Edward Sebesta's Web page for April 11 highlights the texts of the secession conventions of four states. Unfortunately, for the quotes today it links to another page, but the link is dead at the moment.
So I'll mention something that occurred to me during Easter Vigil last night. One of the extended Scripture readings was the story of the Exodus, concluding with the fleeing Israelites escaping through the Red Sea and their Egyptian pursuing being drowned. I was reminded that not only is this the core theological event for the Jewish religion. It was also a key story of hope, inspiration and faith for American slaves.
Slave narratives published during the days of slavery talked about religion, often highlighting the fact that slaves were forbidden from gathering among themselves for prayer meetings or religious services, and attempts to do so were often violently broken up. Slaves were also not allowed to learn to read, which of course meant that they were not able to read the Bible themselves. For religious slaves, this was a particular source of frustration.
Some slave narratives also focus on instances in which a slaveowner becoming religious resulted in his becoming more severe with his slaves, not less. Southern religion supporter slavery with increasing intensity as the ninenteenth century progressed. Proslavery theologians twisted the Scriptures to justify the "peculiar institution." But "twisted" doesn't begin to describe it. Beat, whipped, pounded, dismemebered, trampled in the dust, thrown in chains and sold down the river would be a better set of metaphors.
One of the proslavery theologians' favorite texts was St. Paul's letter to the Colossians 3:22, in which slaves are exorted to obey their masters. The subsequent verse 4:1 in which masters are directed to "treat your slaves fairly and justly" was not a problem for them, since by the degraded standards of Southern slavery, pretty much anything the masters did to the slaves was fair and just. The slaves were property, after all? How can you be "unjust" to property?
In the current (April 2004) issue of Bible Review, biblical studies professor Ben Witherington III, author of a soon-to-be-published study on Paul's ethics, discusses those passages together with others of Paul's relating to slavery. Including Philemon 15-20, in which Paul exhorts a Christian slaveholder to treat his Christian slave in all respects as a free man. Witherington argues that in contexts like Colossians, where Paul was dealing with Christians with whom he was not familiar - and were even in significant theological disagreement with him - his advice aimed "to ameliorate the damagin effect of slavery in the Christian household." His reading of Philemon is that Paul is asking the slaveowner to free the slave Onesimus.
But Abraham Lincoln was speaking much more in the spirit of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament when he said in his Second Inaugural Address of the North and the South (link is to a photo of Lincoln's handwritten manuscript):
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."
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