Rev. Dr. Angela N. Parker is assistant professor of New Testament and Greek at McAfee. She received her B.A. in religion and philosophy from Shaw University (2008), her M.T.S. from Duke Divinity School (2008-2010) and her Ph.D. in Bible, culture, and hermeneutics (New Testament focus) from Chicago Theological Seminary (2015). Before this position, Dr. Parker was assistant professor of Biblical Studies at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology for four years. While at The Seattle School, Dr. Parker received the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion’s ESF New Scholar Award (2nd Place) for her article “One Womanist’s View of Racial Reconciliation in Galatians.” She teaches courses in New Testament, Greek Exegesis, the Gospel of Mark, the Corinthians Correspondence, the Gospel of John, and Womanist and Feminist Hermeneutics unto preaching.
In her research, Dr. Parker merges Womanist thought and postcolonial theory while reading biblical texts. Dr. Parker has two forthcoming books. First, Eerdmans Publishing will release If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I: Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority in September, 2021. (Amazon and Eerdmans) In this book, Dr. Parker draws from her experience as a Womanist New Testament scholar in order deconstruct one of White Christianity’s most pernicious lies: the conflation of biblical authority with the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility. As Dr. Parker shows, these doctrines are less about the text of the Bible itself and more about the arbiters of its interpretation—historically, White males in positions of power who have used Scripture to justify control over marginalized groups. This oppressive use of the Bible has been suffocating. To learn to breathe again, Dr. Parker says, we must “let God breathe in us.” We must read the Bible as authoritative, but not authoritarian. We must become conscious of the particularity of our identities, as we also become conscious of the particular identities of the biblical authors from whom we draw inspiration. And we must trust and believe that as long as God still breathes, Black lives indeed matter.
In her second book entitled Bodies, Violence, & Emotions: A Womanist Study of the Gospel of Mark, Dr. Parker thinks through the issue of imperial violence and its effects on the bodies of Jesus, John the Baptizer, and the woman suffering in a flow of blood in Mark 5. This study allows Dr. Parker to engage real lived experiences of violence and emotions in contemporary society. Dr. Parker has also published articles on prominent women in the Gospel of John. Currently, Dr. Parker is working on a few projects. She is researching Paul’s letter to Philemon in connection with the New York Times special issue on 1619 and the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Virginia. Second, while seeking to connect her research to her activities as an ordained missionary Baptist clergyperson, Dr. Parker is gathering information for a book regarding Paul’s language of flesh, slavery, and surrogacy and how various streams of black Baptists engage these Pauline ideas. In addition to her teaching and research, Dr. Parker serves as co-chair for the Paul and Politics Seminar of the Society of Biblical Literature and is a committee member of American Academy of Religion’s Status of Racial and Ethnic Minorities Committee.
While not engaging in scholarship, teaching, and preaching, Dr. Parker can be found relaxing with her husband, Victor, while researching puppies to adopt.
