Abstract
In this paper, I explore the implications of Black interpretation of the Book of Acts for responses to the legacy of slavery—specifically, my ancestors’ practice of enslaving. In the Acts of the Apostles, God's Holy Spirit fills people of every ethnicity and background at Pentecost. This includes enslaved women and enslaved men, who will be prophets, it is promised, speaking from God. The Ethiopian eunuch, a Black finance minister from Nubia, reads the Scriptures, trusts in Jesus, and is baptized. Peter announces that God shows no partiality, and Paul claims that all human beings are part of one family. To interpret the implications of these passages for White supremacy and slavery, I rely on theologians and commentators who identify themselves as Black. I contrast what Acts says with the horrible practices of my own family who enslaved their fellow human beings in the highly Christianised culture of nineteenth-century North Carolina, United States. I ask what the witness of Acts means for those of us who inherit a legacy of slavery. How can we act in keeping with repentance, letting our truth telling, education, friendships, churches, and use of money change in response to God's work of changing hearts?
Keywords
Introduction
The Acts of the Apostles makes astounding claims about God's gift of the Holy Spirit to all nations, claims that challenge White supremacy and enslavement.
However, for centuries, Christianised cultures continued to practise the enslavement of other human beings, even other baptised brothers and sisters in the faith. I am descended from people who did just this.
The claims of Acts, placed against the history of the church and the history of my family, mean that questions must be asked. What does it mean for those of us tied up with the legacy of slavery to repent, as Peter called his hearers to do on the Day of Pentecost, and to keep living in keeping with repentance? How can dwelling imaginatively in the world of Acts allow us to turn away from falsehood and toward the truth spoken through Black prophets and educators? How can Acts prompt us to respond to the work of the Holy Spirit to grow in friendship and share wealth as one family?
In this article, I will explore the implications of the Acts of the Apostles for responses to the legacy of slavery, relying on Black authors to illuminate Acts’ witness about White supremacy and slavery. I will contrast this witness with the horrible practices of my own family who enslaved their fellow human beings in the highly Christianised culture of nineteenth-century North Carolina. I ask what the witness of Acts means for responding to the legacy of slavery in the United States where I am from and in Wales and Britain where I live, and for me as a descendant of enslavers.
This article came about because two things came together. While working on a book-length manuscript on ethics in the Book of Acts, I wanted to understand the book's accounts of people from many cultures and social standings being filled with the Holy Spirit. I kept coming across Black theologians and biblical scholars who focused on Acts and its witness against slavery and White supremacy. At the same time, I was discovering just how extensive my ancestors’ enslaving was, uncovering documents, visiting the site of their plantation, and talking with family members about how to respond. The confluence of these two factors meant the legacy of slavery was my issue to write about.
About My Background
I write as a White man. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and I am now settled in Cardiff in Wales, with ancestors from Alsace, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. Some of these ancestors, the Bittings, thought of themselves as the owners of Black men, women, and children in North Carolina. I do not proudly own the term ‘White’, but my ancestors participated in societies that used this term to protect their privileges. My ancestor who links me to the Bitting enslavers is listed as ‘W.’ for White on his birth certificate, and those the Bittings enslaved are listed as ‘B.’ for Black on Slave Schedules of the US Census. When my Heimburger ancestors immigrated from France, they could only become US citizens because they were considered White. 1 Before the law, my ancestors have benefitted from being classed as White. I am part of a history and a culture that marks me as White.
I have not been trained to write about my background as a White man descended from enslavers. Words from Anthony Reddie at the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics challenged me to change my way of writing. Reddie began a presentation by saying that he is descended from enslaved people in Jamaica. 2 On another occasion, he lamented the fact that White theologians in Britain are not writing about racism and White supremacy. 3 I take up his challenge to acknowledge that I am descended from enslavers. I take up his challenge to tackle questions of anti-Black racism as a theologian. As such, what I write here is an exercise in White theology as James Perkinson and Kristopher Norris describe it or critical White theology as Al Barrett, Jill Marsh, and Anthony Reddie describe it. 4 Still, outside of the many contributors to Barrett, Marsh, and Reddie's volume and the journal issue that preceded it, few White theologians and Christian ethicists in Britain have written about racism or slavery. 5 Some White theologians who write about slavery deal only briefly with theology and Scripture, choosing history and general moral arguments instead. 6 Here, I foreground what Black interpreters argue that their favourite passages from Acts say about racism and slavery, I investigate my family ties to slavery, and I ask how those of us who inherit these ties might live if we dwell in the world of Acts.
The Acts of the Apostles, Racism, White Supremacy, and Slavery in Black Interpretation
The witness of the Acts of the Apostles raises questions about racism, White supremacy, and the logic of slavery. This is what I take from listening to Black interpreters of Acts. The Bible does not speak against slavery in one voice, and Christians across the centuries have used biblical passages to defend or even commend slavery. But the case that slavery is permitted or beneficial is hard to make with Acts. It is especially hard if I listen to Black interpreters of Acts.
In what follows, I focus on four passages in Acts regarding slavery and racism: the giving of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, especially to enslaved men and enslaved women (Acts 2); the ‘Ethiopian eunuch’ or the Nubian official (8:26–40); the Italian centurion Cornelius’ encounter with Peter (10:1–11:18); and a line from Paul's speech in Athens (17:26). The first three are narratives that Black interpreters frequently point to, and the fourth is a statement that Harriet Jacobs highlights as someone growing up enslaved in North Carolina and writing to expose the ills of slavery. As members of groups that have experienced slavery and discrimination, they appear to be conscious of dynamics in the Acts of the Apostles that White and majority-culture writers are not. I draw on interpreters of Scripture who identify themselves as Black, often in the first page or the first chapter of their writing. 7
Pentecost: The Holy Spirit Falls on Jewish People from Many Nations
In Acts, Jesus’ followers have been waiting and wondering (Acts 1:4). Black British theologian Selina Stone describes this group of disciples as ‘tarrying for the Holy Spirit’. 8 On the day of Pentecost, there comes from heaven ‘a sound like the rush of a violent wind’, tongues of fire rest on each of them, and ‘all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability’. 9
No longer is it only Bezalel, Samson, David, or Jesus who receive the Holy Spirit. 10 The Spirit falls on and fills each person present: apostles, women, and Jesus’ mother and brothers who continued to gather waiting after Jesus ascended (Acts 1:14). As African American theologian Luke A. Powery writes, God brings breath and wind and spirit to all flesh, to every human being, ‘regardless of raced status’. 11 Wind and breath bring life. This runs counter to the experience of Eric Garner, the Black American man who called out, ‘I can’t breathe’, as he choked to death at the hands of a White police officer. It runs counter to the experience of George Floyd, who called out ‘I can’t breathe’ at least twenty-seven times while a police officer kneeled on him, killing him. Violence against people classed as part of a lesser race runs against life, and it runs against the Spirit of God. For Powery, Pentecost moves against any ideology that imagines a race of people that give life and take away life. Pointing to Peter's quotation from Joel in Acts 2:18, Powery continues: ‘Sons, daughters, young, old, and even the enslaved breathe from the Breath of God. In the Spirit, all can say, “We can breathe”.’ 12
Wind rushes in to give power. ‘Divine agency is the prelude to human agency’, Powery writes. God acts first to empower and bring about human action. The Spirit, God's breath, is a gift of power, following what Jesus has said (Acts 1:8) and in contrast to what the apostles imagine his post-resurrection power will look like when they ask, ‘Is this the time you will restore the kingdom to Israel’? (1:6) On Powery's account, it is ‘power to witness’ and to testify, a power to relate and engage across boundaries of race, ethnicity, and culture. 13 It is power to bring unity in diversity, something that those observers in Jerusalem mistook for drunkenness, as the Spirit fell on ‘all flesh, all bodies, not just a privileged few’. 14
Wind rushes in. In the words of Michael Jagessar, Caribbean British theologian, The wild, free, strange and wonderful wind-rush of the Spirit of God blew away the barriers and stirred a multi-ethnic group of people to begin ‘breathing together’ and to become all ‘fired up’ for the adventure of their lives. … Here is the wind-rush God reshaping and re-directing the Babel propensity towards homogenisation. With hurricane force wind and flaming tongues, God's resounding ‘yes’ to the diversities of identity, taste, style, culture, ideology and vision is loud and clear.
15
Wind rushes in on Pentecost to enable Jesus’ followers to speak to the wide Jewish diaspora in languages that they understand as they gather in Jerusalem from the four points of the compass (Acts 2:5–11). At this point, all are Jewish or have joined in Jewish practices. Wind rushes, and the Spirit is poured out, as Peter quotes from the Hebrew prophet Joel: 17In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. 18Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy. (Acts 2:17–18, quoting from Joel 2:28–29)
Prophecy from the Enslaved: How Translation as ‘Servants’ or ‘God's Servants’ has Distracted Attention from Promises to Enslaved Men and Women
A phrase from Peter's speech stands out: Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy. (Acts 2:18, NRSVUE) And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. (KJV 1611, emphasis mine)
But what if my ancestors had heard from the Bible that the Holy Spirit would be poured out on enslaved people? What if they had heard a rendering of Acts 2 that did not skate over the audacious promise God made about enslaved women and enslaved men? They would have to imagine the Black folks they enslaved as human beings whom God planned to fill with the Spirit, enabling them to prophesy and speak words from God. Would that have made a difference as they did what enslavers typically did, ordering the enslaved around, separating children from parents, selling them like property, treating them without honour, and beating, abusing, and raping them? Would it have been so easy for the Bittings, and for generations of English speakers, to think that God could allow them to own other human beings and do with them what they like?
The King James Version's use of ‘servants’ and ‘handmaidens’ to translate the Greek doulous and doulas might come out of seeing enslavement in Roman times as different from enslavement practised by Britain and America in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. So long as there was a possibility for someone to buy their freedom or own property, a translator might express this condition as servitude, as an introduction to the 2001 English Standard Version explains. 17 It is true that manumission was more frequent under the Roman Empire during the time Acts depicts, but this alone does not justify translating these words as ‘servants’, ‘handmaidens’, or ‘bondservants’. Enslaved persons in the Roman Empire, like enslaved persons in the modern Atlantic, experienced violence, domination, and alienation from their parents and their children. In both times and places, these human beings resisted their domination and found ways to exercise their agency. But these were not mere servants. These girls, boys, women, and men were enslaved. 18
It was a momentous shift when modern English versions of the Bible translated those who receive God's Spirit as ‘slaves’—first in the Jerusalem Bible of 1966, commonly used in English-speaking Roman Catholic settings, and then in the New Revised Standard Version of 1989, often used in mainline Protestant denominations. 19 This decision to say that God would pour out the Spirit on ‘my slaves, both men and women’ (JB) is a way of affirming that even though Greco-Roman slavery and slavery under Britain and the United States are different, Peter is still speaking about enslaved people. There are degrees and kinds of slavery, but they still involve the subjugation and control of some human beings by other human beings. And it is this that Joel and Paul are speaking about. The Spirit falls on all kinds of people, in each of the significant typologies of people that Joel and Peter would have recognised: male and female, old and young, enslaved men and enslaved women. And against John Calvin, God does not call them ‘my slaves’ only because they are spiritually enslaved, but God calls them ‘my slaves’ because God is close to these enslaved women and enslaved men. These are my people, God promises. 20 The implications are enormous: those enslaved by other human beings will receive the fullness of God's personal presence and speak God's words.
To take a step further in this emancipatory direction and to signal the humanity and agency of those who are ‘enslaved’ rather than ‘slaves’, it is better to translate a passage like this, in a form that better aligns with the Greek word order:
21
Even upon my enslaved men and my enslaved women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy. (Acts 2:18, my translation)
Wind rushes in, restoring life where crops have failed and creation has been damaged. The Spirit flows even on those whom the law does not consider persons in British and American dominions. Even these, especially these, will prophesy. They will speak truth given from God. They will speak truth against the torturers, the rapists, and the dividers of families that they are forced to serve. The enslaved woman in Philippi in Acts 16 leads the way in speaking truth from God. 25 Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Phillis Wheatley, and a host of women and men living in slavery will speak God's truth, denouncing injustice.
The ‘Ethiopian Eunuch’ or the Nubian Official: A Black Jewish Man Brings the Message of Jesus Back to Africa
In chapter 8 of Acts, the focus shifts from Jerusalem to a wild and dangerous place: the desert road to Gaza in the midday heat (8:26–40). An angel, God's messenger, tells the apostle Philip to ‘rise up’ and go to this place. On the road, Philip meets someone who is on the fringes of those who could be considered Jewish and within God's people. Riding in a chariot is an Ethiopian eunuch, a castrated Black man, the treasury minister to the Kandak’a, the queen of the Ethiopians. 26 He has been in Jerusalem where he had come to worship, and he is reading from the prophet Isaiah.
Black British theologian Anthony Reddie asks his readers, whom do you relate to? He says that in a White context, it is easy to see Philip as one of us. But what if the Ethiopian is one of us? Here is a well-educated Black person of high standing living long before the European colonisation of Africa. What is clear here is that Black people do not have to be disadvantaged. 27 This same scene is Selina Stone's starting point for understanding Christian faith and spirituality for Black people. 28
God's Spirit initiates an encounter between Philip and the Ethiopian in this desert place, telling Philip to approach the chariot. As he runs and hears the Ethiopian reading aloud, he asks the Ethiopian if he understands what he is reading. The Ethiopian responds that he needs a guide, inviting Philip to sit beside him. The passage from Isa. 53:7–8 is about a lamb led to a slaughter, silent and humiliated, and one to whom justice was denied. Black American biblical scholar Esau McCaulley explains that this lamb, ‘the one who suffers to reconcile us, is none other than Jesus the Messiah who is alive and reigning with God on high’. 29 In McCaulley's telling, the Ethiopian eunuch is an African who has a ‘powerful encounter with the cross’. 30 As someone castrated to serve a queen, he probably feels he has suffered injustice. He hears about God who also suffers injustice. 31 This official asks, ‘Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptised!’ (8:36)
Many interpret the Ethiopian official as the first Gentile who trusts in Jesus in Acts. 32 This could lead to the conclusion that the author of Acts is implicitly racist: why would the Ethiopian receive only brief treatment (8:26–40) when the Italian centurion Cornelius receives such lengthy treatment (10:1–11:18)? Black American biblical scholar Love Lazarus Sechrest points a way out of this conundrum. She argues that Luke is not racist. Many commentators are racist. They cannot bring themselves to think that a Black African could be Jewish. Yet it is clear that the Ethiopian has ‘come to Jerusalem to worship’ (8:27) and on his way home, he is reading from Isaiah. 33
Black Christianity begins here. Gayraud Wilmore, African American theologian, minister, and civil rights figure, describes the Ethiopian official as the one who first brought the good news of Jesus to Black Africans. Ages before European-led missionary work in Africa, this queer Black man brings back the message of Jesus. 34 Drawing on ancient historian Pliny, Wilmore connects this official with the city of Meroë in Nubia and to the ‘Candace’—which is not the proper name of the Queen but a title passed down for many generations. 35 Because the official is connected to Candace or the Kandak’a, this means that the official does not come from the kingdom of Aksum in Ethiopia but from Meroë in Nubia in present-day Sudan. The so-called Ethiopian eunuch is in fact a Nubian official, a Black African person. 36
Cornelius and Peter: The Holy Spirit Falls on the Nations
The Holy Spirit has fallen on Jewish people from all around the known world, and the Spirit goes further in the encounter of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10–11.
There is an Italian military commander, a centurion named Cornelius who has already been seeking God. God's messenger, an angel, appears to him in a vision, telling him to send for a man named Simon Peter. He sends his own messengers, two belonging to his household and a soldier. Cornelius belongs to the old order, thinking himself a master and an enslaver, and he sends out the enslaved to seek the new order, Jennings writes. 37 At the same time, Peter the Jewish apostle sees a vision and hears a voice. When the men arrive, Peter hears from the Spirit, ‘Rise up, go down, and go with them without hesitation, for I have sent them’ (10:20, my translation). Travelling to Cornelius's house, Cornelius meets them, falling on his feet and worshipping Peter, but Peter says, ‘Rise up; I too am a man’ (10:26, my translation). Each has been made to rise, to be resurrected; Peter from resistance to recognising God's new work among the nations and Cornelius from his misguided worship of Peter.
Cornelius tells Peter that he and everyone with them are ready to listen to what ‘the Lord’ has commanded him to say. This minister of the Roman emperor recognises a lord speaking through Peter. Peter attempts to make sense of the situation. He begins by saying: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every people anyone who fears him and practices righteousness is acceptable to him’ (10:34–35).
But even as Peter is speaking, the Spirit falls on everyone who hears. There is no time to wait for Cornelius and his household to speak their commitment to Jesus. God acts ahead of what Peter and his companions expect. Spirit falls, wind rushes in, and these Gentiles speak in tongues about the greatness of God. Peter has to act: ‘Can anyone withhold the water for baptising these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we [circumcised believers] have?’ (10:47) Baptising them, Peter remains for a few days, and he is accused of eating with these Gentiles (10:48; 11:3).
Sechrest describes this as a Gentile Pentecost: the Holy Spirit falls on people from beyond Israel, signalling that someone from any nation can be filled with the empowering presence of God. 38 For Jennings, this is an unexpected moment of listening: Cornelius and his Gentile household have said they are ready to listen (10:33), but what happens is that circumcised Jewish people have ended up listening to these Gentiles speaking in tongues. What they have heard is that while Israel is ‘the unrepeatable exception that no other people or nation may claim in time or space or place’, God is calling them as Jewish people to enter into the life, language, and maybe even the meals, of people of any nation. 39
Paul to the Athenians: From One, God Made Every Nation
Peter's affirmation that members of every nation are accepted by God echoes what Paul says in Athens a few chapters later, in Acts 17. Harriet Jacobs, who writes about her struggles growing up in slavery and seeking freedom for herself and her children, claims Paul's assertion as her own: God ‘made of one blood all nations of men’ (17:26, KJV). 40
Jacobs comes from the coastal town of Everton in the state of North Carolina, the same state where my Bitting ancestors enslaved and traded human beings. She offers a powerful and candid picture of living under slavery, and she tells the story of her years of struggle to seek freedom for herself, her son, and her daughter. She points out the contradictions and ironies of Christians involved in slavery.
Here, Jacobs draws from Acts. Paul has come to Athens, this famous city from the ancient world. He is taken aback by what he sees, the idols, the images of false gods. Speaking at the Areopagus, he expands on an altar inscription he has seen, ‘to an unknown God’ (17:23), describing one God who made the world, who is Lord of heaven and earth, who is not made by human beings, giving life to everything. He says that this God has appointed a man to judge the earth, a man that he has raised from the dead. In describing this one God, Paul says God ‘made out of one’ all nations or peoples to inhabit the whole earth.
It is this that Jacobs uses against her persecutors and the persecutors of her people: ‘They seem to satisfy their consciences with the doctrine that God created the Africans to be slaves. What a libel upon the heavenly Father, who “made of one blood all nations of men!”’ 41 For someone brought low by claims that race matters, that there are many races arranged in a hierarchy, that Whites are destined to be owners of Blacks, this is good news, taken from the very Bibles that her oppressors and her so-called masters read. Following from Peter's affirmation that God shows no partiality, and that God accepts members of every nation, Jacobs as someone freed from slavery quotes with confidence Paul's claim that human beings are all descended from one ancestor. We are all family.
There is more to think through about slavery in Acts, and this treatment is just a beginning. There is Rhoda, the enslaved girl or woman in the believing household of Mary the mother of John Mark, who speaks truth in the face of those who think she is crazy (12:15). Other followers of Jesus may also keep people enslaved, like Cornelius (10:48) and Lydia (16:15). 42 There is also ‘Simeon who is called the black man’ in Act 13:1, Cain Hope Felder's way of designating this man who stands among prophets and teachers from many backgrounds in the church at Antioch, where ‘the disciples were first called “Christians”’ (11:26). 43 There are other characters who might have started life enslaved. However, the enquiry stops with these four passages, ones that Black readers highlight as speaking significantly against slavery and White supremacy.
Acts Against Enslavement
The case against slavery is less straightforward in books of the Bible other than Acts. What about Abraham and Sarah's treatment of Hagar (Gen. 16, 21)? Why do Pauline epistles tell the enslaved to obey their earthly masters as they obey Christ (Eph. 6:5)?
But Acts is different. Black interpreters highlight the Acts of the Apostles to make a case against enslavement and White supremacy. In Acts 2, at Pentecost, God's wind rushes in, God's Spirit falls, on people of every ethnicity and language, all Jewish at this point in Acts. Positively, this means that every human being can experience the filling of God's Spirit, uplifting the value and dignity of each person. Negatively, this means that there is no excuse for violence and the denial of breath (spirit) carried out by enslavers and racist police. Pentecost is opposed to the idea of race. It runs counter to the movement of the Holy Spirit to say that there are basic kinds of human beings that are arranged in a hierarchy. Pentecost's multicultural picture of worship indicates that no one from any background should be kept from gathering for worship, in contrast to the frequent practice in American slavery of banning the enslaved from worship gatherings.
At Pentecost, God also speaks through enslaved men and enslaved women as prophets. Positively, this means that enslaved people can be God's ministers and mouthpieces who recall what God has done and said, who name the wrong that is being done, and who point to the kingdom of God. Negatively, this means that no one should be excluded from acting as God's minister. To do so is to deny the gift and promise of God.
In Acts 8, the story of the Ethiopian eunuch shows that a Black African person counts fully as a baptised believer in Jesus. This Black person takes part in Jewish worship, he reads Scripture, and when he asks, Philip baptises him. Positively, this means that Black people and people of all ethnicities can read the Bible for themselves and be baptised. Negatively, this means that no Black person and no human being should be kept from reading Scripture or acquiring the tools to read, in contrast to bans on teaching reading to the enslaved in the United States. 44 Nor should Black people be kept from baptism.
In Acts 10, the Spirit falls on the Italian centurion Cornelius and his household ahead of what the Jewish apostle Peter expects. Positively, God is present with people of all backgrounds, ethnicities, and codes of cleanliness. Negatively, God shows no partiality, and God is opposed to partiality based on race or worship practices. White people are not more favoured in God's economy than Black people, and Black Christian codes and practices are no less holy than White Christian codes and practices. And in Acts 17, God has made of one blood all nations of human beings. Positively, those who enslave and those who are enslaved are of one family.
A colleague asked if slavery can still continue given what Acts affirmed. The Spirit can fill the enslaved, they can prophesy, Black Africans can read the Bible and be baptised, and enslaved and enslavers can all be part of a human family. Like when the Hippocratic Oath (7.ii) affirms medical care for free and enslaved but does not oppose the institution of slavery, Acts likewise does not oppose the institution of slavery. As later generations of Southerners argued, according to Eugene D. and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, there can be a benevolent slavery where enslavers take care of the enslaved, and this ‘Christian slavery’ is better than being a peasant or a wage worker. 45 This is how the objection runs.
This objection ignores the consistently vicious character of Atlantic slavery, both in the United States and in the British Caribbean. Someone who has lived through enslavement speaks better than me. Harriet Jacobs complains about ‘doctors of Divinity’, theologians like me, who visit a slave master, are shown the better quarters of the favoured enslaved people, and then write a favourable account of slavery, saying these people don’t want to be freed. She writes, What does he know of the half-starved wretches toiling from dawn till dark on the plantations? of mothers shrieking for their children, torn from their arms by slave traders? of young girls dragged down into moral filth? of pools of blood around the whipping post? of hounds trained to tear human flesh? of men screwed into cotton gins to die? The slaveholder showed him none of these things, and the slaves dared not tell of them if he had asked them.
46
From the perspective of the Black people and the children of the enslaved from whom I draw this case, the Acts of the Apostles gives hope—hope that God fills the mistreated, the abused, the trafficked, and elevates them to kinship and intimacy with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Descended from Enslavers
Acts provides an astounding testimony of human beings of different nationalities and ethnicities coming together in Christ, brought together by the Spirit. Why then do White Christians so often ignore this testimony? Why did Christians practise slavery for centuries and think they were right? Why have White Christians carried on with practices that extend the violence, domination, division, and legal restrictions of slavery? Why have we practised segregation, kept Black people from getting mortgages, prevented Black voting and participation in politics, and carried out lynching and violent policing against Black people, all the while thinking we were right?
I write this as someone descended from enslavers. In a family where many stories are told and passed down, one was not spoken of. When my grandfather died, I received a photocopy of a handwritten document by Anna Bitting Whitaker. Anna was my great-great-grandmother on my father's side, and the piece bears the title ‘Life on the Plantation near Huntsville, North Carolina’. Within a bucolic picture of life as a young girl on a plantation, she writes: ‘I cannot now remember the number of horses, mules, nor the number of slaves. There were a great many of both’. She recalls waking up one morning to a yard full of soldiers, Union soldiers from the North, who after two days of eating and taking what they could, burned the quarters of the enslaved people and ‘gave the slaves their freedom promising them 40 dollars and a mule. Only a few of the slaves remained and where the others went to, nobody knows’. 52
That there were a great many enslaved people—and that in her writing, she categorised enslaved people with horses and mules as species to be numbered—horrified me and my family members when we discovered this. As my siblings and parents looked into Joseph Bitting and discovered the large extent of his enslaving and slave trading, my sense of outrage grew.
An 1860 US Census Slave Schedule shows her father, Joseph Anthony Bitting, as holding seventy-five enslaved persons. They are listed by age, sex, and colour. No names are given. They range from age 50 to 2 months, and forty-five of them are under eighteen. The one who claimed to own them lived to be 80. It is clear that these girls, boys, women, and men tended to die young. 53 Joseph A. Bitting enslaved people on a larger scale than almost anyone in Yadkin County, not far from present-day Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Other evidence shows that Joseph Bitting was not only an enslaver but a trader of enslaved people, one of just a few in the county. His father John L. Bitting also enslaved people in neighbouring Stokes County. 54
Anna Bitting Whitaker says that her father Joseph was not a member of a church when he was married, though his parents were Lutherans. Her mother Louisa was a Moravian. The parents sent Anna and siblings to a Baptist Sunday school. Though Joseph the enslaver may not have been a regular churchgoer, this was a highly Christianised culture, and Quakers and Methodists were also common in Yadkin County. These churches were riven by debate: Quakers opposed slavery among their members, and disputes over slavery split Methodists and then Baptists into Southern and Northern churches in the 1840s. 55 But enslaving continued in Yadkin County. While the enslaved population was smaller than in coastal North Carolina, there were still more than 1,400 enslaved persons in the county in 1860. 56 How could so many who worshipped regularly, believed in Jesus Christ, and claimed to receive the Holy Spirit, keep women and men, boys and girls as chattel and as property? How could this be?
As I woke up to the concrete proof that I was descended from enslavers of Black people, I was deeply troubled. I had the opportunity to visit Yadkin County, North Carolina, and to see the area where we believe the Bitting plantation sat. With family members, I stood beside the Yadkin River at Shallow Ford, and I drove through the lands where men and women, free and enslaved, farmed. I visited Joseph Bitting's grave, a large and prominent stone monument that indicated the wealth that he continued to hold onto at his death. I was deeply saddened by how this beautiful part of God's creation was marred by such abuse of fellow human beings. As I turned to read Harriet Jacobs to sit with an enslaved person's view of slavery, my sense of horror at what my ancestors did grew. I felt a burden and a weight, the weight of wrongdoing, of damage, of desecration of so many children of God. I began talking regularly with family members about how to respond. We read and discussed authors who would give us an insight into slavery, its legacy, and our response.
A friend asked me if I am guilty for what my ancestors did. I am not guilty, but I carry on their inheritance. While I believe there was no significant financial inheritance passed on from my ancestors who practised slavery, I do know that members of each generation since the enslavers made sure the next generation had a university education to pursue, career opportunities, and a house to live in and own, all ensured by the cultural and legal privileges passed from one generation of White Americans to the next. 57 I have inherited these privileges. They are privileges that many Black Americans have not had in the years since the end of slavery due to years of barriers to education, barriers to home ownership, barriers to careers, barriers to wealth creation, and barriers to political participation. 58 As I acknowledge that I am descended from these enslavers, I acknowledge that slavery and White supremacy are not just issues for the descendants of the enslaved to take up. The legacy of slavery is my issue too.
Repenting of Slavery, Dwelling in the World of Acts
My ancestors enslaved Black people. Many others are tied to communities, institutions, churches, and nations who benefitted from slavery. What are we to do? In the spirit of this article, I close by exploring how to respond to the legacy of slavery by imagining ourselves within the Book of Acts. Acts portrays life change in response to God's initiative in sending the Holy Spirit like wind and like fire. I suggest ways to begin responding, knowing that readers will perceive movements of the Spirit that I do not.
‘Repent’: as people gather in surprise at the Holy Spirit's arrival and listen to Peter in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, they ask what they should do. Peter responds: ‘Repent and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 2:38). Repentance is a turning away from something and toward something else. It is a turning away from falsehood and toward truth, away from false worship and toward true worship, away from the devil and toward the living God. Peter quotes from Joel, and Joel's wider picture draws attention to the heart before a gracious God. For Joel, the repentance God desires is to ‘rend your hearts and not your clothing’, confident that the L
If repentance is turning away from falsehood, for those like me who inherit the legacy of slavery, it involves recognising the lies that enslaving depended on. It involves turning toward the truth, listening to the stories of those who endured slavery. Repentance implies turning from the falsehood of White supremacy and toward the reality of the wind-rush God who fills people of every culture and skin colour with the Spirit of power and joy. Where appropriate, repentance involves apology. It also involves recognising the voices of the enslaved and their descendants to understand the truth they hold. This repentance goes hand-in-hand with changes in what we teach and what we read, with museums, research centres, books, films, podcasts, and more that keep the stories of the enslaved—and the sinful stories of the enslavers—alive so that we can recognise falsehood and turn toward the truth. As an example, Laura Trevelyan and her family recognised that their ancestors had benefitted from enslaving Black people in Grenada. They listened to those people's descendants who encouraged them to offer an apology, and they gave money to promote education in Grenada. 59 These actions are initial steps that fit with the Caribbean Community's Ten-Point Reparation Plan, which calls for apologies from ex-colonial governments, the establishment of cultural institutions, knowledge exchange, and more. 60
Recognising Black prophets and educators is the second step Acts invites. At Pentecost Peter draws on Joel to say that God declares, ‘even upon my enslaved men and my enslaved women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy’ (Acts 2:18, my translation). Here we are offered the gift of prophecy from those who are enslaved and their descendants. When we hear that the Nubian official, the Ethiopian eunuch, is reading the prophet Isaiah and asks Philip to guide him, we have the chance to recognise not only the Black literacy forbidden by the enslavers. Philip does not accompany the Nubian official on his journey. Instead, this man who receives the good news of Jesus returns to Nubia equipped to announce the good news himself—equipped even before the Apostle Paul is—and not only equipped but ‘rejoicing’ (8:39). This Nubian is the first in a line of Black preachers and educators. God's promise at Pentecost invites us to receive prophecy from the enslaved and their descendants, to accept God's word from Black women and men or else to find ourselves having turned away from God. The story of the Nubian official readies us to be educated by scholars who are Black.
Promises from Pentecost and the account of the Nubian official means that in our churches, in our theological education, and in our reading, we are invited to receive prophetic challenge and joyful words from Black preachers and ministers, Black writers and scholars, and Black lecturers and professors. As a White theologian, this prompts me to turn away from an education focused on White authors to read more Black authors and teach their texts. In Britain, colleagues at the Queen's Foundation in Birmingham lead the way in teaching, writing, and speaking Black theology, and if others do the same, they will respond to the promise of hearing from God's Spirit. The Society for the Study of Christian Ethics is considering how there can be more room for Black and global majority heritage voices to lead, teach, and be mentored for vocations as theological educators.
Entering one another's houses and sharing food is the third step that Acts invites. In the encounter between Jewish Peter and Gentile Cornelius (Acts 10–11), each takes steps to invite the other and to enter into the other's space—even if some of those steps are halting, misguided, or uncertain. Their encounter begins with divine prompting on both sides: Cornelius sees an angel, and Peter sees a vision and hears a voice. Though Peter initially resists, he responds to an invitation from those Cornelius sends, first by inviting them into the home where he is staying. As Peter enters Cornelius’ house, Cornelius starts to fall down and worship, before Peter tells him he too is just a man. Entering further, Peter speaks and the Holy Spirit falls, and Cornelius and his household ask Peter to stay as a guest for some days. Back in Jerusalem, the believers accuse Peter of eating with these Gentiles. Now, Peter may have eaten with them, but he may have only stayed with them and continued to keep kosher. 61 Regardless, Peter and Cornelius come from two divided cultures, but God brings them together. While at one level the coming together of Jews and Gentiles is the unique move in the history of God's covenant with humanity, at another level it offers a window into Spirit-guided friendship between divided groups.
Inviting one another into homes and sharing food as friends and fellow believers is an important step among White and Black people. It is perhaps all too rare in settings where slavery has taken place. When this kind of sharing and friendship happens, it is less likely to end up on a website or a radio broadcast. These are ordinary, small stories of a conversation or a bring-and-share meal, but these are signs of the falling of the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:44). Growing fellowship also happens in churches where Black and White people worship together and share in ministry, like in Strong Tower Church in Nashville, Tennessee.
Sharing wealth as one family is a fourth step that Acts points to. Harriet Jacobs’ favourite line from Paul in Athens, God ‘made of one blood all nations of men’ (Acts 17:26, KJV), says that we are one family and one humanity. One way that the Spirit-filled people of God in Acts share is with their money. At Pentecost, the new believers share their possessions, and others sell what they own to meet the needs of the community (2:45; 4:32–5:11). New Christians in Antioch send money to believers in Jerusalem in response to a prophecy of a famine (11:27–30).
When as churches, mission organisations, or families, we have wealth that comes from slavery, we are offered the freedom of giving that wealth up and sharing it, especially to benefit those affected by slavery. In the community that Acts describes as travelling on ‘the Way’ (9:2; 18:25–26; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22), money is given by God not to keep but to share to meet needs. Indeed, in Acts we have a skilled finance minister who is Black—the Nubian official! Questions about the legacy of slavery prompt us to give up White control of finances, letting the descendants of the enslaved manage the money and make decisions about how to use it. The Anglican mission agency United Society Partners in the Gospel (USPG) is a case study in institutional repentance. Having benefitted from enslaved labour in Barbados, USPG has committed funds to work with the Codrington Trust to memorialise this history, enable continuing tenants to become landowners, build infrastructure, and seek spiritual repair. 62 In North Carolina, a charitable foundation set up by my ancestor Anna Bitting Whitaker's sister has made a shift. Founded with money gained from slavery and tobacco to promote health for low-income people, the Kate Bitting Reynolds Foundation is now led by Black medical doctor Laura Gerald and directed toward promoting health in ways that seek to repair racial inequity. 63
These are four steps that dwelling in the world of Acts suggests. They point back to the first: that we are called to ‘do deeds consistent with repentance’ (Acts 26:20), to act in ways that flow out of hearts that are broken, lives that turn away from sin and receive the filling and the empowering of God's Spirit. This perspective causes us not to be content with programmes, projects, and websites, but to be ready to be turned around and changed by God. I close with a question from my colleague Joe Smith: what is going on in us that causes us to enslave? This is a question that keeps us from placing our ancestors’ wrongs at arms lengths and invites us to recognise tendencies to use and enslave others here and now. It invites us to turn and repent, to be healed of desires to dominate others, and as Rhiannon Giddens sings, to ‘march down freedom highway’. 64
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the contributions of student research assistants Lucy Barfield and Elisabeth Moss; to students at Cardiff University in modules where I worked through early versions of this work; for conversation with David Doddington, Benjamin Paulus, April-Louise Pennant, and Andrew Williams; for discussions with family members, Susan West, Betsy Heimburger, Beth and Doug Heimburger, and Lizzie Heimburger; for a North Carolina tour from Dem Ward; for comments on drafts from Doug Heimburger and Lizzie Heimburger; for responses to presentations from Guy Bradley, Brian Brock, Simon Brodbeck, Anthony Reddie, Stephen Roberts, Amanda Russell-Jones, Iwan Russell-Jones, Joe Smith, and Laurence Totelin; for comments from two anonymous reviewers; and to the sisters of Tymawr Convent for space to write.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
