Black Theology, Slavery and Contemporary Christianity

200 Years and No Apology

Anthony G. Reddie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317173823
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Black Theology, Slavery and Contemporary Christianity explores the legacy of slavery in Black theological terms. Challenging the dominant approaches to the history and legacy of slavery in the British Empire, the contributors show that although the 1807 act abolished the slave trade, it did not end racism, notions of White supremacy, or the demonization of Blackness, Black people and Africa. This interdisciplinary study draws on biblical studies, history, missiology and Black theological reflection, exploring the strengths and limitations of faith as the framework for abolitionist rhetoric and action. This Black theological approach to the phenomenon of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery draws on contributions from Africa, the Caribbean, North America and Europe.

PART I

Slavery and Biblical Hermeneutics

Chapter 1

‘But It’s in the Text! Slavery, the Bible, and the African Diaspora’

Randall C. Bailey

The process of writing this essay has been an interesting one. It has caused me to explore my own understandings of the bible and the relationship of these documents to our lives in the north western hemisphere. This process has caused me to reflect on the ways in which we have conformed to, rebelled against, internalized, promoted, cooperated with, subverted, deconstructed, enabled our own oppression. This has occurred, both during and after our experiences of enslavement, through the use of Christian religious documents, dogmas, doctrines, and doodoo!

There is no one narrative as regards our responses to our experiences of enslavement. As Callahan argues in his provocative book, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible,¹ there were those who viewed the Bible as ‘The Good Book’, while there were others who viewed it as ‘The Poison Book’. Similarly there were those who fought and rebelled against enslavement, while there were others who accommodated it and identified with their enslavers. By the same token, there were attempts to use the language world of the bible to fight for manumission, while there were those who decried any allegiance or use of the biblical materials in the struggles for freedom.²

We know from the psychology of oppression that the human mind has a myriad of choices to exercise in the management of the phenomena of oppression.³

Along with these different choices and resultant responses to enslavement, there are also different choices available to scholars to interpret the data. One is able to determine the dots and how they are to be connected to construct an argument in regard to any subject. Data are truly multivalent and their interpretations are as varied as the methods for deciphering them. For example, in biblical studies the existence of repetitions opens the doors to see them as signifiers of differing interpretations. For instance there are two stories of Abram/Abraham and Sarai/Sarah sexually abusing Hagar and her fleeing/being expelled from their house in Genesis 16 and 21.

For an historical critic these two stories would signal different authors, J and E.⁴ For a literary critic, they might signal different emphases and points of view of the characters, showing how the situation gets worse once Hagar is sent back by the deity.⁵ For an ideological critic, they might signify nuancing of a particular ideology or contouring its existence, such as the patriarchal fear of one’s wife having sex with another man.⁶ For a dogmatic interpreter these various elements might not be in conflict. Thus, even though one would agree there are duplicate narratives, their meanings and significance lead to differing conclusions as to interpretation.

The same is the case for exploring various responses to slavery. For example, most scholars would agree that spirituals were used as a means of communication among enslaved Africans in the US, giving signals to others about the happenings in the environment.⁷ Thus, ‘People Get Ready, There’s a Train A’Comin’’ is argued to be an announcement that the Underground Railroad was in operation and some would be leaving that night. Similarly, ‘There’s No Hiding Place’ would tell those on the run that the overseers were looking for them and it was not safe to stop at a particular plantation. Thus, these songs were used for a political purpose, and because they were viewed as religious songs, their multivalent messages were obscured to their enslavers. These songs provided enslaved Africans with a way to pretend to be ‘religious’ while being seditious. Or they operated out of a seditious religious formulation and formation.

Given this type of interpretation, what is to say that the singers really adopted the religion of the bible? Is it possible that for some it was a subterfuge for gaining manumission? If so, how do we interpret the use of the text by the writers and singers of these songs? Are these songs evidence of adoption of Christianity and/or evidence of the cunningness of the writers? Is this a form of ‘overstanding’ as Beckford charges us to do, in other words to reflect on a ‘revelation of hidden knowledge, not disclosed in traditional forms of “understanding”’?⁸

Elsewhere, I have argued that many spirituals, which cite biblical passages often change the text and in effect write another text.⁹ For instance, in ‘O, Mary, O, Martha’ there is a reference to John 11, where Jesus misdiagnoses the illness of Lazarus and decides to stay with his boys, since he claims Lazarus will not die from the illness (v. 4). Once Lazarus does die, Jesus goes to the home, where Mary and Martha confront him with the claim that had he shown up, Lazarus would not have died. Jesus’ response to this is to cry and then claim that he is the resurrection and the life (v. 25). As the spiritual goes,

Oh, Mary, don’t you weep

Tell Martha not to moan

Pharaoh’s army drowned in the Red Sea

Oh, Mary, don’t you weep

Tell Martha not to moan

The spiritual most probably comes from incidents where enslaved Africans saw their ‘Lazarus’s’ sold off to other plantations, raped, castrated, whipped to death, and the like, and Jesus was not showing up and no one was coming out of the tomb. They could identify with Mary and Martha’s tears, so they comforted themselves with a different reason for not crying. Instead of reciting Jesus’ claim that he was the resurrection and the life (11:25), they comforted Mary and Martha with the claim that ‘Pharaoh’s army got drownded (Ex 14:28)’. In other words, it is the hope of the future killing of the oppressor, which enabled them to ‘keep on keepin’ on’. In essence they changed the text to fit their own situation and hopes, or one could say with their own theological claims.

Callahan¹⁰ and Gilkes¹¹ have argued that this spiritual is really a uniting of both Testaments and the theological claim that the God of the Exodus is the God of the Resurrection. I can understand how orthodox theology would lead one to make such a claim. I would argue, however, that in the spiritual there is not a reference to the exodus from Egypt by the Israelites. Rather there is a reference to the drowning of the oppressor’s army in the sea. It is focusing not on the people leaving slavery, but rather, on the punishment of the oppressor.

Similarly, the absence of references in the spiritual to Jesus’ claim of him being the resurrection, suggests a rejection of that part of the story and an embracing of new hope for liberation here on earth. Being liberated while the oppressor is still in power appears not to be liberation to the enslaved Africans. It is not the afterlife to which they looked for salvation. Rather, it is to the killing of the oppressor, which would show them that God is God, that God is just, and that they can trust this God. God’s showing up late for them is a problem, which is resolved by God killing the oppressor. This is a no to ‘love your enemies’ (Matt 5:44), a no to ‘blessed are you when people revile and persecute you’ (Matt 5:11), and a no to ‘God forgive them’ (Lk 23:34) type theology bespoken in this spiritual. It is a ‘get ‘em’ theology which is being advocated.

Similarly, we are all familiar with the spiritual ‘Go Down, Moses!’ As the words go,

Go down, Moses,

Way down in Egypt land;

Tell old Pharaoh

To let my people go.

When Israel was in Egypt’s Land,

Let my people go.

Oppressed so hard they could not stand,

Let my people go.

This song is commonly associated with the Exodus story of the deliverance from enslavement in Egypt and the confrontations between Moses and Pharaoh. One of the interesting facets of this engagement with the biblical text is in the changing of the biblical formula, which appears in Ex 5:1; 7:16; 8:1, 20; 9:1, 13, and 10:3. In each of these instances the formula, ‘Let my people go’ is followed by the clause ‘so they may worship me’. On the one hand, this phrase is understood as a trick, since they had no intention of returning to Egypt. The enslaved Africans in the US, decided not to even consider the trickster message. Instead they just reported, ‘Let my people go!’ No trick, we want to go! What is ironic in this instance, however, is that most enslaved Africans did not go in the post emancipation times. Rather we stayed in our Egypt, expecting to be free there, within the same context in which we had been exploited.

As Callahan correctly notes, the Exodus from Egypt was a major theme picked up upon by enslaved Africans in their adopting of Christianity.¹² The enslaved Africans were siding with the ‘God of the Oppressed’, as James Cone¹³ was later to refer to the deity of the bible. This can be seen in the designation of Harriett Tubman as ‘Black Moses’, a term to which we shall return soon. Similarly, David Walker used the rhetoric of the Exodus in his speeches calling for manumission. Interestingly, there was post-slavery, a so-called ‘Exodus Movement’, where formerly enslaved Africans were carried north and were left in places with no resources. Frederick Douglass was one of the most vehement speakers in opposition to this movement.¹⁴ While the Exodus narrative involves a series of plagues on the Egyptians, there was no analogy for this part of the narrative in the experiences of enslaved Africans in the Americas. Similarly, there was little expectation of a return to Africa. In fact, the number of formerly enslaved Africans who took the return to Africa offered by Cuffie, Lott Carey, Blyden and others was low. The British government settled many formerly enslaved Africans from the so called West Indies and the Americas in Sierra Leone, while those who returned to Africa directly from the US went to Liberia.

By the same token, the British Navy intercepted ships carrying manumitted Africans back to the continent, confiscated the ships, and over-taxed the people, such that the return was unbearable. Many of these returnees had difficulties with the local inhabitants of these areas of Africa, since the returnees came with a sense of superiority and a mission to ‘Christianize’ those whom they encountered.¹⁵ Thus, the use of the Exodus motif was most ironic.

Not only did enslaved Africans in the Americas use the Exodus motif to bespeak their understanding of God, modern day Black theologians also return to this motif as a proof-text and starting point of Black Theology. On the one hand, these Black theologians do not address the efficacy of using a motif, which entails leaving Egypt, when they are writing to and for Diasporan Africans who have not returned to the ‘Mother Land’. On the other hand, Robert Allen Warrior has brilliantly challenged Black Theology for its embracing the Exodus Motif, since Ex 3:7-8 states,

Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, [8] and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites’.

Warrior thus points out that the God of Liberation (v. 8a) is also the God of Dispossession (v. 8b). In other words, ‘my people’ are being liberated to ‘steal someone else’s land’. Cone and other’s responses have enabled us to embrace the Exodus, but we did not embrac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I SLAVERY AND BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS
• PART II SLAVERY, COLONIALISM AND BLACK SUBJUGATION
• PART III SLAVERY AND CONTEMPORARY EXPERIENCE THROUGH THE LENS OF BLACK THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION
• Index