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African American Readings of Paul: Reception, Resistance, and Transformation is unavailable, but you can change that!

The letters of Paul—especially the verse in Ephesians directing slaves to obey their masters—played an enormous role in promoting slavery and justifying it as a Christian practice. Yet despite this reality African Americans throughout history still utilized Paul extensively in their own work, responding to his theology and teachings in numerous—often starkly divergent and liberative—ways. In the...

document with relevance for their lives. Even Thurman and Cleage, who did exhibit a hermeneutic of suspicion toward Paul, showed a hermeneutic of trust toward other parts of the scriptural text. For them Scripture was an integral part of the black struggle for justice and equality.9 Many of these interpreters considered the cosmological feature of Paul’s theology to be important because they, like Paul, believed in a supernatural world filled with God, angels,
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