In celebration of Juneteenth, Jamal-Dominique Hopkins and Angela Gorrell offer appreciation for the influence of Old Testament scholar Charles B. Copher and Christian Educator Anne Streaty-Wimberly.
In celebration of Juneteenth, Jamal-Dominique Hopkins and Angela Gorrell offer appreciation Old Testament scholar Charles B. Copher and Christian Educator Anne Streaty Wimberly.
About Charles B. Copher
Charles Buchanan Copher (1913-2003), a United Methodist minister and Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Scholar, held an illustrative academic career at his alma mater, Gammon Theological Seminary, which later became part of the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) consortium. A respected educator and beloved by his students, he was Professor for Biblical Studies and Languages from 1958-1978. Following his death in 2003, ITC honored his life work by creating the Charles B. Copher Annual Faculty Lectures. He was author of Black Biblical Studies: Biblical and Theological Issues on the Black Presence in the Bible.
About Anne Streaty Wimberly
Anne E. Streaty Wimberly, Professor Emerita of Christian Education at the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC), is a renowned African American researcher, scholar, professor, advocate, and champion of black youth. A leading Christian educator rooted in the United Methodist Church, she has inspired students, colleagues, pastors, church leaders, and countless admirers to pursue education with a “zest to know.” For Wimberly, education centers on the big questions of life’s meaning and purpose, and she has enthusiastically pursued these questions throughout her spiritual and educational journey in light of her embrace of the generating theme of hope. While her teaching and scholarship encompass a wide range of ministerial and educational themes, she is most passionate about youth and family ministry in the black church. She currently serves as the Executive Director of the Youth Hope-Builders Academy at ITC and founder and coordinator of the Annual Youth and Family Convocation. Her passion for learning has undergirded her educational ministry and life-long vocation.
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Visit us online faith.Yale.edu.
This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. 156 years ago on June 9th, 1865, a group of enslaved people in Galveston, Texas finally heard about their freedom. They had been legally free for two and a half years, following the January 1st, 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. And now, 156 years later as of this week, Juneteenth is now a national symbol of the realization of freedom, the realization of abolition, the realization of agency, the realization of the most fundamental of human rights. So our celebration of it, then, marks the unfathomable resilience of the oppressed and the joy of their liberation.
But maybe the wider celebration is not just a memorial, as much as it is present act. A memorial suggests completion, but things are not complete. This realization of freedom is sadly, disturbingly, still in process. 156 years of continual efforts to realize the simple truths of human equality and human dignity, 156 years of economy coming before people, 156 years of waiting, 156 years of excuses, 156 years of repetitions, 156 years of talk without action.
This is what makes MLK's stirring close to the dream speech future oriented. He envisions a future, quote, "free at last."
MLK Recording: With this faith, we will be able to transform the tangling discourse of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
Evan Rosa: Yes, one day. But how long?
Today we're offering two reflections on the influential black voices who have shaped and formed our work. Friends of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, Jamal-Dominique Hopkins, honors the Old Testament scholar, Charles Copher. Angela Gorrell celebrates Anne Streaty Wimberly. Peace to you on this day that hopes for the realization of freedom.
And thanks for listening.
Jamal-Dominique Hopkins: I'm Jamal-Dominique Hopkins. I'm glad to be here with you today. Charles Buchanan Copher was an American scholar and professor. He was one of the first African-Americans to earn a PhD in the Old Testament. He received this from Boston University in 1947, which is significant in that during a time when many African-Americans did not have formal training or education, he was one of those rare exceptions.
He graduated from Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia in 1930, and went on to do his divinity work from Gammon Theological Seminary and Oberlin School of Theology. Copher was an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, where he received his ordination in 1941. During his time as a seminary student, he pastored several churches in Oberlin, Ohio, Columbus, Ohio, and also in Boston, Massachusetts. And he served as a professor at his alma mater, Gammon Theological Seminary, upon his graduation from Boston. He served in this position from 1948 to 1959, and by the time Gammon Theological Seminary merged to form the Interdenominational Theological Seminary, he became ITC's his first academic dean.
During this time, Copher penned numerous articles, including "The Black Presence in the Old Testament" appearing in the seminal work, Stony the Road We Trod: African-American Biblical Interpretation edited by Cain Hope Felder in 1991. He went on in 1993 to write his own work, Black Biblical Studies: An Anthology of Charles B. Copher: Biblical and Theological Issues on the Black Presence in the Bible.
Copher was a pioneer in the area of biblical studies. He influenced such giants like Cain Hope Felder, Thomas Hoyt Jr., who actually was a scholar and became a Bishop in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, David T. Shannon, who was a president of a seminary in his own right, Vincent Wimbush, Clarice Martin, who actually was the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in the New Testament, Renita Weems, who was the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in the Old Testament, and William Myers, who I studied under while I was a seminary student. And it's under Myers that I learned the Afrocentric biblical interpretation, which was an approach that spawned from Cophers work, The Black Presence in the Bible.
Black, African-American biblical hermeneutics was kind of a second generation of the work and scholarship that Charles B. Copher established and laid out. By the time Copher retired from the Interdenominational Theological Center, there was this thing at the school called the Annual Faculty Lectureship Series. In 1979, ITC changed the name of this lectureship to the Charles B. Copher Annual Faculty Lectureship in his honor. And I had the honor of serving as the 2009 Charles Copher annual lecturer, where I was following in the footsteps of persons like Jacquelyn Grant, who was known as the establisher, the founder of womanist theology, Gayraud Wilmore, Justo González, J. Deotis Roberts, Riggins Earl, and others.
You know, my presentation at that 2009 Copher lecturer was entitled "Looking Back to Step Forward." Subtitled "What the Dead Sea Scrolls Can Teach the Black Church." In my address built upon the work of Copher, particularly addressing a comment that he made during his 1987 annual faculty lecture, which also was penned in his essay "Three Thousand Years of Biblical Interpretation with Reference to Black Peoples." It was his address that related to the black presence in Jewish Intertestamental Literature. Copher wrote, quote, "A study of the Old Testament Apocrypha, and pseudepigraphical writings, and those of Qumran reveals, an absence of interpretation of the biblical text with reference to black peoples. All in all there are 13 references to Ethiopia or Ethiopians in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, six with reference to the geographical locations, four with reference to historical events without comment, two in the form of prophetic judgements, and one with reference to the Ethiopians as a stout-hearted people. Thus, there is one complimentary passage, but it does not refer to a text in the Bible. Upon the basis of a check of biblical references in the Qumran literature, using the list of scriptural references compiled by Theodor H. Gaster, there are no interpretations of pertinent biblical texts relating or referring to black persons or people." Close quote.
Copher's scholarship centered on the black presence in the Bible, and particularly the Old Testament. Copher also focused on how biblical misinterpretations borrowed from skewed rabbinic interpretations relating to ethnicity and color. And so Copher was a significant... and he challenged the dominant, Eurocentric, biblical interpretation, which either took out color, or took out references to the African link, or just simply read these texts without any historical accuracy. So Copher, he highlighted conflated biblical readings where, in the case, for example, Genesis five and nine were conflated, and race was anachronistically read into these particular passages, and particularly the Noahic curse.
And so when we talk about biblical conflation, we're talking about taking two, distinct passages that have their own unique context, and taking them out of those passages, taking them out of those contexts, and marrying them together to create a unique context, typically to affirm or validate an agenda. And this is exactly what Copher challenged against with regard to the Genesis five and Genesis nine conflated readings, where Jewish midrash and Babylonian Talmud, Jewish tractates and targums, placed a curse on the biblical figure Ham and, by extension, to dark skinned individuals, to black folks.
This raised a hermeneutic of suspicion on these interpretations, and Copher rightly and poignantly noted in his essay, "The Black Presence in the Old Testament," quote, "It is extremely difficult to deal with the subject of a black presence in the Old Testament. It is complicated by the fact that if it is impossible to arrive at a conclusion that comes anywhere near universal acceptability among the difficulties, at points overlapping ones, confronting the investigator into this subject, the following are to be noted: 1) a traditional view influenced by ancient rabbinic interpretations of some biblical texts often seems to have precedence over what is in the text themselves." Close quote. This among a number of other points Copher made as he illustrated the problem that has dogged Eurocentric biblical readings from time.
Copher was significant. Copher's scholarship, Copher's work, raised the bar in really addressing these problematic readings. Copher rightly noted that it was these readings that informed the antebellum period and Jim Crow era biblical interpretations regarding the subjugation and oppression of dark skinned people. Copher was the first biblical scholar to raise these issues, and to take serious the corpus of ancient Judeo literary witnesses.
Whereas he was unable to discover a black presence in Jewish intertestimental, there indeed was both literary and archeological evidence that points to a black presence, and what I consider an African link. And this is where Copher's work and mine intersect. Copher raises the question, my work, as a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar and biblical studies, I address these questions, and Copher has inspired that. For me, Copher's work is inspiring.
Outside of the New Testament biblical scholar Cain Felder, no one else has taken up the mentions of Copher, particularly related to the black presence in early Jewish literature. To be fair, Copher didn't have access to these Dead Sea Scrolls or Qumran unrelated archeological finds of the time, but my work and my research does.
And for that reason, Copher is significant in black history, and black theological studies, and black biblical studies, and biblical studies in general. Charles Copher, he is someone that you must know, and you must learn about, particularly his work in this time.
Angela Gorrell: Dr. Anne Streaty Wimberly is an incredible Christian religious educator, who has influenced not only the way that I think about Christian religious education, obviously, but also how I think about how I relate to my students, specifically to young people. Her book, Soul Stories: African-American Christian Education, this book was very influential to me while I was getting my PhD. She's able to articulate something that I think we all know to be true already, which is the power of story and the importance of drawing, by young people, the stories that they're living out of them, helping them to articulate them, helping them to understand the stories that have shaped them and the communities that they're a part of, and drawing on those for strength, for resilience, for learning, for growth.
Basically, I felt like when I read Dr. Wimberly's book for the first time, I thought, oh my goodness. She has articulated something that I knew to be true in youth ministry as a youth minister, but in a way that I couldn't quite have put words to. And now that she has, I can actually live into this as a method that is a pedagogy that's central to the way that I teach.
And for me, her work has really influenced the way that I think about what it means to teach for transformation. In her book, Soul Stories, Dr. Wimberley describes a process of story-linking that involves four phases, each of which is subdivided into different activities. One is engaging the everyday story, and then another is engaging the Christian faith story in the Bible, as we know it in scripture, and the third is engaging Christian faith stories from the African-American heritage, and then finally, engaging in Christian ethical decision making. And so it's that for her, there's this process of, we take each story, and as we share them and link them together, what emerges is next steps for us, new, deeper understanding of who God is, under imitation of what it means to imitate Jesus, what it means to, yeah, to live like Jesus.
In Soul Stories, Wimberly expresses hope that the story-linking process can provide a means to explore how six factors, identities, contexts, relationships, life events, life meanings, and our own unfolding story plots, how each can foster liberation and vocation, or how each can inhibit them, and then lead to tangible action toward liberation and hope building vocation, to use her language.
I think that, in my own teaching, I absolutely want students to, in my classes, to engage in all of these kinds of stories, and to do precisely what she's describing too. I want them to engage the everyday story. I want them to talk about and discuss and bring to life the Christian faith story in the Bible. I want them to engage Christian faith stories from American heritage, but also Latin X heritage, every... the different sorts of ethnicities and cultural backgrounds that are represented in the space. I want those stories to emerge and I want them to engage in Christian ethical decision-making. Like I want, so I want them to, and basically I use her model a lot in my classes to help spark students to link together ideas and... sorry, stories... and they recognize that there's wisdom there. Like basically, I think her model is a model of wisdom, and because it's not... I think a lot of people think, "Oh, the Bible is just, it just is. And you just read it, and you just do what it says. And it's... uh, no, it's not "the Bible said it. That settles it." It's much more complicated than that.
And this sort of process that she describes helps us to think, okay, this is really how we make sense of our lives, and the text, and Christian faith, and how our cultural backgrounds and the stories of our communities contribute. They don't inhibit our understanding of God's activity. God's activity emerges from those stories that we are living, that our communities have lived. So they're important, and we link them together to have a fuller picture of who God is.
But one thing that she did in conjunction with her colleague, a religious education professor, Dr. Almeda Wright, which, they did a project on cultural memory and how cultural memory contributes to joy. And she was building on her earlier research related to storytelling. And so, she says that cultural memory is memory within a particular cultural group that has in it images, knowledge, visions, values, poetry, music, and so on, that builds the identity of a culture. And for Dr. Wimberly, cultural memory is connected to joy because embedded in each one of those is a sense of joy, or how we feel about what has happened in the lives of the people. But also, this is all Dr. Wimberly, also how we have come through difficulties.
And so, me thinking about reflecting on these ideas from her research, what I see in this is, like, that describing through stories how people we know, family or chosen family and neighbors, have situated their suffering in the larger context of life, or even made meaning from suffering, inspires hope. And it encourages us to do the same. And similarly, stories where love prevails and joy was felt can give us a picture, a model, of what love and joy look like, as well as the nurture positive expectations for the future. And so when we tell these kinds of stories, we can begin to imagine that such love and joy are possible in our lives too.
And so these things, like the power of story, the power of cultural memory, for understanding that we are, that we have been somewhere, we're a part of the community that has been somewhere, and we are headed somewhere, and we're a part, we're contributing to that story. Much of the way I think about that as being central to discipleship and to Christian religious education is due... like, thanks to Dr. Wimberly's work, to her lectures that I've heard her give. Her work is so essential for drawing out these rich historical Christian practices and saying these are not just things that are supplemental. They are critical and essential, foundational for discipleship, and I am so grateful for her.
And not only this. I just have to take a moment to say, she is not one of these professor's academics, who just says brilliant things and writes brilliant things. She lives them. This woman is so kind, so compassionate. She is a mentor of a loved spiritual mother to so many people in this country and around the world. She is adored for all the right reasons, because she doesn't just preach and teach and write about Christian religious education. She lives it. And so I'm grateful to Dr. Anne Streaty Wimberly, and to her colleague, Dr. Almeda Wright, and other great women like them.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured biblical scholar, Jamal-Dominique Hopkins, and theologian, Angela Gorrell. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edited and produced the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.Yale.edu. New episodes drop every Saturday, with the occasional midweek.
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