A one-volume commentary and a two-volume set on African American Christianity highlight the mission and vision of InterVarsity Press (IVP) and IVP Academic, which includes race, ethnicity, and racial justice. The New Testament in Color and Swing Low, volumes 1 and 2, are new releases that continue IVP’s long line of mission-driven books and herald a future of many new projects.
The New Testament in Color “brings together a multitude of voices to illuminate the New Testament in fresh ways,” says Rachel Hastings, assistant academic editorial director at IVP. “It takes seriously the exegetical approach to the text while also celebrating the ways that our diverse social locations shape our understanding.... For far too long, the commentaries available have reflected a monolithic experience, failing to adequately interrogate the ways a reader’s specific social location shapes biblical interpretation.”
General editor Esau McCaulley, associate professor of the New Testament at Wheaton College, helped guide Black, white, Asian, Latino/a, and First Nations scholars to produce the commentary. “To understand God’s will rightly,” McCaulley says, “we need the whole church, across ethnicity and class, reading the Bible together so that we might discern the mind of Christ.”
As McCaulley writes in the introduction to The New Testament in Color, “It matters that we have diverse representation in the process of biblical interpretation because it is always ourselves as persons with our experiences, biases, gifts, and liabilities that we bring to the text.... We come from somewhere, and that somewhere has left its mark whether we acknowledge it or not. When one culture dominates the discourse, we are closing ourselves off from what the Holy Spirit is saying among other cultures.”
McCaulley also addresses how the academy can create a gap between its theological depth of information and the day-to-day life of the church. He wants to bridge that gap with The New Testament in Color. “We have to find ways to provide resources that will help the church understand the entire story of God and their place within it,” he says.
Gathering the necessary range of diverse voices presented extensive behind-the-scenes logistics for the publisher, including how to ensure editorial cohesion while respecting the high levels of expertise among contributors and the volume’s editors. It took months of coordination to create a volume with both “solidarity and individuality across the chapters,” Hastings says. “The commentary structure needed some templated uniformity across the contributions, but we also wanted to make sure that we allowed contributors to maintain their methodological approach and delivery of their socially located biblical interpretations.”
Jon Boyd, associate publisher and academic editorial director at IVP, sees both The New Testament in Color and the Swing Low two-volume history as “a culmination, the fruit of a logical progression in [the authors’] fields,” he says, “to not just talk about a need for focused, sustained understanding but to get it done.”
Walter Strickland II is the author of Swing Low and an associate professor of systematic and contextual theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He sees the history of African American Christianity as appealing to both Black Christians and their brothers and sisters of other ethnicities. This, he says, is a crucial endeavor because “historic omissions can evolve into missiological hazards, promoting an environment where certain ethnicities are perpetual teachers and others are cast as learners.”
“My aspiration is for contemporary African Americans to see their own stories reflected in the faith and witness of their spiritual ancestors,” Strickland says, “while enabling all Christians to recognize and appreciate the African American legacy of resilience, triumph, and deliverance—centered on Jesus Christ.”
Boyd looks ahead to future releases in the same spirit, including Karen Johnson’s Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice coming out next summer. “Other projects are in development by biblical scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, theologians, missiologists, and psychologists,” he says, “and there will be more from historians like Johnson, too.”
