by Bruce T. Gourley
Published August 2016
(Baptist Studies Bulletin Archives Index)
The killings of black men in America continue, the stories unfolding within an all-to-common world of African American hopelessness, fear and anger.
Tragically, this American legacy owes its origins to the determination, by America’s theocratic colonies of the 17th century, that black persons were inherently inferior to whites and therefore should be treated as subservient. One might conclude that this decision reflected the financial interests of white landowners, but slaveholders noted that the Bible plainly sanctioned the enslavement of humans. Never mind that the Bible did not actually distinguish among light and black skinned races; a clumsy interpretive sleight-of-hand enshrined white supremacy, enforced by violence, as God’s will.
Many of America’s African American neighborhoods are yet living with the legacy of that brutal, barbaric combination of literal and creative biblical interpretation.
Last year Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrestled with the relationship between his institution’s racist legacy and theological fidelity. He rightly called “racial superiority,” vividly embraced by the seminary’s founders, a “heresy” void of biblical support. At the same time he praised the slaveowning founders as biblically orthodox. And in a notably self-defensive manner, he declared that apparently “no one ever confronted the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary with the brutal reality” of white supremacy and slavery.
Quite to the contrary, Southern Baptist leaders, like other educated white elites of the South, were only too well aware that many abolitionists from the 1830s forward highlighted the brutality of slavery and advocated for racial equality. Baptist newspapers of the South routinely criticized and dismissed those who insisted upon the sinfulness of slavery and demanded equality of the races. Among the offenders was Northern Baptist minister Francis Wayland, who remained in public, published dialogue with Baptist leaders of the South up until the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in defense and perpetuation of black slavery.
Wayland, insisting upon the equal rights of blacks, to the horror of southern slaveowners declared that “the gospel makes no distinction between men on the ground of color or of race. God has made of one blood all the nations that shall dwell on earth.”
While defending the founders of SBTS as innocents caught up in the clutches of a slave culture, Mohler adroitly refrained from condemning slavery, a practice liberally and literally embraced and condoned in the Bible, as heresy. In a more recent article, on the other hand, he acknowledged that enslavement of humans is sinful. In so doing he essentially rejected, like most other contemporary Christians, the literal interpretation and textual perfection of scripture in the matter of slavery.
From fundamentalists to liberals, most Christians in reality hold a nuanced view of the Bible as the intersection of humanity and the divine. The biblical text is often captive to particular empirical, cultural and social settings, portraying truth partially, imperfectly and within the constrained limitations of an ancient context, of which slavery is but one example.
Not every instance where the Bible purports to speak on God’s behalf is legitimate. The Bible in Exodus 21 (part of the larger package of laws including the Ten Commandments), speaking as God’s voice, is one of many scriptures outlining God’s slavery commandments. Among the various biblical laws therein are instructions to fathers for selling their daughters into slavery, as well as commands regarding limits on the beating of slaves. In reality the writer of his own volition imposed God’s voice upon common, widely-accepted practices in the larger Middle East of that era.
To be blunt, the Bible is wrong on the issue of human slavery. Even an avowed inerrantist like Albert Mohler concedes the practice is sinful. The lesson herein is that Christians must be careful to understand within context and reject in practice biblical writers’ embrace of ancient cultural practices, norms or prohibitions that do violence to, oppress or marginalize individuals or people groups.
Faithfulness to the Bible is best measured in fidelity to the central and transcendent scriptural imperatives of doing justice and mercy (Micah 6:8), loving others as oneself (Mark 12:31), and embracing human equality (Galatians 3:28). For white majoritarian Christians of the Western world, only then will black lives and that of “others” truly matter.