Abstract
Biblical images have brought grist to the mill of meaning-making for African Americans from the beginning of their troubled sojourn in North America. “African-American slaves, female and male,” explains womanist theologian Delores Williams, “created an oral text from a written text (the King James version of the Bible). They composed this oral text by extracting from the Bible or adding to biblical content those phrases, stories, biblical personalities, and moral prescriptions relevant to the character of their life-situation and pertinent to the aspirations of the slave community.”1 This “oral text” continues to be an African American habit of mind. Biblical images have mediated African American memory, identity, and practice. Harriet Tubman was “the Moses of her people.” Martin Luther King, Jr. was viewed in his lifetime as an avatar of Moses and, after his death, as an imitation of Christ. A long-time family friend of Robert Williams, radical NAACP organizer and advocate of armed resistance in the 1960s, asserted, “I believe it was God’s calling, that Rob Williams was sent here to save us. God sent somebody, just like he did in the Bible.”2 The Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood’s Brooklyn reclamation project, Nehemiah Homes, is named after the man in the Bible who rebuilds the walls of Jerusalem. For centuries African Americans have fashioned their movements and their movers and shakers in the image and likeness of biblical figures.
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Notes
Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 188.
Cited in Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 81.
Randall C. Bailey, “Beyond Identification: The Use of Africans in Old Testament Poetry and Narratives,” in Stony the Road We Trod, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1991), 170, note 22.
Charles B. Copher, “The Black Presence in the Old Testament,” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991), 154.
John Waters, “Who Was Hagar?” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1991), 194.
C. Eric Lincoln, Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), 24.
Clarice Martin, “A Chamberlain’s Journey and the Challenge of Interpretation for Liberation,” in Semeia 47: Interpretation for Liberation, guest ed. Katie Geneva Cannon, ed. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989), 114.
Abraham Smith, “‘Do You Understand What You Are Reading?’: A Literary Critical Reading of Acts 8:26–40,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 22 (1994): 69.
Henry Highland Garnet, The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny of the Colored Race (Miami, FL: Mnemosyne, 1969), 6–12.
Edward Wilmot Blyden, “The Ethiopian Eunuch,” in Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (London: W. B. Whittingham and Company, 1887; reprinted Chesapeake, VA, and New York: ECA Associates, 1990), 162.
Anthony B. Pinn, African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of Nimrod (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 5.
The very ethics of Christianity was an irresistible argument for the atheism of the slave. Thomas J. J. Altizer, arguing for “the problem of the necessity of a contemporary Christian atheism,” propounded a love-hate relationship between Christianity and atheism in modern thought (Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism [Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1966], 23). If even a violently hostile passion is a measure of attachment, then who can doubt that a Blake, a Hegel, a Marx, a Dostoevsky, and a Nietzsche were deeply bound to Christianity? Again, each of these prophets was motivated by a profound moral passion … which, although it assumed an antinomian form, must surely have had its roots in the prophetic traditions of Christianity and the Bible. (Altizer, Gospel, 21) “Christianity as dogma was devoured by its own morality,” the German philosopher Nietzsche declared: “what … really triumphed over the Christian god was Christian morality itself” (
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale [New York: Random House, 1976], 161;
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Random House, 1974], 297, § 343). “It cannot be accidental,” writes Altizer, “that so many of the more creative theologians of our century have implicitly if unconsciously shared much of Nietzsche’s vision” (Altizer, Gospel, 23–24). Atheistic American slaves, “the more creative theologians” of an earlier century, were Nietzscheans before Nietzsche.
Quoted in Sterling Brown, “Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads and Work Songs,” Phylon 14 (Winter 1953): 45–61.
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© 2008 Anthony B. Pinn and Allen Dwight Callahan
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Callahan, A.D. (2008). Introduction: “Figures of the True”. In: Pinn, A.B., Callahan, A.D. (eds) African American Religious Life and the Story of Nimrod. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610507_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610507_1
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