Slavery as a concept, and as an experience in human history, and its interpretation in the Christian context comprise my interest, and belief in problem solving and freedom as appropriate to the image of God in mankind. Slavery is best understood and interpreted, through Christian revelation and faithful perception to it, and its variety of applications by fallible interpreters. I am highly interested in persons like Frederick Douglas, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and others, including abolitionists like John Brown. My favorite is Jim Pembroke, slave, who, as a free man, took the name of James W. C. Pennington. Born in Africa in 1809 (same year as Lincoln): he died in Florida in 1870. He was a contender for human rights, without violence, in a prejudice-controlled society. He was a Christian, a former slave and largely self-educated to the point of entrance into seminary (where his studies were limited because of his race). He proceeded to serve mankind, especially those of his race, with integrity, persuasion, humor, and modeling (example). He deserves greater attention in historical biography, as does Squanto, the Indian (former slave) who aided the Pilgrims in the two years before his death in the Massachusetts colony.
By way of background, we remember that the ugly business of slavery is ancient. It was common within national groups, and smears all races, depending upon the era one is reviewing for the purposes of history. It was legal in the United Sates, but the southern states get the brunt of criticism because it was the last national segment in the northern West to give up the peculiar institution. Further, the institution was intensified in the American experience, limited to one race. The mixing of slavery with racial identity became the most severe application of slavery. There were other features that lowered slavery even further than it had earlier been practiced. The southern states get the brunt of the embarrassment because it was last to give it up, and gave it up not on a progressive improvement in laws, but through the blood of many thousands of citizens, both their own and those of the brother enemy. The north gave it up through popular demand through proper legislation, but even then had to wait for decades for acceptance of persons regardless of skin color or national origin. That part of the scenario is not yet adequately closed, but is well along the way to equality of perception meeting practice. That Scripture opposed slavery from the first writings of Moses, there ought to be no doubt. Those who used the Bible to excuse slavery were using the habits, the culture, of a society at the time of observation, not the theory of mankind as perceived by God, and found in practical theology. Here is one of those contexts of mankind that deserves our education. In that education we find some social problems in discovering the good life including not only freedom, and respect for rights, but the understanding of God, and his good will toward all mankind. (Luke 2:14)
Slavery, in various forms, has always been an issue for mankind, and continues to be albeit not with the support of the larger society – as once it was. It gave rise to monumental contradictions in attempts to maintain it, in virtually every society. Our concern here is the Christian society, a society called Christian because it affirms to be Christian even when there appear rank contradictions. Mark Noll, in his presentation of the world approach to American slavery by the time of the American Civil War, documents the contradictions of Christians so to support or reject slavery as a component of daily life and economies. The contradictions appear across the whole spectrum of Christian thought including Catholic, Protestant, Independent, or Separated groups and movements across the spectrum of the culture. Each had not only their takes on the slavery issue, but related their views to Scripture – as they interpreted Scripture or distorted it. They constructed contradictory logics to fit. Some responders found the slavery issue to relate to Protestant separatism from the traditional Christian faith preserved in Catholic history. Different concepts of freedom were mixed or clarified in objections. The Bible was used and misused. The point to be made here is that we need, all along the spectrum, the better scholarship demonstrated in Noll’s study. The knowledge of the Scripture cannot be of private interpretation, but discovered in objective, devotional and spiritually guided education that does not degrade either God or mankind. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020