You have sat through the sermon on the woman at the well. The preacher counts her husbands, lands on the scandal, and moves on. You have heard Hagar mentioned only as Abraham's mistake, a side character in someone else's covenant. Something in you suspects the text is holding more than the pulpit handed you.
Here is the short answer. Black women read the Bible with a lens that notices what others skip. Dr. Cheryl Sanders, who helped pioneer womanist theology, reads Scripture through the experience of Black women and finds figures like Hagar, the woman at the well, and the women at Pentecost carrying far more weight than the church usually gives them. The text rewards the questions only certain readers think to ask. That is not a trick. It is what every reader does, only this reader is honest about it.
What is womanist theology, actually?
Start with the word, because it carries the whole story. It comes from the writer Alice Walker, and it names a place Black women have long occupied. Present in the fight for Black liberation, but not always treated as equals by the men leading it. Present in the women's movement, but often pushed to the edge by the white women leading that. Womanist theology grew up in that double bind. Sanders puts the definition plainly.
“Basically, it is a Black feminist approach to liberation theology.” (Dr. Cheryl Sanders)
Now the objection, because it is a fair one. Does not reading Scripture through your own experience just bend the Bible to fit you? It can. Any lens can become a cage. But Sanders flips the worry on its head. Everyone already reads through a cultural lens, she says. The suburban reader brings one. The seminary reader brings one. The difference is that most readers never name theirs and assume they are simply seeing the plain text. The womanist reader names the lens out loud and then asks questions a different reader might never think to ask. Naming your lens is not bias. It is the first honest move in reading at all.
And here is the test of any lens worth keeping. It has to send you back into the text, not away from it. The questions only matter if the words on the page actually reward them. So watch what happens when Sanders asks hers.
Why does Hagar matter so much to this reading?
Sanders spends class time in Genesis 16 and 21, the story of Hagar. An Egyptian woman, enslaved, used as a surrogate, then driven into the wilderness with a child and no water. It is one of the least preached stories in the book. Read it with eyes for survival, for single parenting, for what it means to not own your own body, and it stops being a footnote to Abraham. It becomes a starting point for a positive Black identity in Scripture. But Sanders points at something in the text that is bigger than any lens.
“There is nobody else in the Bible who gets that privilege to give God a name. It is a text about God seeing and God hearing a person who had been left to die in the wilderness.” (Dr. Cheryl Sanders)
Sit with that. Abraham does not name God. Moses does not name God. Hagar, the runaway slave, looks up and calls him El Roi, the God who sees me. The honor the patriarchs never receive lands on a woman the story had every reason to discard.
She is not the only scholar who has noticed. Ekemini Uwan, in her own Jude 3 conversation on whether the Bible is good for Black women, draws the line that keeps the point honest. The trouble Black women have inherited from Scripture, she argues, was rarely the text itself. It was what got bolted onto it.
“It is the reception of the faith and the white supremacist additives, the misogyny that is added on top of the faith.” (Ekemini Uwan)
That is the difference between Hagar mishandled and Hagar read closely. The same passage that was used to keep women small is, on its own terms, the one place God lets a person name him. The additive is the problem. The text is the gift.
What did the woman at the well actually do?
Sanders is tired of hearing the Samaritan woman reduced to her marriages. She reads John 4 and sees what the disciples missed entirely. A woman with the nerve to debate theology with a stranger in broad daylight, in public, and who then becomes the most effective evangelist in the chapter.
“She gets the point of evangelism and does it, while his disciples are still scratching their heads. The whole town is saved because of the power of her testimony.” (Dr. Cheryl Sanders)
The objection here is almost reflexive. Was she not a sinner? Is the five-husbands detail not the whole point? Read the chapter again and notice what Jesus does. He does not open with her record. He opens with a request for water and a conversation about worship. The text treats her as a theological partner before it treats her as a project. The church reversed that order. John did not.
This is the womanist move in one frame. Same verses everyone has. A different question. Who is the real subject of this scene? Answer it from the text and the woman at the well walks out of the footnotes and into the role of first missionary to Samaria.
What does Pentecost have to do with who gets to speak?
In Acts 2, Sanders notices the setup before the fire. A room full of women and a few men, on one accord, in prayer. When the Spirit falls, Peter reaches back to the prophet Joel. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. The Spirit poured out on all flesh, including the people the world counts last.
“The people at the bottom rung of the ladder are not exempted from the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. You do not have to earn it. Just by virtue of being human, you are eligible.” (Dr. Cheryl Sanders)
Which is why Sanders pushes back hard on a familiar move. Take one verse, usually pulled clean out of its setting, and use it to silence every woman in the Bible. She asks the plain question. How do you do that with the Book of Acts sitting right there, with daughters prophesying on day one?
The scholars behind Humble Hermeneutic, Dr. Cynthia James and Yana Connor, press the same nerve from a different angle. The problem, Connor argues, is not only how men have read women. It is how women have been taught to read themselves down to size.
“What Queen Vashti for me sort of represents is not allowing anyone to treat you as less than you are. If you believe that you are a person created in the image of God, then you move in the world and demand that people treat you that way.” (Yana Connor)
Cynthia James adds the piece that turns it from grievance to wonder. Scripture keeps showing women moving the whole story with a single choice, often before they can see their own weight in it.
“How amazing it is that others see women sometimes with more power than we may see ourselves. Her one action could send a universal ripple, and I don't know that we think of ourselves as people who really move the world with a choice or not.” (Dr. Cynthia James)
Is this just reading what you want into the text?
It is the loudest charge against this whole approach, so meet it head on. If a lens lets you find anything, it proves nothing. Fair. The womanist reading earns its keep only if it is more careful with the words, not less. Quonekuia Day, who teaches the Old Testament, names the bias most of us carry in the other direction. Many readers come to a male-authored text already braced to see nothing for women, she points out, and so they read past what is plainly there. Slow down, read carefully, and you find a great deal that God is saying about women that a hurried reader misses entirely.
Her caution cuts both ways, and that is the point. People want to fit the text into their lives, she says, rather than letting the text guide their lives. That is the guardrail on every lens, womanist or otherwise. The question is not whether you bring a lens. You do. The question is whether your lens drives you deeper into the text or lets you skip the parts you do not like. Sanders, Uwan, Connor, James, and Day all land in the same place. The closer you read, the more the overlooked people turn out to be carrying the weight.
Why is any of this good news?
Because it means the Bible is not the property of the people who have done most of the public reading. The throughline in Sanders is not a grievance against the church. It is an invitation to read more carefully, to let the overlooked figures teach, and to trust that Scripture itself keeps lifting up the people the world overlooks. If that is true, then the text was never against you. Somewhere along the way someone handed you a thin version of it.
“If we will break down some of the barriers, God will do the rest.” (Dr. Cheryl Sanders)
That is the whole posture. Clear away the additives, the lazy sermons, the one-verse fences. Then read Hagar naming God, the Samaritan woman preaching a town awake, the daughters prophesying at Pentecost. You are not bending the Bible toward Black women. You are catching up to what it has been saying the whole time.
Quick answers
- What is womanist theology? A Black feminist approach to liberation theology, reading Scripture through the experience of Black women and asking questions other readers may not.
- Why does Hagar matter so much? Sanders notes Hagar is the one person in Scripture who names God, in a story about God seeing and hearing the abandoned.
- What does Sanders see in the woman at the well? Not a scandal, but a bold theologian and the most effective evangelist in John 4.
- Does the Bible silence women? Sanders argues you cannot take one verse to silence every woman when Acts shows the Spirit poured out on daughters as well as sons.
- Is this just reading your own ideas into the text? Sanders and others argue the opposite. Everyone reads through a lens. Naming yours pushes you to read more carefully, not less.
Listen to the full conversation
Hear the full episode of the Jude 3 Project podcast with Lisa Fields and Dr. Cheryl Sanders, including her reflections on reading Scripture through a Black woman's eyes and what the church misses when it does not.
Dr. Cheryl Sanders is professor of Christian ethics at Howard University School of Divinity and senior pastor of Third Street Church of God in Washington, DC. She is the author of a book on empowerment ethics for a liberated people and helped convene some of the earliest gatherings in womanist studies.