Learning the Lessons of Slavery
By William E. Hull, Research Professor
Samford University, Birmingham, AL
Note: This article was delivered as Part II of the Dotson M. Nelson, Jr. Lectures on Religion and Life, at Samford University on October 9, 2002.
Slavery has proved to be the most challenging moral issue in the history of the United States. It prompted secession, which threatened to split the Union into competing nations. It precipitated the most costly war that we have ever fought, drenching our own soil in the blood, not of enemies, but of fellow Americans. Its aftermath gave rise to segregation, which poisoned the soul of the South for a century. Even now, the spectre of racism is the most powerful shaper of our regional identity. The institution of slavery posed the supreme challenge to Southern religion, a challenge that our ancestral faith miserably failed to meet.
Here, as nowhere else, white southern evangelical Protestantism was tried and found wanting at the judgment bar of history. For our purposes today, the response of Southern religion to the sin of slavery provides a haunting case study of a faith that failed to grow. For this was not an instance of timidity or cowardice, as if the pulpit muted its denunciation of a monstrous evil. On the contrary, the Southern clergy in one voice went to the opposite extreme; vigorously defending slavery as divinely sanctioned. They succeeded in making slavery an article of faith in Southern Christianity, an essential component of its religious worldview. And yet this was a conviction which all of us finds repulsive scarcely more than a century later. Because we are agreed on how the slavery question should be settled, let us ask why our forebears, based on the same Christian faith which many of us share, came to a totally opposite conclusion.
The Cruciality of Hermeneutics
Then, as now, for Southern evangelicals, the Bible was the supreme source of religious authority. Therefore, the Scriptures were almost universally recognized as the final arbiter of the slave question. Again and again, preachers and theologians poured over the sacred text with minute care to determine its teachings on slavery. Nor were they free to find only what they were looking for, because northern abolitionists were vigorously challenging their pro-slavery conclusions. What evidence was advanced on either side of this bitter debate?[1]
The pro-slavery South could point to slaveholding by the godly patriarch Abraham (Gen 12:5; 14:14; 24:35-36; 26:13-14), a practice that was later incorporated into Israelite national law (Lev 25:44-46). It was never denounced by Jesus, who made slavery a model of discipleship (Mk 10:44). The Apostle Paul supported slavery, counseling obedience to earthly masters (Eph 6:5-9; Col 3:22-25) as a duty in agreement with "the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with godliness" (1 Tim 6:3). Because slaves were to remain in their present state unless they could win their freedom (1 Cor 7:20-24), he sent the fugitive slave Onesimus back to his owner Philemon (Phlm 10-20). The abolitionist north had a difficult time matching the pro-slavery south passage for passage. They could only point out that biblical slavery was more benevolent and, in some cases, more temporary than its modern counterpart. They argued that neither Jesus nor his apostles legislated slavery but only sought to make it more humane. At best, they had to appeal to the spirit of the Bible rather than to specific texts, buttressing this appeal with general principles of justice and righteousness drawn from moral philosophy. But they could not shake the fact that slavery was commonplace in the Bible and that it was often cruel, especially in its treatment of foreigners. Israelite masters considered their slaves to be property that could be sold (Ex 12:44; 21:20-21, 32). They often used female slaves for reproductive purposes and claimed their offspring`s as their own (Gen 16:1-4; 30:3-4, 9-10; 35:22). They were permitted to punish slaves by beating them to the point of death (Ex 21:20-21).
Professor Eugene Genovese, who has studied these biblical debates over slavery in minute detail, concludes that the pro-slavery faction clearly emerged victorious over the abolitionists except for one specious argument based on the so-called Curse of Ham (Gen 9:18-27).[2] For our purposes, it is important to realize that the South won this crucial contest with the North by using the prevailing hermeneutic, or method of interpretation, on which both sides agreed. So decisive was its triumph that the South mounted a vigorous counterattack on the abolitionists as infidels who had abandoned the plain words of Scripture for the secular ideology of the Enlightenment. Here is the beginning of that familiar ploy by which those who insist on a literal reading of the text try to bolster their position by suggesting that their opponents are "liberals."
The debate over biblical slavery was based on a Reformed hermeneutic, which insisted that Scripture was an omnicompetent, infallible authority for life, which should be interpreted literally using common sense.[3] That approach may not be far from the view that some of you hold today. If so, how would you counter those who insist that the Bible sanctioned slavery? Admittedly that question has become somewhat theoretical in our day, but there are many who, like the more extreme abolitionists, are prepared to reject the Bible precisely because it does seem to endorse such reprehensible practices as slavery. The problem here is that the traditional Southern hermeneutic gave to slavery a transcendent justification rooted in sacred Scripture. Bad as it was to claim that slavery was backed by the almighty dollar, Southern preaching succeeded in claiming that it was also backed by Almighty God! Do you have a hermeneutic adequate to challenge that conclusion, or do you just hope that the hard questions will somehow go away?
In quest of a growing rather than a static faith in the Bible, let me suggest four ways of interpreting Scripture that would result in a better understanding of what it has to say about slavery. First, recognize that, because the biblical revelation is given in history, it has an inescapably time-bound character. In the ancient world, whole populations were enslaved and subjected to a brutality that is almost unknown today. So pervasive was slavery that it could not fail to find a prominent place in the biblical story. But this does not mean that God intended for time to stand still so as to perpetuate political arrangements and social institutions, which were prevalent in the world of Abraham or Moses, Jesus or Paul. Rather, it means that, against all Gnostic notions of timeless revelation, God was willing to work with humanity just as it was rather than waiting for more ideal conditions to emerge. The fact that God involved himself in a world where slavery was commonplace only means that he will work with us today despite our own corrupt social structures.
Second, God is never defeated by our sinful circumstances but works redemptively to overcome such bondage in ways that honor our freedom of choice. In the case of biblical slavery, he was forever "pushing the envelope" by insisting on the more humane treatment of slaves, a strategy which came to a climax in Paul`s skillful appeal to Philemon on behalf of Onesimus. Indeed, by sending his own Son in "the form of a slave" (Phil 2:7), God transformed the very category of servitude and invested it with radically new meaning foreshadowed centuries earlier by the Suffering Servant of the exile (Isa 52:13-53:12). In this forward thrust of the slavery texts we see God sowing the seeds of change in the rocky soil of human exploitation where their harvest would ripen slowly, even fitfully, in response to human growth. Here is the key issue: did God intend for this growth to come to a stop when the Canon of Scripture was closed, or did he intend for the dynamic launched by these texts to energize his people throughout the ages until they learned to express his will for human relationships in a more mature fashion?[4]
Third, always follow this redemptive movement of the text to its climax in Christ as the center and criterion by which the whole Bible is to be understood. Jesus could not fail to know that the majority of persons in the Roman Empire were slaves, yet his teachings on sacrificial love in human relationships undercut every rationale for slavery (Mt 5:21-48). It is just here that we see the cruciality of the "in Christ" formula freely used by Paul. On three occasions the Apostle insisted that "in Christ" the distinction between "slave and free" had been abolished (Gal 3:28; 1 Cor 12:13; Col. 3:11), even though that distinction was still important in the world of his day. But the Apostle insisted that life "in Christ" offered oneness to slave and free alike: they were members of one body (1 Cor 12:13), they shared one Spirit (Eph 4:4), they had become one new humanity (Eph 2:15). A new social order of voluntary equality had invaded the old order of enforced hierarchy and now coexisted within it to express, in advance as it were, the life of the New Age already inaugurated but not yet consummated.
Fourth, with a Christocentric hermeneutic firmly in place, set the sweep of God`s saving history in the context of creation and consummation. Ask: what was God`s original intention from the beginning before human sin entered the picture? What is God`s ultimate intention for his world when time shall be no more? As regards slavery, protology would suggest that we are all made in the image of God[5] and thus destined for "dominion" rather than servitude in the created order (Gen 1:26-27), while eschatology would suggest that one day the creation will be set free from every form of subjection and bondage in order to "obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God" (Rom 8:20-21). In other words, slavery belongs neither to the Alpha nor the Omega of God`s purposes but is a tragic interlude in human affairs introduced by our determination to rule others rather than being ruled by God. It has no place either in Eden or in Eternity, which is precisely why it should have no place "in Christ."
To summarize these findings in formula fashion: (1) Never confuse a descriptive statement in the text of the way things were with a prescriptive statement of the way God intends them to be. (2) To avoid this mistake, ask not only about the intentionality of a text for its day but also about the potentiality of that text to define the horizon of promise toward which the people of God journey. (3) Remember that we are called to live, not only "in Corinth," or wherever, but also "in Christ" as the sphere of God`s climactic redemption. (4) Hence, as Luther once put it, let the whole Bible lead you to Christ, then let Christ lead you back to the whole Bible, especially to its outer edges where history is bracketed by heaven.
The Power of Consensus
In the antebellum South, slavery had been viewed for centuries as a way of life. It was as much a part of the social landscapes as church and school and home. In particular, it was viewed as essential to the plantation system of the agrarian south, without which the economy would quickly collapse, resulting in the degradation of the culture. Lacking a dependable source of bound labor to supply emerging world markets, there would not be the money needed to send young men to the better schools and to cultivate in young women a life of refinement. Therefore, those who challenged slavery in the South paid a high price for their protest. Any who freed their slaves or failed to punish runaway slaves were subjected to bitter criticism or even ostracism within their community.
Why was religion unable to serve as a corrective to this repressive cultural consensus? To consider that question we must recognize two trends in the Americanization of Christianity. The first was the democratization of church polity according to which most congregations, especially in the dominant Baptist denomination, had become self-determining with little or no external control by ecclesiastical bodies or clergy hierarchy.[6] The second was the interpretation of the priesthood of the believer in terms of American exceptionalism according to which the Bible was self-interpreting so that ordinary folk using common sense could readily grasp its message for themselves.[7] The practical effects of these trends are described by Genovese with no little irony:
Decade by decade, church leaders frankly acknowledged that the sentiments of the white communities largely determined their response to measures for segregation, disfranchisement, and the politics of race. The capitulation to a community sentiment that, in effect, defied Scripture proved one of the many joys of the steady-indeed endless-democratization of the churches.[8]
What this means is that Southern religion had become such an integral part of the prevailing culture that it was never able to get the critical distance needed to challenge slavery. Pastors were so immediately answerable to their people that they lacked the leverage to fulfill a prophetic role. The church became so enmeshed in the power structure of the day that vox populi had indeed become vox Dei, the voice of the people had become the voice of God, making the pulpit but an echo of the pew.
Here we are confronted in its most blatant form with what might be called the tyranny of the majority. To those accustomed to view "majority rule" as a cardinal principle of democracy, it is important to remember that, throughout much of the nineteenth century, an overwhelming majority that approached unanimity approved slavery in the South. In both overt and covert ways, virtually every congregation and denomination except for the Quakers lined up solidly behind slavery. The minority was not even free to form a loyal opposition and debate the issue. No comment was tolerated except to answer the infuriating claim of northern abolitionists that slavery was a sin. In a campus atmosphere of free inquiry such as we enjoy at Samford, it is almost impossible to realize how hopeless it was to question the views of leading opinion-makers in the community regarding slavery, especially when the prosperity of the economy was at stake.
But, of course, this cultural consensus contributed absolutely nothing to making slavery right. If slavery was indeed a sin, then we must recognize that it was a sin, not so much of individual moral choice, as of complicity in a vast collectivity of oppression from which it was almost impossible to escape. The autonomous conscience, which we so cherish, was no match for this monolithic Southern mindset. Even though only a small minority of Southerners was wealthy enough to own slaves themselves, this influential aristocracy received such solidarity of support that it created a vast social system with the power to legitimize slavery and marginalize dissent. We are sometimes puzzled over the dour doctrine of original sin, but one thing it means was abundantly illustrated in the antebellum South. Namely, that decent people with good intentions found themselves caught in a sinful situation not of their making (it was already there even before they were born), trapped by an aggregation of evils so enormous that only the most heroic could extricate themselves.
There is one more dimension to this dilemma that highlights its bitter irony. The Bible is replete with warnings of judgment and calls to repentance, so how did the clergy fulfill their calling to preach against sin if slavery itself was exempt from this indictment? The answer is that they succeeded in making a moral crusade out of this hideous system by seeking to bring it up to biblical standards. We have already seen that the Scriptures themselves urge a more humane treatment of slaves in comparison with the harsh practices of their day. This concern was translated into an appeal to end such abuses, such as breaking up families by selling off individual members, passing literacy laws making it a crime to teach slaves to read and write, and refusing to allow slaves to testify in civil and church trials. Many religious leaders warned that God would not honor the Confederate cause if the abuses of slavery were not corrected. When the war was lost, the prevailing theology of defeat was rooted not in the evils of slavery, but in the failure of white owners to do their biblical duty to their black dependents.
Salutary as these calls for reform may have been, the constant stress on making slow, minor improvements in the conditions of slaves distracted attention away from the central issue of the legitimacy of slavery itself, particularly in its non-biblical form based squarely on African racism. The creation of an increasingly idealistic concept of "biblical slavery" made the appeal for reform more theoretical than practical. No matter how strongly preachers fulminated against flagrant abuses, their congregations failed to discipline slave owners guilty of brutality. Finally, the gradualism urged by the clergy to ameliorate the abuses of slavery became nothing more than an earnest effort to treat the symptoms rather than to cure the disease!
To summarize our second lesson: (1) One of the greatest threats to spiritual growth is the power of a cultural consensus to coerce conformity to the status quo. Beware of preachers who try to substitute the Bible for Christ because they cannot control Christ but can control how the Bible is interpreted from their pulpit, which is often in accordance with the power structure of the church. (2) Never allow your faith to be shaped merely by a majority vote even of sincere Christians. Remember that almost every moral and spiritual breakthrough in history has come from a courageous minority in opposition to an entrenched majority. (3) Never let the good become an enemy of the best. Gradual reforms are always needed, but they must not be allowed to dissipate the energies that are required to establish a new order in human affairs.
A Secular Messiah
Once the Southern church used its Bible to sanction rather than to condemn slavery, thereby enlisting God in support of the dominant cultural consensus, the Confederate cause was captured by the ideology of racism. By its very nature, an ideology is an abstraction grounded in theoretical idealism rather than in historical realism, which is why it eventually becomes absolutist, even totalitarian, resulting in a certainty that brooks no contrary opinion.[9] Once the South gave its soul to this artificial "ism," it lost its capacity for self-criticism. Slavery won by silence because dissent could not be tolerated. There was neither a free pulpit in the churches nor a free podium in the schools nor a free press in the communities. Soon the region was isolated by its cherished ideology, losing touch with the conscience of the world at a time when the emerging cash economy was producing revolutionary changes in the role of workers everywhere.
In such a closed society, how could the terrible shackles of slavery ever be broken? Enter a strange, even enigmatic, figure named Abraham Lincoln. Abolition was not his burning cause. Indeed, he hardly bothered himself with the slavery question until it was thrust upon him by necessity. Nor was he quick to play the religion trump card as the South delighted in doing. Son of a poor Baptist farmer, he was early stamped with the severe Calvinism of his parents, but he could never bring himself to affiliate with the church even though it was politically expedient to do so. Intellectually, he was the opposite of those Southerners who found God cheering them on no matter where they opened the Bible. By contrast, Lincoln was a deconstructionist of his day, shrewdly recognizing the power of motives and of self-interest in shaping all that one says and does.[10] Rather than jumping on a religious bandwagon to advance his cause, "he increasingly wrapped his political ideas around religious themes, appealing at the very end to a mysterious providence whose inscrutable and irresistible workings both baffled and comforted him."[11]
Strange as it may seem, it was this lonely, reluctant "redeemer president," with his "wearying sense of `metaphysical isolation`"[12] who "proclaimed release to the captives" and "set at liberty those who were oppressed" (Lk 4:18). For this act of emancipation he paid with his life on Good Friday of 1865. As Joel Bingham would put it a week later, his was "a bloody sacrifice, upon the altar of human freedom, "which" wrought out the painful salvation of the Republic."[13] When Lincoln had visited the Confederate capital of Richmond on the day after it fell, he was surrounded in the streets by African-Americans shouting, "Glory! Glory! Bless the Lord! The Great Messiah."[14] Many a Southerner might have welcomed that spontaneous tribute, for they viewed their cause as nothing less than messianic, but it filled Lincoln with awkward embarrassment since he was at best a secular messiah. We are reminded of how Scripture hailed the Persian King Cyrus as "the Lord`s anointed," or Messiah, for his defeat of the Babylonians (Isa 45:1).
Like Cyrus, Lincoln was forced to use the "terrible swift sword" of war to do his messianic work of deliverance. And what a costly redemption it was! More than 620,000 soldiers lost their lives, more than all the casualties in our nation`s other wars combined from its founding through Vietnam.[15] The South saw twenty-five percent of its white males of military age slaughtered in the carnage.[16] Soon it would endure the agonies of Reconstruction and, to this day more than a century later; it still struggles to gain equal footing with the rest of the nation. But the religious cost was equally great in terms of the loss of credibility. Mark Noll remarks with biting irony of the biblical debates over slavery:
The North-forced to fight on unfriendly terrain that it had helped to create-lost the exegetical war. The South certainly lost the shooting war. But constructive orthodox theology was the major loser when American believers allowed bullets instead of hermenutical self-consciousness to determine what the Bible said about slavery. For the history of theology in America, the great tragedy of the Civil War is that the most persuasive theologians were the Rev. Drs. William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant.[17]
Clearly this heartbreaking bloodbath would never have been necessary if the evangelical faith of the solid South had been mobilized to solve the slave question by the deepest teachings of its Scriptures on sacrificial love instead of by committing regional suicide without a foreign shot being fired. Does this mean, therefore, that we should simply give up on religion and resort to political and military action to achieve our moral aims? Not at all, for the Christian faith can be a powerful force for constructive change when its teachings are insightfully understood and courageously implemented. Antebellum Southern religion proved ineffective in solving the slave question, not because it was worthless and needed to be discarded, but because it was immature and needed to grow! At a catalytic moment in world history, when market capitalism made possible the substitution of free wage labor for bound labor (and hence the overthrow o slavery), capitalism allowed itself to be caught in a cultural cul-de-sac. It thus forfeited the chance to provide leadership in one of the great moral breakthroughs of all time.
The good news here is that, even when the church`s faith refuses to grow, God has other contingency plans at his disposal. His agenda is too important to entrust to any one representative of his cause. When religion neglects its messianic mission, he can use secular messiahs, such as Cyrus and Lincoln, to do his bidding. It is liberating to realize that the clergy does not have to do it all. As in the great struggle against slavery, lawyers and politicians and journalists and, yes, even soldiers can also serve as the Lord`s anointed. If it offends you to think of God using the rough-and-tumble side of life to accomplish his will, remember that in the crusade against slavery, he had precious few volunteers step forward in the stained glass ghetto of Southern sanctuaries. As Lincoln saw so clearly from his profound doctrine of divine providence, sometimes the will of God is done because of our goodness while at other times it is done in spite of our evil, but, in either case, it shall be done!
The very fact that the church does not always rise to the occasion means that God`s people should be heavily invested in a wide range of callings devoted to human betterment-which is one reason why Baptists sponsor comprehensive universities such as Samford. For example, there are times when the church is in the vanguard of change, as was the Black Church during the civil rights movement. At other times education is the harbinger of progress, as in the scientific revolution that has redefined our responsibilities for the care of the earth. In other settings the rule of law shapes a more just and humane society, as with the extension of civil liberties through the judicial process. Even business and politics, for all of their reputed corruption, raise up leaders who contribute powerfully to the common good. Spiritual growth does not occur just by our becoming more and more active in the life of the church. It also grows by discerning God`s will for the entire created order and discovering how we can serve those great purposes through our chosen vocations, whatever they may be.
Here, then, are three important lessons of slavery: (1) It is dangerous to champion the Bible when you do not know how to interpret it aright. (2) Societies that suppress dissent in support of an ideological consensus sow the seeds of their own destruction. (3) When God is not well served by those who claim his cause, he will use surprising substitutes to do his bidding. Learn well these lessons of the past and use them to face the challenges of the future.
Endnotes
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1 For a more detailed analysis of this debate see Willard M. Swartley, Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women: Case Issues in Biblical Interpretation (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1983), 31-53.
2 Genovese, Eugene D., "Theological Roots of Southern Secession," unpublished manuscript of an address delivered at Samford University, February 20, 1997, 38.
3 For an analysis of this hermeneutic see Mark A. Noll, "The Bible and Slavery," Religion and the American Civil War, edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 43-50.
4 On the "Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic" reflected in this paragraph see William J. Webb, Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 30-66.
5 On the struggle of the South to affirm the imago Dei in a context of white supremacy see H. Shelton Smith, In His Image, But . . . Racism in Southern Religion, 1780-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1972).
6 On this trend see Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
7 On the power of "cultural hermeneutics" to control a popular understanding of the Bible see Noll, 45-50.
8 Genovese, Eugene D., A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 95.
9 On the pernicious effects of ideology, especially in the twentieth century, see Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 3-19.
10 Guelzo, Allen C., Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 117-118.
11 Guelzo, 5.
12 Guelzo, 20, citing A. N. Wilson, God`s Funeral.
13 Guelzo, 440.
14 McPherson, James M., Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, The Oxford History of the United States, volume VI (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 847.
15 McPherson, 854.
16 McPherson, 856.
17 Noll, 66.
