Reading the Bible Responsibly in a Polarized Church & World – Part 12

Opening Prayer

With you is the source of life, O God. You are the beginning of all that is. From your life the fire of the rising sun streams forth. You are the life-flow of creation’s rivers, the sap of blood in our veins, earth’s fecundity, the fruiting of trees, creatures’ birthing, the conception of new thought, desire’s origin. All these are of you, O God, and we are of you. You are the morning’s freshness.

• John Philip Newell, Sounds of the Eternal – A Celtic Psalter, p. 50.

Reading the Bible Responsibly in a Polarized Church & World:

The Bible’s content in many ways engages its readers – puzzling, angering, challenging, and inspiring them. How has the Bible historically been used, including with the issue of slavery? Can readers navigate the use of biblical texts that are quoted across the political spectrum? What principles exist for interpreting these texts that support conflicting viewpoints? Together, we will explore a way forward: reading the Bible with each other guided by the rule of love.

The Bible and Racism in the United States (cont’d and conclusion)

“There is also a similar phenomenon at work in how pro- and anti-slavery Christians read the Bible. As seen, pro-slavery Christians appealed to the plain text of the Bible, which contained laws about owning slaves and direct commands for slaves to obey their master. In this way they resemble the strict constructionists in the American legal tradition. However, the reading of the Bible for its plain sense meaning in American Protestantism was born out of the Reformation in the sixteenth century and not American jurisprudence. In Ebenezer Warren’s biblical defense of slavery, the Southern slaveholder tells the Northern minister, that, as a Christian, the minister is ‘required to believe what God has spoken in plain language.’ On the other hand, as seen from Douglass’ speeches, antislavery Christians were faced with the challenge of constructing interpretations of the Bible that had to draw on more than the plain sense of words. In response they appealed to larger ideals or values from biblical stories that revealed insights into the nature of God. One of the most important of these biblical stories was the Exodus, which illustrated freedom for captives to be a biblical value. Both in the writings of abolitionists and the spirituals sung by the enslaved, God’s liberation of the Israelites from slavery showed that God was on the side of the enslaved, biblical laws notwithstanding. Even though both pro-and antislavery Christians saw the Bible as divine revelation, their understanding of what exactly was being revealed were very different. For the proslavery readers, the Bible’s commands on slavery were what matter. To see the Bible’s importance in that it contains rules or commandments is to understand the Bible as a form of communication: this book tells us things that God wants us to do or not to do. For antislavery readers who argued not on the basis of specific commandments but on more abstract biblical themes and values (often illustrated in specific passages), the Bible’s revelation was understood as a form of disclosure: this book tells us what God is like and obligates us to pattern our lives on the values revealed in God’s qualities.”

“This isn’t to say that antislavery readers never appealed to specific Bible verses, because they did. However, these specific verses were often not understood as commandments, but rather as illustrations of qualities of the divine nature or of God’s values. This also doesn’t mean that proslavery readers never appealed to larger values that they saw at work in the Bible, because they did. But on the whole, antislavery readers tended to see the Bible as a book of divine disclosure, and on the whole, proslavery readers tended to see it as a book of divine commands. These two views of the Bible should be imagined as 

two poles on a spectrum, with a range of combinations between them, but as poles they mark two fundamental approaches to biblical interpretation that have characterized how Americans have used the Bible to inform political and social struggles ever since.”

“While the Emancipation Proclamation, Civil War, and Thirteenth Amendment put an end to chattel slavery in the United States, they did not eradicate racism, White supremacy, and discrimination, all of which we are still contending with now, although the use of the Bible to support White privilege and whiteness is less pronounced than in the past. With the 1954 Supreme Court decision against segregation, the racist readings of the curse of Ham in Genesis, in [author] Stephen Hayne’s words, ‘reemerged with a vengeance.’ West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd even read the passage out on the Senate floor (from the KJV, of course) during his 1964 filibuster of the Civil Rights Act. In response to the revival by the segregationists of the proslavery readings of the Bible, the Civil Rights Movement drew upon and made new the biblical interpretation of antislavery Americans. The obvious examples that first come to mind are, of course, from the speeches and writing of Martin Luther King Jr. Although King was trained in the methods of modern biblical scholarship, he drew more from the African-American interpretive tradition in his speeches and sermons than from his graduate study.”

“A century later and continuing to this day, these kind of readings were adopted between the respective descendants of the proslavery and antislavery readers. This shouldn’t be surprising, given how the racism present in the US today is the persistence of the racism that fueled African slavery. However, the same dichotomy of reading the Bible as divine communication or divine disclosure is at work when Christians appeal to the biblical text in discussing other pressing moral issues today.”

(Thomas M. Bolin, An Inspired Word in Season – Reading the Bible Responsibly in a Polarized World, 2025.)

For this week: For reflection: What is next for you when you consider the persistence of racism?

An invitation to our virtual participants: Discussion and comments are very much encouraged and welcomed. Online discussions can be held in the comments section in the upcoming post on Social Media for this week’s Deacon’s Reflection which is part of adult formation at St. Francis Episcopal Church.

Some Suggested Study Resources:

• The New Oxford Annotated Bible, NRSV, with the Apocrypha; 5th edition.
• The Harper Collins Study Bible, NRSV, Fully Revised and Updated (Including Apocryphal Deuterocanonical Books); Society of Biblical Literature; (e-book).
• The Jewish Annotated New Testament, NRSV, 2nd edition, Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, editors; Oxford University Press.

Closing Prayer – Prayer of Blessing

In the gift of this new day, in the gift of the present moment, in the gift of time and eternity intertwined, let us be grateful, let us be attentive, let us be open to what has never happened before, in the gift of this new day, in the gift of the present moment, in the gift of time and eternity intertwined.

May the light of God illumine the heart of my soul.

May the flame of Christ kindle me to love.

May the fire of the Spirit free me to live this day, tonight, and forever. Amen.

• John Philip Newell, Sounds of the Eternal – A Celtic Psalter, p. 53.