The Problem

During a 2024 Bible study series, a member emailed me to inform me they were moving their membership and leaving the church over comments made referent to sexuality and the Bible. While I assured her that my comments were not meant as they were interpreted, this member doubled down in their homophobia and emphatically reinforced what the Bible said about same sex practices. Pastorally, I invited this member to have additional conversations and offered Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas’ book, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective as a launching pad for further study, inquiry, and discourse. It did not avail.

The Bible is a complicated book and the way [we] read, present, study, and make meaning of prose, narratives, and literary corpuses situated in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Testament, the Torah, Nevi’im, Kethuvim, (the law, the prophets, and the writings), Pentateuch, Masoretic Text, Latin Vulgate, or Talmud often influences our ethical and ecclesial commitments and shapes our religious experiences, collective hermeneutic, and social imagination. Reading is fundamentally an act of resistance (especially for Black people whose theology was shaped in the “hush harbor” of chattel slavery in the antebellum South where biblical illiteracy persisted). Howard Thurman recounts this truism by sharing the story of his grandmother, who refused to let him read certain portions of the Bible because of their oppressive machinations. Reading scripture, then, on our own without appropriate historical, theological, socio-political, cultural, philosophical, and linguistic contextualization is like reading WebMD and trying to diagnose yourself as opposed to going to a trained doctor for professional assistance or guidance. While some passages are easy to understand, others are extremely complicated and cannot be adequately decoded with a simple Google search. To combat this practice, Beulah reconfigured its Christian Education curriculum to create safe space for responsible ways of reading sacred texts. 

Why Womanism?

Womanism helps to deconstruct, decentralize, and decolonize the process of scripturalizing in such a way that gives agency and autonomy to women and social “others” who have been historically marginalized. Womanism privileges the intellectual and ideological experiences of Black women — as exegetes of scripture — and invites their experiences to be voiced, valued, and validated in religious epistemologies (ways of knowing and being) and ecclesiologies (church doctrine). Womanism also takes seriously the importance of intersectionality — what Black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw defines as intersecting, conflicting political and structural identities, navigating both one’s Blackness and womanality. It also takes seriously the literary technique of intertextuality as an interpretive mechanism. Mitzi Smith in Womanist Sass: Social Injustice, Intersectionality, and Biblical Interpretation, argues that “inter(con)textuality is critically engaging dialogue between readings of the biblical text…”¹ Intertextuality is the analysis of intersecting texts within biblical literature that examines the ways they function symbiotically and uniquely inform one another. This is critical to understanding holiness codes, household codes, clobber texts, and texts of terror. Womanism not only helps to unearth the complexities of textual analysis using traditional forms such as form criticism, rhetorical criticism, textual criticism and the like, it also invites communities to read from margins and ask whose voice is being redacted from the narrative.

This invites us to use what Paul Ricouer calls a hermeneutic of suspicion. In our 2024 Bible Study series called, “Hidden Figures: Celebrating Women in the Word,” Rev. Dr. Gabby Cudjoe-Wilkes  (Co-Pastor of Double Love Church; Brooklyn, NY) explored the hermeneutic of suspicion while teaching on the story of Hagar and Sarah. Utilizing this literary tool, it allows the reader to ask necessary questions of the Bible to ensure the passage in question has been, and is being, contextualized appropriately. It gives space for us to “talk back” to the text and put it in its proper setting and framework so the reader can more aptly make sense of its contents. 

How?

Black Baptist churches can partner with organizations such as The Candler Foundry to bring scholar practitioners to their local churches (accessible via Zoom as well for those in remote or rural areas) for multi week classes on a topic of their choosing. Congregations may co-create with the organization the subject matter they would like to embrace and structure it in such a way that it serves the particular congregation’s needs. We accomplished this at Beulah Baptist Church by working with Dr. Nicole Symmonds, Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary [Decatur, GA], and offering a three (3) week course called, “Reclaiming the Body: A Womanist Theology of Belonging, Inclusion, and Grace” in March 2025, which explored ways that the Bible, ethics, and Black theology interface around the Black body. This allowed parishioners to interact with a practitioner directly and ask tough questions about canonical formation, womanist theology, Black social ethics and more as we explored haptic theology, theological anthropology (Shawn Copeland), erotic defiance, sexual deviance, respectability politics (Evelyn Higginbotham), etc. 

Develop focus groups, or small groups, within the congregation and provide space for them to cogitate on Black social ethics and clobber texts, or texts of terror, to begin the process of unpacking the ways these are foundationally imbricated. These groups should be led by a trained theologian and/or Pastor. Provide guiding questions using Norman’s Gottwald template “Framing Biblical Interpretation: A Self Inventory of Biblical Hermeneutics,” helped individuals to identify their social location, positionality, and historical reality and the “pre-horizons” they unconsciously harbor when making meaning of texts. Gottwald argues, “how we construe the Bible is greatly affected by our experience and identity as interpreters. There appears to be a complex of factors at work in all of us as biblical interprets, no matter how different our conclusions.”² Being abreast of one’s social location helps to contextualize one’s theo-ethical beliefs and avoid gross scripturalizing errors like cherry picking and proof texting. While the questions he asks are necessarily provocative, they invite people to reflect on the following categories and the way it shapes our understanding of the Bible: ethnicity, gender, social class, education, political preferences, political science, communal priorities, Biblical translation, family dynamics, trauma, and functionality of Biblical preaching. He asks reflection questions, penultimately, that are generative for discourse: “Now that I have attended to each of these hermeneutical factors, is it possible to rank them in terms of the extent of their importance in my biblical interpretation? Do I recognize that some factors are foundation or pivotal for me? Do I want to learn more about the workings of some of these hermeneutical factors in the way I interpret? Now that I am getting more aware of how these factors interplay in my interpretation, is there anything I may way to consider changing in my attitude or practice so that I may become a more adequate and self-consistent biblical interpreter?”³ 

Resources

1. Smith, Mitzi. Womanist Sass. p. 29

2. Gottwald, “Framing Biblical Interpretation: A Self Inventory of Biblical Hermeneutics,” Reading From This Place, p. 257

3. Ibid, p. 261