Womanist Biblical Scholarship Analysis

Womanist biblical hermeneutics also challenges both male and female Eurocentric perspectives and Black theological perspectives. Cheryl Sanders, an ethicist, and Junior outline ways that womanist biblical scholarship has been influenced by traditional European biblical scholarship and the theological and biblical scholarship of Black males. Both scholars also note however that although feminist and black male biblical scholarship provided an impetus toward methodological reorientation in biblical studies, their interpretations fail to regard the intersectionalities of sex and race as meaningful in biblical interpretation and constitutive of Black women’s struggles. Biblical scholar Renita Weems’s scholarship accentuates the ways that Anglo-Saxon

male interpretation has dominated American and European biblical scholarship. Clarice Martin further develops this conversation by offering a critique of the traditional interpretations of the doulos as she illustrates how Womanist biblical hermeneutics provide evidence of European scholar’s distortions of the Bible to legitimize slavery in the U.S. context. Martin’s critical assessment of the linguistic and socio-historical nuances and interpretations of the doulos reflect complex understandings of the conceptual use of slavery. Her article underscores how African American women’s historical struggles against racial, gender, and class oppression are constitutive elements in their conceptual and interpretive hermeneutics. Thus, her assessment illustrates why womanist scholarship necessitates a hermeneutic of suspicion and a hermeneutic of resistance.
Douglas emphasizes that to be white and female eliminates the claim to gender privilege and to be Black and male “portends” a racial privilege.

Therefore, to be Black and female is to have virtually no claim to the privileges accorded in a white patriarchal society or church. Douglas, Junior, Martin, Sanders and Weems’ scholarship all note the failure of white feminist and Black theologians to advance the interest of Black women in their scholarship and interpretations within the United States context. Similarly, Masenya emphasizes the failures of Black Theology in South Africa to incorporate issues that impact South African women. Junior’s scholarship maps temporal contexts for the emergence of womanist biblical hermeneutics as it provides a much fuller overview of the ways that both white feminist and Black activists failed to argue for the importance of both race and gender in the nineteenth century which resulted in African American women offering new biblical interpretations. Junior maintains that these non-biblical scholars who were activists challenged standard views of the public role of women through biblical interpretation and are the forerunners for womanist biblical interpretation that manifested in the twentieth

century.