Onesimus Our Brother: Reading Religion, Race, and Culture in Philemon (Paul in Critical Contexts)

by Matthew V. Johnson

The explanation offered above helps to explain the immediate question that may occur to the contemporary reader: how could such laws and opinions, leading up to and connected with Dred Scott, be enacted and perpetuated by people who prided themselves as constituting a Christian nation—in John Winthrop’s words, “a City on a hill,” set apart by God to fulfill a specially ordained purpose entailing religious and political freedom? We have to account for this historically. The economy, law, and religious outlook developed together. However, the contradiction under consideration was apparent to the nation’s founders and may account for the use of the word “slave” being assiduously avoided in the Constitution. Even if the nation’s founders had been blind to the contradiction of equating taxation without representation to virtual slavery, those on the other side of the Atlantic did not hesitate to confront them with the hypocrisy of complaining of being reduced to slavery while holding others in bondage. So too, slaves indicated their acute awareness of the glaring contradiction between their situation of servitude and the War of Independence’s articulated aims in their petitions and speeches for freedom. An earlier critique, however, operated at the theological level. In the seventeenth century, slaves filed a petition for freedom based upon baptism. This petition rested upon the assumption of the unlawfulness of one Christian enslaving another. The petition was invalidated by s...