Love Lazarus Sechrest’s Race and Rhyme: Rereading the New Testament is a rigorously argued and insightful book about how the Bible can be read in a way that takes the historical situation of the biblical text and current social realities seriously. The book’s underlying premise is that God revealed in the Bible has something relevant to say about the problems of race, racism, and White supremacy. To hear this liberative word, we must work through our own “cultural and perceptual biases” and build bridges between the world of the biblical text and our own (xiii). Her analogical method called “associative hermeneutics” attempts to identify appropriate harmonies or rhymes between these vastly differing worlds whenever possible but without making excuses for the text when it is not. It emerges from her formation and commitment as a Black womanist NT scholar to read the Bible with race, gender, and class in mind. It is also the product of her fruitful synthesis of theory and years of teaching in the classroom.
Sechrest applies associative hermeneutics to Matthew, Luke, John, Acts, 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, and Revelation. For example, she reads Matthew’s depictions of Jesus’s enemies through the framework of Jesus’s teaching on love to construct a Christian ethic of allyship. She detects an analogy or rhyme between unlikely characters. Similar to the Canaanite who recognizes both Jesus’s status as Israel’s messiah as well as her own outsider, enemy status, White anti-racist allies must come to grips with the protracted history of conflict and institutional racism that complicate interactions between Whites and African Americans. In her reading of John 4, she argues that Western racialized feminine stereotypes of foreign women have caused many commentators to read the text with “sex on the brain” and assume that the woman was morally and sexually promiscuous (132). Sechrest instead offers a reading that sees intertextual rhymes between Jesus’ interaction with the Samaritan and the Isaac-Rebecca betrothal narrative in Genesis 24. She interprets Jesus as the agent sent by God in search of a suitable bride and the Samaritan as that bride.
Sechrest’s exegetical depth and interdisciplinary breadth may be dizzying for students as she moves from current events to explanations of relevant concepts and terms to her exegesis of biblical texts and back again. I assigned the book in my masters-level Introduction to the NT Course. According to one student, the book helped broaden her perspective and make new connections between her context and the biblical text while making her squirm with discomfort. Another student appreciated Sechrest’s unique interpretations of biblical passages but found the book hard to read due to its academic language and extensive footnotes. Nevertheless, Sechrest’s engagement with diverse domains of knowledge is a gift in and of itself. Although Sechrest’s Race and Rhyme is not an easy read, I consider it essential for those who desire to integrate their reading of Scripture, faith, and commitment to racial justice, interrogate their own biases and the ways White supremacist culture has seeped into their readings of the Bible, and imagine liberative solutions to complex problems of race and gender.
