I don’t know where I first heard of Esau McCaulley – maybe from a friend or through reading something he wrote in Christianity Today or The Atlantic. Regardless, I like what he has to say. And I like how he says it. Or at least how he puts it in writing.
Maybe someday I’ll hear him speak. Though, as he’s already warned his readers, he doesn’t have that traditional Black preacher cadence. People aren’t always what you expect them to be. He may be as arhythmic as me.
A priest with the Anglican Church of North America and a professor in New Testament at Wheaton College, McCaulley is also a theologian-in-residence at Progressive Baptist Church, a historically black congregation in Chicago. Scholar that he is, he communicates broadly.
He’s even written a couple of books for kids – though I haven’t read them yet. Josey Johnson’s Hair and the Holy Spirit (IVP Kids, 2022) and Andy Johnson and the March for Justice (Convergent Children’s, 2024) are geared for kids ages 4-8. Reviewers tell me adults enjoy them, too.
For a very different audience, McCaulley has produced a couple of commentaries. He served as editor of The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary, which was published by IVP Academic in 2024. And he authored Sharing in the Son’s Inheritance: Davidic Messianism and Paul’s Worldwide Interpretation of the Abrahamic Land Promises in Galatians (T&T Clark, 2021). Both are on my wishlist.
As is his book, Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal (IVP, 2022). Again, I haven’t read it – yet.
What I am recommending to you are two books I have read of his. One is a memoir, and the other is a theological work on biblical interpretation from the Black Church tradition. One book for those who love story; the other for those who love study.
Christmas a year ago, I gifted my wife McCaulley’s How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South (Convergent Books, 2023). Kim and I both love reading good memoirs and this book came well recommended, so I ordered it by faith. Was not disappointed. Turned out to be a two-fer. After she read it and loved it, she loaned it to me!
McCaulley sets the story of his own life in the stories of his family over several generations. While born after the Jim Crow days, he was shaped by a community deeply rooted in segregated Alabama soil. He grew up in a world filled with both pain and promise. But the promise had no guarantees, not even for a young man of faith, intellect, and athletic ability like Esau.
What a name! I won’t spoil the story for you, but I loved reading about how he came by that name and how he dealt with it. Of all names!
What I especially like about McCaulley’s memoir is the way he wrestles with how individual as well as corporate responsibility play out in individual lives. That he includes individual and corporate responsibility may turn off some of my readers who sit one side of that divide or the other. But, for McCaulley, there is no divide. His life and the lives of his extended family were and continue to be affected by systemic oppression (my words, not his) and individual decisions.
The challenges any of us face in life are never uncomplicated; for McCaulley and his extended family life’s challenges were extremely complicated. When individuals live with harsh social challenges, not of their own making, the margin of error for individual mistakes becomes dangerously narrow. Narrow paths require abundant grace and great wisdom to navigate.
Young Esau was raised with a sense of moral agency even as he was discovering that the systems that governed his life were more than a little out of his control. My hope is that my friends who sit on either side of the individual-corporate responsibility divide will read this book, and be open to broadening their take on a conversation critical in our time. You will do yourself a favor to hear McCaulley out.
As McCaulley leads us on a journey through five generations of his family’s life, we are not left without hope. Hope is ever present. But we are reminded how even though we may trust in God, we can go through very dark times, with outcomes never guaranteed.
I’ve read many bios and memoirs of Black Americans over the past 50+ years. Each of the stories I’ve read has had something unique to say. McCaulley did not disappoint.
I’d like to say this book will sit on my shelf with these other classics. But I have to remind myself it’s not my book to decide.
I know the shelves are bulging, Dear, but can we keep it?
For readers who like a good theological read that is still broadly accessible, I highly recommend McCaulley’s Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope (IVP Academic, 2020). This was my introduction to McCaulley.
In a time when our society is secularizing, the voice of the Black American experience of faith stands out as a beacon of light. What our intensely secularizing society has discovered is that it is a lot harder to secularize the Black experience for which faith is so deeply intertwined with communal struggle and identity.
For both secularists and for those of us of faith, there is great value in seeing faith through the eyes of those with different lived experiences. McCaulley speaks to the role of faith in our society through the lens of a man who grew up in the margins, even as he was deeply committed to Jesus.
If perspectives others bring to the Scriptures were of no use to me, I would have no use for group Bible studies or reading books authored by others or hearing the Word preached by someone else. I could get all I need from the Bible by reading it for myself. Hopefully you can affirm with me the value of gleaning biblical insights from other believers – others who bring their own life experiences to bear on what the Scriptures have to say.
McCaulley and I happen to share the same faith, but our life experiences and family heritages are vastly different. He brings to the table of my understanding sustaining food I will not find on my own.
One of the many points McCaulley makes is how God values the undervalued, who come to know they have “an advocate in the person of Christ.” In this context, he brings up that dual focus on individual and corporate responsibility.
What McCaulley understands in Jesus’s ministry and his view of the kingdom is “nothing less than the creation of the new world in which the marginalized are healed spiritually, economically, and psychologically.” Contrast that with how we dehumanize others. We tend to do so through one of two forms: One, when we treat them as mere bodies needing food and not the transforming love of God; Two, when we treat them as souls whose earthly experiences are not our concern. (page 94)
For much of the book, McCaulley is speaking to all of us. Then there are times when he speaks directly to his own Black American community, as he does in his chapter on “What shall we do with this rage?” Here McCaulley points to Israel’s ancient experience of rage as having much to say about suffering and pain. God’s first answer to such rage is to enter alongside it as friend and redeemer, as Word made flesh. (page 130)
Even at these times when he is speaking to his own community, McCaulley invites the rest of us to enter alongside, not as redeemers, for we all already have a Redeemer. But he invites us to listen in, trusting we will learn as we listen. We have much to glean from the experiences of our brothers and sisters, just as we glean from the experiences of the ancient Israelites, whether suffering in Egypt or Babylon.
Like any good theologian, McCaulley doesn’t avoid the tough questions. Suffering is obviously a tough one. As is slavery in the biblical context, a context that was used so demonically against our enslaved brothers and sisters in our own US history.
But to read McCaulley is to come away with a sense of hope. Remember what I said about McCaulley’s own memoir, how outcomes are never guaranteed? Well, just as true is the other point I observed, that hope is ever present.
This book will definitely land as a keeper on my bookshelf (okay, my collection of bookshelves). Someday when I am gone, someone else will inherit it. What they will inherit is a book that has been dog-eared to death.
Whether preaching or teaching, whether writing stories for children or adults, or treatises for students and academics, McCaulley is only getting started. Now in his later 40s, he’s just hitting his stride. I look forward to listening to what God speaks through him for years to come.
For a bonus, I invite you to listen to this song by the Original Gospel Harmonettes with lead singer Mildred Howard. There was no divide for these old-time gospel singers and civil rights activists like the group’s organizer, Dorothy Love Coates, pictured at the left of the foursome in this video. To quote an old preacher, this song fills my bones with hope! https://youtu.be/-6GNzKIN2Gs?si=sfh8eSn6VEkYihIA
I love writing for people serving or journeying in the margins, or as I like to call those margins, the borderlands. I do that regularly on this blog, On a journey in the borderlands. You are welcome to follow along – by subscribing for free at Contact Us!
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