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The Piety of the (Not So) ‘Poor’ but Nonetheless ‘Oppressed’

The Genesis of Liberation provides an account of African American biblical interpretation with its roots in North American chattel slavery. As academically trained experts from different testaments, the co-authors combine their cumulative research to answer profound questions regarding freedom, interracial relationships, the conversion of slaves to Christianity, and theological implication from Pauline texts. The primary theme throughout the book entails an in-depth exposure of how the Bible became of book for liberation contrary to the will of their captors. Since the Antebellum, African Americans equated literacy with individual and collective empowerment, and a means to gain an understanding of the Bible as favoring liberation rather than an instrument for oppression. ‘During slave auctions intelligence was a significant offense’ (p. 72). The book fills a gap in the sub-discipline by making plain that there lies a rich heritage of African American biblical hermeneutics that predate the first generation of such scholars including Charles Copher, Cain Hope Felder, Renita Weems, and Clarice Martin by more than a century. ‘These early black interpreters developed crucial hermeneutical skills that allowed them to understand both their Bible and their world’ (p. 163). The book’s most unique contribution entails how the authors demonstrate the way in which African Americans employed biblical criticism as slaves with a high degree of sophistication during the Antebellum period in the absence of modern scholarship. In six concise chapters written for a broad audience, Powery and Sadler provide twenty-first century readers with evidence that biblical concepts that reference slavery or other forms of servitude in the ancient world required interpretation within the context of the broader biblical message. Both authors remind the modern reader that slaves, recently emancipated former slaves, and first generation descendants of slaves have provided a foundation for scholars, clergy, and laity to discerned as false teachers that misuse the Bible to justify aristocratically constructed ideological claims that dehumanize a group of people. The freedom-narrative tradition of the nineteenth century remain relevant because such approaches challenge the status quo of protecting in-group privilege by placing an emphasis on the biblical Jesus as committed to justice.