As I say, he is writing for Black people, but McCauley explodes the White Enlightenment theology that claims to hold a single, scholarly and biblical theology that speaks for all people. Sniped at by progressive Blacks for maintaining its faithfulness to the Bible along with belief in forgiveness and a hope for Christian unity, while also treated with condescension by evangelical whites for (supposedly) less rigorous theology, the broad Black church, according to McCaulley, offers a distinctive voice that is worth clinging to. McCaulley writes for American Black people in an attempt to vindicate the Black church he grew up in. The book showed me something I have never seen before: an ethnic theology.

I just finished reading Esau McCaulley’s Reading While Black. Ethnicity in God’s kingdom can’t be just distinctive clothes and foods-otherwise, why would it endure to the end?

It is a lovely portrait, but it risks becoming a religious version of “It’s a Small World” unless those ethne contribute something distinctive to our worship of God. She joyfully anticipated joining that scene. When my mother was dying, she wanted to hear this passage read again and again. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. Rather, the nations-the ethne, the “people groups”-maintain their distinctive identities to the end. For most of my life, I’ve been aware that the Bible doesn’t portray the kingdom of God as a melting pot.

Reading the bible while black