Yes, Black Christians can trust the Bible, and the reason is found in the Bible itself. Esau McCaulley argues that what was done to Black people in this country came from the Bible read poorly. It did not come from the Bible read properly. Read as one story, from Genesis to the cross, Scripture denies any ranking of races and shows a God who frees the enslaved. The enslaved believers who said their masters were misreading the book were right, and they were the better interpreters.
That is a strong claim, and it should be tested. The way to test it is to read the passages themselves, in their setting, and to read the hard ones as closely as the hopeful ones.
What does it mean to trust the Bible in the first place?
McCaulley starts by clarifying the question. When people ask whether they can trust the Bible, he says, they are asking something deeper than whether a book is reliable. They are asking whether God has spoken faithfully through it. In his words, “So our trust in the Bible isn’t actually a trust in the Bible, it’s a trust in the God who gave us these texts.”
That shifts what is on trial. If the Bible is where God reliably makes himself and his will known, then the history of its misuse raises a sharp question. Was God on the side of the auction block, or did the people holding the book misrepresent him? McCaulley names the two answers that have run through Black history. One stream of interpretation says the Bible justified everything from capture through the Middle Passage to Jim Crow. If that is true, he says, Black people have reason to set it aside. The other stream says those things happened because of a bad reading, and he takes that side: “all the things that have happened to African Americans has not been through the Bible read properly, but the Bible read poorly.”
He also notes that this is an old question, as old as the first time an enslaved person heard about Jesus. People who were never given a choice about who held power still had to decide what the book actually said.
Some people answer by saying God is bigger than the Bible. McCaulley agrees with the statement and rejects how it gets used. Of course God is bigger than the book, since he made the world and the people who wrote it. But he calls this move “the way of avoiding the issue.” The real issue is whether God communicates reliably through these texts. McCaulley adds that the slogan often sneaks in a replacement authority, usually the confidence of the present culture, and he does not think that culture has earned Black trust.
Where did the slaveholder’s reading actually begin?
McCaulley makes a historical point that changes where the argument starts. In his account, the slave trade did not begin because someone studied Paul and found a defense of slavery. It was justified in part by a view of human beings that put Europeans at the top and Black people at the bottom. The verses came later, recruited to bless a hierarchy already in place. That is his historical reading, and it gives the reader a precise first question. Does the Bible teach that some races are worth less than others?
Genesis answers before any law or letter is written. The text says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). The verse comes early in the story and covers all of humanity. It makes no exception by people group. It is the base on which the rest of the book’s account of humanity is built. McCaulley draws the conclusion plainly: “A racial hierarchy then is functionally idolatry. It is putting value in something that God himself doesn’t value.”
The word idolatry fits the argument. An idol is a false object of worth, something given a weight God never gave it. Skin color, used to decide who may be owned, is exactly that kind of false weight. When a reader builds a racial ladder, Genesis 1 does not merely fail to support it. Genesis 1 contradicts it.
A second question follows. Does the Bible have a chosen people set above everyone else? It does speak of a chosen people, Israel. But the calling of Abraham in Genesis 12 explains the purpose of that choice. God promises Abraham, “and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). McCaulley reads the passage this way: “the idea of God’s chosen people was for those chosen people to be a blessing to everyone else.” Israel’s election was a vocation to serve the nations. It was never a claim to be a superior kind of human being. Paul makes the same point in his sermon at Athens, where he says God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26).
So the first thing the text does, McCaulley argues, is undo the founding lie. “So the very foundational myth of white supremacy that justifies the slave trade is countered by the scriptures.” He also observes that no one needs Greek or Hebrew to see this. An English Bible is enough.
What kind of God does the story introduce?
The second question is about God’s character. When Israel first comes to know God as a nation, the setting is slavery. The text says, “And the LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows” (Exodus 3:7). The Exodus is a narrative, so it describes rather than legislates, but it is the narrative Israel is told to build its identity on. McCaulley’s summary is direct: “He’s the kind of God who sees the suffering peoples of the world and acts on their behalf.”
The law then turns that memory into ethics. Deuteronomy repeats it again and again, as in the instruction for releasing a Hebrew servant: “And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee” (Deuteronomy 15:15). McCaulley’s point is that the memory of oppression was meant to train compassion into God’s people. The prophets carry the same concern forward, often by confronting the economic exploitation of the poor.
Then Jesus reads Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth and claims the passage as a description of his own work: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives” (Luke 4:18). McCaulley treats this as Jesus summarizing what he found at the center of Israel’s Scriptures. The line from Exodus through the prophets to Nazareth is not imposed on the text by later readers. The text draws it itself.
What about the verses that allow slavery?
Here the argument has to be honest, or it fails. The Bible does contain laws that regulate slavery in Israel and letters that instruct slaves to obey their masters. McCaulley does not avoid them. He says it would be dishonest to deny that some passages in both halves of the Bible give readers pause. Those texts are what make a hard question hard.
His method is an analogy from music. Every text is a key, and the theologian’s task is to play each one at the right time and for the right length so the whole song comes through. “And if you just hit the wrong key at the wrong time, it distorts the song that is trying to be played.” The slaveholder’s method was to hold down one key and call it the song.
McCaulley frames the tension as a choice about what is fundamental. Either the Exodus, the prophets and the laws pointing toward freedom are fundamental, or the problematic passages are. Black Christians, he says, have historically answered that “for every problematic passage, I got 150 other passages.” He is careful to add, “I’m not talking about ignoring difficult text.” The claim is about weight and direction. It is not permission to delete.
He also offers a way to read the hard laws themselves. God enters the messy world of real history and does not wait for a perfect people. So a reader can ask, “at what place is God actually accommodating himself to the weaknesses and brokenness in humanity?” Jesus himself reads one law this way. Asked about divorce, he says, “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). That passage shows Jesus distinguishing a concession in the law from God’s original design. Applying the same distinction to slavery laws is an interpretive proposal. It is not a verse that settles the matter. But it is a proposal that uses Jesus’s own way of reading.
Two more texts sharpen what the Bible forbids. The law says, “And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death” (Exodus 21:16). Paul lists “menstealers,” the KJV’s word for kidnappers or slave traders, among those who act against sound teaching (1 Timothy 1:10). The trade that carried Africans across the Atlantic began with capture, and these texts condemn that act outright.
This reading has a limit, and it should be stated. It does not make every hard passage easy, and it does not explain why God allowed what he allowed in the way a reader might want. What it shows is narrower and still decisive. A reading that turns regulations for a broken world into a divine endorsement of race-based, inherited chattel slavery has to ignore Genesis 1, the Exodus, the kidnapping laws and the ministry of Jesus. That is not a faithful reading of the whole book.
Who read the Bible better, the enslaved or the enslavers?
This is McCaulley’s sharpest point. Enslaved Black Christians made a specific claim about interpretation, and he states it in their plain terms: “We claimed that them knuckleheads who was enslaving us were bad readers of the Bible, and that we, who saw God as the God of freedom, were better readers of the Bible.”
His concern is that many people today have quietly given that ground away. “We’ve become convinced that the people who read the Bible in an oppressive manner are actually better exegetes of the text.” That assumption treats the oppressor’s reading as the real, default meaning and the enslaved reading as a comforting add-on. McCaulley calls this simply untrue. Once a reader traces Genesis 1, Genesis 12, the Exodus and Luke 4, the enslaved reading turns out to account for far more of the text.
He points to evidence from how slaveholders behaved. They edited the Bible and kept the enslaved from learning to read. If their case was strong, he asks, why not hand over the whole book? His answer: “They took those things from us ’cause they knew that if we read these texts for ourselves, we’d be difficult to control.” A reader does not ration a book that supports him.
McCaulley also widens the circle. The reading that hears a God who cares for the stepped-on peoples of the world is not only Black American. He points to Christians across Africa and South America who read the gospel the same way. He urges readers to “decenter the European reception of the Bible” when judging whether it can be trusted. Leaving conservative European readings for progressive European ones, he argues, still keeps Europe at the center. His deeper conviction is that white supremacy has already taken a great deal from Black people in America, and it should not be allowed to take God and the Scriptures too.
If people who claimed the Bible did harm, does that prove the Bible harmful?
McCaulley says the deepest version of the question is ethical. Does trusting these texts produce a good and just person, or a cruel one? His answer is the life of Jesus. He is not saying that Jesus believed the Bible, so you should too. He is saying that Jesus was visibly shaped by Israel’s Scriptures, including the passages that trouble readers today, and that life was compassionate and just. Jesus is the proof of concept for what these texts produce when read rightly. That gives readers a test: “if my reading of scripture makes me less like Christ, then I know that I’ve read them incorrectly.”
Lisa Fields pressed on this with a counterexample. Judas walked with Jesus and still became greedy and a betrayer. Someone can claim the Scriptures as authority and still not be changed. McCaulley agreed. A person can affirm every high view of the Bible and still live badly, and he says that gap is what wounds people most. The fault in Judas does not reflect on Jesus, and the fault in a slaveholding reader does not reflect on the text he misused.
McCaulley does not speak about this from a distance. He says he came to faith in a setting of deep hypocrisy, where people said one thing on Sunday and lived otherwise through the week. Jesus’s warning about causing little ones to stumble means the people who did this will answer for it. He also offers the wounded an apology and a hope that they can find the God their teachers pointed to, even if those teachers were broken. He finds strength in early Black Christians, who faced the same contradiction, and adds, “Black Christians have the advantage of never having believed the propaganda.” They did not take up the faith because they trusted the people who brought it. They took it up while seeing those people clearly.
That may be the most important thing the enslaved readers teach. They did not need their oppressors to be good in order to trust the God of the Exodus. They needed only to read the whole book, and they judged their masters by it.
Quick answers
Does the Bible teach that some races are superior?
No. Genesis 1:27 places every human being in God’s image, and McCaulley calls any racial hierarchy functionally idolatry. Israel’s election in Genesis 12 was a calling to bless all families of the earth.
Didn’t slaveholders get their ideas from the Bible?
McCaulley argues the trade was justified first by a racial hierarchy, with verses recruited afterward. The law’s death penalty for stealing and selling a person (Exodus 21:16) condemns the capture on which the trade depended.
How should I read the passages that regulate slavery?
Honestly and in context. McCaulley weighs them against the liberating thread from the Exodus to Jesus and asks where God is accommodating human brokenness while pointing to a better way, the same distinction Jesus draws about divorce in Matthew 19:8.
Were the enslaved really better Bible readers?
McCaulley says yes. Their reading accounts for more of the text, and the slaveholders’ choice to edit the Bible and forbid literacy suggests they knew the whole book would not serve them.
How can I tell whether a reading is faithful?
Ask whether it makes you more like Jesus. McCaulley’s test is that a reading which makes a person less like Christ has been read incorrectly.