I took an American church history class last month, and I've had an idea percolating since then.
What if versejacking was the reason we had good Anglicans and Baptists and Methodists in the South saying that the Bible doesn't have a problem with slavery? They would grab a verse or two to show how slaves were a part of Jewish society in the First Testament, and they would use the verses from Paul to show that slaves are to submit to their masters. This wouldn't have been a monolithic perception. In the early 1800s, people would say that slavery was a necessary evil. By the mid-1800s, they were saying slavery was a positive moral good. American society had a covenant with God to be the best society. Whites were put at the top of the hierarchy to oversee a millennial kingdom of Christ. God in his sovereignty had ordained that Blacks were inferior to the Whites and therefore were slaves. All of this perception was wrapped up in Southern American civil religion. They were trying to maintain order (God-ordained order), while the Northern Progressives saw the millennial reign of Christ coming with the equality that the Declaration of Independence offered. Both sides used the Bible to prop up their cause. However, the Northerners saw in the scriptural metanarrative that all people are equal (okay, all men, not women). The Southerners saw order in a hierarchy brought about by versejacking.
Another interesting point is how religion was meted out to the slave populations. There was always a debate about how much religion slaves should be given. If they were taught to read the Bible, they would get uppity. If they were baptized or educated, the economy would lose the benefits of slaves, because they would start to demand equal rights. Southern slaveholders felt varying levels of compunction toward salvation for slaves. If they weren't human, they didn't need salvation. If they were inferior humans, they might need to get to heaven. They would be given enough religion to "save" them, but not enough to let them feel the egalitarian impulse in Paul: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (TNIV).
One thing the slaveholders never counted on was the fact that Judaism and the Christianity that sprang from it were primarily oral traditions. They kept the Bible and literacy from the slaves, but they didn't count on the narrative element of the faith energizing the slave populations. The slaves were able to tell the story of the exodus as their own story, looking toward heaven as the promised land. It doesn't seem like they held much hope for deliverance in this world. Ironically, the slaveowners held that they were the new Israel in the promised land subjugating the Canaanites and bringing about the reign of Christ. The slaves believed they were Israel waiting to be brought into the promised land and delivered from the tyranny of the Egyptians. America had two groups of people, both claiming to be the same group, one mature, one nascent. The slaves could look at the owners and say, "There's no way they're Israel." The owners didn't really think much about the slaves as long as they kept working, but even if they did. they probably didn't see the slaves grasping the narrative of Israel as their own.
It's very intriguing to me that this historical snapshot shows how different groups used the Bible so differently. And in the justice of history, the group that used the Bible badly had no concept that their slaves were gaining hope from the same Bible. Further, it appears to me that those with literacy and the written word emasculated the storied context of the Bible. The uneducated grasped the story. The story ended up winning (with help from some people who also seemed to grasp a larger story in the Bible, although they did their share of versejacking).
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3 comments:
Great post as always John. Almost as always, I have nothing to add :)
Well, John, I'll risk stepping into it a bit with a couple of thoughts. First, I guess I tend to find the Biblical approach to slavery to be more troubling than you do, as it doesn't really offer any kind of a blanket condemnation of it. One doesn't really have to go searching for out-of-context random verses to find some sort of general acceptance of the practice. On the other hand, it doesn't really work in a world where all are "equal" in Christ. I guess I would see this as relating the paradoxical answer that the Bible offers to the broader question, “Was Jesus a revolutionary figure?”
Verse-jacking can be in the eye of the beholder. The way I see it, all three groups that you reference basically read the Bible as supporting their own view of the world—whether it be the Hamiltonians, the Jeffersonians, or the slaves. That's not necessarily wrong and certainly wasn't from the slaves' perspective.
But, everyone likes to focus on the books/stories/passages they like and kind of ignore the ones we won't like. However, I see this historical episode as an example of the trouble we can find when we look in the Bible for self-justification instead of finding a critique of our own selves.
Points, all, well made (and taken). It's very important to note that everyone has their own skewed view of the Bible (except for me, right?). I say skewed because there's no such thing as pure objectivity. If you're looking for objective, you're only going to come out skewed. Approaching the Bible with an arrogant objectivism is an abomination because it, not surprisingly, objectifies it. One of my pastors has helped me see recently that it can be helpful to refer to the Bible in terms of "God said" rather than "I learned." Naturally there can be dangers there as well, but it was a needed corrective for me.
Because humans are necessarily storiented beings, we bring our own narrative to the text, and we're formed and reformed by the text. Maybe my narrative is "I'm a surgeon, and I will dissect you!" I'll reserve my (perhaps) harshest versejacking critique for that approach. It's my opinion, though, that the Northern Progressives and slaves got the scriptural metanarrative better than the Southern slaveowners (with significant blind spots, all). I'm imposing my own narrative in calling a metanarrative here, but it appears to me along the lines of "Love the Lord your God with all ya got, and love your neighbor as yourself." I don't see slaveowners doing that, but they had their own perspective on it all.
If you've stuck with me long enough to see my question, can you unpack the paradox of Jesus as a revolutionary figure and how it interacts with things like this slavery question?
Oh, and one more thought that occurred to me as I was working on a manuscript about the "crucified life." While slavery doesn't sit well with our current, general American mindset of individual rights and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it's a key metaphor for how we are related to Jesus. Perhaps that's why the American church (generally) doesn't play well with the idea of utter submission to Jesus.
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