Working Against the Grain by Reddie Anthony G.;

Author:Reddie, Anthony G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Warrior’s claim to identify with the marginalized and oppressed others across the globe has been adopted with great alacrity by my colleague in Birmingham, R.S. Sugirtharajah. In such landmark texts as The Bible and the Third World40 Sugirtharajah demonstrates the many ways in which colonial exegetes ruthlessly exploited the images of violence within biblical texts as justification for their subjugation of native peoples.41

Similarly, within Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation42 the author demonstrates the extent to which Liberation theologies’ methodological and thematic decision to work within the hermeneutical frameworks provided by the “Word of God” leads them to undertake often uncomfortable “deals with the text” in order to preserve its overarching status as the primary source against which human experience is interpreted.43 This means that when the Bible advocates unremitting violence against those who are othered, many Black Liberation theologians (myself included if truth be told) have to find some means of “reading against the text” (thereby still making it normative) as opposed to decentring it as being the major problem itself. Sugirtharajah cites Latin American Liberation theologians who state that “the Bible itself is not the problem, but the way it has been interpreted.”44 The author makes a sharp critique of Liberationist approaches to the Bible when he states:

There is a danger in liberation hermeneutics making the Bible the ultimate adjudicator in matters related to morals and theological disputes. Postcolonialism is much more guarded in its approach to the Bible’s serviceability. It sees the Bible as both safe and unsafe, and as a familiar and a distant text.45

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