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

by Matthew V. Johnson

In the modulation of activism and accommodation, African Americans appreciated with ambivalence and, rarely, with hostility, Paul’s canonical ambiguity. Paul was a man beckoned by a Spirit that illumined him in his darkness, led him in his sojourn, and vindicated him in his suffering. That same Spirit moved him to write of freedom and of love, freedom’s greatest exercise, in words that speak and have always spoken to the enslaved and the unloved. But that same Spirit on occasion recommended accommodation to the powers of a world that Paul believed was passing away. Paul’s ambiguity is captured for posterity in the Bible: in the stories told about Paul in Acts and the stories he struggled to tell about himself in the epistles, in the occasional conservatism of his Asian letters and the occasional recklessness of his European correspondence, and in the radical proclamation of freedom by a man who often referred to himself as a slave. It is this profound ambiguity that black folks have not only appreciated in Paul but, perhaps, have shared with him as well.