African American Readings of Paul

Reception, Resistance, and Transformation

Lisa M. Bowens

• Editorial: Eerdmans
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781467459341
• Categoría: Théologie et religion
• Categoría: Critique et interprétation bibliques

The letters of Paul—especially the verse in Ephesians directing slaves to obey their masters—played an enormous role in promoting slavery and justifying it as a Christian practice. Yet despite this reality African Americans throughout history still utilized Paul extensively in their own work to protest and resist oppression, responding to his theology and teachings in numerous—often starkly divergent and liberative—ways.

In the first book of its kind, Lisa Bowens takes a historical, theological, and biblical approach to explore interpretations of Paul within African American communities over the past few centuries. She surveys a wealth of primary sources from the early 1700s to the mid-twentieth century, including sermons, conversion stories, slave petitions, and autobiographies of ex-slaves, many of which introduce readers to previously unknown names in the history of New Testament interpretation. Along with their hermeneutical value, these texts also provide fresh documentation of Black religious life through wide swaths of American history. African American Readings of Paul promises to change the landscape of Pauline studies and fill an important gap in the rising field of reception history.

CHAPTER 1

Early Eighteenth Century to Early Nineteenth Century

But God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the mighty. Divine goodness raised me and honoured me as an angel of God.¹

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a variety of laws and legislation were passed to subjugate blacks and to enforce the belief that blacks were either less than human or, if human, of an inferior lot.² For instance, in 1787 the US Constitution declared an enslaved African to count as three-fifths of a person, and between 1830 and 1860, Southern states increasingly prohibited manumission, expelled freed blacks, eliminated black churches, and ignored penalties for hurting or killing blacks.³ Views of black inferiority and black inhumanity were propagated widely and believed by many people across the spectrum of society. Indeed, many who adhered to such understandings taught that Scripture, which was central to the discussion about slavery at the time, upheld these perspectives. As discussed above in the introduction, proponents of slavery employed Paul’s words to justify slavery, but a common belief during this time was that the story of Ham in Genesis 9:18–27 sanctioned slavery as well. Proponents of slavery proclaimed that Ham was the originator of the black race and that the curse Noah pronounced upon Canaan referred to God’s ordination of blacks’ enslavement. In Slavery as It Relates to the Negro or African Race, written in 1843, Josiah Priest, a proslavery advocate, represents well the prevalent sentiments of the time regarding this passage of Scripture. Priest writes:

The appointment of this [Negro] race of men to servitude and slavery was a judicial act of God, or in other words was a divine judgment. There are three evidences of this, which are as follows:

First—The fact of their being created or produced in a lower order of intellectuality than either of the other races … is evidence of the preordination of their fate as slaves on the earth as none but God could have done or determined this thing.

Second—The announcement of God by the mouth of Noah, relative to the whole race of Ham, pointing out in so many words in the clearest and most specific manner, that they were adjudged to slavery … that they were foreordained and appointed to the condition they hold among men by the divine mind, solely on account of the foreseen character they would sustain as a race, who, therefore were thus judicially put beneath the supervision of the other races.

Third—The great and everywhere pervading fact of their degraded condition, both now and in all time … that the negro race as a people, are judicially given over to a state or peculiar liability of being enslaved by the other races.⁴

Priest captures the white supremacist scriptural hermeneutics of his period in these passages. Because blacks descended from Ham, as this interpretation goes, their slavery was ordained and appointed by God, and the evidence of this preordained status is their intellectual inferiority, the prophetic utterance of Noah’s curse, and their degraded condition, which demonstrates that their enslavement lasts for all time. Priest repeatedly affirms the lasting nature of this curse in his work, writing that the curse “not only covered the person and fortunes of Ham, but that of his whole posterity also, to the very end of time.”⁵

Priest’s interpretation of this passage also reinforced another prevalent stereotype of the period, which was the inferior and evil character of blacks. He states: “The curse, therefore, against Ham and his race was not sent out on the account of that one sin only. But … was in unison with his whole life, character, and constitutional make prior to that deed, the curse which had slumbered long was let loose upon him and his posterity … placing them under the ban of slavery, on account of his and their foreseen characters.”⁶ Priest contends that Ham’s character was always deficient and that his act merely brought about the inevitable curse. In an interesting “exegetical” move here, Priest aligns Ham’s character with that of his descendants. Just as Ham’s character was always evil and morally corrupt, so too is the character of all his posterity. According to Priest, Noah uttered this curse through the power of the Holy Spirit, demonstrating God’s knowledge of Ham’s character and that of all his future generations. Therefore, God’s ordination of blacks’ enslavement is just because their character necessitates it. The ramifications for perception of blacks in these interpretations are significant, for such interpretations promote the notions that blacks are unintelligent, evil, and cursed by divine decree to eternal enslavement. Corresponding to this view, many Southern preachers proclaimed that the curse of Canaan was a curse of black skin as well as perpetual slavery. Augustin Calmet related, in his popular dictionary, that Ham’s skin became black upon Noah’s pronouncement of a curse on Canaan and Ham.⁷

One cannot underestimate the prevalence of such beliefs in society during this time. For example, a group of Southern petitioners wrote in their document that “We of the South understand the Negro character. We know that naturally they are indolent, lazy, improvident, destitute of forethought, and totally incapable of self government.”⁸ John Saffin, considered today one of the important minor poets in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century who is also well known for his debate with Samuel Sewell over slavery, wrote a poem published in 1701 that captures well the perceptions of blacks that permeated the culture. The poem, entitled “The Negroes Character,” reads as follows:

Cowardly and cruel are those blacks innate,

Prone to revenge, imp of inveterate hate.

He that exasperates them, soon espies

Mischief and murder in their very eyes.

Libidinous, deceitful, false and rude,

The spume issue of ingratitude

The premises consider’d, all may tell

How near good “Joseph” they are parallel.⁹

Saffin, like Priest, forefronts common beliefs of the period that blacks are inherently vicious, hateful, and full of everything that those traits entail, such as being murderous and prone to lying. Saffin contradicts Sewell, his conversation partner, who had rejected slavery because he believed adhering to slavery was akin to Joseph’s brothers selling him into slavery (Gen. 37). Saffin argues against Sewell, sardonically stating that blacks cannot be compared to “good ‘Joseph.’” Their character precludes such an association.

Underlying the scriptural exegesis of people like Priest and the perspectives of the Southern petitioners and Saffin was a deep-seated belief in the inferiority of blacks. Thomas Jefferson shared such views, writing of blacks, “Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”¹⁰ And again he states, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”¹¹ Consequently, for Jefferson both color and faculty cast doubt on the possibility of freedom for the slaves, as he asserts, “This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”¹² As indicated by these quotes, Jefferson adhered to the idea of white superiority. Moreover, the idea of black inferiority coupled with depictions of blacks as dangerous, as seen in the Saffin poem, meant that for whites black movement needed supervision and monitoring. In 1786 a Delaware group petitioned the legislature “to more rigorously regulate the movements of people of color” because “many idle and evil-disposed slaves throughout this County” move throughout the area, “some with and some without passes or Certificates.” These petitioners asked for the creation of a law that forbade blacks from traveling from one county to another without some sort of written or printed pass, or certificate.¹³ The notions that blacks were not only inferior but also dangerous permeated the body politic. The Democratic Standard, a newspaper in Concord, New Hampshire, summed up all these convictions well: “To us, the proposition that the negro is equal by nature, physically and mentally, to the white man, seems to be so absurd and preposterous, that we cannot conceive how it can be entertained by any intelligent and rational white man.”¹⁴ These statements of Jefferson, the newspaper quote, along with the words of Priest, the Delaware and Southern petitioners, and Saffin provide salient snapshots into the environment of the time regarding racism and slavery.¹⁵ In such an atmosphere, laced with this prevalent type of scriptural exegesis and attitudes about blacks, Paul’s admonition of “Slaves, obey your masters” (Eph. 6:5; Col. 3:22) cohered well. Whites depicted the apostle as merely endorsing what was “evident” from Genesis and sanctioning common beliefs about African Americans’ character and nature.

Slavery advocates’ distorted use of Scripture and the laws they implemented, which they believed to be sanctioned by the Bible, sought to prevent or limit enslaved Africans’ access to Scripture and thereby underscored “one of the greatest fears of slaveholding society: that religion, if taught honestly, was full of revolutionary possibilities.”¹⁶ Although sometimes slaveholders permitted black ministers to preach to the enslaved Africans, more often than not white ministers preached to them, and the message they proclaimed was “Slaves, obey your masters.” When black preachers did preach to the slaves, they had to be careful what they proclaimed, as indicated in the following testimonial of Anderson Edwards, an enslaved preacher: “I been preachin’ the Gospel and farmin’ since slavery time…. When I starts preachin’ I couldn’t read or write and had to preach what massa told me and he say tell them [n——] iffen they obeys the massa they goes to Heaven but I knowed there’s something better for them, but daren’t tell them ’cept on the sly. That I done lots. I tell ’em iffen they keeps prayin’ the Lord will set ’em free.”¹⁷ This black preacher dared to proclaim the true gospel to his fellow enslaved Africans because he “knowed” there was more to the gospel than what the slave owner wanted him to proclaim. That slaveholders tried to derail and control African Americans’ access to the Bible testifies to the liberating potential of the scriptural text.

Remarkably, despite the repeated attempts of slaveholders to drill into the hearts and minds of enslaved Africans, through Scripture, that God appointed slavery for them, many enslaved Africans refused to believe it. Albert Raboteau writes about enslaved Africans’ resolve regarding this issue: “In opposition to the slaveholder’s belief, the slave believed that slavery was surely contrary to the will of God. John Hunter, a fugitive from slavery in Maryland, attested to this belief: ‘I have heard poor ignorant slaves, that did not know A from B, say that they did not believe the Lord ever intended they should be slaves, and that they did not see how it should be so.’”¹⁸

In the midst of Pauline interpretations that repeatedly deemed them as destined for slavery and designed for such a life, blacks resisted by engaging in their own hermeneutical delineations, for “African Americans have struggled for more than two centuries to reinterpret and revise a distorted gospel received from White Christians.”¹⁹ Part of this reinterpretation and revision involved snatching Paul from the hands of white slaveholders and employing him in the liberation fight.

In her essay “Paul and the African American Community,” C. Michelle Venable-Ridley states that one of her goals is “not to redeem but to reclaim the writings of Paul as a religious source for the African American community.”²⁰ The present project reveals that historically many African Americans considered Paul’s words to be a redemptive force, and so he became a religious as well as a political resource for them. For these interpreters the religious and the political were intricately linked and could not be separated, and Paul’s words provided spiritual nourishment and the biblical basis to protest unjust laws and to resist the dehumanization of slavery promulgated by the distorted gospel of white Christian slaveholders and preachers. These rich, early interpretive trajectories of African American Pauline hermeneutics provide an important glimpse into Paul’s significance in the black struggle for justice.

Early Petitions for Freedom and Liberty That Cite Paul

As early as 1774, enslaved Africans interpreted Paul to argue their case for freedom and liberty. Below is a petition written to the governor, council, and representatives of Massachusetts, with Pauline references italicized:

The Petition of a Grate Number of Blackes of this Province who by divine permission are held in a state of Slavery within the bowels of a free and christian Country Humbly Shewing

That your Petitioners apprehind we have in common with all other men a naturel right to our freedoms without Being depriv’d of them by our fellow men as we are a freeborn Pepel and have never forfeited this Blessing by aney compact or agreement whatever. But we were unjustly dragged by the cruel hand of power from our dearest frinds and sum of us stolen from the bosoms of our tender Parents and from a Populous Pleasant and plentiful country and Brought hither to be made slaves for Life in a Christian land. Thus are we deprived of every thing that hath a tendency to make life even tolerable, the endearing ties of husband and wife we are strangers to for we are no longer man and wife then our masters or mestreses thinkes proper marred or onmarred. Our children are also taken from us by force and sent maney miles from us wear we seldom or ever see them again there to be made slaves of for Life which sumtimes is vere short by Reson of Being dragged from their mothers Breest Thus our Lives are imbittered to us on these accounts By our deplorable situation we are rendered incapable of shewing our obedience to Almighty God how can a slave perform the duties of a husband to a wife or parent to his child How can a husband leave master and work and cleave to his wife How can the wife submit themselves to there husbands in all things. How can the child obey thear parents in all things. There is a grat number of us sencear … members of the Church of Christ how can the master and the slave be said to fulfil that command Live in love let Brotherly Love contuner and abound Beare yea onenothers Bordenes How can the master be said to Beare...