The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (review)

The Christian Bible's relationship to African-American culture is a complex one. Whereas selected biblical proof texts have served historically to justify slavery, casting the peculiar institution as one ordained by God, others provided—at the same time—a rhetorical and conceptual foundation for resistance to American bondage, driving the struggle for liberation. As a consequence this ancient text has remained charged with powerful implications for black Americans in the here-and-now of every era, and the stakes of biblical criticism are always high.

Biblical interpretation is as much a political statement as it is a theological one. The historical critical method, derived from nineteenth-century German scholarship and devoted to "scientific" interpretations unfettered by religious dogma, long presumed itself to treat objectively the texts it took under consideration. That utter objectivity is impossible, of course, is not a new critique. Albert Schweitzer observed more than a century ago in The Quest of the Historical Jesus that "each individual create[s] Jesus in accordance with his own character" (6). Thus exegesis (the critical process of drawing meaning out of a text) always involves some measure of eisegesis (the critical process of reading meaning into a text). This presents what William H. Myers has called a "hermeneutical dilemma" for the scholar serious about participating in academic biblical discourse, but also cognizant of biases that denigrate a vibrant and compelling biblical tradition fostered by black churches. The historical critical method discounts one eisegetical (African-American) bias while cultivating another: belief in objectivity, a product of the Enlightenment. Myers asks: "Should the African American biblical student's strategy be to offer a complementary critique of the Eurocentric [historical critical] method? Or should one [ . . . ] argue that [it] is so irrelevant, bankrupt, and dead" that it is beyond rehabilitation? (48).

Allen Dwight Callahan, a New Testament scholar, is no stranger to "Eurocentric" methods of criticism. Still, throughout his career he has managed to frame his work as relevant to the broader contours of African-American culture, as two of his book-length publications illustrate. In one, a controversial revisionist study of Philemon (Embassy of Onesimus: The Letter of Paul to Philemon [1997])—an epistle that was frequently cited by nineteenth-century proponents of slavery—Callahan argues that Onesimus, Philemon's slave according to tradition, is actually Philemon's brother, thereby nullifying historical arguments that Paul endorses and sanctions slavery as part of a Christian order. A second book, A Love Supreme: A History of the Johannine Tradition (2005), is an exegetical study of the epistles and gospel attributed to John that is executed with evident, though implicit, reference to John Coltrane's masterpiece. Callahan's cultural allusions to slavery and jazz in these earlier works address the hermeneutical dilemma that Myers describes above. On one hand Callahan pays his historical critical dues; on the other, he contextualizes these findings within his own cultural milieu. Thus, while his method engages explicitly in exegesis, he offers implicit eisegesis through his subtitle's reference to A Love Supreme as hermeneutical counterpoint.

Callahan's method in The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible serves as a further innovative riff upon the historical critical tradition. He reverses the standard methodological direction of criticism, offering a biblical-textual reading of African-American history instead of an historical reading of a biblical text. Callahan sifts through cultural artifacts, excavating layers of biblical sediment. "African Americans [ . . . ] have made their collective claim to a peoplehood on the basis of neither a common ancestry nor a common territory but a common history" (116), he writes, and so for a people dispossessed of home, exiled in the liminal wilderness of hyphenated identity, the juncture of common identification became biblical narrative, shot through the trajectory of American history and interpreted through African-American experience. Toward these ends Callahan, over the course of seven chapters, nominates three identities for the Bible ("Talking Book," "Poison Book," and "Good Book") and cultivates four related themes through which he reads the history of African-American...