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

by Matthew V. Johnson

Christian communities cannot reasonably entertain the notion of addressing the problem of racism by merely integrating their churches or starting multicultural congregations, as valuable as these endeavors might be. If the structural inequities are not addressed, then inclusion of nonwhites in mainline denominations and ecumenical efforts will lack the reciprocity that the corpus of Paul’s letters envisions. White Christians must rediscover the locus of human value in God, other than in whiteness as property and property as whiteness. According to Paul, our justification or value is lodged in God. As such, we are not valued separately, but only in relation to the whole human family. This sort of relationship entails an utter obliteration of white supremacist discourse through inter- and intracommunicative modalities in which, as Matthew V. Johnson shows in his chapter in this volume, Onesimus assumes value through the articulation of his own voice.