March 8, 2022

Episode 17 – “The Bible and Social Justice” with Dr. Esau McCaulley

If you love something, you have to be willing to put in the work. That is especially prevalent in our relationship with God and us as individuals. In this episode of VOICES’ Where Ya From? podcast, host, Rasool Berry, speaks with Dr. Esau McCaulley about helping Black churches rediscover hope, the division between social justice and the biblical texts, and what can be done to dissolve that tension.
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Show Notes

 

Guest Bio:

Rev. Esau McCaulley, PhD, is an assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. He is the author of Sharing in the Son’s Inheritance and Christianity Today’s book of the year, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. Esau’s writings have appeared in the Washington Post, The Religious New Service, and Christianity Today, and he is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. Esau is married to Mandy, a pediatrician and Navy reservist. Together, they have four wonderful children.

 

Summary of EPISODE:

Is God only concerned with saving souls? Or does He care about both the spiritual and physical well-being of humanity? In this episode of VOICES’ Where Ya From? podcast, Dr. Esau McCaulley shares his origin story with Rasool and outlines what the Bible has to say about being socially active and pursuing justice.

 

Notes and Quotes:

  • “What happens when you’ve received everything that you want, but it’s not sufficient to bring you joy?”
  • “I wanted to write something that’s going to inspire African American Christians to continue to see in the text of the Old and New Testament, hope. Because I think that’s what’s marked the African American Christian tradition throughout all of our history, right? That we looked in these texts and we saw in them a God who loved us.”
  • “It is simply exegetically dishonest to say that you can get from one end of the Old Testament to the New Testament and not see some engagement of Christians in the public square.”

 

Links Mentioned In Show:

 

Verses Mentioned in Show:

  • Romans 14:13–23 “Don’t cause another Christian to stumble.”
  • Isaiah 5:6–11
  • Isaiah 58 and 61 quoted by Jesus in Luke 4
  • Luke 1:46–55 “the Magnificat”
  • Revelation 17 “Babylon the prostitute”
  • 1 Timothy 1 and 2
  • Deuteronomy 15:18
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