If God Still Breathes, Why Can't I?
Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority
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If God Still Breathes, Why Can't I?
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Narrated by:
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Chanté McCormick
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By:
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Angela N. Parker
A challenge to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy that calls into question how Christians are taught more about the way of Whiteness than the way of Jesus.
Angela Parker wasn’t just trained to be a biblical scholar; she was trained to be a White male biblical scholar. She is neither White nor male. Dr. Parker’s experience of being taught to forsake her embodied identity in order to contort herself into the stifling construct of Whiteness is common among American Christians, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. This book calls the power structure behind this experience what it is: White supremacist authoritarianism. Drawing from her perspective as a Womanist New Testament scholar, Dr. Parker describes how she learned to deconstruct one of White Christianity’s most pernicious lies: the conflation of biblical authority with the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility. As Dr. Parker shows, these doctrines are less about the text of the Bible itself and more about the arbiters of its interpretation - historically, White males in positions of power who have used Scripture to justify control over marginalized groups. This oppressive use of the Bible has been suffocating. To learn to breathe again, Dr. Parker says, we must “let God breathe in us". We must listen to the Bible as authoritative, but not authoritarian. We must become conscious of the particularity of our identities, as we also become conscious of the particular identities of the biblical authors from whom we draw inspiration. And we must trust and remember that as long as God still breathes, we can too.
©2021 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (P)2021 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Generally, when I read a book, I try to write about it within a few days. This has become a spiritual practice of mine, not just because I like to encourage reading but also because I want to incorporate what I am learning. Part of that incorporation is writing about the book so that I can put on paper what was important to me. But sometimes, I get busy with my paying work or other aspects of life, and at some point, I am just too far away from a book to do it justice. In the case of If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I? I read it in February 2022 and then again in December 2022. It was certainly one of my favorite books of 2022, but because I hadn’t written about it, it was hard to talk about why succinctly.
I have had a running book club since 2020 or 2021, depending on whether you count the Be the Bridge groups that it grew out of or the later discussion of Color of Compromise that started an actual book club. Since then, I am told we have discussed 12 books. I have wanted to get a group to talk about If God Still Breathes for a while, and this spring seemed like a good time.
If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I? is a fairly short book, only 128 pages and about 3 hours. But there is some weight to it. It was the most challenging book we have tackled so far. Most of the group was new to Womanist thought, so there was that aspect of difficulty. Only a couple of other group members had taken formal college-level Bible classes either. Mixing womanist thinking and biblical hermeneutics introduced many in the group to a lot of new vocabulary. One of the members expressed how happy he was to be reading on Kindle because there is a built-in dictionary.
As someone with a seminary degree who has read Womanist theology as part of my seminary education, I did not think this was a hard book to understand. Still, the group's reaction did help me understand where there were ideas I had come to think of as ordinary but not common. I knew that the discussion of her being trained as a “White Male Scholar” and the discussion of Hagel and other German scholars would be a bit challenging. Still, the fourth chapter, where she talked about translation theory and the Greek language, was more difficult than I remembered. There are a lot of subtle nods to other things that, if you have some background, show the brilliance of the writing. If you don’t have the background, you don’t need to know it to understand the main point, but I did find myself wanting everyone else to understand what was under the surface.
There are a lot of things going on in a very short book. She introduces a lot of biography in part because she is introducing the concepts of Womanist biblical interpretation, and those biographical elements are a really good way of showing why Womanist is not just appropriate but is an essential corrective to what some would consider more traditional biblical interpretation.
Chapter Four is the longest and most constructive of the chapters because, after having laid out her background, she shows how the womanist biblical interpretation works through the discussion of Galatians. I wanted the book to be longer because I wanted to see other examples of Womanist biblical interpretation. But I also read Wil Gafney and other womanist theologians, so I was not completely new. And I think writing a short introduction was the right choice because it does something different from a long biblical interpretation. If God Still Breathes is about introducing the method, not a longer commentary on scripture.
An introduction to Womanist hermenutics
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