So convinced were the total abstainers of the superiority of their moral conviction that the most extreme of them argued that it didn’t matter what Jesus did or what scripture said. If Jesus drank, then he would have to go. Said one of these radical reformers:
What?! Accept a brewer, distiller, or manufacturer of intoxicating wine as my Savior? Convince me that Jesus of Nazareth was such, and I will relinquish on the instant a faith I have fostered for more than thirty years, and will unite in the cry, “Away with Him! Crucify Him! Crucify Him!”
What was becoming increasingly clear was the tension between the ambiguity of the Bible and the clarity of cultural convictions that desperately required its moral sanction. “If the duty of total abstinence from all intoxicating drinks cannot be fairly made out from the unforced testimony of the word of God, we should…be left without the greatest of all sanctions to one of the best of all causes.” The Cold Water Army thought it was reading the signs of the times through the lenses of the Bible. In fact, it was attempting to read the Bible through the lenses of the signs of the times. The question of temperance raised the even greater moral question of how to interpret the Bible, whose cultural context was clearly at odds with the contemporary culture, without compromising the moral authority of the Bible or falling into a dangerous relativism or situationalism. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the nineteenth-century crisis of biblical authority had less to do with the higher criticism and the assaults on the Bible of Darwin and nineteenth-century science than with the increasingly frustrating task of translating biblical morality wholesale into the contemporary culture without doing violence to either.
Principle over Practice
By 1958, when Prohibition was but the fading memory of a failed social experiment, the great defeat for cultural Protestantism in America, a way out of the nineteenth-century debate between biblical practice and biblical principle was finally cleared in the matter of drink. In the conservative Protestant journal Christianity Today, Roland Bainton, professor of ecclesiastical history at Yale Divinity School, wrote an article titled “Total Abstinence and Biblical Principles.” He began: “With regard to the use of alcoholic beverages, my practice and teaching are those of total abstinence. This stand is based on biblical principles, but I am free to confess that it is not based on biblical precepts or biblical practice.”2
What could he possibly mean? Bainton remained utterly unconvinced of the earlier arguments from the Bible for total abstinence. Any unforced reading of the word of God must conclude that at best the Bible is itself indifferent to the prohibitionist principles. The two-wine theory is utterly without merit, and to impugn the moral character of Jesus because without such a theory he is seen to have drunk wine is both ignorant and arrogant. For Bainton the issue was not biblical precedent but Christian principle. Such a view, he recognized, was contrary to much of Protestant America’s bibliolatry, the worship of the text of scripture and its elevation as the sole norm of faith and practice. The Bible, for Bainton, was a book of principles, and not of precedents. The principles that governed his own behavior in the matter of drink clearly were contrary to much of biblical practice, but like the spirit which is superior to the letter, the principles rather than the precedents are meant to guide Christian living.
Bainton derived his principles from the New Testament. First, as Paul writes in I Corinthians, the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and therefore ought not to be abused. The second principle, also Pauline, is that the stronger should bear with the weaker, and thus set an example that the weak can follow. This is derived from Romans, where Paul says that while for some the eating of meat and the drinking of wine is no problem, they should abstain out of regard for those for whom it is a problem: “Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for anyone to make others fall by what he eats; it is right not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that makes your brother stumble.” (Romans 14:20–21)
Making the biblical case for or against temperance is of course not really what Bainton’s essay is about, and although he was concerned enough to make the best possible case for his position of total abstinence, the principle he introduced to do so is in many ways far more significant than the cause for which it was employed. In addressing a moral issue with both public and personal implications on the basis of Christian principles derived from a reading of the Bible, rather than simply on the basis of biblical practice and precedent, Bainton liberates us from a simpleminded bondage to texts whose context may be unrelated and unhelpful to our own. In other words, to be biblical may well mean to move beyond the Bible itself to the larger principles that can be derived from the Christian faith of which the Bible is a part, but for which the Bible cannot possibly be a substitute. To determine with what Christian principles one reads the Bible is to undertake an enterprise that requires more rather than less engagement with the Bible and with the cultures of its interpretation. It involves a rather daunting effort to see beyond the diversions of text and context, and of precedent and practice, and into the far more complex landscape of principle and teaching by which the whole is made considerably larger than the sum of its parts. Contrary to popular thinking, this invariably means giving more attention to the Bible, and more rather than less care to its study and interpretation.
The Bible must be understood not as a thing in and of itself but as a part of the whole teaching and practice of the Christian faith. The confrontation between our social and moral presuppositions is what we bring to the text, and what we find in the text and in its context is something we will have to face. That conflict, if it is to be resolved, must be done not on the basis of expedience but on the basis of the Christian principles with which we interpret biblical practice. To argue policy from biblical situations is to be limited to the textual imagination of the biblical context. Bainton requires a more demanding criterion: that we seek after the lively Christian principle that transcends the particularities of the Bible situation and with which we understand both those situations and our own. Not only is the Bible to be subject to this scrutiny, but so too are those who would take the Bible seriously, and this demand may well be the most dangerous and uncomfortable of all demands for those most accustomed to concealing their self-interested agendas behind the protective camouflage of the Bible. Difficult and demanding as such a principle of interpretation may be, it is, I suggest, the only viable way to negotiate, as biblically minded people, between hard texts and changing times, without doing damage to the text, the times, or to ourselves. How we have gone about this business in the context of some of the more demanding issues of our day is the subject of the next chapters.
Chapter 5
The Bible and Race: The Moral Imagination
IN the summer of 1995, one hundred and thirty-two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, one hundred and thirty years after the end of the Civil War, and twenty-seven years after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., at their annual meeting the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination, apologized for the role it had played in the justification of slavery and in the maintenance of a culture of racism in the United States.1 The Baptists did more than apologize. They took on the more morally rigorous and theologically appropriate term of “repentance” to describe their action in adopting a resolution on the floor of their convention. For many this was a radical step, for while no one was prepared to embrace the historic arguments either for slavery or for racial segregation, there was no general enthusiasm to appear to repudiate either the faith or the conduct of their cultural ancestors. For others this was hardly news at all. In their not altogether unsuccessful efforts to be a national rather than a regional church, the Southern Baptists have for a generation sought to distance themselves from the more vivid racism of their past, and have increasingly extended the right hand of fellowship to African Americans who earlier would have been excluded, or would have excluded themselves from such fellowship.
/> For still others, including some African Americans, the apology and the act of repentance was too little too late: “We knew you were wrong, the world knew you were wrong; why did it take you so long to learn that you were wrong?” This was the question, uncharitable but pointed, that many African Americans asked of their newly repenting brethren, and in the age of the ubiquitous nonapology apology—when people routinely issue apologies not for what they did but for what you think they did, or for the consequences of what they did, or for the feelings that estrange you from them, but neither confess to what they did nor repudiate what they did—the apology can be seen to be a morally artful dodge that implies responsibility but avoids confession and confrontation with the sin or the crime. This is why, for example, morally ambiguous apologies such as those offered by Japan for its part in World War II prove unacceptable to those with a sense of grievance. When an Englishman treads on your foot in a crowded car on the London Underground, simultaneously with the offending deed he mutters “Sorry,” which, as we all know, is not an expression of regret but a statement of intention. When politicians “apologize,” they usually say something like this: “If I have given offense, I am sorry that you see it that way; and thus, for your error in perception of my actions or intentions, I apologize.” We all recognize that artful dodge.
The Southern Baptists are more than Southern Baptists, however; they are Christians as well, and hence they are engaged in an act of repentance that in theological and biblical terms is a much more demanding exercise. It requires that one confront the sin, the sinner, and the sinned against. It demands confession, the asking of forgiveness, and the expression of an intention for what the Book of Common Prayer calls Amendment of Life. Only in that sequence of actions can pardon or forgiveness be granted; otherwise it is merely an exercise in self-exorcism. Most Americans understood the moral implications of an incomplete process of repentance when Gerald Ford “pardoned” Richard Nixon for crimes and misdemeanors to which Richard Nixon had never confessed. The process was manifestly incomplete, and despite President Ford’s genuinely noble efforts to put all that unpleasantness behind, it was never settled, nor did it ever disappear, for the essential ingredients of confession, contrition, and amendment of life were absent.
Cultural apologies in which one segment of society apologizes for its crimes against another are very rare indeed, and most entities follow the famous dictum of the Duke of Wellington, “Never apologize, never explain.” Spain has never apologized to what is left of the indigenous peoples of South America for the destruction of the native culture in the name of Christian imperialism. The United States has yet to utter a word of contrition for its treatment of the Native Americans, or for chattel slavery. In modern times, only Germany has taken public responsibility for its atrocities in World War II and apologized both to the Jews and to Israel. The example of President Richard von Weiszäcker, in his speech of May 5, 1985, to the German Bundestag, stands nearly without parallel in the acceptance of moral responsibility.2 When Harvard’s Henry Rosovsky read this speech, he said that he felt “as if a stone had been lifted from his heart.” A decade later, France’s President Jacques Chirac, in a ceremony commemorating the end of World War II, issued a similar apology to the Jews of France for French complicity in acts against the Jewish people during the occupation. It is within this context that we take seriously the brave actions of the Southern Baptists in their resolution of repentance concerning American slavery.
While apologies and repentance in the matter of slavery are fascinating topics and worthy of more attention than can be paid them here, of even keener interest is the role that the Bible plays both in the debates on slavery and in the actions that have ensued in the repudiation of slavery and racism. If the ancestors of the Southern Baptists understood their system of slavery and racial apartheid to be based upon their reading of the Bible, what does this tell us about how people in general, and the Southern Baptists in particular, interpret scripture? What biblical or extra-biblical principles, explicit or implicit, are at work? What does this say to us about changed understandings of an unchanged text? It is abundantly clear that the Southern Baptists rejected neither the faith nor the Bible of their mothers and fathers, but they have certainly changed their minds as to what scripture says and to what scripture means, and that change has engendered enormous changes in the social consequences. How is the moral consensus changed without changing the contents of the Bible?
What Does the Bible Say About Slavery?
Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ.
(Ephesians 6:5)
God is no respecter of persons.
(Acts 10:34)
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
(Galatians 3:28)
As previously noted, I grew up in the 1940s in the relatively benign climate of Plymouth, Massachusetts, where there had been since the Revolutionary War a small community of colored people, as we were then called. We were not the first persons of color in the land of the Pilgrims’ pride, for we had all heard of Abraham Pierce, the “blackamoor” who had settled in Duxbury in the 1630s. We were by and large an insular and contented lot, long integrated into the Yankee culture and regarding much of it as our own. We were not, however, unaware of the legacy of slavery from which our ancestors had either escaped or been freed, and we were mindful through the Negro newspapers, to which some subscribed and which were circulated to all, of the larger issues of race in the country. Whenever we read of racial troubles in the north or of lynchings in the South, or of egregious instances of discrimination in the armed forces, or in the local police and fire departments, where some of our people served, the elders among us would murmur something about “poor Aunt Hagar’s children.” When my own parents remonstrated with me for not doing my homework, or for not doing it well enough, they would say, “You are meant to be more than a hewer of wood and a drawer of water.”
These were biblical allusions, common parlance among black people for centuries, and they reflected the biblical literacy and Christian culture of black Americans descended from the slaves imported into America. Hagar was the slave girl who bore Abraham’s first child, Ishmael, and when Sarah, Abraham’s wife, bore him a legitimate heir some thirteen years later, both Hagar and Ishmael were banished from the household and sent into the desert on foot. The story is in Genesis 21. In Joshua 9 we read of a remnant of Canaanites who had not been slaughtered by Joshua but who were condemned to perpetual slavery in the land. To them Joshua says, “Now therefore you are cursed, and some of you shall always be slaves, hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God.”
As we have seen, the definitive Old Testament text for slavery and the subjugation of one race to another is found in the story of Noah. Thus, within the first third of the first book of Moses, almost as the first act of the second creation, the seeds of racism are sown and the foundations for slavery, segregation, and apartheid are laid. And slavery is no stranger among the patriarchs. The greatest of them, Joseph, has listed among his successes as Pharaoh’s minister for production the enslavement of the people whose forced labor was orchestrated in behalf of Pharaoh. “He made slaves of them from one end of Egypt to the other…. Then Joseph said to the people, ‘Behold, I have today bought you and your land for Pharaoh. Now…sow the land, and at the harvest you shall give a fifth to Pharaoh.’” (Genesis 47:21–24)
The culture of the New Testament was one in which slavery was quite common, and neither Jesus nor Paul condemn the practice; rather, they assume it to be one of the social givens of the day. Paul, with great eloquence, argues for the leveling of distinctions and the unity of spirit that is to be found in the fellowship of Christ, that is, among those who are called to be Christians; but he is equally clear that such spiritual freedom does not overcome the human circumstances in which one is f
ound. In I Corinthians 7, he argues that everyone should lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and into which God has called him; everyone should remain in the state in which he was called. He says, “…this is my rule in all the churches…. Were you a slave when called? Never mind. But if you gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity. For he who was called in the Lord as a slave is a freedman of the Lord.” Paul means that insofar as the Lord is concerned, the distinction between slave and free, as in Ephesians between male and female, is of no account. It is clear to Paul, and now made clear to the Corinthians, that in this life the distinctions do count. “So, brethren,” he writes in I Corinthians 7:24, “in whatever state each was called, there let him remain with God.”
The letter of Paul to Philemon would seem to amplify this position. Paul asks his fellow Christian, Philemon, to treat his slave, Onesimus, “no longer as a slave…but as a beloved brother.” This does not mean that Onesimus is any less a slave than he was, and Philemon is not ordered to release him from slavery on the ground that chattel slavery is inconsistent with Christianity, or that one Christian cannot hold another Christian as a slave. None of that is said. What is asked of Philemon by Paul is that he treat his slave as a Christian brother, and what is implied is that in the Lord, Paul, Philemon, and Onesimus are moral equals. It is clear that the institution of slavery is not condemned. Onesimus is not set free, and Paul sees no apparent contradiction is asking a free Christian brother to treat his Christian slave as a brother in Christ. As one black commentator critical of Paul noted, “Paul never met a social status quo that he didn’t like.” Not only did New Testament morality fail to liberate the slaves or even to mitigate their lot in this life, but it required of the slaves obedience to their masters, even those masters who were not Christian, as a part of their duty to Christ. Slaves were free only to obey, and these arrangements were ordained of God, sanctioned by the patriarchs, tolerated by Jesus, approved of by Paul, and enshrined in the Bible.
The Good Book Page 10