Toward Decentering the New Testament: A Reintroduction

by Mitzi J. Smith, YungSuk Kim, Michael Willett Newheart (Foreword)

Toward Decentering the New Testament is the first introductory text to the New Testament written by an African American woman biblical scholar and an Asian-American male biblical scholar. This text privileges the voices, scholarship, and concerns of minoritized nonwhite peoples and communities. It is written from the perspectives of minoritized voices. The first few chapters cover issues such as biblical interpretation, immigration, Roman slavery, intersectionality, and other topics. Questions raised throughout the text focus readers on relevant contemporary issues and encourage critical reflection and dialogue between student-teachers and teacher-students.

Genres: New Testament, Theology, Nonfiction, Christian, Religion, Race, Christianity

386 pages, Paperback

Published August 21, 2018

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful to have an introductory NT text written by people of color! Tone shifts between the authors was a bit jarring at times, and some assertions are questionable (for example, the repeated claim that Judaism was a lauded ethnos in the Roman Empire), but overall a very coherent, easy-to-read, and most importantly contextually hermeneutic text.

[Zoe · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book, but ..... I just couldn't. Much of the material is just such a stretch. Not my cuppa but I had to read it for a class.

[J Percell Lakin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reintroducing the New Testament

I thought this book did a good job of connecting the New Testament to the lived realities of students of the Bible that are from minority communities. I especially appreciated some of the material that connected the context of Scripture to contemporary issues that can cause the text to come alive in different ways and also to help us see our own context from a thoughtful biblical perspective.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for my New Testament Interpretation class. It's always fun to read the professor's book, but I'm really glad Dr. Smith had us read this. There are really helpful discussion questions that consider multiple sides to the scriptures. If you need a solid resource for preaching, general understanding of each book, and overall themes, this book was very helpful for me!

[Cralls · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really struggled rating this. I feel the book is probably better than my rating suggests but for me it was only a three.

I believe this book was written primarily for first year theology students. As such, it’s an introductory text with a very broad scope. The premise is very exciting: books, articles and opinions which come from minority communities’ perspectives are more than not ignored in preference for a supposed more neutral majority perspective (read:white CIS male). One of the authors even laments seeing textbooks she was supposed to give to her students which would talk about black perspectives, but were still written by a white guy! A colleague suggested she write her own book then, and here is the book.

The first part are essays discussing the background of the New Testament or perhaps some of the ideas that will be followed in later chapters on specific biblical books. Some were fine but a few seemed out of place to me. It felt almost like the authors just included essays they had written previously but.. it wasn’t really related to the theme if the book. The chapter in intersectionality was one such chapter. The chapter itself was fine, but only at the very end did it explain how any of this was relevant to reading the New Testament and even then I’m not really sure.

Other than that, it was a fine book. Very little of it, if any, felt very different to me. Oh sometimes they nonchalantly mention how Jesus was ‘lynched’ and they sometimes had discussion questions with good probing questions regarding how certain passages (such as the household rules) could negatively affect especially the already disadvantaged. But most was pretty… well introductory. Which is exactly what it’s supposed to be which is why I feel bad giving it three stars.

Overall, it probably does fulfill its purpose. I would have benefited from this just coming out of high school and the pushing of different perspectives especially from those within minority groups is an absolute necessity. Reading it now though, I picked up very little I haven’t already heard in more depth before.

[Nate Rubright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty OK for a secular NT textbook