What the "Assembly" is "About in the Psalms: Special Attention to Ps 95

In Scripture a Spiritually minded worshiper comes to the assembly (i.e. gathering) of the People of God desiring five things:

1) The worshiper desires to come into the Presence of God (cf. 27.4,8; 42.1-2; 63.1;

  73.25)

2) The worshiper desires to experience the forgiveness of God (32.1-5; 51.10-12; Isa. 6.1-7)

3) The worshiper desires to give God a gift (Deut. 16.16; Ps. 69.30-31; 107.21-22; Heb. 13.15)

4) The worshiper desires to promise God something (Ps. 116; 119.57-64)

5) The worshiper desires to edify fellow worshippers and to be edified him/herself (Ps. 22.25; Heb. 

    3.12-13; 10.25)

From Psalm 95 we learn a way of structuring the assembly/gathering.  This structure helps to highlight the themes listed above:

1) Invitation/Call to Worship (Ps. 95.1)

Here “we” invite others to join in the worship of God. This is not responding to the Gospel but responding to the mandate to worship God.  This begins the gathering/assembly.  Songs like “O Come Let Us Adore Him”; “We Bring the Sacrifice of Praise;” and “O Worship the King” fall could be used in this section of worship.

2) Engagement (Ps. 95.1b-2)

             

Here the service turns from calling others to worship to focusing upon God himself. This phase of the gathering contain songs about God.  His greatness, grace, love, etc, are themes for this phase.  Songs like “Awesome God”; “Thank You, Lord”; “Our God He is Alive” contribute to this theme.

3) Exaltation (Ps. 95.3)

             

This is similar to #2 but nuances it by “placing” God on the throne.  In this movement we are in essence proclaiming God’s Lordship.  Songs like “Majesty”; “Mighty Is Our God;” “We Exalt Thee”; “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name.”

4) Adoration (Ps. 95.6)          

            

 Adoration is generally quieter, slower, reflectiveor meditative.  Songs that could contribute to this movement are almost exclusively in the first person addressing God directly with “I” or “we.” “On Bended Knee”; “We Bow Down”; “Christ, We do All Adore Thee.”

5) Intimacy (Ps. 95.7b)

            

 Here we express our love for, our longing to do God’s will and our desire to be with him.  Songs like “Abide with Me”; “I Want to be Where You Are”; “As the Deer”; “I Need Thee Every Hour.”

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Can the King be Trusted? The Vision of Psalm 73

“The book of Psalms contains not only the merry shouts of Israelites clapping their hands and making a joyful noise to the Lord. It contains also the groans and the pleas of the sick and the frightened and the dying. I had known that before. Now, I realized it for the first time.” (Stephen Broyles, The Wind that Destroys and Heals: Trusting the God of Sorrow and Joy, p. 21).

The Horizon of Psalm 73

Described as “the most remarkable and satisfying of all the psalms” [1], or a “microcosm of Old Testament theology,” [2] Psalm 73 is strategically placed within the canonical Psalter. Though hard to imagine in the face of the evidence, older scholarship virtually dismissed any notion of design to the book. Rather that scholarship focused on the origins and “setting in life” of individual psalms.  Some of that scholarship was, and is, very insightful but it dismissed the overwhelming evidence that the book of Psalms has been “put together” deliberately and purposefully. There is in fact a progression in the Psalter. When read carefully and attentively we even get the feeling that sometimes the various psalms are "talking to each other." 

The book articulates Israel’s worldview  (i.e. the biblical worldview) as powerfully, and brilliantly, as any book in Scripture. In short that worldview is 1) Yahweh is the Creator God who is the Redeeming King, 2) God has called Israel into a relationship with Yahweh as a graced kingdom of priests worshiping God on behalf of the world, and inviting the world to worship 3) that God’s kingdom is filled with justice, mercy and shalom - hesed is the law of the kingdom  4) and finally that God will defeat the challengers and usurpers of his reign (thus his law) in this world.  Israel’s worldview and faith is anything but simplistic as it is revealed in the canonical Psalter.

The journey getting to Psalm 73 through the Psalter is like a journey over the Alps and through Death Valley.  It is intense and calls for openness.  The introduction to the Psalter, Ps 1, declares a certain world confessed to be true.  I believe Psalm 1 was specifically, and intentionally, created to be the door through which the rest of the book was to be read, sung, and understood.  This means that Psalm 1 was created AFTER all the rest had been gathered and was confessed only after the storms have been weathered. Thus Ps 1 is not naïveté but a confession of faith refined in fire about how the world really is ... about what the Truth is. 

But the world God’s People live in does not correspond to Psalm 1, it is Fallen and Rebellious. We learn that as soon as we read Ps 3. There is no deception in the psalter thus there are two books of Psalms prayed through before we arrive at Ps 73.  Many do a lot of lamenting the dissonance between "out there" and "in here."  Psalm 73 shows a person, who I take to be representative of the entire people of God, who is serious about the values of Psalm 1 but had been the victim of injustice one to many times.  He/she questions whether God’s kingdom is real, whether God’s justice is real, whether having faith in Yahweh is worth the trouble.   But 73 stands at the head of Book III, almost literally the half way point in the book, and refocuses the people of God on what faith really means.  So Brueggemann is correct, I think, when he writes, “in the canonical structuring of the Psalter,  Psalm 73 stands at its center in a crucial role … I propose it is central theologically as well as canonically” [3]. It shows us how to integrate Psalm 1 in our theology.

The Psalm is structured in the following manner

I. Contested Claim (v.1)

II. The Protest and Evidence against the Claim (vv. 2-12)

III. Is it Useless to Follow the King (vv. 13-14)

IV. I Saw the Truth (vv. 15-20)

V.  Faith Refocused: Yes! God is Good and Worth Everything (vv. 21-28)

Verses 2 and 17 are the hinges of the Psalm.

The Contested Claim: The King is Good to Israel

“Surely God is good to Israel,

to those who are pure in heart” (v.1)

The RSV/NRSV repoint the Hebrew text to yield the reading “God is good to the upright” rather than “Israel.” Westermann argues this is necessary because the Psalm is about an individual but that is a mistaken understanding in my view [4].

But verse 1 is the thesis and conclusion of the Psalm.  It points back to Psalm 1 and affirms the truth of that worldview.  But it is a conclusion that that has been arrived at only through the valleys of the next several verses and the previous 70 psalms.  It is not naïve faith but tested and tried. The King is good to Israel.  Israel is not just an ethnicity here but is nuanced by “those who are pure in heart” likewise tying in to Psalm 1. Purity of heart means that the inner attitude actually coheres with the outward word or action. Jesus said his amen to this (cf. Mt 5.8).

The Protest and Evidence against the Claim

Israel’s faith has mettle. Israel’s is honest faith. The gathered people of God acknowledge that what they claim and what they experience is in profound tension.  No not tension, they are in conflict! In fact the next several verses are a full scale attack upon naive faith.  The world claims that God is not King, his will does not rule, and that he is irrelevant at best.  The experience of people “out there” does not cohere with the Faith confessed.  That is the crises! The verses, 2-12, recognize and confess the conflict and its power on the believing community.

“But as for me, my feet had almost stumble;

my steps had nearly slipped.

For I was envious/jealous of the arrogant;

I saw the prosperity of the wicked” (vv. 2-3)

Clearly echoing the language of Ps 1, and contrasting its claim, the wicked are so prosperous that those serving God are “jealous” or “envious.” To the point of even “slipping” away so as to join them. The disciple has nearly fallen away because (as we shall see) the wicked have it so well.   This is “protest” language. Our faith is shaken in the justice and, therefore, the reign of God. They have it made.

The “wicked” described here, it must be noted, differs markedly from laments regarding the ubiquitous “enemies.” There is nothing in the psalm to indicate that the original writer is being attacked.  The language of verses 2-12 is that of observation, experience and even meditation.  Almost like in Ecclesiastes ...

“They have no pain;

their bodies are sound and sleek.

They are not in trouble as others are …

People turn and praise them

and no fault is found in them.

And they say, ‘How can God know?’ …

Such are the wicked;

always at ease, they increase in riches. (vv 4, 5, 10, 12)

These are the reasons for the confession and protest in v. 2.  We almost stumbled asking ourselves the real question: Is it useless to serve God with a clean heart? What is the point of “being on God’s side?” The counter story affirms that it is just not worth it.

These observations are so realistic. Any Christian that claims that walking by faith is either “self evident” or “easy” is a false teacher and a deceiver.  Biblical faith acknowledges the struggle and the challenges of living by faith.  The Holy Spirit honors that honesty by “canonizing” it!

Is it Useless to Follow the King?

The testimony of countless suffering disciples bears heavy upon Psalm 73.2-12.  The nature of the evidence to subvert the claims of v.1 seems “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Case closed.  God is unreliable. Or he is just not there.  When “we” (i.e. the people of pure heart, the people of God, those actually seeking to live what is claimed) see the “facts of the case” – none of which are in dispute – the temptation to throw in the towel is powerful indeed (v.2). Thus the community, through its representative, does in fact sing in guttural tones …

“All in vain have I kept my heart clean

and washed my hands in innocence.

For all day long I have been plagued,

and am punished every morning.” (vv. 13-14)

What!? We thought the righteous were planted like a tree and the wicked were like “chaff!” To live a life in view of the Kingdom of God is an absolute waste of time. Contrary to Ps 1 it is in fact the wicked who are at peace and it is the righteous who are blown away like so much waste. 

Again I want to call attention the anguished honesty.  This is in fact lamentation. It is mourning. It is confession that the world is absolutely messed up and contrary to the torah of God.

If we do not embrace the honesty of the faith of Israel then the power of these Spirit words will be lost on us.  

"I" Saw the Truth

Beginning in verse 15 we have a turning point. The reason for the turning point is given in v.17.  Just when we see the people of God ready to renounce allegiance to the King, to walk away from faith and join the wicked, something amazing happens. The psalmist confesses the power of being identified with the church.  The power of belonging! Identity is found with the group and the beginning step of resistance to the Story of the World is being firmly rooted in the community of believers.

“If I had said, ‘I will talk on in this way,’

I would have been untrue to the circle of your children.”

The sense of belonging is a powerful motive.  It is in, and among, the “circle of your children” that the dawn of just what Truth really means begins to set in.  The wicked really are chaff. They really are nothing but hot air. They really are destined for the garbage heap.  How did “I” come to see this truth?

The truth was seen and ascertained through the memory and the participation in worship with that circle. Worship confronts the false claims of the counter story.  Worship pulls the veneer off the face of wicked. Worship refocuses the eyes of God’s People in order to see “the rest of the story” [5].  The people of God confess clearly the ground for renewed faith. 

“it [thought of the wicked] seemed to me a wearisome task,

UNTIL I went into the sanctuary of God;

there I perceived their end.”

Sometimes we disciples have very narrow tunnel vision. Scripture is replete with exhortation to have “eyes to see” and “ears to hear.” The training for such seeing and hearing is before the throne of God in prayer and praise.  Worship, like the canonical Psalter, is functionally eschatological. Psalm 1 is true because we know the End! Psalm 73.1 is true because we know the End (by eschatology we do not mean just denying the claim of premillennialists!). The book of Psalms, as Walter Brueggemann observed, in its “final form” is “highly eschatological in nature. It looks forward to the future and passionately yearns for it.” In worship the circle of children experience the future in the present.  The Hebrews Preacher testifies to the eschatological nature of the assembly in 12.18-29.  Worship is not simply a matter of songs sung, instruments played or not played, or those mundane things we expend such great energy upon.  Rather worship is about what the community discovers in Psalm 73 – communion with the King.  In worship we have something that the wicked cannot dream of or imagine.  They are excluded from it by the very nature of things.  Only the “pure in heart” can “see God.” Verse 17 is the saving moment in the life this disciple.  He did not find the answer to the problem of the wicked rather he found fellowship with God among his people. Communion changes what we deem to be "the Truth."

Faith Refocused: Yes! God is Good and Worth Everything

The last section of the psalm the community confesses its dismay over almost falling for the “truth” of the false counter story. The psalm confesses that in our jealousy and bitterness that we had actually become a “monster with you” (v.22). Bitterness is devastatingly revealed in its ugliness. The believers had assumed a monstrous disposition toward the King. God the King is truly merciful. Some of the most powerful and poignant words in all the Bible flow from the person enmeshed with the communities worship …

“Nevertheless I am continually with you;

you hold my right hand.

You guide me with your counsel,

and afterward you will receive me with honor.

Whom have I in heaven but you?

And there is nothing on earth that I

desire other than you,

My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart

and my portion forever.” (vv 23-26)

These are among the “most powerful, daring and treasured” words in the whole “Old Testament” according to Brueggemann. So radically altered is this person’s (i.e. = church) worldview because of the encounter with God in worship that all the old problems of the wicked, the claims of the world, and his own weakness (his flesh is still weak unlike the wicked!) are judged to be nothing.  No riches. No health. No position. No prosperity. Nothing at all! All that is required is God himself.  He is the only necessity of life. The Truth, the real Truth, has been embraced.  This is the renewed faith of the psalm.

Just as in Job there is no solution offered. What is offered is Presence. What is offered is God himself. What the psalmist discovers in the assembly of the children before the throne of God is simply communion with God. Everything else is trivial in perspective. God is good because he gives Israel himself!God is good to the faithful because he brings them, through his grace, into fellowship with him. Reorientation and refocusing takes place through communion with God in worship. Here the truth that the world cannot fathom, appreciate, understand, or even “see” is given freely and graciously to Israel. Resolution consists not in answers but in Encounter, not in rationality, but in letting ourselves to unravel before him. 

As noted above these rich verses take on power precisely because they were not, and are not, arrived at without going through the heat of Death Valleys. This is the confession of the people of tried faith, of people who have faced the mocking, jeering crowd. It is the faith of those who have heard the evidence but have been with God.  It is the faith of those who have chosen to bear the scandal of the King. 

Taking It All In, the Scope of Ps 73

The placement of Ps 73 is hardly accidental. Opening up Book III it provides sort of a summary what the community has learned through the first 72 psalms. What is that lesson? Blessedness is not material prosperity (though that at times comes) but with the assurance of God’s gracious Presence in the midst of his community and in our lives. Israel shall not be moved precisely because it is rooted in the Presence of God. [6]

Psalm 73 affirms what Paul confesses in Romans 8.37-39

"No, in all these things we are more than conquerors  through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

In the light of the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah - who read, breathed and prayed the psalms, including Ps 73 - our faith is victory because of his faithfulness.  Psalm 73 calls us to have a faith oriented to the “End.” That is the goal of God’s creative and redemptive work.  Through our worship, celebrating the Lord’s Supper is but one example, we begin to live the “End” in the present.  Through this orientation we do indeed confess the truth of Psalm 73 and the whole Psalter ...

1) God does in fact Reign.

2) We do in fact belong to God.

3) No experience separates us from the reality of God’s Presence.

4) Blessedness means to live in dependence upon God and in community, not upon ourselves.

5) Renewed faith and correct “seeing” come through Encounter with God in Worship.

6) Yes! Got is Good to Israel!! He can Be Trusted!!

Notes:

1] Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary (Augsburg, 1984), 115

2] J. Clinton McCann, Jr, “Psalm 73: A Microcosm of Old Testament Theology,’ in The Listening Heart (ed. Kenneth Hoglund; JSOT 1987), 247-257.

3] Walter Brueggemann, “Bounded by Obedience and Praise: The Psalms as Canon,” JSOT 50 (1991), 81.

4] Claus Westermann, The Living Psalms (Eerdmans 1984), 134

5] Brueggemann, “Bounded by Obedience and Praise,” pp. 85-86.

6] John Goldingay, Psalms Volume 2: Psalms 42-89 (Baker Academic 2007), 417-419.

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The Psalms, The Reign of God, and Jesus the Messiah

"O precious reading of the psalter, which for this alone deserves to be called the book of life!" (Richard de Bury, The Philobiblon, p. 24)

Wading into the Deep Waters

Jesus is a Jew. According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus was born to an impoverished but faithful, and full of faith, Jewish family.  His mother, Mary, was obviously a gifted singer and prayer warrior as we see in her Magnificant (1.46-55).  From the time of his birth, he was so deeply immersed in the Jewish faith that his family made the arduous journey "every year" to Jerusalem for the Passover (Lk 3.41).  The stories of God with his people were constantly with him. The worship of his Jewish family would mold him inside and out. One part of his prayer life and worship was immersion in the book of Psalms. His family knew how to pray, his people knew how to pray and those prayers, those cries of faith, those longings he heard and sang as a child became part of the fabric of his mind.

Since the Psalms were so deeply enmeshed in his family life, it is not surprising to find that the ministry of Jesus in so many ways is sort of a mirror of the concerns, theology, and often the very words of the Psalms [1]. Communion with God. Importance of truth. Anger at injustice. Disgust at hypocrisy. Celebrating the flood of God's gifts. Trust that leads to freedom. Gratitude that expresses itself in humble obedience. And above all the kingdom of God.

 YHWH MALAK

The Book of Psalms discloses, as much any section of Scripture, the radical unity of the Testaments. Grace, faith, creation, redemption, the fellowship of the saints, the presence of God, worship, and the proclamation of that the God of Israel is King and the glory of his reign are unbreakable chains that tie the Testaments together through the Psalms. It is a surprising, yet common, misunderstanding among Evangelicals and restorationists that the kingdom of God was an idea introduced by Jesus of Nazareth.  But Jesus did not introduce the reign of God into Jewish piety.  Jews knew, believed, and preached that God was/is King.  Jesus did too, every time he prayed and sang the Psalms. We do know that the central proclamation of Christ was the kingdom ... but it was an "Old Testament" doctrine.

Yhwh Malak! This is the central theological claim of the canonical book of Psalms. It is the center on which all faith and "topics" in the Psalter depend.  This declaration can be translated as Yahweh reigns, or the LORD is King (NRSV), or "the LORD has become King" (REB). The first translation views the kingdom as an activity, the second as a role, and the third as an event.  Here is the kicker, all three are grammatically possible.  So I embrace them all without denying the accuracy of any.

The Lord, the God of Israel, is King. This is, according to James Luther Mays, is the central theological claim of the canonical Psalter [2].  My own study of the Psalms indicates that Mays is not far from the mark, if at all. God's reign is explicitly stated and lies behind the major metaphors for Yahweh in the book as we shall see. I want to encourage my readers to meditate upon all the following Psalms: Pss 24, 29, 47, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 104, 145, and 146.  When you are reading through the rest of the psalms note phrases like the Lord "sits enthroned" or "rules the nations." It is a theme that is not hidden.

Why Yahweh is King?

The Psalms declare the kingship, and thus the kingdom, of God from two directions.  The first is that Yahweh is the "maker of heaven and earth."  Psalms such as 8, 19, 29, 33, 93 and 104 show the Lord overcoming the forces of chaos (anti-creation and anti-life) in order to establish a dwelling in which his creatures can thrive in his presence. Because Yahweh is the Creator, all other powers of whatever nature are subject to him. It is for this reason the Psalms repeatedly exhort, and even command, "all the earth" to acknowledge and submit to the Reign of God. It is the reason that "all creation" declares his glory.  The Loving King creates.

The second direction the Psalms come from to proclaim the reign of Yahweh and his kingdom is through his astounding, and unprecedented, act of pure grace in redeeming the most insignificant (Deuteronomy 7.7) of people to his very own treasured possession - Israel.  The Exodus is the Gospel in the Hebrew Bible. Such psalms as 47, 68, 98 and 114 all bring the Gathered People back to the fact that Yahweh is King because he rescued, redeemed and saved Israel.  God is King because he is the Redeemer! These texts all bring us back to the central Story of Israel - the Exodus from certain death in Egypt.  These psalms recall the very first time in the Bible that God is declared to be King.  In Exodus 15, after the great miracle of grace in the Exodus, the prophets Moses and Miriam lead the people in worship. In worship they declare, "The LORD will reign forever and ever" (Ex 15.18).

These two ways of declaring the kingship of Yahweh are intertwined in numerous Psalms.  Creation and Redemption are never that far apart in the Bible.  Such powerful mingling of these occur in psalms such as 33, 136, 146, and 147.  Sometimes within a single psalm these themes are brought together in the corporate prayers of God's people.   Look at Psalm 74

"Yet God my King is from old,
working salvation in the earth.
You divided the sea by your might;
you broke the heads of the dragons 
in the waters.
You crushed the heads of Leviathan;
you gave him as food for the for 
the creatures of the wilderness.
You cut openings for springs and 
torrents;
you dried up ever flowing streams.
Yours is the day, yours also the night;
you established the luminaries and 
the sun.
You have fixed all the bounds
of the earth;
you made summer and winter."
(74.12-17; see also 89.5-14)

The classic example of the bringing of these themes together in the Psalms is the majestic hymn to the King's  HESED in Ps 136.  The psalm thunders between the congregational leader and the response of the gathered people declaring God has shown steadfast love in creating the world and for redeeming Israel in that world.

God is King! This is not new with Jesus, rather it is the foundation of Israel's faith. As we read, pray, and praise our way through the Psalms we see many other "titles" for God's activity.  But these are royal in nature in the Ancient Near East even if at times we in the modern west misconstrue the nature of the images [3]. It is as King that the Lord is warrior, judge, refuge, and shepherd. These roles are all kingly roles and all proclaim the kingdom of God in the Psalms. Prayers of appeal and lament, as well as hymns of praise are based on the belief that Yahweh is in fact the King of the Universe and King of Israel in particular.

Dimensions of God's Kingdom

Worship is such a radical enterprise. Israel was "literally" the backwoods of the ancient world. Yet they made "grandiose" claims.  Mt. Zion is a pathetically small hill and yet Israel declared it to be the greatest and grandest of all mountains.  In fact Zion is the sort of the "navel" of the world.  These claims are nearly laughable from the perspective of the rebellious world and its "empirical evidence." These statements are all true though because Israel had gone to worship. In worship a reality is disclosed, the Psalms declare it to be so, in which the rebellious creation is turned on its proverbial head! What is "out there" is mere counterfeit.  God is King. His Kingdom will fill the whole earth. His dwelling is the center of all creation.   Israel knows these truths not through observation but through faith and worship. Jesus believed these truths he learned as a child singing and praying the Psalms as a faithful and liturgical Jew.  Israel makes three claims (if not more) about Yahweh and his kingdom.

First, the Psalms declare that God's kingdom is transnational and universal.  Israel is the manifestation of God's kingdom but God's kingship is not limited to the boundaries of Israel. He is King of all the earth.  Israel knew this because Yahweh defeated the faux king named Pharaoh (Ex 8.2, 9:14, 16, 29).  The "Old Testament" proclaims the kingdom of God is universal.

"They shall speak of the glory of your
kingdom,
and tell of your power,
to make known to all people {nations} your
mighty deeds,
and the glorious splendor of your
kingdom.
Your kingdom is an everlasting
kingdom,
and your dominion endures
throughout all
generations"
(Ps 145.11-13)

Israel is the "type" of the church in the Hebrew Bible.  Israel does not correspond to any nation states such as the USA, Germany or Japan.  Israel corresponds to the church. In fact the "church" is the Israel of God. No. Gentiles have not "replaced" Israel of old rather Gentiles have been grafted by God's amazing grace into the one People of God stretching back to Abraham.  Thus Israel is God's kingdom made visible in the world, just as the "church" is the kingdom made visible.  But God's kingdom is greater than both and never reduced to some nation state.  It is universal.

Second, the Psalms declare that God's kingship is redemptive in its function. Celebrating the King is an act of faith done in worship.  The declaration Yhwh Malak is made within hymns in the Psalter.  Declaring Yahweh to be King is not something the wicked perceive, that the nations acknowledge (anymore than they think Zion is greater than Mt. Everest!). It is something proclaimed through worship and lived because we know it to be true. In the kingdom of God specific values are inculcated and enjoined because they flow from the King's nature. These values turn the world, again, on its head.  Note these texts,

"righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne" (97.2)

"The King is mighty, he loves justice, you have established equity,
you have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob" (99.4)

"The LORD is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and rich in love.
The LORD is good to all;
he has compassion on all he has made" (145.8-9, see vv. 14-20)

"He upholds the cause of the oppressed 
and gives food to the hungry.
the LORD sets the prisoners free,
the LORD gives sight to the blind,
the LORD lifts up those who are bowed down,
the LORD loves the righteous.
The LORD watches over the alien
and sustains the fatherless and the widow
but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.
The LORD reigns forever,
your God, O Zion, for all generations.
Praise the LORD." (146.7-10)

It is difficult to read these few excerpts and not hear the voice of Jesus in the Gospels saying virtually the same things. Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God is so "Old Testament." His preaching molded and shaped by the faithful worship of his mother Mary and his step-father Joseph. The kingdom has a redemptive thrust. Compassion is the value of values. In the kingdom we imitate God. We love what he loves, we do what he does.  The reality of the kingdom cannot be "spiritualized" into some "heaven" or privatized as my own secret walk with God.  It is the aligning of our entire life, in every way thinkable, to the redemptive will of God.  We are the vessels of God's will being done "on earth as it is in heaven."  God's kingdom is in the world as salt, light and leaven to undo the vandalism of shalom throughout creation.

Third, the Psalms reveal that God's kingship and his kingdom have an eschatological dimension. One cannot read in the psalms with any degree of sympathy and not come face to face with the cold fact that we live in a world that is completely alien to the kingdom of God. The world we proclaim in gathered and private worship is so contrary to the world "out there." God's people are often as flawed as the "wicked" and "enemies." Those who are specifically designated to safe guard the powerless aliens, widows and poor become the very instrument for crushing them. These kinds of huge gaps are dealt with in the Psalms themselves and also in the prophets of Israel.  In worship we confess that we do not place trust in human powers of any kind.  We have learned that we are easily seduced by the "dark side," that is by the corrosive and toxic appeal of the fallen world.

So the Psalms proclaim that the King is coming! The coming King is reason for celebration, rejoicing and the ground of all hope.  So worship itself is a form of prayer in which God's people call for the kingdom to be fully and completely manifest "out there." This, by the way, is not simply so the wicked will go to hell.  Rather when the King comes to "judge" (as it is often translated) the notion is not simply that he is coming to condemn.  He will deal with gross evil though.  Rather the main point of the Hebrew is that the King "will make things right."  All will be well when the King arrives.  This eschatological theme pervades a number of psalms.  The coming is Good News of great joy,

"Shout for joy before the LORD, the King.
Let the sea resound and everything in it;
the world and all who live in it.
Let the rivers clap their hands,
let the mountains sing together for joy;
let them sing before the LORD,
for he comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness
and the peoples with equity."
(98.6-9)

Creation bursts into joy because of the King is coming to put the world back together again.  You may want to compare this train of thought in Ps 98 with Paul's in Romans 8.18-25.  The king is coming.  That is something we look forward to. This eschatological look to the kingdom is what gives such potency to Jesus' proclamation that the "kingdom of God is at hand."

Wrapping Up

The notion of the kingdom of God is a fundamental theme in the Story of God.  It binds the Testaments together down to the DNA.  In the Psalms, this belief in the Sovereign God smashes directly into the human notion of Sovereign Self. The Psalms call us to confess that the Lord is King because he is Creator of all things in heaven and earth.  The Psalms call us to confess the King because he has redeemed by his own grace a people out of rebellious creation.  The Psalms call us to drink deeply the faith and values of the King and live them as missional people.  The Psalms call us to recognize the universal and cosmic nature of the kingdom of God and to be the people of redemption.  And the Psalms call us to recognize and pray for the King to come.

When we look at these themes, just mentioned, it is not hard to see why Jesus' ministry in the Gospels looks the way it does.  Jesus' ministry is a mirror of the prayers, the worship, and the faith of the minstrels of Israel who sang about the Glorious God - Yhwh Malak. 

Notes:

1] For a brief overview of how Jesus' life and the Psalms "mirror" one another see J. Clinton McCann, Jr, A Theological Introduction to the Book of Psalms: The Psalms as Torah (Abingdon, 1993), 163-175.

2] James Luther Mays, "The Language of the Reign of God," Interpretation 47 (1993): 117-126

3] See Othmar Keel, The Symbolism of the Biblical World: Ancient Near East Iconography and the Book of Psalms (Crossroads, 1978), 244-306.

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Stories of Grace, Stories of Forgiveness: Frederick Douglass Affirms the Humanity of a Slaveholder

Frederick Douglass is one of the greatest Americans to have ever lived. Far greater than Malcolm X. Greater still than Martin Luther King Jr. His name should roll off our tongues with the ease of George Washington, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps even faster than the latter two. I place him in that elite category of Founding Fathers: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. They go together like Moses, Aaron and Miriam.

Douglass' story is sadly not one that is told as frequently and deeply as it should. We have much to learn from this man among men. He wrote his story three times in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; My Bondage and My Freedom; and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. In 1991 William S. McFeely published an extensive Pulitzer winning biography titled simply Frederick Douglass.

Colonel Lloyd

Born in about 1818 (Douglass was not sure the exact date) to a slave who had been used for the lustful gratification of the the "master" of the plantation. This was not exactly an unusual thing to occur in slavery. Douglass would eventually become the slave of Colonel Edward Lloyd who owned three to four hundred slaves in Maryland. He would be sent off to Lloyd's son in law, Thomas Auld from whom he escaped in 1838.

Sixty-three years after his escape from human bondage on an early June morning in 1881 the world had changed greatly.  The slavery Douglass knew as a young man was gone.  The nation had been bloodied by Civil War. Douglas was known internationally and was a powerful moral force in the United States. On that morning the former fugitive slave, now Marshall of Washington D.C, was aboard a cutter heading up the Wye River off Chesapeake Bay. His mind could not have but recalled the landscape he had written about in his 1845 Narrative. Suddenly Douglass caught "the stately chimneys of the grand old mansion." The mansion of none other than Colonel Lloyd. Writing in his 1893 Life and Times, "I had left there a slave and returned a freeman; I had left there unknown to the outside world, and returned well known."

How would the family of Colonel Lloyd receive Douglass? How would Douglass act toward this family who had grow rich off the oppressed? How can the slave and the former oppressors come together? Is it possible for redemption to take place? Is it possible for reconciliation to be a reality in the face of the the grossest evil? The greatness of Douglass tells us that yes it can be done. Those committed to God's good news for his fractured creation can indeed voice the blessed word, yes! it is possible! That is our word to the world bleeding from self-inflicted wounds. 

Howard Lloyd, the great grandson of the colonel, greeted the elderly Douglass with as "hearty a welcome as we could have wished." Saying his father was away on business, Howard offered to escort Frederick Douglass around the palatial grounds. Testifying to the powerful memories that flooded his mind he writes, "I found the buildings, which gave it the appearance of a village, nearly all standing, and I was astonished to find that I had carried their appearance so accurately in my mind for so many years."

In a detail that is possibly overlooked but fraught with meaning for Douglass he saw the old room off the kitchen where he had slept in a bag. Only the dirt floor had disappeared under wooden planks. This room was Douglass' introduction to the barbarity of slavery. From that room he had witnessed "Aunt Esther" with "wrists firmly tied" above her head. The top of her body stripped bare as she was whipped by Colonel Lloyd till she bled profusely on the ground below. He cries of mercy indelibly etched into his young mind for eternity. Of it, Douglass wrote in his Narrative "I shall never forget it whilist I remember anything." But now Douglass was standing in that same room of bitter memories with Howard Lloyd.

Howard took Douglass next to the family cemetery. As they enter the grounds Howard offers Frederick a "bouquet of flowers and evergreens from different graves around us."  Douglass is so moved by the gesture that he would bring it back to his home in Washington and preserve them as a testimony that grace can exist even in the most horrid of places. What memories and thoughts passed through the old orator's mind as he stood over the grave of his former tormentor we do not know. But in that moment he forgave both him and his family.

After the walk through the garden of tombstones Lloyd took Frederick into the mansion itself and onto the verandah. Here the former slave whose flesh bore testimony to the whip was now at ease in the old master's chair and receiving the greatest of courtesy from the family that he had excoriated as examples of the horrid evil of slavery.  And they where! Yet forgiveness was able to allow the victim and victimizer to fellowship in shalom as a testimony of the possibilities of God's vision.

What does forgiveness look like? Douglass narrates for us a beautiful picture of what true and costly reconciliation looks like.  Forgiveness looks like Douglass and Howard standing over the grave of the Colonel and recognizing in one another a genuine fragility of humanity. No more and no less.

Captain Auld

Frederick Douglass relates another tale of forgiveness in his Life and Times.  Sadly, McFreely's excellent biography barely touches on either of these powerful episodes. The example of Douglass makes no sense in a secularist worldview.  Douglass was adamant that the USA could not afford to forget the horror of slavery.  To do so would invite the resurrection of tyranny.  He was a prophet because tyranny was revived because the horror of slavery minimized (as in Gone with the Wind a pure apologetic for the Old South). Even today most Americans simply do not realize that the legacy of slavery is around us each and every day.

However, Douglass was for forgiveness. He showed us, white and black, how we can still embrace the humanity of those around us. Douglass tells us that he received an invitation from old Captain Auld (Lloyd's son-in-law and a former master) who was now dying and confined to bed. The fiery orator was stunned by the invitation.

"To me, Captain Auld had sustained the relation of master - a relation which I held in extremest abhorence ... He had struck down my personality, had subjected me to his will, had me property of my body and soul ... I, on my part, had traveled through the length and breadth of this country and of England holding up this conduct of his ... to the reprobation of all men who would hear my words."

He could have easily refused to go. Most of us probably would have been among those who counseled against it. But Douglass agreed to visit Captain Auld. But why? "He was to me no longer a slaveholder either in fact or in spirit, and I regarded him as I did myself, a victim of the circumstances of birth, education, law, and custom" (my emphasis).

When Douglass entered the elderly man's room they "addressed each other simultaneously, he calling me 'Marshal Douglass' and I, as I had always called him, 'Captain Auld.'"  Just as he had been moved by Howard's symbolic gift of flowers - a gesture of letting old hate die - so now Douglass is moved to the core of his being that his old master called him "Marshal."  The greatness of this apostle of liberty is on display as he responded to Auld in pure grace. "Hearing myself called by him 'Marshall Douglass,' I instantly broke up the formal nature of the meeting by saying, 'not Marshal, but Frederick to you as formerly."

Anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear recognizes immediately the risk Douglass is taking here. Risk to his own personhood. He risks his personal dignity.  He invites his former master to address him in familiar terms, terms closely tied to his former identity. So dangerously close to - boy! He is taking a political risk here with his black constituency.  But the former slave was more concerned in modeling the way forward to an America that was paralyzed by bigotry.  He allowed himself to be vulnerable even to Captain Auld because he saw that Auld was the victim of prejudice himself. Douglass gave him forgiveness. His forgiveness allowed him to see a person rather than simply a slaveholder.

As the visit came to a close Douglass relates,

"We shook hands cordially and he, having been long stricken with palsy, shed tears as men thus deeply afflicted will do when excited by any deep emotion. The sight of him ... his tremulous hands constantly in motion, and all the circumstances of his condition affected me deeply, and for a time chocked my voice and made me speechless."

The greatest orator in American history is speechless!

The scene is incredibly powerful. I believe that the former slave rendered mute by the trembling tears of his former master is intended to move us in the same way. Douglass in no way forgot slavery. He in no way forgot evil. He forgave a man who committed evil. His gift of the grace of forgiveness affirmed the humanity of even Auld. This kind of behavior does not make sense in our world but Douglass knew that such behavior was the only hope for the future.The spirit of forgiveness is the Spirit of Life.

Forgiveness, Gift of Grace

How I wish we knew more about such giants as Frederick Douglass. He has words to say to America about race relations today.  He has words to say to the rich and the poor. He has words to say to anyone who has been wronged, seriously wronged, by another human being.  We can learn what genuine "righteous indignation" looks like in his immortal "What to the American Slave is Fourth of July?" We can learn from him the passion of simply wanting to have an education.  What a lesson that is for today's abysmally apathetic moms, dads and kids on education. We can learn from him the danger of collective amnesia. But we can also learn from him that even the grossest offenders and the weakest of victims can in fact forgive one another.  Justice is not simply about evening the score (ohhh that is what the world believes justice is). Justice bears fruit in shalom and reconciliation. This is a message that even Christians need to hear. Perhaps Christians most of all!

The stories of grace and forgiveness that Frederick Douglass models exhibit three biblical truths regarding the notion of forgiveness as it is put into practice.

1) Douglass rediscovered the humanity of the person who hurt him. As we practice the Spiritual gift of forgiveness we likewise must discover or rediscover the fallen, defaced and even broken humanity in the person who has wronged us. This is often a difficult and painful process because our own fallenness will want to defend our reasons for denying the essential humanity of the person who has grossly wronged us.  This is why the picture of Douglass over the grave of Colonel Lloyd is so gripping.

2) Douglass surrendered his right to get even with the tyrants. This is fundamental to biblical forgiveness. Douglass did not deny the pain, the suffering, nor the barbarism of slavery.  That is in fact the very evil needing to be forgiven. No, forgiveness affirms the bitter reality that the wrong has in fact been committed. Rather in forgiveness we choose, in light of rediscovering his or her humanity and the greater light of the cross of Jesus Christ, to give up the right of revenge. Douglass could have easily exacted retribution upon Captain Auld but instead became his equal. I am as speechless as Douglass was himself.

3) Douglass decided, this was a conscious decision, to revise his feelings toward the persons who had gravely wronged him. His feelings regarding slavery and bigotry did not change one iota nor should they.  What he changed was his feelings toward human beings.  Colonel Lloyd was a victim of a prejudiced upbringing and society.  Auld was a tragic figure himself. Frederick Douglass in light of the grace of forgiveness changed his feelings toward them.

Maybe the United States should put Frederick Douglass on the ten dollar bill rather than Alexander Hamilton. He deserves it far more. His is a great story.  Near the end of his life, one of the images he wanted us not to forget, was that even slaveholders and former slaves could come to see in one another the image of God and extend the most profound of blessings upon one another - the gift of forgiveness. At no time is a human being more like God than when they give the gift of forgiveness.

Who does not need forgiveness.

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" - Jesus of Nazareth

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Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Bible & America, #2

"Reading the Bible with the eyes of the poor is a different thing than reading the it with a full belly. If it is read in the light of the experience and hopes of the oppressed, the Bible's revolutionary themes - promise, exodus, resurrection and spirit - come alive." (Jurgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit)

An "Event"

The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin (UTC) was significant. Theodore Parker, the famous Boston preacher, called it a "world event." And it was! Harriet Beecher Stowe had been contributing chapters of the book in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era throughout 1851-52 and the public was eating it up. When printed, the book was immediately (no international copyright laws back then) published in three Paris newspapers simultaneously. It's first print run was sold out in a few days. The book was quickly translated into thirty-seven languages.  It produced countless conversions to Christianity, such as the dying German poet Heinrich Heine.  It mobilized waning anti-slavery zeal of the day.

UTC  was also cursed by thousands. It was banned in southern states and caused a riot among students at the University of Virgina where it was burned publicly.  It was branded "pulp fiction." Conservatives labeled Stowe a "revolutionary" and an advocate of "higher lawism" (fancy words for civil disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Law). UTC was even branded forthrightly as a "pernicious book of sin."

Whatever one may say of the book, with one hundred and fifty years of hindsight, it cannot be said the book was neutral or conservative. Reading the book is a moral experience. I've never had to put Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn down (love them both) because they moved me so deeply in my inner being but I have Uncle Tom's Cabin.  Indeed I read recently from one English literature professor arguing that UTC should replace Twain in our prescribed canon of reading in high school. It has my vote. 

The Bible, How is It to be Used? Uncle Tom's Cabin's Answer

Harriet Beecher Stowe was brilliant.  She has not always been recognized as such by secular, white male, historical scholarship since WW II.  Much of this scholarship has been astoundingly biblically illiterate, incredibly uniformed on how religion and American culture were intertwined through the Civil War, and even (ironically) prejudiced against her and UTC. This trend has significantly reversed in the last fifteen years most significantly with the publication of David Reynolds tour de force Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America. Stowe read widely knowing such theological heavy weights as Schleiermacher and Feuerbach and was fans of the writers of the Romantic Movement. Her husband, Calvin, wrote her confessing how he misses their late night scholarly "discourses in sheets." He wrote of his longing to have her with him because he,

"wants to got to bed & talk about Tholuck, Dannecker, Jean Paul, Frederick William ... There is not a soul that I can say a word to about any of these matters, and I begin to find out, (what I knew very well before) that you are the most intelligent and agreeable woman in the whole circle of my acquaintance." [1]

Among the things that disturbed Stowe was the use of the Bible by Christians to justify slavery.   By 1852 there were plenty of biblical apologists for slavery and racism among United States Christians, North and South. This apparent biblical endorsement of slavery had a pacifying affect upon the anti-slavery temper that was building in the 1830s and was steadily loosing ground throughout the 1840s. For Stowe this was a serious misuse of the Word of God.  Her questions generated in the narrative properly force hermenutical questions upon us too. Near the end of her book she makes a direct appeal to the reader (not the only time she does so in the book) that gives a window into what she thinks the reader should do even if some of the technical aspects of the biblical text are in question.

"But what can any individual do? Of that, every individual can judge. There is one thing that every individual can do, - they can see to tit that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race. See, then, to your sympathies in this matter! Are they in harmony with the sympathies of Christ? or are they swayed and perverted by the sophistries of worldly policy?"

The "sympathies of Christ." Whatever one does about slavery, Stowe demands that the Christian side with Crucified One. This is her angle of attack against the biblical apologists of slavery and she weaves this in through her characters in the novel.  I want to look at a few of these characters as they express Stowe's criticism of the use of the Bible.

Augustine St. Clare of New Orleans: Social Location & Vested Interests

Augustine, the father of Eva, is a complex character.  Augustine is married to Marie who "always made a point to be pious on Sundays."  Yet Augustine refused to attend church no matter how much his wife pleaded. Stowe tells her bigoted Christian readers that one of the greatest Christian thinkers in history was an African named Augustine  "Bishop of Carthage" and that not only he but most bishops were "men of color."  Augustine St. Clare however becomes her instrument to critique not only the church but the "clergy."  The unbelieving, slave owning, Augustine does not think the Bible actually justifies slavery.  When Marie and cousin Ophelia corner him on the matter he "goes off" on the ladies.  Slavery is controlled by economics and the hermeneutics of the clergy is put in service of justifying oppression.  I quote at length

"The short of the matter is, cousin, ... on this abstract question of slavery there can, as I think, be but one opinion. Planters who have money to make by it, - clergymen, who have planters to please, - politicians, who want to rule by it, - may warp and bend language and ethics to a degree that shall astonish the world at their ingenuity; they can press nature and the Bible, and nobody knows what else into the service ..."

But should slavery adversely affect the price of cotton, Augustine says

"Well suppose that something should bring down the price of cotton once and forever, and make the whole slave property a drug in the market, don't you think we should soon have another version of the Scripture doctrine? What a flood of light would pour into the church, all at once, and how immediately it would be discovered that everything in the Bible and reason went the other way!"

Stowe, through Augustine, pins the vested interest that drives the justification of slavery.  The real motivation was not exegesis and certainly not the "sympathies of Christ" but power and economic interest.

"If I was to say anything on this slavery matter, I would say out, fair and square, 'We're in for it; we've got'em, and we mean to keep'em, - it's for our convenience and our interest;' for that's the long and short of it,' that's just what the whole of what ll this sanctified stuff amounts to, after all; and I think that will be intelligible to everybody, everywhere."[2]

Looking back it is easy to see that Augustine (Stowe) was dead on in this critique.  In the Stone-Campbell Movement one who defended slavery was James Shannon.  Shannon was ne of the most educated men of the movement.  He was president of Bacon College (the first college in the SCM) and later the University of Missouri.  In 1844 he addressed the student body of Bacon College on The Philosophy of Slavery, As Identified with the Philosophy of Human Happiness. This was later published in a booklet in 1849 and went through several editions.  Shannon offered a myriad of interpretations in support of slavery as essential to "human happiness."  In his criticism of the abolition movement he freely uses the economic dimension.  Abolitionists were guilty of breaking the tenth commandment "thou shalt not covet." "Hence, the advocates of Emancipation without compensation to the owners, are involved in the deep guilt ... of violating the tenth commandment and exciting others to a similar violation." [3] Slave holders are entitled to their "property" regardless of any claim by abolitionists.  Stowe sees this argument for what it is ... vested interest and power play ... but Shannon would have denied that. Are we blind to our own vested interest and how that shapes our hermeneutic?

George Harris, Eliza's Husband: Spirit of Humanity & Fellowship

George is a powerful character we even meet him before Tom in the narrative. He is intelligent (taught himself to read). He is creative.  He is militant.  His was separated from his wife, Eliza, and baby son. He and Eliza's exodus to the north is the opposite mirror for Tom's descent further south. Doubt plays a significant role in his character.  Stowe believed that God, especially through Christ, was on the side of the sufferer.  She described him as "God the Omnipotent, the Creator, the Destroyer, is suffering himself to be detained in weak human hands, and controlled by the passionate earnestness of human desire ... He whose touch could annihilate, can yet be held by your infant hand--can be swayed by your prayer."

It is this suffering, caring Creator, that is so difficult for the oppressed slave - in George - has difficulty in believing.  During the journey George meets Mr. Wilson a law and order man. Mr. Wilson attempts to use the Bible to support the Fugitive Slave telling George it is his Christian duty to return. He told him how Paul sent Onesimus back to Philemon.  Yet the angry fugitive will have none of it.

"Don't quote the Bible at me that way, Mr. Wilson, ... don't! for my wife is a Christian, and I mean to be, if I ever get to where I can; but to quote Bible to a fellow in my circumstances, is enouch to make him give it up altogether. I appeal to God Almighty; - I'm willing to go with the case to Him, and ask Him if I do wrong to seek my freedom."

Mr. Wilson admonishes George to trust in God and his laws (which in this case would mean obedience to the Fugitive Slave Law). But George fires back at his antagonist: "IS there a God to trust in? ... There's a God for you, but is there any for us? [i.e. black slaves]"

George is reunited with his beloved wife (not legally married because they are slaves) and his son Harry in a Quaker community in Ohio. The Quaker's were on the outside of the orthodox religious establishment in America so these folks have a similar function as the non-believing Augustine. Through these unrepentant breakers of the Fugitive Slave Law George learns the true meaning of Christian faith.  Stretching all social bounds of the time, Stowe has George and Eliza sit down and eat at white person's table ... in a white person's home. As Jesus affirmed the human worth and dignity of social outcasts in the Gospels so George is moved deeply that a person accords him actual human dignity. The Quaker Simeon Halliday tells George that God actually bestows upon us goods for the purpose of being generous and merciful.  George is astonished that this man would risk going to jail to help him and his escaping family. Simeon and George read Psalm 73 together and it soothes his soul and the flame of faith begins to flicker in George.  Stowe says of this psalm that the words might sound like pious bosh from a self-indulgent exhorter but "coming from one who daily and calmly risked fine and imprisonment for the cause of God and man, they had a weight that could not but be felt ..."  Simeon demonstrated the sympathies of Christ. George rejected the use of the Bible as a prop for injustice. At the Table we are all equal ...

Uncle Tom: The Man of Sorrows

One of the "ah ha" moments for the followers of stereotypes is that Tom, as Stowe narrates him, was anything but an "Uncle Tom." He is introduced to us a "large, broad chested, powerfully made man." The "air" around him is "self-respecting and dignified." He is literate (it was against the law in many southern states for a slave to learn to read).  Tom is strong and stands his ground.  He sacrifices his personal needs for the sake of other slaves and refuses to disobey his conscience.  He is a principled man ... a serious stab at the ugly stereotypes of black men of the day.  He will not cooperate with evil and will not bring harm to others.

Tom is truly a Christ figure in the book. Tom is the ultimate embodiment of the true meaning of the Christian faith and the Bible in particular. As Tom is ripped from his wife (not a legal marriage again), sold down river to almost certain death we hear the pathos of the slaves come through with power in Stowe's imagery. The Mississippi is imagined to be the river carrying the lamentations of the slaves to the - absent - God. Would that "the tears of the oppressed, the sighs of the helpless, the bitter prayers of poor, ignorant hearts to an unknown God - unknown, unseen and silent, but who will yet 'come out of his place to save all the poor of the earth!"

Tom arrives at his new "owner," Simon Legree.  Legree is Tom's third owner in the narrative, each spans the kind of slave owners Stowe believed to be in the South.  It is easy to hate Legree. Legree is an inhumane tyrant.  But Stowe does not want us to hate Legree rather she invites us to pity him. He is the end result of the system of dehumanization of slavery upon the slave holders! He pales in comparison to Tom. He retains the brute power of force but is emasculated by the real power of Tom's presence. The more Simon rails at, and abuses, Tom the truth of what he is is revealed. Tom reads the Bible to the other slaves on Legree's plantation. An important text was Matthew 11.28, "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." But the slaves cannot believe that God "is around" for "God never visits these parts." Stowe quote Ecclesiastes 4.1-2 to embody the darkness of Legree's place.

"Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Look, the tears of the oppressed--with no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive ..." (NRSV)

Cassy, Legree's sex slave, laments to Tom - the Lord "isn't here! there's nothing here, but sin and long, long despair!" Truly Tom has arrived in hell.

To Legree Tom was a trouble maker precisely because he was such a powerful man. "Had not this man braved him, - steadily, powerfully, resistlessly, [sic]- ever since he bought him." This made Legree fear and hate Tom. Legree attacks Tom's faith saying "I'm your church now!" Legree succumbs to the irrational fear of the oppressor (echoes of Exodus 1.12) in his fear of Tom's mighty personality. When Tom refuses to flog another slave Simon he has Tom whipped nearly to death. After the whipping Tom says to Simon,

"I'll give ye all the work of my hands, all my time, all my strength; but my soul I won't give up to mortal man. I will hold to the Lord and put his commands before all, - die or live; you may be sure on't. Mas'r Legree, I an't a grain afeard to die. I'd soon as die as not. Ye may whip me, starve me, burn me, - it'll only send me sooner where I want to go."

Sambo and Quimbo, slave overseers bought off with alcohol and sexual favors, finish the cruel torture of Tom. Yet in the book Tom forgives them and they break down: 'O, Tom! do tell us who is JESUS, anyhow?"  Sambo and Quimbo are victims of the system of evil too. Tom's forgiveness simply enrages Legree. His anger boils as he realizes that "his power over his bond thrall was gone."  Simon Legree literally beats Tom to death in an incredibly moving narrative. 

Tom is the Christ who willingly endures great suffering for others. As Tom nears death he reads of the Passion of Jesus. Soon "a vision rose before him of One crowned with thorns, buffeted and bleeding." Like Jesus he forgives his enemies and loves them. Tom is the embodiment of the sympathies of Christ.

Far from being an "Uncle Tom" the Tom that Stowe narrates was incredibly challenging and offensive to white Christians of her day.  And he is still a powerful figure when read today.  Tom is the model of nonviolent resistance found in Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks.  Just how threatening Tom was we will see in our next blog.

In Worship at the Lord's Table

Harriet Beecher Stowe believed that God had moved her to write Uncle Tom's Cabin. While there were antecedents in her life for the contents of the book it was not until February 1851 that she began the novel.  While visiting Brunswick, Maine she attended the First Parish Church.  As she was taking the bread and wine she reflected upon the cross of Jesus. She says that she at that moment had a "vision that was blown into my mind as by the rushing of a mighty wind." The vision given her at the Lord's Table was of an old slave being whipped to death by two fellow slaves who were under the control of a white man.  Stowe was so disturbed by her vision that she began to write UTC and felt the entire time as if the words were from another source. The story of Tom's death in the novel is clearly the literary version of her vision. For her a visit to Calvary at the Table led her to another Calvary ... not the one of Christ but an American Calvary of slavery.  At the Table, in worship, she was moved to identify powerfully with the hated and oppressed nobodies in the United States ... the slaves. Worship changes lives - just ask Harriet.

Final Hermeneutical Thoughts

Stowe saw powerfully and clearly that God takes a side. Her frustration with the church and Christians in general because of their complicity in injustice reached a breaking point. We have only scratched the surface of how she explores biblical themes and how they might look in the eyes of the oppressed. Through her novel she forces us to ask potent questions.  Is it a legitimate reading of Scripture that endorses something blatantly contrary to the values and mission of Christ? She forces us to ask of ourselves ... are we so enmeshed in the machinery that our exegesis and theology always supports us in our own agenda? She forces us to ask does the fact that we have money or power control how we read the Bible and determine what is or is not righteousness? Again she saw that God does takes sides.  She saw this because she looked through the eyes of the slave.  Reading from that location is not always easy.

One powerful narrative that slaves in the South routinely gravitated to was that of the Exodus. There interest in the Exodus was not historical or critical but it was gripping.  They saw something that whites like James Shannon did not ... God took sides. If we look briefly at the Exodus we see four things that are theologically significant and call for response by God's People:

1) A struggle between the powerful and the weak is going on
2) God hears the cries of the weak and is fully aware of the situation of the weak
3) God is not neutral in this struggle between the powerful and the weak
4) God calls his people to join in the struggle for the weak  [4]

If this actually true then how should that affect our Bible reading? and more importantly our living in this world? Harriet Beecher Stowe believed it meant shelving self-interest and engage in the risky business of altering the status quo ... I think we can learn a lot from this small but powerful lady.

NOTES:

1] Quoted in Patricia R. Hill, "Uncle Tom's Cabin as a Religious Text," a paper delivered at the June 2007 Uncle Tom's Cabin in the Web of Culture conference sponsored by the National Endowment of the Humanities.  Pages are not numbered but on my print copy see p. 4.

2] All quotes from The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, eds Henry Louis Gates Jr & Hollis Robbins (W. W. Norton, 2006).

3] James Shannon, The Philosophy of Slavery, As Identified with the Philosophy of Human Happiness, An Essay (A. G. Hodges & Co., 1849), 13.

4] For a very readable source on hearing the Bible from another location, and that looks at specific texts and works through them see Robert McAfee Brown Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes (Westminster/John Knox 1984).  See pp. 33-48 on listening to the Exodus.

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Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Bible & America #1

I hate to admit that in 1990 if some one had mentioned "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to me, the only reference to come to my mind would have been the hair band Warrant.  To be sure it was a different sort of song for a metal band - no drugs and no sex. The song was something of an allegory. To this day I can still sing the lyrics.  The song opens ...

"Just for the record let's get the story straight.
Me and Uncle Tom were fishing it was getting pretty late.
Out on a cypress limb above the "Wishin' Well."
Where they say it got no bottom, say it take you down to hell!

Over in the bushes and off to the right.
Come two men talkin' in the pale moon light.
Sheriff John Brady and Deputy Hedge,
Haulin' two limp bodies down to the water's edge.

I know a secret down at Uncle Tom's Cabin, oh yeah.
I know a secret that I just can't tell."

Three years out of high school, and nearly the same number of college years under my belt, I was stunningly ignorant of not just "American" history but black American history. I knew nothing of the stories of Mickey Schwerner, James Chancey and Andy Goodman, [1] and many more Civil Rights works and Freedom Riders that were murdered either by, or with the help of, law enforcement.  But in 1990 Uncle Tom's Cabin was simply a great rock song to jam to on the way down the highway.  In 1995 I learned there was a book by Harriet Beecher Stowe by this title and read it for the first time in response to a black friend who told me my world was to white. Since then I revisited the book in 2001 and again at the end of 2012.  Being far more mature and knowledgeable in 2012 my reading was considerably richer.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

Uncle Tom's Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly is possibly the quintessential American novel and without a doubt the most influential book outside the Bible to ever hit the shelves in America. Historian David Reynolds states baldly in his history of the lives and after lives of UTC, Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America, "No book in American history molded public opinion more powerfully than Uncle Tom's Cabin" (p.xi). It was by far the runaway best seller of the 19th century but unlike the contemporary Da Vinci Code it changed the world.

When  Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in December 1862 he is quoted as having said "Is this the little woman who made this great war?" [2]. Harriet was born into what became a large, prominent and reforming family in America.  Some one said of Lyman Beecher, Harriet's father, on his seventy-ninth birthday that he was "The father of more brains than any man in America" [3]. Among her famous siblings were Henry Ward Beecher.  Unlike some other famous families the Beechers were not fabulously rich (Harriet lived in poverty until after Uncle Tom was published) rather they were famous because they rocked the American boat. 

Harriet married Calvin Stowe in 1836.  Calvin, whose first wife died of cholera, was Professor of Greek at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati.  Calvin was fluent in seven languages, had a good sense of humor and encouraged his wife's writing abilities.

Stowe embraced an abolitionist position over time.  Her father, Lyman Beecher, was anti-slavery but considered abolitionism to be extreme.  Before Lyman moved to Cincinnati one of his parishioners was William Loyd Garrison who emerged as a radical abolitionist. Garrison and the elder Beecher had a falling out over what Lyman believed was the former's extremism. The elder preacher focused upon what he thought were the real sins of the day "rum, Sabbath-breaking, Catholicism, and gambling." [4] He exhorted Garrison on slavery, "you can't reason that way! You must take into account what is expedient as well as what is right." For his part the editor of the Liberator became convinced that the Christian church, the American government and the Constitution had been corrupted to the core by the slave interest.  Harriet moved far beyond her father on slavery and the issue of race period.  She met with Garrison, and though reticent about his heretical reputation came to appreciate him greatly as an ally and friend.  She said that no one could "know him and not love him--love him personally, love him for his earnestness and his faithfulness."  But she did ask him "Mr. Garrison, are you a Christian?" [5]

What pushed Stowe beyond her father and into the abolitionist fold? Scholars point to a number of reasons.  The underground railroad passed, almost literally, by her front door step.  She and her husband Calvin were confronted with the reality of fugitive slaves when they learned that a girl in their employ was in fact a runaway slave.  Her husband Calvin, and her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, helped the girl escape via the Underground Railroad through a friend John Van Zandt (who shows up in UTC as John Van Trompe).

Second major source of antipathy for slavery as a system per se in Stowe was the pervasive sexual exploitation of female slaves by white "masters." This exploitation was common in two ways: 1) the sexual gratification of white males and 2) forcing females to become "breeders."  Many female slaves were forced to have sexual relations with various men in order to "breed" a fresh crop of slaves to work or sell.  Eliza Buck, a young "mulatto girl" and fugitive slave, came to the Stowe household in Cincinnati. She was the offspring of an illicit encounter between her former master and her slave mother.  She too became the victim of repeated rapes by the same man. Eliza told Stowe of being sold down in Louisiana and then to Kentucky.  Harriet had also met Lewis Garrard Clarke, an escaped slave so light he could pass for white. Clarke's family had been broken apart and variously sold, his sister being sent to New Orleans as a sex slave. Clarke's sister was befriended by a Frenchman who purchased her freedom. Harriet brings this secret "privilege" of the white slave owner out in full view in UTC. She was disgusted by it. The havoc of slavery on families ... indeed in most southern states marriage was illegal for blacks ... was an abomination to God. Stowe illuminates powerfully the family bond among slaves whether legal or not.

Another source of Stowe's growing hatred of slavery was the violence used by those who protected the system.  James Birney a family friend was a former slave owner who emancipated his slaves. He began what he believed was a mild and moderate voice for the emancipation cause, The Philanthropist. But on July 30, 1836 a mob estimated to be about 4000 strong, surrounded Birney's Cincinnati office, smashed his press and threw it in the Ohio. The mob then proceeded to pillage streets with the houses of free blacks.  Birney just escaped with his life.[6] The next year however, Elijah P. Lovejoy, a special friend, was attacked and murdered by a mob of proslavery advocates.

Finally Stowe became a reader of slave narratives. The stories of Josiah Henson, Henry Bibb, Lewis Clarke, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and others. These heroic tales revealed to her people, not animals, with a thirst for liberty, capacity for learning and critical thinking, and above all the capability of pride in being God's creation. Stowe came to embrace the humanity of the African slave.

Harriet Beecher Stowe became convinced that Christianity and slavery was absolutely incompatible. In Uncle Tom's Cabin she unsparingly exposed the toll that slavery took upon both blacks and whites who, surprisingly, are bound by a common humanity.  For her the responsibility of slavery lie with both Southerners and Northerners who made economic profit off it. Slavery was more than a personal evil but a systemic evil that must be atoned for.  Indeed slavery was America's Calvary ... the beaten and dying slave was the American Christ.  That was Tom!

Wrapping up Part One ... Factoids to Whet the Appetite

Two of the most frequent responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin are:  1) the surprise that Tom was no "Uncle Tom" and 2) just how profoundly "religious" the work is.  The stereotype of "uncle Tom" as weak, servile, and passive is the work of a massive subversion of the book. Not only is Tom incredibly strong but George Harris (another major character) is a Malcolm X kind of man. When I think of Tom now I think of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr ... brave and willing to suffer on behalf of others. This is no trait of a weak and cowardly person. 

Stowe was an inspiration to both Leo Tolstoy (who thought UTC was a brilliant novel and I would say he was a qualified critic) and Vladimir Lenin who held UTC was his favorite novel from childhood [7]. Translated into 37 languages, used as a Sunday School text, adapted into countless "Tom" plays ... UTC remained a powerful and subversive force even when it was forgotten by many. 

More to come ...

Notes:

1] See the classic by  William Bradford Huie, 3 Lives for Mississippi with an Intro by Martin Luther King, Jr (New American Library, 1964, reprinted several times)

2] Daniel Vallaro discusses this remark and its authenticity at length in "Lincoln, Stowe, and the 'Little Woman/Great War' Story: The Making and Breaking of a Great American Anecdote," in Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association (Winter 2009) at www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/30.1/vollaro.html#FOOT54

3] Quoted in Debby Applegate's Pulitzer Prize winning biography, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Three Leaves Press 2006), 264.

4] David Walker, free black and fellow Bostonian, castigates white Christian preachers for condemning these very evils and yet turning a blind eye to slavery.  "The preachers and people of the United States form societies against Free Masonry, Sabbath breaking, Sabbath mails, Infidelity, &c. &c. But the fountain head [i.e. slavery] compared with which, all those other evils are comparatively nothing, and from the bloody and murderous head of which they receive no trifling support, is hardly noticed by Americans." David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Peter P. Hinks, (Penn State Press 2000), 44.  Walker and his Appeal had a profound impact upon Garrison.

5] Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Loyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (St. Martins Press 1998), 417-424, quotes from p. 421.

6] David S. Reynolds, Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America (W. W. Norton 2011), 93-94.

7] ibid., 175

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