Lisa Fields: Hello. Welcome to the Jude three Project podcast. I’m your host, Lisa Fields. I’m the founder of the Jude three Project. Well, thank you for watching another episode of the g three project podcast. As always, I’m your host, Lisa Fields, the founder of the g three project. And today, we’re joined by my good friend,
Dr. Esau McCaulley: doctor Esau McCauley. Welcome, Esau. Thank you. It’s been a minute since you had me on the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It has. Do I am I do I have the record of the most shows, or does someone who’s been on more than me? I don’t know. I think somebody has been on more. Okay. Who who who’s in am I in the top three? Yes. You’re definitely top You’re definitely top three. You might be the top two. Okay. Yeah. Who who who do you think is ahead of me? I don’t know. That’s a great question. You might be I’m claiming the top spot until until you can show. Yeah. For those who don’t know who you are, tell our audience a little bit about you. Yeah. My name is Esau McCauley. I am the Jonathan Blanchard associate professor of New Testament and public theology at Wheaton College. I’m the church planter and pastor of All Saints Anglican Church in Naperville. I’m a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. I host a podcast called the Esau podcast here at Holy Post. We’re recording this episode, Studios, and I have written a bunch of books. You might have heard of reading while black, how far to the promised land, New Testament in color. And recently, I published, a kid’s book called Isaiah Johnson and the Big Game and a children’s bible called
Lisa Fields: God’s Colorful Kingdom. So I think that’s the that’s the briefest version of my CB that I can drop for you. Yes. And we’re gonna try to put two episodes together. Okay. So this is gonna be part one and part two. Part one and part two. A double episode. Yes. A double episode. Oh, what we’re gonna dive in right now in part one Okay. Part one. Is the controversy
Dr. Esau McCaulley: of the ground Controversy. Okay.
Lisa Fields: Okay. The conversation in Paul versus Jesus. Okay. Which is so funny because that was the first, like, courageous conversation topic you were a part of. Yes. With the first courageous conversations, I knew back then in 2018. That’s man, I’ve known you for a long time. Yes. That this was a topic that we needed to address, and it’s funny that it’s circling back around. And It never goes away. I feel like I feel like basically the same three or four topics keeps coming up. So what actually do you wanna know about Paul versus Jesus? Tell our audience for those who don’t aren’t even aware of the conversation.
Dr. Esau McCaulley: Tell them what the conversation is. Well, one idea is that Jesus is kind of loving and kind, and Paul is the legalist. Mhmm. And so there’s one form of Christianity that, Jesus presented, and then Paul presents another version of Christianity. And so I think there’s a tons of things that we can say. I wanna see which are the ones that are most helpful. Let me start by talking about, like, Jesus’ context. Mhmm. Jesus is born into a conquered and colonized area Mhmm. As a Jewish person, a minority, became blessed as a Jewish person. And everybody there, the majority culture there was Judaism. They were Jewish. And so when you begin to read Jesus’s, story, he’s often pushing back on the hypocrisy of religious leaders. Mhmm. And so they would say one thing and do another thing. Now it’s important to know in that context, wasn’t because there was anything inherently correct about being Jewish. It’s because the high priesthood at the time was for sale, so you could buy by bribing Roman officials. You could buy the the high priesthood. And so the high priesthood wasn’t chosen, because of his piety. It was chose because of his proximity to the empire. And so Jesus is and the people know that people know the high priesthood is corrupt, and then other religious groups within Israel because of that who are associated with the high priesthood and even the Herodians, they’re corrupt. Mhmm. And so Jesus is pushing back on this stuff. And so you see a lot of Jesus talking negatively about religious leaders, which people love. Right? People love it when Christians are you know, when people are talking about religious hypocrisy. Mhmm. That’s the first thing. The second thing is Jewish ethics. Right? So Jesus grows up in a time where everybody nominally at least says they want to follow the Old Testament. And so you see on the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus would take an Old Testament passage and then raise it. You’ve heard it said you should not commit adultery. So in other words, he can say that, and everybody would agree. Like, oh, yeah. We know that part. And then he goes, but I say to you, a man who looks at a woman lustfully in his heart. So he’s saying, I want to go beyond the surface level of what the scripture says to the heart of the scripture. And so you see these two elements that Jesus is pushing back on the religious figures of his day, and we see him, kind of taking Jewish ethics to a higher point. A key part of Jesus’ ministry is the kingdom of God. That because in his life and his death and his resurrection, what he was bringing to the earth was this this moment of God’s definitive action. So you need to repent and believe in the kingdom. And so the center of the kingdom was god’s righteousness, god’s justice, all of the stuff that we care about as as it relates to both care for the marginalized and the transformation of of life. God’s people should be holy. Mhmm. So you then take Paul. Paul in a different context. Paul is a minority born in Tarsus where there he grows up as a minority in a majority culture, and he’s a Roman citizen. And Paul, when he’s converted, he becomes an evangelist largely to Gentile audiences. Mhmm. And so Paul can’t begin with the ethical basis of Judaism and build from there. So you don’t hear Paul say, you’ve heard us say, do not do not commit adultery, but I say that you do this. He’s beginning to say things that no one else that that would be surprising to his audience. I tell you again, the people who drink, who steal, like, you want you won’t inherit the kingdom of God. And so when Paul is saying these things, he’s basically paraphrasing the, 10 commandments, but he’s giving it to the gentile audience. Mhmm. And because Paul is dealing with particular concerns that are emerging as he’s evangelizing Gentiles, he has to be more direct. And for that reason, people tend to say, Jesus is nice. Paul is mean. But even as it relates to something like sexual ethics, Jesus is the one who goes beyond actions to intent. He’s the one who says, hey. If you look at a woman lustfully, if you’re imagining having sex with this woman, then you’re then you’re sinful. And so part of it is kinda just Paul gets a lot of propaganda against him, and another part of it is not taking Jesus’ word seriously. And there’s more we can say about that as relation to the kingdom, but I probably said a lot now. So I wanna give you a chance to jump in and stop me. Yeah. So I think what happens is Paul’s
Lisa Fields: words on women, his words on sexuality, and his words on slavery Yeah. Are what make people dismiss him. Right? Yeah. So they’re like I’ve heard it said, Paul is my brother. Jesus is my savior. So I don’t have to listen Paul in an authoritative way on the the topic of gender, sexuality, and slavery. And I think it’s the,
Dr. Esau McCaulley: maybe a misunderstanding of what Paul is communicating. How would you feel about that? I mean, there’s a lot of things that are, like one of the tricky parts when you have slogans is that slogans always communicate a half truth. Paul is our brother. Jesus is our savior. Nobody thinks that Paul and Jesus are equal Mhmm. In the sense of who they are as persons. Jesus is God. Paul ain’t God. But the real question is that did the same God who inspired Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John also inspire Romans, first Corinthians, and second Corinthians. Right? So to to posit Paul versus Jesus, where Jesus is also mediated to us through authors who believe that God inspired. And so what we’re trying to articulate when we’re trying to wrestle with Paul is Paul’s is whether or not we believe that the Pauline texts are inspired. And this is something that’s not new to so I guess one of the thing could could we talk about inspiration for a second? Yeah. And then we’ll kinda come back around to the three issues you talked about. And define inspiration for our audience. Inspiration just means, was God at work in the composition of these texts? Mhmm. That’s probably the simplest way of talking, but there’s a bunch of different ways people talk articulate it. But was this a are these purely human doc documents, or are they a combination of God working through human beings to communicate. Now there are different ways of accounting for this. Right? People say, oh, these books are just written by men. Well, of course, they were written by human beings, but that’s how God comes to us. Like, the idea that God couldn’t use a fallible person to tell us something true will simply just mean God couldn’t communicate. That’s all I mean, ultimately saying God to say that God used a human being Mhmm. To write something means that God can use broke broken people to do good things, which basically means God can God can communicate with us. Mhmm. And so that to me, like, saying that he’s just a human being, it’s just it’s not actually making an argument. It’s just an assertion. Now as it relates to, like, Paul, gender, sexuality, and slavery, These are huge questions. We’ve dealt with each one of these individually. Mhmm. I would just say this very clearly. The Pauline texts that are often used to argue for the exclusion of women in ministry have been interpreted differently by people who have high views of scripture. That there is a strong case that Paul believed that men and women should work together in the preaching and teaching ministry of the church. And so that is simply a misreading of Paul. The idea that the New Testament, broadly speaking, and and even Pauline theology, cannot be read in such a way as to see slavery as a evil is just also something that Christians have done. I mean, it’s really and this I’m writing a book about this, and I wanna say this, like, with with this much shared a book. Tell tell our audience what you’re writing a book about. It’s it’s not gonna come out so long. It’s about Paul it’s about called the bible it’s called it’s about the bible slavery and liberation. And it is to me always interesting that our ancestors, and I’m talking about our black Christian ancestors, the abolitionists, looked at the text of the new old and new testament and saw in it a god who liberates. Mhmm. And they said that, the people who are using the Bible to oppress black people reading this book incorrectly. Mhmm. And so now we’ve kind of gone all the way around to now there’s a certain segment of the black community that’s saying no. The slave masters were the better readers of the Bible, and our ancestors were foolish. And the thing about it is and I just wanna can we just talk about this for, like, thirty seconds? Yeah. Go ahead. I think what people try to do is they try to pretend as if the argument was simply around the exegesis of Pauline text by themselves. But if you just go back and read this literature, there there is the curse of Ham that is going on there. There is blatant racism. One of the things the abolitionists kept saying over and over again is, if this is how you read these texts, why can’t black people and enslaved white people? They said this. And and the and the enslavers goes, that’s ridiculous. That can’t work because you’re inferior to us. Mhmm. And so undergirding all of this stuff was an exegesis that had nothing to do with the Bible, but they were baking white supremacy into their interpretation of these passages. Mhmm. And what we try to argue is, okay, you take all the white supremacy out, you take all the racism out, and the argument is still better. But the non racist, non white supremacist argument in North America was not the majority argument. The majority argument is we know, and here’s the thing. There was scientific racism. There was all the stuff about, like, what they said about there was scientific racism, there was social racism, or cultural racism, and all of these things are impacting how people are arguing about the Bible. And so we tried to isolate this one portion of the argument and say that people were just reading Paul. If that was actually the case, then you would have seen in the time the enslavement of the Irish and the or or or, like, the Germans and the other people. One of the things that happened, and I’ll say this and I’ll I’ll just go on. One of the reasons the slavery explodes in The United States is that initially, they’re doing indentured servitude for whites who are coming in during, like, the potato fam famine. And so things are bad. The, and so they would bring people over, and they would serve for seven years, and it was then they would kind of go, and they would kind of integrate into society. But the but the people learned two things. One, that’s not as good of an investment. Right? You get someone who’s seven years, and then they go. And second, because they can integrate into society, those people who want your indigenous servants now become your competitors. And so they said they didn’t just open the bible and go, we should enslave black people. They said, hey. There’s another, labor source that we can enslave. They can never integrate in society because they’re black and they’re different than us and they’re they’re they’re a permanent underclass and we never had to let them free and their children inherit their status. And so the things that is driving the massive expansion of, the enslavement of Black people in America is socioeconomic and cultural and not simply the extra use of the biblical text. And so it is as much attributable to greed as anything. And so I think we can sometimes oversimplify these things. Now it is simply the case, and and and here’s the thing. And this and this is what I mean when I say to have each one of these things considered in a thirty second or sixty second sound bite is just unfair to the complexity of these questions. As relation to human sexuality, I think it is the case that we have to be able to, as Christians, read the Bible, the Old, the New Testament, the the Torah, the Psalms, the prophets, the narratives, the gospels, the epistles, the book of Revelation, and ask the question of what is human flourishing and how would how my god expects us to steward our sexuality? And the idea that we can just, assume that the only reason there’s a Christian that the only thing that’s informing Christian ethics is the reading of a few Pauline texts. It’s just simply not true. And so there are, I think, a way of saying maybe I’ll put it this way. We think that that we can look at all of these things for ourselves, and we can decide what we will keep and what we will throw away. And we just assume that, like we can do this well. I will say there’s a long history of people editing the bible to suit their own needs and that has not always ended well. What what I think is is is is true of Christianity, and this is not some kind of, like, tired biblicism or something like that. It is to say there is a God who exists outside of us, who’s able to make demands not even make demands, it’s the wrong question, who’s able to direct us in a way that leads to human flourishing. And if he is actually the one who created us, then he actually gets to define what that flourishing is. And I think that sometimes we can be overconfident in our ability to discern God’s will apart from anything beyond our own opinion, and I think there needs to be a little bit more humility there. And I think that Paul versus Jesus is a way of trying to get at that question without actually doing business, like, with maybe what it is that god might be calling all of us to. And so I think I think that’s probably part of what’s going on. Yeah. I was seeing somebody recently deconstruct, and
Lisa Fields: one of the things that they wrestle with was slavery
Dr. Esau McCaulley: in the bible. Yeah.
Lisa Fields: You’ve talked about this a number of times Yeah. Since we’re on the subject of Paul versus Jesus. Yes. Can you just give your spiel? You you’ve I mean, for people could get reading while black, you have a whole chapter in that. But
Dr. Esau McCaulley: Yeah. Okay. So I think it’s very oh, man. There’s so much stuff I can say. There’s a whole book that’s coming. I think that one of the things that let’s talk about what the slave masters did. Okay. Let’s talk about slave masters did. This is actually important because people didn’t say stuff, but it’s actually important to see what they did. Mhmm. The slave masters wanted to use the bible as the the ceiling and not the floor. It’s the Pauline text. It’s the ceiling. So there are Pauline texts where there’s slaves, submit to your masses, and all of these other things. And there these texts exist in the bible. To say they don’t exist in the bible will be like an unserious argument. Well, why is it that Christians, were able to still see in the bible a liberative text? Mhmm. They had a couple of them. Let’s just let’s just let’s stop at, like, three places. The gospels, the prophets, and then some of the Torah text. So in the gospels, they looked at the Christians looked at the love command. Mhmm. They said, you know, the guy says love your neighbor as yourself or do unto others you would have them do unto you. They quoted these two passages over and over again. And they say, well, okay then. If you were if you were an enslaved person, what might you desire? You might desire freedom. So neighborly love would entail freeing the slaves. Right? That’s what it means. Loving your neighbor. So how did the actual so we talked about, like, how did the the pro slavery party actually respond to this claim? And they said, well, because Black people are inferior, you can find this over and over again, because Black people are inferior, to set them free would be harmful for them because they wouldn’t know what to do with with freedom. They would misuse it and be lazy. And so the loving thing to do is to keep them enslaved because we’re the ones who are civilized civilizing them. And so you can ask yourself, is that actually a viable interpretation of the Bible? They’re saying that what it mean their understanding of the love command was this, that God created hierarchy with whites on the top, blacks on the bottom, and that love then means people operating within the place that God designed them within the hierarchy. That’s the interpretation of the of the of the golden rule. And so when you then begin to see the slave narratives that come as a result, autobiography of Frederick Douglass, Is this in life of the slave girl? Those aren’t just narratives. They’re a long reflection on the love command. So they’re saying, this is what slavery is. This is actually what it is. Can you love someone and do this to them? Which is where you get the the, stereotype of the happy slave. Well, they say no. No. No. The slaves are happy. They got the birth of the of a nation becomes a movie later, but this, like, narrative of happy slavery. So as relate and then they said as it relates then to the gospels, they found themselves struggling to make sense of the story of Jesus. There’s another guy named, I think it’s Barai Green. He takes Matthew 25. He says, I was sick. I was in prison. I was a foreigner. All of those passages. Right? And he says, you look at each one of those descriptions of people who are who are who are described as the disenfranchised. And he said the enslaved person meets every one of those categories. So you can judge a person in his day about how they treat the enslaved. And And so the abolitionist, like, well, no. No. No. God sorry. The pro slavery party. God didn’t actually care about the enslaved people. He meant other oppressed, hungry, imprisoned. It’s like, no. These are the people. It’s okay. Then you go to, like, the prophets. The prophets talk a lot about the oppressed and the disenfranchised and the people whose wages are stolen from them. Mhmm. And the abolitionists were going, well, if Jesus calls himself the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, and the law and the prop the law and the pro the prophets in particular, places like Isaiah, talk about the breaking of bonds. He said, well, there could be nothing more Christian than the breaking of bonds and the fulfillment of all of these oppressed passages in in the prophets. So how do I then our our beloved slave proprietor, how do they respond? They go, no. No. No. When Jesus says he came to fulfill the law and the prophets, he had in mind the curse of Ham because the curse of Ham was in the law. And so that Jesus approving of slavery was Jesus bringing the fulfillment, even the prophecies in the Torah, as it relates to the perpetual enslavement of black people. That’s what it actually meant. The prophets and the law that includes slavery, that Jesus was coming to make sure that that thing stayed in place. And so I think you can also do something like look at the Torah and so look at the prophets and see, hey. This is how they’re reading it. Let’s look at what’s going on in, like, these Torah texts. The abolitionists go, well, hold on. There is a law in the Torah that says any if you injure a slave, you knock out his tooth. If you injure the slave, the slave goes free as a result of the injury. And he said they also say, hold on. There’s also a law that says, if anyone escapes from one place, you’re not to send them back into slavery. And so they’re saying that the fugitive slave laws that goes to The United States going counter to what the what the Torah says. And they said the idea that any person who escapes from one place and goes to the other place, that that person is allowed to be free makes slavery effectively voluntary in, like, the Old Testament. Now whether or not that’s actually what happened in practice is a different question. They’re saying the text itself says, hey. You should if someone escapes, you shouldn’t send them back. They also say there’s explicit laws against kidnapping, of people to send them into slavery. They said every black person in America was kidnapped, every single one of them. And so you do begin to see that there it’s not as simple as, hey. I’m sorry. Let me say this last one. They say, okay. Let’s look at the story of the Exodus where God sees and enslave people and he sets them free. And what the abolitionists are trying to get to and people often misunderstand what they’re trying to do. Some people talk about it versus the spirit of the text versus literal interpretation. What they’re actually saying is a Christian can do this. They could look at the entire witness of scripture from the law, the prophets, these narratives, Jesus’ own ministry, the concern for the weak and the marginalized, Paul’s statement about our essential equality in Christ and say, okay. Taking all of these together and if I have two options, to enslave people or to set them free, it seems to me that that the way that the evidence goes towards setting people free. They said this last thing, and, actually, this is really important. They said, okay. This is what I mean, the ceiling and the floor. Paul doesn’t call for abolition. But they’re saying, well, there is the Christians were, like, 1% less than 1% of the population, and it was a monarchy. They had no ability to vote. You couldn’t vote slavery out as as you weren’t that most of them weren’t even citizens. And he’s saying now, the abolitionist is saying now, Christians control every level of power. They control the church, they control the, businesses, they control the government. And they’re saying to treat Paul as the maximum that is required in a context we have all of the power misunderstands what he’s trying to do. And they’re saying that the the changing circumstances of Christians in North America in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds means they have an added responsibility, that they can’t be put they are actually held to a higher standard because they can actually effectively change these laws. And so that’s the reason why the abolitionists did not think that what they were saying was crazy. And I think wishing all of that away and not doing the hard work of trying to synthesize all of these complex texts in these complex circumstances and accounting for the differences between the first century and the eighteenth century is not necessarily taking the testimony of our own ancestors seriously who read these texts. I mean, I talk about this a lot. Frederick Douglass says it explicitly. He said, what do you do? He says, what do you do when they when you see things like the fugitive slave law and people are using the Bible to justify the enslavement of our people? He said, do you toss this book away? He goes, no. You you you you hold it to your chest more tightly, and you show from these pages the guy that’s on the side of freedom and not enslavement. And that’s what they did, and I think they’re taking their testimony seriously in reading them and hearing what they have to say makes it clear to us that they weren’t just begging the question. They weren’t running from difficult text. They’re trying to say that on the whole, this is a liberative text. And the truth is that liberative tradition has been the same wherever the Bible has gone in oppressed groups. They see in these stories
Lisa Fields: a god who’s a friend of theirs and a god who’s not their enemy. Mhmm. No. I I think that’s helpful because what you’re getting at is the misreading of the text by slave owner. And I don’t even know if they thought this with, like, conviction or they were looking for tools to manipulate.
Dr. Esau McCaulley: So it’s really interesting. This is what I mean. So there’s a lot of stuff happening around, like, the ’17 eighteen hundreds. At the beginning, especially after the revolutionary war, and by the way, they all this is all motivated by greed. So I’m not trying to Yeah. That’s why that’s why I was saying that the abolition was a war. Let me let me explain. So in the seventeen hundreds, like, oh, this is an unfortunate reality that we hope ends. Right? So Jefferson, like, super racist. Right? But he kinda comes in and out as to saying black people are inferior, but slavery is kind of an embarrassment to the republic. By the time you get to the era leading into the civil war, because of things like the cotton gin and it has become the economic engine of the South, the argument changes from slavery as a a a a unfortunate necessity to a positive good. And the reason it becomes a positive good is because people are making money off of it. And so the idea that, like, there was that this is strictly these are people who would otherwise treat black people as equal, but they happen to find a couple of verses in Paul to justify enslavement is not true of the human experience. Right? There is a a reality that and this is the bible talks about this, human sinfulness, that people desire to make money. And one of the ways that you can justify making money is you you must first dehumanize the person that you want to exploit. You see it there in the same thing with immigrants, right? These immigrants are different. They’re not normal people. They’re they’re called we you know, the you know, the, this government, they call them animals. They call them dangers. They say they’re like eating dogs. So you have to say that. So then, when you exploit them, you don’t feel the pangs of conscience. And so what you actually and this happens in Christian context and in non Christian context. They’re completely secular places all over the world. There’s economic They’re silencing their conscience for their own For their own economic and social benefit. Yeah. Now I wanna be really clear. Their church is complicit in allowing the co option of its message to do that work. But at least you have to say something like this. This is what I’m talking about, these bare facts. Right? You have in Christianity, at the center of Christianity, a person who died a death that was not possible possible except for noncitizens. Right? A Roman said the reason Paul they apologized to Paul when he’s beaten Mhmm. Because Paul is a citizen. But at the height of Christianity is this idea that Jesus, a noncitizen and a part of an oppressed people who’s colonized, is killed on trumped up charges and tortured to death because they saw the Jewish people as less than human. And so that act, yes, it’s an it’s an atonement for sins, but it does also critique of imperial ways of being, of dehumanizing, beating, torching, assaulting, and murdering people. So the fact that you worship someone who that is a an essential part of their narrative ought to raise by the bare fact of the cross, ought to raise the question of, well, how am I treating the marginalized in my own context? Mhmm. And so the idea that all of this stuff can easily be co opted with the empire is simply not true because that’s the reason they didn’t want the enslaved people to read this book. Mhmm. It’s the reason why they edited this book. And so if there is no danger in these texts, then they would have given it to us. It’s the reason that when they preach the the sermons to us, they preach only certain texts. Right? Because they understood that their implications their that that the book is dangerous. We often treat the bible as this domesticated tool of patriarchy Mhmm. When it is a tool that actually inspires revolutions. Mhmm. And I think that that’s like, when and so when I when I talk about, like, why these texts ought to remain useful for us as the church, it is because I think it’s the book that sets people free. Mhmm. And it’s not the book itself, like, it’s some kind of, like, talisman. It’s the fact that God was at work in this book and through this book and through other things too. Through creation, we see the glory of God. But he said to work in a unique way through this book to give his people in a and a chance to encounter and know him and have their lives transformed. What I think we see a lot is don’t trust this book, trust me. And I wanna go, well, who are you? You didn’t save me. You didn’t die for me on the cross. Your words have no long history of bringing transformation to our community. I have receipts. People often talk about like the receipts of what God has done for Black people, like literally read our history, read all of our read many of our best authors and our and our best activists who brought change. It’s because they saw in this story a a a hope that that they cannot concoct on their own. Mhmm. So
Lisa Fields: before we go, I want you to talk a little bit about the role of German scholarship
Dr. Esau McCaulley: in We’re talking about the Germans again.
Lisa Fields: Our interpretation. Because I think when we’re taking the ways sometimes we’re framing Paul’s words or our textual criticism our our criticism around Paul and his text saying we’re, we’re, trying to remove a white supremacist framework,
Dr. Esau McCaulley: we’re also using a white supremacist framework in German state. I think I think that, like, sometimes we can hurl these, like, who’s who’s who’s colonizing who argument back and forth. Right? Mhmm. And I think to put some context is the idea seems to be that any Christian who has a belief in the ongoing relevance of scripture and its inspiration is internalized white supremacy. They’re not performing whiteness when I say that I believe that, like, God was at work in the in the writers to deal with the New Testament. Well, on one level, that’s just simply not true because I guess you can keep you can keep chasing down this where this whiteness originates. Like, was it it was in Huntsville, Alabama at the black church that I was growing up in. It was actually when my grandfather, where he was raised. It was actually in the black church all across the South. Then you could say, yeah. The entire Black church in the South is internalizing white supremacy. And then you say, okay. Then maybe we go back to, you know, the early church with the early church, but so there there’s this way of saying, I don’t like this. And the way that I can separate Black people from something like the inspiration of scripture is to link it to whiteness. That just it’s a rhetorical ploy that is historically inaccurate. So, like, I just wanna say, like, it’s possible for people to make the decision of their own in their full black selves. They believe that this is the word of God. So it’s just like to me an unserious argument, and it’s like a slander that people ought to make better arguments. Now we could also say that none of us come to these texts without an history. There’s a history of scholarship that comes out of the what they call the mainline tradition, the majority white traditions in The United States during the early nineteen hundreds, the nineteen twenties and thirties and forties. There is what is called higher criticism of the Bible, the doubting of miracles, the doubting of inspiration, the, kind of more skeptical and hostile readings of Paul. And those things do come from Germany. They come from Europe. And so what happens later is that those ideas are adopted in certain black spaces, and then issues of race injustice are globbed on top of those things. But undergirding that skepticism, right, that Paul is just a man and all of this other stuff and Paul versus Jesus, that comes from German scholarship. Now it was dipped in chocolate. Right? And now we’re having this what becomes the same argument. Right? Is the text inspired? Is Paul this? This is the same argument that white scholars had. And so if I am guilty of maternalizing white supremacy, then that my opponent is also guilty of maternalizing, white respectability and the the white intellectual seriousness is coming out of there. And the important part about that though is that those Germans themselves were also racist and that you can have progressive racism, which is why it’s not just in, like, evangelical institutions. You have black people that make at mainline institutions who experienced a different forms of racism and discrimination. You’ve been at your job, your progressive job, in your progressive city where it was racist. Right? Where you wanna say, we’re all about justice and equality until it’s time to build some affordable housing. And we don’t want those black people near us. And so the idea that progressivism is going to protect us from anti black racism is historically not true. Those some of those same institutions weren’t there’s this I want I’m gonna put them on, put them in the streets. And certain institutions, they didn’t they didn’t wanna let black people in. Like, it wasn’t just the evangelicals. I mean, I can’t water for them. And so what does that mean? That means simply saying, hey, there are some white people who believe something and those white people who believe certain things like inspiration are tied to right wing ideology, then everybody who believes in the inspiration of scripture is tied to that same ideology. Even though that doctrine precedes the creation of what we now call modern whiteness, it’s in the actual Bible itself. Right? Where the prophets claim the word of the Lord came to me. Right? The prophets themselves said, when when and when they says no one spoke with their own accord, but they are carried along by the Holy Spirit. In the early church, in the first and second and third century, before they were part of the empire, they were arguing that these texts were in some sense authoritative. And so the idea that the inspiration of scripture is only created to perform white supremacy is a historically unserious argument because you can just look over it, take yourself over to Russia. Take yourself over to parts of Africa and say, what were these churches in Ethiopia and Syria? What were they saying about these texts? Now they were Catholic or Orthodox and so they had other doctrines that are attached to it. They might have something about, like, you know, bishops, priests, and deacons. But all of these different Christian traditions across time and culture and apart from white supremacy saw these texts as serious. And so I do I think that that means that we’re going to have to, at some point, answer these questions on their own merits and not use white supremacy, arguments as a cover. Because a lot of these questions have been answered. And I think that what happens is, and I, and I, and I want to say I feel this too, We to be a Christian in America means to consistently be deeply disappointed with other Christians. It means to see people in the name of God do things that are unconscionable. And it’s and and sometimes in particular black people. And we need to and we’re trying to find a reason why. And the answer that is offered to us because that is partially true. Like people use this text to oppress our people. Therefore, these texts the solution to these things are to get rid of these texts. But the problem is we see places where these texts aren’t normative in the lives and the imagination of the people, and we see white supremacy being still performed. It might mean that white supremacy is a product of human brokenness. I don’t think that anybody believes that, like, Donald Trump or whoever read, like, you know, Paul and decided he want to redistrict Texas. Right? You know what I mean? I don’t think he’s read. You You know what I mean? Like yeah. Like, it’s like that’s like and so I think I think that what I’m saying to you is the empires often saw, religion as a useful tool of oppression, but in the absence of religion, they will use whatever tool is available to them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Fields: the president is reading scripture and Yeah. Like, oh, man. You know? Creating legislation. Yeah. Like, oh, man. I
Dr. Esau McCaulley: I wanna redistribute Louisiana because I, you know, I really believe you know, it’s like I think it’s power. He’s using He wants power. Yes. And he’s using Christians
Lisa Fields: he’s using some segment of Christianity
Dr. Esau McCaulley: Yeah. To
Lisa Fields: to to use to be his, cover for the things he’s trying to do? I think I think
Dr. Esau McCaulley: I think one of the things that I am noticing is that the problems that we face as a people and as a country persist, and we want a solution. It’s going to that gives us a place to put the pain and the anger. Mhmm. And I think for me I have found that and I say this not as a as a line but as a true thing, despair and cynicism has never liberated anybody And that I actually believe this is like a crazy take. This might be crazy. The testimony in these texts, there was a guy named Jesus preached the kingdom of God and they killed him. And three days later, he rose from the dead, and he appeared to his disciples, and he commissions those disciples, and those disciples went transform both hearts and societies. And I believe that the same message that inspired them kind of inspire can inspire us today. And so actually I have no desire to be in some kind of like intellectual back and forth to whoever might be this imaginary interlocutor. I am trying to say it is part of my job as a as a Christian to pass on this thing to the next generation as best I can. And I think that if if if we lose this thing as a people, we’ve lost something precious. And so I I get it. They’re like they’re all of these questions, like, that we that we have to answer that are really important intellectual questions. You don’t wish no way. It’s Jude three, apologetics. But I think that I think that this might yeah. I’ll put it there. You have to be taught to see. It was very natural for me to see in these texts a God who’s a friend and not an enemy. It’s not that I didn’t have questions about these texts. Mhmm. But the things that that gave me comfort were way greater than the things that gave me pause. Mhmm. And I just think that that that truth is something I wanna pass on to people, not to run away from these questions, but to find that there’s a god who still loves us on the other side of them. Mhmm.
Lisa Fields: No. I think that’s helpful. Tell our audience how they could get your book.
Dr. Esau McCaulley: That I mean, that book is gonna come out whenever it comes out. Well, Reading While Black because that’s the reason Black, Hop Out to the Promised Land. I got books for kids, Isaiah Johnson and the Big Game, God’s Colorful Kingdom. You can go to my website, esamccarthy.com. All of the books are there. You can go to any place that you buy books. But, yeah, I think I think that anywhere I’m on social media.
Lisa Fields: Esa mccarthy is not a lot of people with that name. You type that into the search bar. It’ll pop up. Alright. Well, thank you for watching another episode of the G3 Project podcast. As always, you catch all our episodes on our website or our YouTube channel or wherever you stream your favorite podcast. Remember to get my book preorder, When Heroes Fall. We’re coming back for part two for that in a sec. But, become a monthly partner. We cannot do what we do without generous support from people like you. So continue
Dr. Esau McCaulley: Hit that donate tab. And until next time, grace and peace and god bless. And I’m a monthly partner. So if I can do it, you could do it. Thank you.