Slavery, Sin, and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism
Ed. note: A lot of you are probably familiar with this book already, but here's a nice review of Molly Oshatz's new book, from Choice.| . Slavery and sin: the fight against slavery and the rise of liberal Protestantism.
Oxford, 2012. 183p index afp; ISBN 9780199751686, $49.95. Reviewed in 2012may CHOICE. | ||
| Oshatz (San Francisco State Univ.) describes the ways in which the antebellum debates over the morality of slavery helped create the foundations for liberal theology. Because so many Christians looked to the words of the Bible to inform moral decisions, the proslavery tenor of its text posed a challenge to those Christians who increasingly opposed slavery. Some abolitionists simply rejected the Bible as an Iron Age relic. But moderates began to approach scripture in a different way than these immediatists or the apologists for slavery, who read the Bible literally. Moderates contended that the Bible reflected the historical times in which it was recorded and that its words masked more eternal principles of justice that could be apprehended through the individual's conscience. As human consciousness evolved, people became better able to understand eternal moral principles behind the plain text. This understanding of morality, rather than the words in the text itself, rendered slaveholding a sinful behavior. In Oshatz's skilled analysis, liberal theology provided an important, if short-lived, haven for those Christians who wished for a biblical rather than a secular morality, but whose evolving moral vision could not countenance the evils of antebellum slavery. Summing Up:Recommended. All levels/libraries. -- E. R. Crowther, Adams State College |
Comments
For my part, I like the way she tries to emphasize the constraints of an historical moment when she argues that historians have treated moderates as if they had "more intellectual autonomy than they in fact possessed" (though I wish she would have developed this point further). There is a sentence in Oshatz's book that caught my attention (and that of my students who read her earlier article for my Christianity and Slavery class this past fall quarter). She writes: "The slavery debate was a real debate, not just a cloaked defense of interests against ideals." That little word "just" is an important one and I'm curious about its inclusion because I'm unaware of those who claim the biblical debates were "just" or merely about economic interests. To say that they were real in this sense implies that interpretive "difficulties" deeply influenced by and enmeshed in economic and cultural interests and appeals to the Bible and debates about the moral legitimacy of slavery in this social context somehow make them less real. I'm not sure it is all that helpful to treat debates of this kind so discretely or to regard them as so separately set off from broader concerns. Or if in fact interested debates of this sort ever occur in such a vacuum in actual historical circumstances, though one can still appreciate, for the sake of analytical clarity, this kind of intellectual history that Oshatz provides. Despite my quibbles over this and a few other issues, I think Oshatz deepens our knowledge of the intricate and complex ways that the slavery debates played out and the long-term consequences, especially in liberal Protestant conceptions of truth, God's relation to the world, and notions of moral progress. It is a necessary and helpful work.
Thanks for the note on Sweet. I will have to look at his work again to see what precisely he argued.