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

by Matthew V. Johnson

Paul clearly regards slavery as the most apt metaphor to describe the human condition under the power of sin. When Paul talks about being “bought for a price” or being “redeemed” or “being adopted” or “becoming citizens” or being “freed” from the law, his language is against and informed by the social reality of slavery.

Having already referred to Philemon’s love, he makes that the basis of his appeal rather than instituting a legalistic requirement.

God’s work of reconciliation—which Paul elaborated upon in 2 Corinthians 5:20—is being thought out in the context of the outcome Paul envisions from Onesimus’s return to Philemon. Paul is not sending Onesimus back to Philemon so that he can reenter the same master/slave relationship from which he had earlier escaped. Paul wishes the house church over which Philemon presided to exemplify the agape¯ love to which he refers in the opening salutation.

Taney made twenty-one allusions in this opinion to the inferiority of blacks as an “inferior class of beings,” an “unfortunate race,” “degraded race,” “unhappy race,” and “far below [whites] in the scale of created beings.” Thus an important component of Taney’s logic was that black inferiority was the cause of their enslaved status and of the legal necessity of enforcing their bondage and preventing their social intercourse with their white superiors.

The first Africans to arrive in North America came in 1619, when a Dutch ship delivered twenty or so blacks to Jamestown, Virginia.

In 1680, the black population in all the thirteen colonies was nearly 7,000. By 1690, it was at about 16,730. By 1780, the black population was 575,000, as compared to the white population of 2,200,000; that is, blacks were some 20 percent of the total.

Martin Marty has concluded that by the nineteenth century, the normativity of “whiteness” was something that was taken for granted by both northerners and southerners. The medium for generating and sustaining this sense, among whites and those still becoming white, of whiteness as the normative mode of human existence is what I referr to as white supremacist religious discourse.

With the African slave trade, the notions of “Christian” and “civilized” were collapsed into the category “white,” narrowly conceived.

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...

By the time Taney rendered his decision, one of southern evangelicalism’s uncontested orthodoxies was articulated in South Carolina by Rev. Richard Furman, president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention and pastor of First Baptist Church in Charleston, following the Denmark Vesey revolt in 1822. In an address to the governor, he claimed to speak for the entire state in setting forth “a biblical defense of slavery as a positive good” and argued continued religious instruction of slaves as a prevention against insurrections.

Thornwell wrote in the July 1850 issue of the Southern Presbyterian Review that the requirement of the rule as it pertained to the master/slave relationship was only that “we should treat our slaves as we feel we ought to be treated if we were slaves ourselves.”36 Thornwell was silent about how it was possible for a master to place himself in the condition of a slave and how masters were to respond when they discovered the slaves’ foremost desire was for freedom. One aspect of paternalism is the confusion of one’s desire and self-interest with the Other’s: it is the practicing of a “hegemony of desire.” No amount of Christian instruction to the contrary would succeed at exorcising the desire for freedom from blacks’ consciousness. Therefore,

Because of this psychosexual history, the white male psyche has had an aversion-repulsive reaction to the black male that was compromised by attraction and desire for the black female. Violence is the theme in both forms of desire.

Because proslavery ideology was so intent upon naturalizing black oppression, it generated the fantasy of blacks being contented with their plight. This fantasy was one wherein blacks were desire-less beings, or beings whose only desire was to satisfy the desires of their masters. This delusion allowed whites to repress two things from their consciousness: the violence involved in the maintenance of black docility and the pathos of the subjugated longing for freedom that stirred in the slaves’ consciousness.

Guess who’s coming to dinner, indeed! One of the most intimate things two different groups can do together in establishing community is to participate in a shared meal;

American culture has never come to terms with, or had an authentic encounter with, the full complexity of black humanity. To do so would force America to be confronted with the history and current conditions generating legitimate black rage.

evernote this.

However, it is precisely because of slavery’s effects that a significant number of whites find it impossible to encounter the humanity of the Other in the sense we are understanding Paul to have meant—namely, Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship of reciprocity.

Paul’s primary focus was not on the institution of slavery but on the possibilities for transformed relations, as Philemon demonstrates.”

Ever Note

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.

Religions, like governments, should be measured in practice against their claims, values, objectives, goals, and aspirations.

Yet in the end, the Invisible Man, whether author, thinker, or protagonist, was not a photographer. He wrote. What he sought was not so much to be seen but rather heard. The problem of African Americans and most systemically oppressed and degraded people, particularly where asymmetrical power relations abound, where they are ensconced in sedimented historical forms, encoded in mores and modes of civility, buried in the presumption of prerogative and access is limited, barred, monitored, closely screened, subject to persistent surveillance and meticulously vetted—the issue is not so much visibility but voice.

The problem is not so much the Invisible Man as it is the Inaudible Man.

I am arguing that instead of running from inconsistency or its stronger and, I think, more fruitful cousin, contradiction, we should in fact run toward them and embrace them for the creative hermeneutical possibilities they represent.

Onesimus’s voice, like the unintegrated inertness of trauma, disturbs the comfort zone of the text and like a pregnant silence impinges upon our cultural and spiritual imaginations. The gravitas of the slaves’ silence refracts the passing of all other light, including Paul’s glowing recommendations for brotherhood and acceptance on the part of slaveholding Philemon.

At best, Paul is sending Onesimus back as a slave with the request that he be set free. I think that these kinds of attempts to render some passages consistent with what we know to be right are unnecessarily painful, not to mention intellectually dishonest (if perhaps well meaning). I want to point out, however, that the logic of Paul’s rhetoric outdistances the political restrictions to which he remains true. To say it another way, in reading Philemon, the moral telos of the discourse transcends the limitations of the speaker.

It is not unlike liberal whites in America who will speak up for, that is, recognize, African Americans and feel very kind and noble in doing so. But their kindness is constituted and would have no reality or appearance of virtue but for the very system and circumstance that necessitated it. The appearance of virtue in the act is predicated on the very evil it purports to challenge. The moral fault line of this posture is betrayed in how angry, resentful, and even disillusioned so-called liberals have become when African Americans have historically attempted to speak for themselves, to tell their own story. The

American culture, though farming African American creativity to feed its exorbitant appetite for the sadomasochistic delicacies seasoned by our rhythms and baked in our blues, refuses to accommodate the African American voice.

After all, he did rely on the faith and love of Paul in making the journey back to Philemon. His willingness to return, even with the written plea from Paul, is remarkable and speaks both to his faith in Paul and his belief in the promise of Christian brotherhood.

A student of W. E. B. DuBois, whose book Black Reconstruction she frequently cited, Hansberry came to share his philosophy that the slave system oppressed the oppressor and enslaved alike.

But Hiram’s health is failing, and control of the plantation is taken over by his immature, simpleminded son, who runs the plantation with a harsh hand, hiring Zeb as overseer to enforce his new policies. When Everett discovers that Hannibal has learned to read, he orders a reluctant Zeb to carry out brutal punishment—put out Hannibal’s eyes. Zeb, astonished and horrified, stifles his own protest and carries out the order. The blinding of Hannibal shatters the illusion that slavery can be redeemed from its moral bankruptcy. The master cannot even protect the son of a woman for whom he cares; the slave’s loyalty to the master cannot prevent a human catastrophe; and the poor white farmer cannot maintain any semblance of self-respect and humanity while being an overseer and enforcer of brutal actions. The disease of the slave institution infects them all.

As W. E. B. DuBois wrote of the Southern slave master in Black Reconstruction: “[He] suffered not simply from his economic mistakes—the psychological effect of slavery upon him was fatal. The mere fact that a man could be, under the law, the actual master of the mind and body of human beings had to have disastrous effects. It tended to inflate the ego of most planters beyond all reason; they became arrogant, strutting, quarrelsome kinglets; they issued commands; they made laws; they shouted their orders; they expected deference and self-abasement. . . . The few who were superior, physically or mentally, conceived no bounds to their power and personal prestige. As the world had long learned, nothing is so calculated to ruin human nature as absolute power over human beings.”

In the biblical text, Paul’s cautious approach to Philemon suggests that both Onesimus and Philemon, like the characters in the plays discussed here, have been wounded by their experiences. And it is clear that the slave or descendant has pent-up frustration and angry, recriminating words that must be given voice in order to move forward.

As filmmaker Katrina Browne said to her community of Episcopalians in Traces of the Trade, we must “make things right not out of personal guilt, but out of grief.”

Enslaved by the Text

Skip this essay. The guy makes no sense and it seems the worst kind of Bombastic liberal hermenutical non sense.

It is perhaps not too far beyond the pale, then, to ask if Philemon’s presence in the canon is not already an imperial gerrymandering of textual politics in service of elite interests—a recasting of early Christianity’s literary production that explicitly installs slavery as thinkable within the purview of a movement that originally harbored antislavery and “outlaw” currents.

Lewis, as Hagar and countless other expatriate African women, had overcome humiliation and rejection, had struggled and suffered, had come to know the wilderness as a place of tears and promise. God calls to her in the wilderness and grants to her issue a compensatory covenant. It is this compensatory covenant that Paul declares hopelessly servile in the fourth chapter of his epistle to the Galatians. Paul gives an allegorical reading to the patriarchal narrative of struggle for inheritance between Ishmael, the son of the slave Hagar, and Isaac, the son of Abraham’s wife Sarah. Isaac is the son of promise. But Paul’s tortured typology leaves off precisely where the implicit, lapidary exegesis of Lewis begins. The center of gravity in Lewis’s representation is in the concluding verses of Hagar’s story. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him in thine hand; for I will make him a great nation. And God opened her eyes, and she saw the well of water, and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink. And God was with the lad; and he grew, and dwelt in the wilderness, and became an archer. And he dwelt in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother took him a wife out of the land of Egypt. (Gen. 21:19-21) In one verse of Scripture, Hagar moves from abandonment to agency: in verse 19 alone, she is the subject of no less than four verbs. The slave woman Hagar receives a promise from God that bestows dignity on her posterity. She reestablishes her Egyptian ancestry by...

In the peculiar context of the peculiar institution, Paul is an ambiguous figure in the biblical imagination of African Americans.

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.