Reading Black Books , livre ebook

Endorsements
“I met Claude and his family when they moved to Boston to plant a church here a few years ago. When Claude guest preached, I told my husband I thought we’d just heard the next Tim Keller. Claude is a gifted communicator with a particular flair for speaking to people of different backgrounds and educational levels and carrying a broad audience with him. I’m thrilled that he has applied his skill to this fascinating and timely project. This is his first book, but I’m confident it will not be his last. I see Claude as a rising star, and I look forward to watching God use him in the coming years, both in print and in the pulpit.”
— Rebecca McLaughlin , author of Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion
“Claude Atcho has artfully crafted a masterpiece of literary and theological reflections. Reading Black Books dares us to better see and understand the Black experience and, in doing so, to better see and understand ourselves. Claude is our guide to embracing and embodying a more whole and just faith through the study of Black books.”
— Michelle Ami Reyes , vice president, Asian American Christian Collaborative; author of Becoming All Things: How Small Changes Lead to Lasting Connections across Cultures
“No one knows better or shows better than Atcho how twentieth-century African American literature is equipment for a better, truer orthodoxy. Reading Black Books offers brilliant and accessible theological readings of this literature that function—and feel—like the pastoral care we desperately need. Faithful to the works on their own terms, Atcho recognizes both the unflinchingly critical theological challenges and unfailingly constructive theological contributions of these matchless, essential works. His readings bear life-giving theological fruit that nourishes readers toward life together, daring to do so because the literature dares and the gospel declares! For generations, these books have been bread in the wilderness, a table prepared in the presence of enemies. Atcho’s work helps readers in these desolate, polarized days to find anew in African American literature the welcome table. This is the book—and its hope the hope in Christ—that I have been hungry for as a reader and as a teacher.”
— Tiffany Eberle Kriner , Wheaton College
“Atcho opens his book with the acknowledgment, ‘Right now, Black voices are in.’ Thank God for that! But his claim also implies the embarrassing ii history where Black voices were silenced. For the God who created all people, what a sorrow that churches have been divided and some voices amplified over others. Atcho’s book participates in redemption by handing the mic to Ellison, Wright, Hurston, Morrison, and others. Even more than extracting truth from their work or increasing our empathy with their characters, Atcho highlights how this literature discloses eternal verities. We dig into Countee Cullen’s portrayal of Christ, Wright’s depictions of sin and justice. By attending to Black books, we renew our faith in the God who did not leave us to carve our own path but who revealed himself through his creatures and the stories they tell as they reach for him.”
— Jessica Hooten Wilson , author of The Scandal of Holiness
“This book is a superb achievement that combines keen theological insight and in-depth literary analysis in a highly accessible format. Under Atcho’s masterful guidance, classic works of African American literature become an invitation to Black experience and, thereby, to a deepened Christian imagination. With its focus on the beauty of great stories, Reading Black Books has the potential to transcend ideological barriers and to open up new paths of discipleship for all Christians at this cultural moment.”
— Rev. Matthew Wilcoxen , rector, St. John’s Anglican Church, Sydney, Australia; author of Divine Humility: God’s Morally Perfect Being
“With literary nuance and careful theological reflection, Claude takes the reader on a potentially transformative journey. The world needs more theologically reflective books on substantive literature, like this one. It deserves wide reading.”
— Jonathan Dodson , pastor, City Life Church; author of Gospel-Centered Discipleship and Our Good Crisis
“This book breathes the Black experience with overtones of strength and hope and Jesus. Reading Black Books pays homage to brilliant Black scholarship while demanding we pay attention to the Christ it points to. Well-written and unique.”
— Jason Cook , senior pastor, Fellowship Bible Church–Roswell
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2022 by Claude Atcho
Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com
Ebook edition created 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-3700-9
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016
Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and post-consumer waste whenever possible.
Dedication
For Mom
Thank you for always praying for me.
Contents
Cover
Endorsements i
Half Title Page iii
Title Page v
Copyright Page vi
Dedication vii
Introduction 1
1. Image of God: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man 9
2. Sin: Richard Wright’s Native Son 27
3. God: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain 39
4. Jesus: Countee Cullen’s “Christ Recrucified” and “The Black Christ” 57
5. Salvation: Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain 75
6. Racism: Nella Larsen’s Passing 91
7. Healing and Memory: Toni Morrison’s Beloved 109
8. Lament: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Litany of Atlanta” 127
9. Justice: Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground 143
10. Hope: Margaret Walker’s “For My People” 159
Acknowledgments 173
Discussion Questions 175
Notes 181
Back Cover 195
Introduction
Right now, Black voices are in. That’s why on a recent Target run, as I maneuvered past the grocery section and the LEGO aisles, I was only partly surprised to find myself standing face-to-face with a display of James Baldwin books. In this unique cultural moment where people and corporations are ostensibly committed to listening to Black voices, I want to present this humble offering: one of the best ways to listen to Black voices is to attend to Black stories, specifically the enduring ones captured in classic African American literature.
This book suggests—and performs—listening to Black stories through a particular mode of reading. This way of reading joins the literary and the theological in a dynamic interplay for the spiritual and intellectual enrichment of Christian and spiritually curious readers from all walks of life. In other words, when we read Black literature’s twentieth-century classics through a dual lens—the literary and the theological—we unearth the ways in which God’s truth addresses Black experience and how Black experience, as shown in the literature of our great writers, can prod readers from all backgrounds toward sharper theological thinking and more faithful living. There is a way to read even brutal works like Native Son that respects the text and enriches our faith.
The book you are holding in your hands is light on theory and heavy on practice. Each chapter is my reading of a text through this dual lens in reflection on a key Christian truth or reality, like God, hope, and sin. The reading performed in each chapter does not displace a literary reading but stands upon it like on a ladder, elevating our textual engagement from one plane to another, to challenge us and help us gain a more expansive view. To mix analogies, the literary reading—attending to the form, content, themes, and devices of a text—becomes a bridge to theological musings: How does the text in its shape and substance raise important questions or prompt crucial lessons about ourselves, God, and the world as we know it? The answers to these questions, found through these texts being read in this manner, can make our faith more whole and more just.
Reading beyond Empathy
The great film critic Roger Ebert once called movies “empathy machines.” 1 The same can be said of literature. To read literature is to incarnate and inhabit the experience of another, as crafted by the author. Literature’s empathic power is why abolitionists leveraged slave narratives to warm the cold consciences of northerners indifferent to the suffering of enslaved Black persons. To read literature is to experience what Martha Nussbaum calls “links of possibility,” a powerful bond of empathy. 2
But a theological reading of literature demands we do more than empathize. In fact, a theological approach necessarily demotes empathy from one of the central purposes of our reading to a good product that happens along the way. We are after not less than empathy but more.
A theological reading of literature takes human experience seriously enough to examine it through the grid of divine revelation; it’s the sacred, dignifying task of placing our collective story, told through literature, in conversation with God’s story. It’s listening to the stories of human experience with ears attuned to questions raised, the mind engaged in theological interplay, and the heart