorics and images in African American gospel music, hip-hop, and political traditions. (9)

Furthermore, the efforts of some to regulate biblical interpretation within African American communities have not gone uncontested. Various groups have inscribed their lives into the biblical narrative and have found direction and encouragement therein for their everyday lives. As it has functioned within African American communities, the Bible could fruitfully be thought of as a cultural canon of sorts from which select passages are chosen, memorialized, and their interpretations rendered near timeless. The figures within the text have become living cultural icons, which contest definitions of religion reliant on self-identity, institutionality, and clergy. Jesus no longer exists just for his early followers, he becomes the best friend of many African Americans, their “fourth man in the fiery furnace,” deliverer, “lawyer in the courtroom,” “doctor in the sickroom,” “way maker,” “wheel in the middle of the wheel,” “lily of the valley,” “bright and morning star,” “rose of Sharon,” and “I am that I am.” Said differently, the Bible is a living document that contains stories that continue to play out in present reality, stories that cannot be restricted to certain time periods or applications. African Americans have creatively employed biblical narratives in a variety of ways; they have “embraced them, endured them, seized them, stolen them, caught them, and captured them.” (10)

Quoting Charles Long, Callahan writes rather frankly that African slaves forcibly brought to North America used the Bible because it was available. (11) It had been “the single most important centering object for social identity and orientation among European dominants” in the wake of modernity. (12) There is a certain creative genius in using the same document that invested one’s perpetual servitude with cosmic significance to invest one’s liberation similarly. One could argue that the best kinds of critique are those staged between immanence and imagined transcendence, deconstructing something from within with an eye to the beyond, that is, what it could become. Callahan compellingly describes: “As modernity’s most thoroughly humiliated people, small wonder that African Americans have taken the texts of the Bible so eagerly and earnestly. Slavery’s children entered history from below: from their straitened vantage they came to see in the holy scriptures that God grants victory to the unlikeliest people — people like themselves — and by the unlikeliest means.” (13) Resignified for their unique needs, it is the biblical images that American slaves heard about — and later discovered in the text for themselves — in sermons, stories, and conversations flowing from the lips of white ministers and slaveholders that sustained them. (14) Images can facilitate one’s ability to make sense of one’s situation. Symbols can provide the tools communities need to craft collective identities forged through narratives of common history and destiny. Images and symbols were acutely important for a non-textually literate people, most of whom at the onset of their arrival in the Americas were unable to read the words of the Bible as some Europeans could. African peoples had largely come from communities who communicated through oral and visual technologies not reliant on the written or printed word characteristic of Western European cultures, especially after the invention of the printing press. Not only did many of these slaves learn about biblical themes aurally, they also chiefly communicated them orally or visually. For example, many of the themes of historical African-American folk sculpture are biblical in orientation, though they are African in their “iconic patterns and techniques of sacred ornamentation.” (15) It is the unique combination of biblical themes, particular interpretations of those themes, and African cultural styles of dissemination that marked the “African-Americanness” of early American slaves’ biblical hermeneutics.

Callahan argues that the late eighteenth-century served as a crucible for the birthing of a uniquely African-American tradition of biblical interpretation. America slaves’ developing emphasis on justice came into stark relief against the injustice they experienced, against the empty revolutionary-era rhetoric of “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” which obviously did not extend to slaves. It is the God who “sits high and looks low,” as a traditional African-American prayer describes, that unsettled the right of Europeans and Euro-Americans to rule. (16) By reconstructing God, American slaves ideologically cast suspicion on — wholly damned — the theological foundations of colonial and imperial domination. Such an intellectual maneuver called into question the assumed moral superiority of Europeans and Euro-Americans and the rightness — the divine status — of their cause. Ironically, this move also suggested the intellectual radiance of Africans, who Europeans and Euro-Americans thought intellectually inferior to themselves.

Those “who wield power on earth” have often imagined themselves to be God’s sole “natural representatives” — the sole bearers of the imago Dei — and have subsequently ignored that countless others have also been called by God to represent Godself. (17) Those who are in power or who seek to expand their power over against the agencies of others have frequently identified their own faces as the sole faces of the human. Consequently, they have legitimized their right to dominance, to rule. It is easy to justify one’s oppression of another if one views that other as precisely that, wholly other to — having nothing in common with — oneself. Therefore, in order to resist the “morality” and “divinity” of slavery, many American slaves quite radically believed themselves to be created in the image of God, representatives of God on earth. (18) This theologically grounded anthropology was enough to shield the interiorities of many American slaves from the psychological warfare slavery initiated. Put differently, new theologies based on new readings of the biblical text gave birth to new humanities — new conceptions of what it means to be human and who gets to be included in that category. They infused the abolitionist sensibilities of many American slaves with cosmic significance and the urgency that it implies, giving many of them a sense of divine mission and moral superiority. We can imagine an enslaved African asking boldly, in the words of the Apostle Paul, “If God be for us, who can be against us?”(19)

In this sense, reading the Bible — or re-reading the Bible, for that matter — has historically constituted a profoundly liberative religious practice for many African American communities. It has allowed Black people to re-signify the U.S./North America as Egypt in defiance of Europeans and Euro-Americans, who have signified it as the Promised Land. It has also allowed them to rearticulate God in such ways that make it impossible for God not to be an active liberator of Black people. God is figured as one who works through history to bring about the material/physical, psychological/emotional, cultural, and spiritual liberation of Black people.

For many African Americans, the Bible has helped them “to imagine themselves as something other, in another world, different from what their immediate situation reflected or demanded.” (20) It has been a source of empowerment precisely because it has been a site of interpretive possibilities. These possibilities were manipulated and created by a people who experienced profound disorientation — ruptures in culture, context, and consciousness — at the hands of a violent modernity. (21) Although the Bible has been implicated in Western modernity’s imperial web of relations, it has also acted as an anchoring tool, a way to orient a (newly) subjugated people in a new time and space. In conclusion, it is these sorts of analyses of modern power relations that we lose when biblical studies is locked in the past and viewed only as the study of ancient texts, a move that no doubt serves imperial power. (22) The Bible is just as ancient as it is contemporary. It continues to wield incredible power, both oppressive and liberative, as it is constantly taken apart and put back together again — repeatedly redacted — in communities of interpretation. Through Holy Spirit’s loving guidance, we can exercise our collective responsibility to push our hermeneutic communities to read the biblical text toward fostering the emancipation of a groaning creation, the widest category of material being most closely within our grasp and most able to move us beyond narrow self-interests that idolatrously exalt hegemony.

1 Vincent L. Wimbush, The Bible and the American Myth: A Symposium on the Bible and Constructions of Meaning (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1999), 1.

2 Ibid., 4.

3 Ibid., 3.

4 See Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) and James Treat, ed. Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge, 1996).

5 See Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Christ (Maryknoll: New York, 1994), 92–96.

6 See Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown: Persephone Press, 1981), bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000), and Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984).

7 See Douglas, The Black Christ, 99–102.

8 Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), xi.

9 Ibid., xi-xii.

10 Ibid., xi.

11 Ibid., xii.

12 Vincent L. Wimbush, The Bible and African Americans: A Brief History (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress), 4.

13 Callahan, The Talking Book, xiii.

14 Ibid., xii.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., xiv.

17 Leonardo Boff, Holy Trinity, Perfect Community (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988), xi.

18 Callahan, The Talking Book, xiv.

19 Romans 8:31, KJV.

20 Wimbush, The Bible and African Americans, 4. 21 Ibid., 5.

22 Wimbush, The Bible and the American Myth, 2–3.

This piece was originally published on Plural Space, an online column of Postcolonial Networks, in May 2010.