Walter McCray
He runs a test on live audiences with Genesis 9 open in front of them. Almost nobody passes it, and the answer is sitting in the text where it has always been.
Rev. Walter Arthur McCray. President of the National Black Evangelical Association since 1999. Co-founder, with his wife Thelma, of Black Light Fellowship, the Chicago publishing house that put most of this work into print. Author of The Black Presence in the Bible: Discovering the Black and African Identity of Biblical Persons and Nations (1990) and its second volume on the Table of Nations, Genesis 10.
Also anchors session 1.5 of the learning path
Who he is
Walter Arthur McCray has led the National Black Evangelical Association since 1999. With his wife Thelma he founded Black Light Fellowship, the Chicago house that published most of this material when nobody else would. He wrote The Black Presence in the Bible and its second volume on the Table of Nations.
He is not primarily a debater. He is a teacher, and his method shows it. Where other people in this archive argue a conclusion, McCray hands you a passage and asks you to read it again.
What you are getting in this dossier
The classroom test he runs on Genesis 9, and why almost nobody passes it. Where the curse of Ham actually comes from, which is not where you have been told. His argument that the Bible has no category of race at all. The Acts 1:8 reading that puts the gospel in Africa eight chapters before it reaches Europe. And the correction he offers to the Hebrew Israelite claim, which is the passage the learning path uses.
The test
Start with what the text says. Noah gets drunk, Ham sees him, the brothers cover him, Noah wakes up angry. Then McCray asks his audience one question.
"Oftentimes I ask people in my teaching sessions, 'Who did God curse?' Once they've read the passage. Some will say Ham and some will say Canaan, and I will say to them, 'Read it again because God does not even speak in the passage.' God doesn't say a word. Who says something is Noah with a hangover and he curses. There's no indication of scripture that God approved of what Noah said about Canaan."
The rest of this dossier is part of Unspoken
2,583 more words and 12 more clips of him making the case, including the three objections he answers and the place he refuses to flatter his own argument.
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