Bible

Abstract

The Bible, most often the King James Version, has served as a source of inspiration, spiritual guidance, artistic production, education, and political strategy for Africans in America since their arrival in the New World. White enslavers allowed enslaved black people to attend Christian church services to listen to both white and black preachers admonish obedience to masters, according to the biblical teaching of Ephesians 6:5–8, Colossians 3:22–25, I Timothy 6:1–2, and I Peter 2:18–21. When the preachers chose Ephesians 6 as their biblical text, their sermons always stopped just short of verse 9, which instructs masters not to threaten their servants and to be aware that God is always watching. Abolitionists and fugitive slave narrators used the same Bible to argue for the sinfulness of slavery. Black men and women, inspired to answer “the Call” to preach the Christian gospel, used the Bible as their primary source for inspiration, authority, and confirmation. More than any other source, the Bible has been the foundation upon which Black preachers have built their homiletic arguments —spiritual, social, economic, political, and familial—despite the preacher’s level of literacy. Its stories, doctrines, language, rhythms, and tones have provided the preacher the tools to paint word pictures on a virtually blank and vast canvas for his or her listeners, some of whom could read, many of whom could not prior to the 20th century. Yet all were familiar with the messages of hope the Bible offered. For both early and contemporary African American women who aligned their lives with and even felt led to preach the Christian gospel, the Bible has supported their right to undertake what they believed to be a divine vocation. In the face of resistance from male clerical leaders of mainstream religious denominations, unlicensed black women preachers have systematically read the legitimacy of their ministries through the experiences of both Old and New Testament women, like Deborah, a judge of Israel; Mary Magdalene, the first to spread the news of Jesus’s resurrection when she returned from the tomb after His crucifixion; and Priscilla, the wife of Aquila, who worked with the Apostle Paul to establish the early Christian Church in Europe. From the earliest African American preaching women, like Elizabeth and Jarena Lee, to contemporary Black women preachers like Bishop Vashti McKenzie, the first woman elected bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the Bible offered indisputable evidence of God’s dispassionate call for laborers to His vineyard and continues to undergird their right to join that labor force. The Bible and the sanctuaries of Black churches served as the manual and meeting space for planning and implementing a successful 20th-century American civil rights movement. The Bible provided the movement’s most prominent leaders, like Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the messages of love, hope, urgency and inspiration they would preach in the face of hatred, despair, complacency, and resistance. Quoting the prophet Isaiah’s inspiriting words, they confidently proclaimed: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.” (Isaiah 40:4–5) Finally, for scholars of African American life and culture, especially those interested in its religious traditions and forms of spiritual expressivity, the Bible has remained the central text for the study of Black theology, liberation theology, Womanist Theology, and African American Hermeneutics and homiletics.