A Word from Bob: You’re reading Part 3 of a blog mini-series on One America; Two Experiences. I’ve taken my thoughts from chapter 10 of my book Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. You can read Part 1 here: Racial Reconciliation: Understanding 2 Vastly Different Views of America. Read Part 2 here: The God of the Promised Land.
Who We Are in Christ
To move beyond the suffering, believing slaves began with the biblical narrative of who God is. As vital as this was, it could have remained impersonal. As we’ve seen, it certainly did not. Why? What was the “secret” to the African American ability to relate who God is to their lives?
They clung to biblical narratives of who they were in relationship to God and His drama of deliverance.
Christian slaves used scriptural imagery to counteract the shaming imagery of enslavement.
It is as if they said:
“We may be slaves of men, but so were God’s chosen people. In fact, God’s people have always been enslaved by God’s enemies and God has always had compassion on His enslaved people.”
Joining God’s Larger Story: Transmitting Our Faith Stories
Having a biblical sense of self may seem rudimentary until we recall that African Americans were not perceived or treated as human beings, but as chattel. This is why the slave narratives were so monumental. Through the simple act of telling their own life stories they indicated that blacks, just as much as whites, had a personal narrative and lived fully human lives with emotions, actions, goals, thoughts, and longings.[i]
Octavia Albert found her motivation for interviewing her fellow African Americans in her conviction that their personal stories were part of God’s larger story. Colonel Douglass Wilson was “a colored man of considerable prominence, not only in Louisiana, but in the nation.” Albert consistently communicates to him what a rich experience he had before and after the war. She urges him to tell his story because it “would delight almost any one. Don’t keep all the good things to yourself; tell us about them sometime.”[ii]
When Colonel Wilson expresses hesitation about his storytelling because some may think it inappropriate, Albert responds:
“‘I assure you,’ said I, ‘you will never hear that from me, because I believe we should not only treasure these things, but should transmit them to our children’s children. That’s what the Lord commanded Israel to do in reference to their deliverance from Egyptian bondage, and I verily believe that the same is his will concerning us and our bondage and deliverance in this country.’”[iii]
Albert is an artful soul physician. The Scriptures are her soul anatomy textbook. She dispenses ample doses of biblical wisdom as she helps Wilson to see that his storytelling is not self-serving, but community-building and God-glorifying. She enlightens Wilson to his role in God’s plan—by your testimony you witness to God’s Exodus-like deliverance of his people.
Insiders in the Drama of Deliverance: Envisioning Our Life Stories
The central biblical image through which African Americans interpreted their lives and the Scriptures was the Exodus/Conquest. They were God’s chosen people and He was leading them out of the land of Egypt, across the Red Sea, over the Jordan River, and into the Promised Land of Canaan. Exodus was the model drawn from Scripture that became the lens through which the Bible was read, and liberation from bondage was the Bible’s central thrust.[iv]
By identifying themselves with the children of Israel:
“African slaves declared themselves as insiders in the scriptural drama. The Hebrew model of interpretation placed the slaves squarely in the center of the salvation narrative. While slaveholders focused on ancient Israel as a slaveholding society, the African slaves saw ancient Israel first as a nation descended from slaves. In this sense, slave interpreters were able to reverse the patriarchal paradigm of the slaveholders”[v]
The suffering slaves certainly resembled Jesus, the suffering Servant, more than their unsympathetic masters did.
As with their image of God, their image of themselves as God’s chosen children journeying to Canaan was omnipresent. John Boston, a runaway slave from Maryland, took refuge with a New York regiment during the Civil War. Writing to his wife on January 12, 1862, from Upton Hill, Virginia, he weaves into his letter his “Exodus identity.”
“My Dear Wife, It is with great joy I take this time to let you know where I am. I am now in safety in the 14th Regiment of Brooklyn. This day I can address you thank God as a free man. I had a little trouble in getting away but as the Lord led the Children of Israel to the land of Canon so he led me to a land where freedom will rain in spite of earth and hell.”[vi]
The Power of Story
Edward Wimberly recounts that in past and current African American ministry, pastors have used storytelling in preaching and counseling to deconstruct and reconstruct shame-filled African American stories of being unlovable. He further explains that people bring secular scriptures to church—well-formed personal narratives fashioned by the world, the flesh, and the Devil.[vii]
These worldly narratives of life become idols around which people organize their lives and interpret reality. Changing them requires Divine and human intervention. Using the language of the Apostle Paul, people need to put off the old secular idolatrous lying scripts and put on the new worshipful truth-telling Scriptures (Colossians 3:1-17).
The Rest of the Story
You’re invited to join us for Part 4: God Comes Down!
Join the Conversation
What biblical narratives organize your view of yourself? Are you God’s chosen child? Is your life story worth-telling and God-glorifying?
How can you use the concept of narrative images of God and of self in your ministry? How can you help people to put off the shaming lies of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and put on the freeing truth and grace of God’s Word?
Endnotes
[i]Ashby, Our Home Is Over Jordan, p. 56.
[ii]Albert, The House of Bondage, pp. 129-130.
[iii]Albert, The House of Bondage, p. 130.
[iv]Evans, We Have Been Believers, pp. 40-41.
[v]Ibid., p. 41.
[vi]Berlin, Free at Last, pp. 29-30.
[vii]Wimberly, Moving from Shame to Self-Worth, pp. 16-27.
