A History of Racial Segregation in the Church

[0:00] What we're going to do today, or for our last session, is going to be radically different than anything that we have done so far. So we're going to set aside Ephesians for now, and we will return to Ephesians for the sermon that will conclude our time together.

[0:17] But one of the other things that I do, besides standard biblical interpretation, is African American interpretation and how our culture reads the Bible.

[0:28] Because we've spoken a lot recently about this vision for the nations reconciled into one body, existing as one family as a manifestation of God's glory.

[0:40] But the question is, how do we get to the place we find ourselves so separated? So we're not in this place where we experience Paul's vision for all things. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you through, really briefly, kind of the history and development of the African American tradition, especially our habits of Bible reading, with the end towards helping us understand ways we can be reconciled.

[1:03] So this is not a story of, like, centering the white experience in the United States. It's the black experience of this story, okay? So we're going to talk about black people for about 40 minutes.

[1:13] Is that okay? Okay, here we go. So early black encounters with, and I get to go into lecture mode. I get to go full professor. I do have a PhD.

[1:24] Respect me. Okay. So you talk about the first black encounter with Christianity in this country. And I'm actually going to read to you really briefly a quote from an Anglican missionary.

[1:39] This is before the Church of England, when the Church of England was over here, before there was kind of the United States of America. And this is one of the things that one of the early Anglican or Episcopal missionaries had the slaves recite before they were baptized.

[1:53] So before you agreed to be baptized, you had to stand before your congregation, and you had to make this declaration. I'm going to read it to you. So you come in the early initial evangelization of African Americans.

[2:27] It did not include them having access to the entirety of the Bible. It's simply oftentimes they would receive a catechism that would point out to them Paul's commands, the slaves be obedient to your masters.

[2:40] So I want to ask you a quick question. How successful do you think that this evangelistic effort was? It failed robustly. This is why there's like very few African American Anglicans.

[2:51] This goes all the way back. So what happened? So the early generation of early Presbyterian and Anglican evangelization in the colonies was largely unsuccessful because of this perspective.

[3:04] We want to make sure that the system stays in place before you can become a Christian. Now, interestingly enough, the first African American, large-scale African American conversion to Christianity happens during the Great Awakening.

[3:15] At least you guys remember back enough in college, during the Great Awakening, all these evangelistic revivals, so they're going through and they're preaching, people falling out. You know this? Okay. So the Great Awakening happens, and these Baptist and Methodist preachers come down to the south.

[3:28] And one of the things that happens is the preaching of the Great Awakening, at least in its doctrinal emphasis, this idea that all are sinners who are equally in need of the grace of God and who are all justified on the same standards.

[3:40] And so this idea that all are equally sinners at least indirectly spoke to the equality across all races. And so they even had in some of their early evangelistic Great Awakenings blacks and whites together during this revival.

[3:56] One of the interesting things that marks out the early history of black conversion to Christianity that stands to this day, this actually happens here, and we still haven't resolved this. African Americans, on the whole, are first converted in large numbers during the Great Awakening, and they're drawn to evangelical theology but fundamentally alienated by practice.

[4:20] So your doctrine is one in which we should all be able to live together, but we experience this disconnect. So one of the things that happens is then the African American churches explode within two particular traditions.

[4:33] One is the Baptist, and the other is the Methodist tradition. Why are there so many black Baptists? We're not ontologically free church, right? The reason there are so many black Baptists is because you know what you need to start a Baptist church?

[4:47] Nothing. A Bible, right? And you can just tell we're now First Baptist Church. In the Anglican polity, you needed a bishop to ordain you. And how many bishops were willing to ordain black people?

[5:00] We had a polity problem. The exact same issues we're dealing with today, right? How did we get more ethical anointings into the ACNA? There's a polity problem. So because the Methodist church doesn't have a strong understanding of apostolic succession, John Wesley kind of just chose some bishops, right?

[5:15] And they kind of ordained themselves. Also, the polity of the Methodist tradition is true, right? The Methodists said, we're going to be bishops. God bless them. No shade at the Methodists. But like, this is how the Methodist tradition starts.

[5:26] And so because both the Methodist polity and the Baptist polity allow for rapid multiplication, African Americans, especially in the South, become overwhelmingly Baptist and Methodist, which becomes the AME, which kind of remains to the day.

[5:44] The Church of God in Christ, the Pentecostal tradition happens later, which is kind of on the side of this story. They won't come into it. So what happens when African Americans actually become Christians? What do they do with the Bible?

[5:54] There are three basic responses that actually also continue to this day. One of the favorite, and I think one of the ways it's represented in one of the favorite passages, that if you read the early slave narratives and early sermons, one of the passages that you see occur over and over again is Acts 1726.

[6:14] It actually occurs in the King James translation. We translate it a little bit differently now. But in the King James Version, it says, out of one blood he has made all the people of the earth. Actually, this still is in the collects in the Book of Common Prayer where it says that.

[6:29] But we now know that the proper translation is from one man he made all the people. So if you guys look it up in your Bible, you'll see from one man. And so what the early African American preaching tradition does is say, look, the Bible says very clearly that from one person, from one common blood, we're all made.

[6:45] So let's create this multi-ethnic brotherhood united in Christ. So this is like one strand of African American preaching. You see it from the beginning. You see it in some ways in the preaching of Martin Luther King 100 years down the road from this.

[6:59] Another tradition kind of internalizes the negative assessment of the African American person that was dominant in the day. And so if you wanted to have kind of a platform, there's a platform for African, even some enslaved who encourage other slaves to kind of submit to their masters and do the thing.

[7:20] So there's a tradition of submission in repeating the talking points and internalizing some of the negative views of black bodies. The third strand is represented by, I guess, the person who you would see most clearly, someone who was actually a Christian.

[7:35] And that turn is that God told him to lead this revolution. And so you see kind of the violent response and using kind of the stories of the Exodus as a motivator for revolution.

[7:50] There's the submissive approach where you repeat the talking points of the dominant culture. And then there's this turn towards brotherhood, which we'll talk about later. It's also coupled with a strong public critique.

[8:03] And historically, the emphasis on brotherhood linked to a strong public critique of America becomes indicative of the African American tradition.

[8:13] And in general, the part that is received most freely within kind of white spaces is the submissive tradition, where you repeat the talking points from the dominant culture.

[8:26] So the early testimony of black churches. So if you ever want to know, like, what black theology is, the easiest place to go is the primary document.

[8:38] So in the same way that we have the church fathers that represent the first 100, the 1 to 300, 400 years of church history, they're all the primary documents of the African American Christian tradition.

[8:49] They're called the fathers and mothers. So here is one testimony from the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1787. So I'm going to read to you again. In 1787, the colored people belonging to the Methodist society in Philadelphia convened together in order to take into consideration the evils under which they labored, arising from the unkind treatment of their white brethren, who considered them a nuisance in the house of worship, and even pulled them off their knees while in the act of prayer and ordered them back to their seats.

[9:21] From these and various other acts of unchristian conduct, we considered it our duty to devise a plan in order to build a house of our own and to worship God under our own vine and fig tree.

[9:37] So what happens? The African, the black people in Philadelphia are praying. They're told to return to their seats because they can't pray in the front. They must go to the colored section of their own.

[9:47] And it's because of these and other unchristian acts. They wanted to go and form their own communities. The thing that I want you to hear is they're actually accusing. This is the important part. They started their own church so that they can actually be Christians.

[10:02] They didn't say that there's something fundamentally wrong with the doctrines and the teachings of Christianity. They're saying that in this context, we can't actually be Christians. So in order to follow Jesus fully, apart from the heresy of racism and white supremacy, we need to form our own community where we can follow Jesus.

[10:19] So one of the things that I've talked to Tommy about a lot in the last couple of days is one of the things that I see is that when people come to grips with kind of the legacy of racism in this country and they have this angst or this guilt and they go, well, what do I do?

[10:33] And one of the common responses is, why don't you stop being Christian and become progressive? We didn't ask you to stop becoming Christian. We said stop being racist, right? Those are two separate things.

[10:44] And so it's possible to say, you know what, I'm going to leave the racism alone and keep the orthodoxy. And this is at the heart of the foundation of the black church. You can go, if you had time, you probably won't, but I'm going to tell you that it's there anyway in case you want to Google it.

[10:57] You can go and look at the early confession of the Methodist church, which is rooted in the same 39 articles that become the foundation of the Anacan church. And then you look at the catechism that is created by the AME.

[11:08] And the catechisms are almost identical with a few small changes. And you see, I'm going to give you an example of one adjustment to kind of show you how black theology develops in a slightly different way. So here's from the catechism of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

[11:22] Question. What shall be done for the extermination of slavery? Answer. We will not receive any person into our society as a member who is a slaveholder and any who are now members that have slaves and refuse to emancipate them after notification being given by the preacher, having the charge, he shall be excluded.

[11:42] The amazing thing about this is there's no one in the AME who probably owned a slave. It's an all-black congregation. But it's at least in principle open to the white brothers and sisters coming over here that you need to get rid of the false teaching around slavery.

[12:01] You can go through the rest of the catechism, and you will see that the rest of the doctrines are almost the same. One of the things that is kind of necessary to understand, and this is part of the historic disconnect that I talk about, the African American church is born in protest against an established law.

[12:20] We think of slavery as this moral thing that you can kind of be for or against, but slavery was actually legal. And so when the African American church is born and they begin to speak out against slavery, they're asking the government to change an existing law.

[12:34] You get that? So African American Christianity has always been political. It's always been political. And so when you say we're going to focus on preaching the gospel and not get involved in issues of politics that are divisive, it is heard as what the Anglican missionaries said, content yourself with the transformation of your soul and have no designs towards your freedom.

[13:00] And it's actually calling upon us to abandon the entire tradition of seeing it wrong in society and advocating for that change for our good and our liberation.

[13:13] Here's an example. This is another testimony from William J. Simmons, a Baptist. This is 1887. So we're 20 years downstream from the Civil War. Listen to this testimony.

[13:24] Listen to the scope of what he talks about here. God has permitted us through him. God has permitted us to triumph and through him has implanted in us a vigorous spiritual tree.

[13:35] And since freedom, how has this been growing? Untrammeled, we have, out of our ignorance and punery, built thousands of churches, started thousands of schools, educated millions of children, and supported thousands of ministers of the gospel, organized societies for the care of the sick and for the bearing of the dead.

[13:55] This spirituality and love of offspring are evidence that slavery, though long and protracted, met in our race a vigorous, vital, godlike spirituality, which like a palm tree flourishes and climbs upward through opposition.

[14:12] What did they do? What did they do? They planted churches, thousands of them. They started schools, so there was no place to educate these slaves. They formed places to care for the sick.

[14:24] And they raised up clergy. So you see that, once again, at the heart of this, it was 20 years in, the combination of activism for the transformation of the lives of its citizens and proclamation of the orthodox faith are inherent in the tradition.

[14:43] I want to be, like, polemical and say what God has joined together, let no man tear asunder. But I won't do that. I won't do that. That's an allusion to the wedding liturgy, for those of you who don't know your book of Common Prayer well enough.

[14:56] Okay. What happens after that? We're going to skip forward about 70 years to the birth of what becomes academic black theology. So I'll talk to you about black ecclesial theology, what's happening in the pulpits, what's happening in the actual community.

[15:11] And for a variety of reasons, there wasn't a huge black presence in the academy during this early, you know, post-slavery up through around the 1960s. There wasn't a lot of places for African-Americans to study theology academically and publish these papers.

[15:26] So the first generation of black writers, especially as it relates to the Bible, gets really excited about the black presence in the Bible. Because the story had been told in such a way that they thought that there was no African presence in the New Testament.

[15:39] And, like, our presence there was like a fact hiding in plain sight. And an example of this that I'd like to use, and if we had more time, because I can only give you 40 minutes, not 41, is the story of Ephraim and Manasseh.

[15:54] This is the kind of stuff that they did. You guys know Ephraim and Manasseh? These are two of the 12 tribes of Israel. The heads are two of the 12 tribes of Israel. And Ephraim and Manasseh are the children of Joseph and his half-Egyptian wife.

[16:08] And so when you get to the end of Jacob's life, and they take, Joseph takes these two boys to meet their grandfather before he dies.

[16:18] The text says that Jacob looks at him, looks at the boys, looks at them. So he looks at the, like, he sees their ethnicity. He sees their ethnicity and says, God made a promise to my forefather and to me that he'll make me a father of many nations.

[16:38] So now I'm going to bring these two boys into my family. So these two boys, who are sons of Joseph, actually become tribes in Israel.

[16:49] The point of that is their Africanness was a manifestation of God's promise to Abraham, and so he brought them in. And the point that people like Charles Cofer and Cain Folt Hilda was making, it's like no one talks about the fact that two of the 12 tribes had Africans at the head of them.

[17:06] Because in the South, in the 1960s and the 70s, they had the one-drop rule. If you had one drop of blood, you were black. And you couldn't get pulled over and say, I'm only half black, so you should only be half racist towards me, right?

[17:20] No, you have to deal with it. And so they were saying that these boys were Africans. And so the early generation just wanted to kind of recount our presence and bring us back into the story.

[17:32] If we had time, we could give you 15 more examples. This gives you a picture of what they were doing. Now, later on, you have kind of, in the same context, people like James Cone and what becomes Black Liberation Theology, and they're in the mainline academy.

[17:52] So they're at progressive institutions. What I'd like to explain to people is if you think about the history of kind of white Christianity, you see the creation of kind of two streams. There's like what becomes the mainline church, and then it becomes evangelicalism.

[18:05] So you could go to Duke or Wheaton, right? You have two options, right? Duke's never going to hire me now. It's fine. Sorry, Duke. I like Wheaton.

[18:15] It's okay. I'll be fine. But if you're African American, there was no Wheaton for you to attend at this point because it wasn't friendly to you. So the only place where you could go and learn and be educated and have a position were in the mainline tradition.

[18:30] So early Black theology, what becomes Black academic theology, is in a part of the mainline tradition. The interesting thing that people don't really often realize is that actually the critique of Christianity that is offered by Black liberation theologians is not in the first place directed towards evangelicals.

[18:47] It's actually directed towards their mainline people. These are the people who are actually living life with, and they're experiencing the racism there. James Cone writes his fiery critique of white Christianity right in the middle of white progressivism.

[19:00] He wouldn't have Wheaton, right? Okay. So what does James Cone say, and how does it relate to the history of the African American tradition? Now, this is a sentence that is not representative of his entire thought, and we could go into a wider thing, but this actually gets to the place where I think there's this strong divergence.

[19:17] And it's a little bit complicated, so I'll read it, and then I'll explain it. This is what he says, and maybe I'll translate it as I read it. The hermeneutical principle for biblical interpretation is the revelation of Jesus Christ as liberator.

[19:31] So the hermeneutical principle, the means by which you read scripture is Jesus Christ as liberator of the oppressed from oppression. You see the move?

[19:55] He ceases, and once again, this is like a small sliver of his thought, so this is not the whole thing. This is where I think some of these sentences get to the ways in which he's in continuity and discontinuity with the historic African American tradition.

[20:08] He rightly emphasized, and we've talked about this, you can trace black quests for liberation through the entirety of our tradition. That part of the gospel involves African Americans longing for the experience of freedom here, not just eschatological freedom.

[20:24] But there's also been this, alongside that tradition, this radical assertion about the need for personal transformation as well, and the need of Jesus in the blood that cleanses from your sins.

[20:35] You can hear that in all of our gospel music. And so one of the things in which I would say what becomes black liberation theology is discontinuous with black ecclesial theology is the emphasis on liberation to the exclusion of the atoning work of Christ and salvation from sin.

[20:56] So the way that I like to describe this is to say that historically in the African American tradition, exodus is giving way to Leviticus, right?

[21:08] Liberation to worship, the formation of a people whose holiness reflects something of God's nature in the world. So if I think that ultimately what Cone does, though important, because I think that Cone does a really good job of articulating, we'll get to it later, Cone picks up on another aspect of the African American tradition that is also best seen in actually going back in history a little bit for Frederick Douglass.

[21:34] Because I think that ultimately there's enough problems there that this isn't the way forward for us. I'm going to now read Frederick Douglass, who I think is the patron saint of black biblical interpretation.

[21:47] And this is his quote, and I think that this quote captures so much of our spirituality and ethos. And it also gets to some historic evangelical, like, distrust or angst around African American rhetoric and theology.

[22:02] This is what he says. This is towards the end of his narrative of the life of a slave. He says this. I have in several instances spoken in such a tone and manner respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion.

[22:17] So he has been so mean to Christians that people are going to say, do you hate Jesus? This is the assertion that Frederick Douglass is now an enemy. Because when we say religion, they're thinking of Christianity here.

[22:30] Like, does Frederick Douglass hate Jesus? And this is what he says. What I've said, respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land.

[22:43] And with no possible reference to Christianity proper. For between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.

[22:55] So wide that to receive one as good, pure, and holy is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked.

[23:10] To be a friend of one is of necessity to be an enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ.

[23:21] I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women whipping, cradle plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land.

[23:32] End quote. So here, Frederick Douglass engages in an unmeasured critique of American religiosity.

[23:45] And he calls it hypocritical. I call it the audacity, what becomes a tradition of black audacity. So I'm all like, because if you listen to African American preaching, you will hear this like, did he say that?

[24:01] I can't, and it is unfiltered and it is uncomfortable. And sometimes that very black audacity is what makes evangelicals uncomfortable because they hear themselves in the critique.

[24:14] If what Frederick Douglass is saying is true, then what does it mean about the faith that I practice? And because it seems to be difficult to imagine a different form of, that's the wrong, that's the wrong, different form is the wrong word.

[24:26] But because America and Christianity seems so intertwined, the strong critique of American Christianity seems to be a critique of Christianity itself.

[24:40] And in the African American tradition, there's been a historic distinction between the hypocritical Christianity of this land and the Christianity of the Bible. And we have been consistent in our critique of the Christianity of this land.

[24:51] And for that reason, we're consistently accused of not believing the Bible. Like the Frederick Douglass critique marks out. So the requirement then for participation in white spaces is measured critique.

[25:04] It's measured critique. Don't say anything that is too far because then you will lose your audience. But the very preaching of the very black rhetorical tradition that actually exists both in the black church and it comes into what becomes black hip-hop and soul music.

[25:23] The same audacity that marks hip-hop music is stolen from the black preacher. And the reason the rhetorical power is there is because it was the only tools that we had with the fight oppression. So I think that unless churches are able to come to grips with this idea that we are completely comfortable with public critiques of American Christianity, unless churches can really come to grips with that and they can accept that, then you can't have African Americans in your congregation.

[25:56] Because if the cost of membership in your church is silenced in the face of what we're seeing going on in society, then it's just hard for us to exist in these places.

[26:07] I like to use, I wish I had like a board, but you had to imagine a Venn diagram. Can someone bring one of those over? I'll do a very bad drawing. But you can imagine like, can you make a Venn diagram for me with an overlap in the middle, those of you who can draw?

[26:22] I'll just keep talking and if you find a marker, we'll do that. And so what I say is, there we go. I'll pause this and then this doesn't count as a part of my time.

[26:34] I'll do this. I didn't tell you to write in the Venn diagram. I can't help it spell.

[26:50] EB is correct. I'm going to stop there. Okay. So what I like to say is, there is a bar of entry within the African American context, where there's a certain understanding of what is happening in society and culture that you must be able to articulate, or we won't even listen to you.

[27:14] Now, there is also in evangelicalism kind of what evangelicalism can accept before it like loses its mind.

[27:27] Right? And then there's the rest of evangelicalism. So on the right here, there are things that will, in some sense, rightfully so, that will only exist in the black church. Certain things.

[27:37] And there's certain things that only exist in evangelicalism. And then there's actually a place in the middle where both of these communities can come together. And I would say the churches that actually value diversity are going to have to come to grips with this section right there, which is going to be the far extreme of evangelicalism, for whom any discussion of race is going to cause them to leave your congregation.

[28:03] It doesn't matter how well you articulate it, it doesn't matter what you say, any discussion of race or justice, they're just going to leave. And so you have to be willing to, not because you don't love them as brothers and sisters in Christ, but to say, if I care about diversity, I am going to have to speak in a way that makes people of color comfortable, if it makes them uncomfortable.

[28:25] And I've never seen a church, never in my entire life, that manages to become diverse and doesn't lose its, like, far right, it's the cost.

[28:38] And if the church is led from the perspective of what's going to happen to my most extreme elements, if I say this, that church never is successful in becoming multi-ethnic.

[28:49] Because African Americans, in particular, are used to hearing about what's going on in society in the congregation.

[29:00] And this doesn't mean that every, because, like, there's an event every single day. So it doesn't mean that, like, the sermon becomes a commentary on every political event. What I'm saying is the culture of the congregation is one in which the struggles of being a person of color in America are acknowledged and spoken about.

[29:20] It's not about a number. It's not about how many times. It's not about, you know, every single time you need to have this particular critique or that you need to take a particular stance. But it is mean, it does mean that you, I've never seen this not happen.

[29:36] Because we come from the Frederick Douglass tradition. So Frederick Douglass addresses it, right? He goes, you might think I hate Christianity. Who is he addressing? He's not addressing the people who are sympathetic to him, who recognize that slavery is wrong.

[29:50] He's the person, he's speaking to the people for whom any discussion of the evils of Christianity as it is practiced is seen as a critique of Christianity, full stop. So what do I think then kind of mark African American interpretation and why it's important for you all to understand this?

[30:11] So at least some of the disconnects, at least you know where the disagreements are. I would say that in general, African American theology is unapologetically canonical and theological at its origins.

[30:23] So when I speak about canonical, I mean that you had these catechisms that says slaves submit to your masters and you had in the African American tradition that say, well, there's the book of Exodus and here's like 50,000 ways in which God shows himself to be on the side of the oppressed.

[30:38] And so it has this tendency to do biblical theological moves over against adamantistic readings of particular texts. When I say theological, there's origins is the African American theological tradition has a huge emphasis on the imago Dei, the image of God.

[30:57] And we reason from the theological truth that we are image bearers to how the church should function, right? So it's both canonical and it's theological more than it is adamantistically exegetical.

[31:11] It's not that it's opposed to close readings of text, but it tends to look at the whole testimony of God and the theology of God and persons that arise out of that reading. The other thing that I say is that it clearly arises out of the particular context of black Americans.

[31:27] So we began as a protest movement within Christianity. So we said these are the issues facing us, slavery, later Jim Crow, and we're saying Christianity speaks to these issues and speaks to these issues in a particular way for our freedom.

[31:44] And it does so without, once again, denying historic orthodoxy. The other thing that it does is our method, if I can speak about one, listens to the ways that the scriptures themselves respond to and redirect black issues and concerns.

[31:59] When I speak about this, I mean the emphasis on family and the one brotherhood that marks the African American tradition is not something that we just came up with. It came from our reading of the Bible. So, like, what do we do in response to the truth of slavery in this country?

[32:13] Well, we see it in Acts 17, 26, and a bunch of other passages that say we actually reconcile with our brothers and sisters rather than burning the thing to the ground. So actually that shows the formative impact on the Christian tradition, on the African American sensibility.

[32:28] One of the other things that I would say that it does is that it listens to and enters into dialogue with both black and white critiques of the Bible. When I speak about black and white critiques of the Bible, I'm speaking about the fact that even at seminary, and this may not be your experience, but, like, we learn how to defeat liberalism.

[32:48] Right? We say here are, like, here's the liberal worldview, and here are the ways which Christianity responds to it as a coherent theological system. So much of evangelical thought and biblical interpretation is, like, in a constant battle against this, like, monster of progressivism.

[33:07] Like, that's where the attention is drawn, and they hear everything from that perspective. Anything that seems like he comes from over there is bad. The African American tradition has historically had to have two separate contexts in which it is critiqued.

[33:22] We also deal with kind of the progressive turn in theology, but we also deal with an interior critique within our community of Christianity from African Americans. So if Frederick Douglass makes the distinction between the hypocritical Christianity of this land and Christianity full stop, there are African Americans who don't make that distinction and say, no, no, no, the Bible is the white man's religion, and you shouldn't be a Christian if you're black because that isn't for you.

[33:50] And so part of what is happening, and this happens all of the time, if an African American is speaking about Christianity in such a way that, like, triggers evangelicalism, it is also the entry point to conversations in the African American context.

[34:10] So if I can't speak about white supremacy in an all-black setting, and I'm making the argument that things aren't that bad, it's going to be a rough move for me, right? And then, but if people hear me say the word white supremacy, then they say that, you know, people hear it, and they attach it to the only people they're in dialogue with, which is the progressive world.

[34:32] And so if you want to understand kind of the African American experience of Christianity in this land, it's that you have to understand both those pressures, which is the reason why we have to be willing to offend you all if we want to keep, participate in a community that is experiencing oppression.

[34:54] So what does this mean? Does this mean that, like, the African American interpretive method is the only thing that we should do? No. This, at least really briefly, explains the ways in which our experiences shape us, and they shape our instincts towards the text.

[35:10] But it is one particular manifestation of God's glory. If we had time, we could ask questions about how the Asian American experience in the United States shapes how they experience Christianity in this country and how it gives rise to certain habits of biblical interpretation.

[35:29] And what I think the proper biblical interpretation is, is a discussion across culture with the scriptures as the primary authority. So that my blind spots are made up by people from other cultures who say, Esau, because you have these issues, here are the things that you can't see.

[35:45] And then I say to them, because you have these issues, I can't see. It's almost as if God needs all of us together to interpret his word correctly. So it is not a call for the triumph of, like, black Bible reading over against a history of interpretation everywhere else.

[36:02] It's actually to understand what we bring to the table and how what we bring to the table is often misunderstood by our brothers and sisters who claim to believe the same things.

[36:13] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.