Pacific Journal VOL. 2 2007 Published by Fresno Pacific University The Church Confronts Slavery, Race and Gender Editor Rod Janzen Associate Editors W. Marshall Johnston Ruth Toews Heinrichs Roberta Mason David Alan Thompson Honora Howell Chapman Book Review Editor Richard Rawls Copy Editor Wayne Steffen Editorial Board Doreen Ewert Indiana University Abraham Friesen UC Santa Barbara Donald Goertzen UC Berkeley, International Studies Program, Philippines Elfrieda Hiebert UC Berkeley Jane Middleton CSU Fresno Lisa Sideris Indiana University Peng Wen Fresno Paciic University Pacific Journal Manual Style Purpose The Paciic Journal follows The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003). Authors should use endnotes, and they should be numbered consecutively throughout the manuscript, using superscript, and produced in double-spaced format on separate pages following the text. Except for quotations as necessary, manuscripts should be written in English, although exceptional articles in other languages may be considered. Manuscripts should be submitted in two double-spaced copies. All manuscripts should also be submitted on computer disc. Authors alone are responsible for the content of their articles and will be asked, prior to publication, to certify that these present original work not published elsewhere. The Paciic Journal accepts and encourages submissions from scholars at Fresno Paciic University and other colleges and universities, as they relate to each issue’s theme. Each submitted manuscript will be double peerreviewed, with at least one of the assessments done by someone not on the FPU faculty. Subscriptions are $10 per year. Bulk mailings are also available as quantities allow. Paciic Journal occupies a special niche in the world of academic journals. Although there are a number of peer-reviewed journals associated with prestigious Christian colleges and universities, few provide an opportunity for Christian faculty to publish scholarly works in their academic ields, enlarging the knowledge base without a mandatory integration of faith and scholarship. Manuscript submission The Paciic Journal is published annually by Fresno Paciic University. To submit articles, request a subscription or bulk mailing, and any other oficial correspondence, contact Rod Janzen, Fresno Paciic University, 1717 S. Chestnut Ave., Fresno, CA 93702; email rajanzen@fresno.edu; telephone 559-453-2210. The university website is fresno.edu. Books for review should be sent to Richard Rawls; mail Hiebert Library, Fresno Paciic University, 1717 S. Chestnut Ave., Fresno, CA 93702; email rrawls@fresno.edu; telephone 559-453-2219. Table of Contents Articles SCOTT KEY The Tragedy of Slavery: The Church’s Response .................................................... 1 W. MARSHALL JOHNSTON Response to Scott Key’s “The Tragedy of Slavery”............................................. 23 ZENEBE ABEBE The Two Faces of Racism— Undeserved Discrimination and Undeserved Privilege ............................................ 29 HONORA HOWELL CHAPMAN Response to Zenebe Abebe’s “The Two Faces of Racism” .................................. 51 HOPE NISLY The Church and Women: Power, Participation, and Language in Christian Institutions ..................................................................... 57 VALERIE REMPEL Response to Hope Nisly’s “The Church and Women: Power, Language, and Institutions” ........................... 71 LARRY WARKENTIN What’s in a Name?.................................................................................................... 73 COVER Chris Janzen, New Woman, 2006. Oil on canvas. 72 x 65 in. (182.88 x 165.1 cm). Courtesy of Sarah Scherschligt. The painting questions the assumption that 21st century women have reached social equality with men. The woman pictured stands tall, moving forward with a bodily expression that suggests strength and boldness, but her fashionable dress, accessories and face conform to male ideals of beauty rather than personal comfort. Janzen’s art explores the conscious and subliminal implications of the American mass media visual landscape. He serves as faculty in studio art at Fresno Paciic University. Pacific Journal Reviews PAUL TOEWS LITERATURE REVIEW: RECENT TITLES IN RUSSIAN HISTORY ................ 93 DAVID REMNICK Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire ANNE APPLEBAUM Gulag: A History ORLANDO FIGES Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia ERNEST CARRERE On the Human Condition. Dominique Janicaud, translated by Eileen Brennan. ................................................ 97 JANITA RAWLS Focus Like a Laser Beam. Lisa Haneberg ........................................................................................................... 101 PAMELA D. JOHNSTON Fame, Money and Power: The Rise of Peisistratos and “Democratic” Tyranny at Athens. B. M. Lavelle ............................................................................................................ 103 RICHARD RAWLS The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. Bryan Ward-Perkins ................................................................................................. 107 From The Editor FROM THE EDITOR This second issue of Paciic Journal focuses attention on the church’s response to women, slavery and racism. Articles by Hope Nisly, Scott Key and Zenebe Abebe are responded to by Valerie Rempel, Marshall Johnston and Honora Chapman. We have also included Larry Warkentin’s analysis of the origins of the “Warkentin” surname, one of the names most commonly held by Mennonites of Dutch Low German background. This issue is completed by reviews of seven books. The general theme of our next issue (2008) is the environment. Rod Janzen Pacific Journal CONTRIBUTORS ZENEBE ABEBE HOPE NISLY Dean of Student Life, Psychology Fresno Paciic University Librarian, History Fresno Paciic University/ Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary ERNEST CARRERE Librarian, Philosophy and Theology Fresno Paciic University/ Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary HONORA HOWELL CHAPMAN Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures California State University, Fresno JANITA RAWLS Dean, School of Business Fresno Paciic University RICHARD RAWLS Director, Hiebert Library, History Fresno Paciic University VALERIE REMPEL PAMELA JOHNSTON History and Classics Fresno Paciic University W. MARSHALL JOHNSTON History and Classics Fresno Paciic University SCOTT KEY Education Fresno Paciic University History and Theology Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary PAUL TOEWS Director, Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies, History Fresno Paciic University LARRY WARKENTIN Music Fresno Paciic University Paciic Journal The Tragedy of Slavery The Tragedy of Slavery: The Church’s Response SCott KEy Slavery. The very word conjures up images of pain and suffering, of oppression and subjugation. Yet, prior to the eighteenth century, slavery was simply an accepted part of life for many cultures and civilizations throughout the world. The enslavement of human beings occurred for many reasons, from the punitive treatment of enemy populations conquered in war to discriminatory actions taken toward religious and political dissenters. Sometimes inherited class or ethnic distinctions automatically imposed slave status. Slavery took many forms, from the household slave system of ancient Greece to serfdom in the Russian Empire. Some forms allowed for measures of individual freedom. Often slavery provided the foundation for particular economic and political systems. While the forms of slavery are as diverse as there are cultures in the world, the legitimacy of the institution was seldom questioned historically. Yet today, most people who identify themselves as followers of Jesus believe that slavery is morally wrong and attribute the abolition of slavery to the work of the church. The church’s response parallels, in some ways, the history of Christianity. As the church’s story moved through the centuries, it became more complex as different groups emerged in different parts of the world. This article examines Western Christendom and explores the church’s connection and response to slavery in the “New World.” It begins as a uniied story, then splits into Protestant and Catholic narratives as the Reformation impacts European colonialism and, ultimately, the church’s response to slavery. Particular attention is paid to slavery in the United States. Slavery and the Early Church Jesus of Nazareth. Whether you see him as God the Son, a prophet or simply a wise teacher, his life altered human history. Jesus offered a new path to God and wanted his listeners to connect faith with their daily lives. Jesus expanded the understanding of who was human to include women and children, the poor and the sick, and all who had been marginalized. Since all human life was valuable, the actions of those who followed Jesus should relect this. Jesus called his followers to connect belief and action and, thereby, 1 Paciic Journal change the world. Those who follow Jesus should “in everything do to others as you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12). This new approach to life challenged religious and societal structures. While Jesus did not speciically address slavery, slaves were viewed as marginalized human beings, not simply property. This radical message was passed on to Jesus’s followers. The Apostle Paul proclaimed, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:23). Paul did not condemn slavery or call for its abolition. He, in fact, supported it by commanding, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ” (Ephesians 6:5). But, he also wanted to change the institution, commanding masters to, “stop threatening them... and...do the same to them” (Ephesians 6:9). Paul was in a dificult position. The growth of the Church was a threat to the Roman Empire. Its existence was uncertain. Paul needed to “prove that Christians were good citizens and upheld traditional Roman family values: namely, the submission of wives, children, and slaves.”1 His teachings do this, but they also include challenges to the social order by placing new expectations on husbands, fathers, and slaveowners. Masters could no longer do whatever they wanted with their slaves. Instead, Paul reminded, “You have the same Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality” (Ephesians 6:9). As the early church emerged, positions taken on slavery were affected by concern over survival and the expectation of Jesus’ imminent return. As time went on and the church grew, leaders such as Polycarp and Ignatius of Antioch spoke out against slavery and some Christians freed their slaves upon conversion.2 Many Christians found slavery repugnant to the dignity of the image of God in all. However, this voice changed when Christianity was established as Rome’s state religion. Most church leaders supported the institution of slavery, in part, because the Roman Empire was dependent upon slave labor. As the decades rolled past, the church became inseparable from the state as the church of martyrs aligned with an earthly government that used military might to maintain control. 3 Even though most church leaders were complicit on slavery, occasionally individuals spoke out and worked against it. For example, in a remote part of the Roman Empire, a Christian missionary named Patrick (who spent six years as a slave) declared slavery was sin and authored, “a letter excommunicating a British tyrant, Coroticus, who carried off some of Patrick’s 2 The Tragedy of Slavery converts into slavery.”4 The inluence of Patrick (and the church) helped end slavery in Ireland.5 After the fall of Rome, Church leaders continued to support slavery as a means to maintain societal order. Pope Gregory I (c. 600) wrote, “Slaves should be told . . . not [to] despise their masters and recognize that they are only slaves.”6 Slavery was an integral part of European economic and social life and Christians enslaved other Christians with little concern for the morality of the enterprise.7 This changed, however, in the eighth century, when the Muslim Moors raided coastal areas from the Mediterranean to Britain and carried large numbers of Christians to markets on the Barbary Coast. As a response, the church now spoke out against the speciic enslavement of Christians, a irst step toward an anti-slavery stance.8 But, Christians continued to enslave other peoples, for example, pagan Slavs, and Muslims.9 Slavery and the Medieval Church While the institutional church prohibited Christian slaves, some individuals pushed for the end of all slavery. In the seventh century, Bathilda (the Queen Regent of Burgundy and Neutria) campaigned to stop the slave trade and free all who found themselves in this condition. In the ninth century, Anskar (a Benedictine monk who established the irst church in Scandinavia) tried to halt the Viking slave trade. Venetian bishops worked to prevent the slave trade in the tenth century.10 While these efforts did not succeed, the prohibition on Christian slaves (and the subsequent conversion of most of Europe) led to the de facto end of slavery there. This prohibition was enforced by rulers and churchmen such as William the Conqueror, Wulfstan, and Anselm.11 During the early Medieval period, the church promoted pilgrimages to the Holy Lands (Palestine) as a means to practice penance (essential for the forgiveness of sins) and renew one’s faith. Between the eleventh and ifteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims risked disease, shipwreck, robbery, and enslavement. Simultaneously, Seljuk Turk Muslims gained control over the Holy Lands and threatened Europe. Church leaders including Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Innocent III called for Palestine’s liberation and the resulting Crusades led not only to the enslavement of captured Muslims, but Orthodox Christians as well! During this period, Christian Western Europe also began to expand trade into North Africa, where merchants encountered dark-skinned African slaves. Arab Muslims there had been involved in the slave trade for centuries with 3 Paciic Journal three to four million black African slaves sent to Mediterranean markets between 750-1500 AD.12 European traders saw a new way to make money and justiied this form of commerce by viewing black Africans as inferior beings. Thus, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the church was required to further develop its ideas on slavery. This task fell to Thomas Aquinas, who made the distinction between “just” slavery (where owners work for the beneit of the enslaved) and “unjust” slavery (where owners work for their own beneit) and concluded that “unjust” slavery was a sin.13 The church’s support of “just” slavery was closely tied to its support of “just” war, a concept earlier developed by Augustine. So, the church fell short of outright rejection of slavery, partly, due to the close connection between church and state. The threat from Muslims led the church to support the state through “just war” theology. While the church continued to forbid Christian slavery, the enslavement of non-believers was permissible. This position would prove crucial as the Muslim threat dissipated and European colonial expansion took center stage. Slavery in the Age of Colonization Africa has often been portrayed as a continent of “savages”14 but, in the early ifteenth century the Portuguese began their exploration of Western Africa and discovered advanced kingdoms with complex economic, political, and social systems.15 Instead of undeveloped cultures to conquer, the Portuguese found new customers for their luxury goods, such as textiles, jewelry, liquor (later tobacco), and iron.16 Africans traded gold, malaguetta pepper, textiles, ivory, and people for these luxury items.17 Prior to European contact, the majority of slaves were prisoners of war, criminals, or debtors. However, as the Portuguese and other nations began to bring black African slaves to Europe, a commercial slave trade was created with Africans procuring slaves from neighboring or rival tribes to sell to European buyers. Slavery was simply good business for everyone involved. The number of black African slaves in Europe rose slowly throughout the ifteenth century and these slaves were integrated into the nations’ economies. During this century, the church’s position lip-lopped as Nicholas V and Innocent III afirmed the right to enslave non-believers,18 but Eugene IV, Pius II, and Sixtus IV condemned slavery outright, especially among indigenous populations in the Americas.19 While the church continued its march toward the outright rejection of slavery, Portugal and Spain colonized the New World and needed cheap, stable labor to maximize the production 4 The Tragedy of Slavery and removal of raw materials and resources for the mother countries. Black Africans slaves were perfect because they were not Christian and were not considered civilized; they could be legitimately exploited. Another part of the moral justiication came through a changed understanding of “the curse of Ham” that ascribed servitude based on the darkness of one’s skin.20 This was the curse placed on Ham and his descendents after Ham viewed his father Noah in a drunken, naked state. This notion—the darker one’s skin, the more inferior—would be the key in the expansion of the African slave trade for centuries.21 Slavery in Central and South America By the end of the ifteenth century, the age of colonization moved into full gear with the voyages of Columbus. It was in colonization that the marriage between church and state found its fullest expression, and this marriage was perfected in Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella united their throne, defeated the Moors, expelled the Jews and seized their property, and placed a Spaniard in the Vatican. The expansion of their kingdom was not merely economic and political. It was interwoven with religion. They sent Columbus on a complex mission to seize territory, take wealth, and convert heathens. Columbus himself desired wealth and power and to extend the Kingdom of God. Thus, he claimed lands for Ferdinand, Isabella, and the church.22 This approach to the extension of Christianity was conquering and enslaving lands and inhabitants. The marriage between church and state gave rulers support for their imperial ambitions and gave the church a means to spread the Gospel. The idea of religious liberty and choice had yet to emerge. Rulers decided the religious faith of their subjects throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. This is largely how Christianity and Islam spread. This is how Christianity expanded in Central and South America. The subjugation of the New World was accomplished through soldiers and priests as inhabitants were stripped of their property and way of life in order to control and exploit colonial wealth. The enslavement of the indigenous populations in Central and South America was, at times, challenged by the church. In the irst decades of the sixteenth century, priests like Antonio Montesinos and Bartolome de Las Casas waged a campaign against the enslavement of native peoples and their efforts led Pope Paul III to tie slavery to Satan and threaten those involved with excommunication.23 But, the need for more laborers trumped this position and led the Portuguese and Spanish to import increasing numbers of 5 Paciic Journal black African slaves. By 1600, the Portuguese and Spanish had brought one million black African slaves to South America and the Caribbean to work on plantations and exploit the wealth of the region.24 If rulers refused to abolish slavery, the Catholic Church could do very little about it. Popes threatened excommunication with little effect. Church leaders did not alter the oficial rejection of slavery, but their limited political power meant they had to settle for ameliorating slave conditions. For example, in the New World, the Catholic Church conirmed certain slave rights (e.g., their material and spiritual welfare) and imposed obligations on slaveowners (i.e., limiting their control). The Code Noir of 1685 is one example. It laid out the rights and obligations of slaves and their owners. Slaves should be baptized, allowed to marry, and guaranteed basic food and clothing, but they could not sell sugar cane, carry weapons, gather together, hold ofice, or participate in lawsuits. Masters were to care for their slaves and treat them as human beings. The Black Code made a difference in the lives of slaves conirming that they were fully human in the eyes of God. This belief led to an accepted mixing of black, indigenous, and European populations—something that did not happen in North America. Slaves were also able to purchase their freedom and masters frequently granted manumission. This led to a large free black population that comprised the majority in Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Caribbean Columbia. When Spain tried to reestablish racial segregation and a slave plantation economy through the Code Negro Espanol in 1783 it proved impossible because too many free blacks had been integrated into society.25 The conditions and experiences of native and black African slaves in Central and South America were very different from their counterparts in North America. The Catholic Church declared that slavery was a condition of service not a matter of nature and worked to improve the conditions for black African slaves. This was not the Protestant approach. While this does not excuse the Catholic Church’s complicity in the enslavement of millions, it illustrates the limited power of religious leaders when opposed by political leaders. The best example comes from the Jesuit Republic of Paraguay. For 150 years (1609-1768), the Jesuits worked with the indigenous Guarani to create a remarkable civilization with thirty-plus communities. This was still an effort to Christianize and civilize, but the Jesuits used persuasion, not force, and tried to protect the Guarani from colonial oficials and planters. This experiment offended the elite. So, when Portugal and Spain re-divided 6 The Tragedy of Slavery South America in 1750, both countries attacked and destroyed the republic. The natives were enslaved and the Jesuits expelled.26 The Catholic Church was unrelenting in its oficial call to reject slavery. Individuals risked much and, at times, died to protect slaves. But slavery was simply too important to the economies of Portugal, Spain, and their colonies. The economic advantages of slavery outweighed its moral and religious repudiation. Would the same be true for slavery in North America? Slavery in British North America Many immigrant conquerors of North America came as religious refugees from Western Europe. As the seventeenth century unfolded, several small groups split away from state-supported Protestant churches and left Europe to practice their faith freely. Yet, the majority did not believe in religious freedom, per se. Rather, they continued to support a close connection between church and state. In all colonies, except Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, colonists established a “state” church and required that everyone conform to its doctrines and dictates. At times, government policy and colonial law conformed to religious beliefs. At other times, religious beliefs conformed to policy and law. In this regard, there was little difference between the Church of England in Virginia or the Presbyterian and Puritan (Congregationalist) denominations in other colonies. There was little debate about the legitimacy of slavery. As the colonists in Virginia quickly discovered, the cultivation of tobacco (which proved to be their salvation) required much labor. The colonists considered enslaving the indigenous population, but these peoples were tough, resourceful, deiant, and initially outnumbered them.27 They were also quickly decimated by diseases.28 The only answer was to import labor. The irst choice was indentured servants from Europe, but there were two disadvantages. First, they proved to be an ineficient and expensive labor force since colonists could only get a few years of service out of them before they were free of work obligations.29 Second, once free, the indentured servants became competition as they utilized their own skills to cultivate tobacco. In order to maintain their inancial status, large landowners needed a long-term, stable labor force. The answer was black African slaves.30 The irst load of twenty slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619 from the British West Indies.31 This was the beginning of the commercial slave trade to North America. Millions of black Africans died during forced marches from the interior to the west central African coast and during transatlantic 7 Paciic Journal crossings. The slave trade brought ten-ifteen million black Africans to the New World, with the majority ending up in Central and South America. Still more than ive hundred thousand black African slaves ended up in North America.32 Slaves became indispensable as the economies of the colonies developed and allowed southern colonists to create large plantations that sent vast quantities of cotton and tobacco back to Europe. The importance of slave labor created many dilemmas for the churches in the American colonies. On the one hand, black Africans were non-Christian and subject to the “curse of Ham.” Yet, it was the work of the churches to convert non-Christians. But, Christian tradition said conversion made one a free man (or woman). Evangelism thus might lead to a continuous turnover of slaves as those converted were replaced by newly imported pagan slaves. This would be impractical and expensive. What was the solution? Between 1660 and 1700, the slave codes of six colonies (i.e., Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Jersey, and New York) were altered to afirm that baptism was not a basis for freedom and that, regardless of religious status, slaves were required to serve for life (e.g., the Virginia slave codes of 1667 and 1682).33 The churches could now actively convert slaves and slaveowners did not have to fear the loss of their property. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the established churches seldom spoke out against slavery. In Virginia, the Church of England denied that there were any inconsistencies between Christianity and slavery. This meant that the church did not question the right of its members to hold slaves and made no effort to emancipate them.34 The same was true for the Presbyterians, where the right of members to hold slaves was not questioned and no oficial action towards emancipation was taken before 1774.35 While it was up to individual churches and ministers in the Puritan/Congregationalist congregations, here too there was little action taken against slavery. Even the non-established churches were silent. Lutherans initially opposed slavery but the need for labor led to a change in position where slavery was justiied because slaves gained moral and spiritual advantages (i.e., salvation).36 The Baptists and Methodists left action against slavery to individual ministers and members. In general, the positions of the churches expressed pragmatic concerns about the economic and social impact of emancipation.37 The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s focused on religious revival and conversion. Preachers like Stoddard, Frelinghuysan, and Ed8 The Tragedy of Slavery wards called individuals to “feel” and repent of their sin, then follow God. The message preached was one of spiritual, not social equality. Salvation was for all, but equality came only after death. This it nicely into the policies and laws of Colonial America. The call was to individual change, not societal transformation. Still, a nascent abolitionist movement began to grow as individual Christians saw the moral inconsistency between slavery and Christianity at the same time as the power of mainline Protestant churches declined.38 Earlier, two smaller denominations had openly advocated an end to slavery. In 1688, Quakers and Mennonites made the earliest pronouncement in Germantown, Pennsylvania.39 The Quakers were consistent in their oficial opposition to slavery and were one of the irst denominations to expel members for owning slaves. Other small denominations like the German Baptist Brethren (later the Church of the Brethren) also actively opposed slavery. These early voices had little impact, but the First Great Awakening increased this inluence as the connection between the established churches and colonial governments was questioned. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of this early opposition was that it demonstrated that not all Christians or churches supported and defended the institution. Anti-slavery Christians listened to the viewpoints of slaves like Olaudal Equiano (1789) who asked, “O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you?”40 If slaves had souls and needed to be saved, how could they be treated as less than human? While most churches did not change their oficial stance, the beliefs of individual Christians began to yield results. Slavery and the Church in England The period between 1750 and 1780 saw much promise for the abolition of slavery in the northern colonies, where there was less economic necessity for slave labor, as well as religious and moral critiques. While oficial church renouncement of slavery was slow, more and more Christians regarded slavery as inconsistent with Christianity. These individuals found allies with those inluenced by the Enlightenment ideals of equality for all.41 Another important inluence was the growing abolitionist movement in Great Britain. The colonies were very much inluenced by the “mother” country. In the late eighteenth century, British Christians organized various societies to alleviate social ills, including slavery. John Newton was a powerful voice. Remembered for writing “Amazing Grace,” he was an ex-slaver 9 Paciic Journal who, as an anti-slavery advocate and pastor, inluenced many members of the Clapham Sect, a group of prominent and wealthy evangelical Anglicans dedicated to social reform that included William Wilberforce.42 The call to abolish slavery quickened in the 1780s. As a member of parliament, Wilberforce repeatedly introduced pieces of legislation aimed at ending slavery in the British Empire. In 1788, Wilberforce introduced a twelve-point motion detailing the atrocities associated with the slave trade.43 While the motion was defeated, Wilberforce became convinced that the abolition of slavery was God’s will and thus, his calling. Wilberforce faced an uphill struggle. Powerful West Indies plantation owners, African merchants, ship owners and captains, and the British Crown were opposed, fearing the end of slavery might lead to a national recession and personal inancial ruin. There was some legitimacy in this argument. The slave trade was essential to commerce in the New World.44 Starting in the West Indies with sugar plantations and expanding into North America with tobacco, then cotton, the British used slaves for territorial expansion and inancial gain throughout the seventeenth century. The slave trade was a key component in Great Britain’s commercial and naval strength. When Britain gained a monopoly to supply slaves to Spanish colonies under a 1713 treaty, Britain became the leader in this form of commerce. At its peak in 1770 Britain transported ifty thousand slaves to the New World.45 Oddly, the general English public cared little about Africans. It was the social and political elite that ended slavery in Great Britain in 1772. During the American Revolution, the British government promised freedom to any slaves that fought on their side. This offer enticed thousands of slaves to do so and many pro-British slaves led to Canada in the early 1780s.46 But, enormous proits kept the slave trade going. In 1806, as the supporters saw the end coming, there was a rush to transport a inal forty thousand black Africans. After more than a decade of struggle, Wilberforce and his parliamentary allies abolished the slave trade in February 1807. The timing is crucial because a few months later the United States also outlawed the importation of slaves; however, the elimination of the primary source of transportation made the American ban as much a matter of practicality as morality. In Great Britain, once the slave trade was abolished, the general public began to support the abolition of slavery itself. In 1814, more than one million signatures (about 1/10 of the British population) were collected calling for the abolition of slavery throughout the Empire. The perseverance of Wilberforce, the rest of the Clapham Sect, and countless others won the 10 The Tragedy of Slavery day. In 1833, three days before Wilberforce died, the Emancipation Act was passed and slavery was abolished in the British Empire. The key abolitionists were Christians who believed that they had been called by God to destroy this evil.47 Slavery in the United States The experience of British Christians encouraged and motivated many American Christians. The early actions in Britain and the efforts of individual Christians placed pressure on many northern colonies to restrict slavery prior to the American Revolution. The culminating event was the banning of slavery by Rhode Island in 1774. As the colonies moved towards independence, the issue of slavery illustrated the frequent disconnect between belief and action. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed the ideals of human equality coming out of the Enlightenment. Prior to and immediately after the War of Independence, prominent leaders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson spoke out against the institution of slavery, even though they refused to free their own slaves.48 Others such as Noah Webster, William Livingston, and Benjamin Franklin were active in anti-slavery societies. Many in the northern colonies opposed the continuation of slavery, but independence did not bring its immediate abolition. The American Revolution was about democracy, political independence, and control over a growing economy. The English controlled the colonial economy through many rules and many taxes. The war changed those in control, but did not change the basic economic system. Wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few. The southern colonies depended on slave labor. The Constitutional Compromise of 1787, in which slavery was made legal and permanent, was necessary for the union to be achieved. The Constitution cemented the dehumanization of African slaves as they were considered only 3/5 of a person for the purpose of determining political representation and viewed as property. Yet, the struggle over the morality of slavery was apparent as limitations were placed on it. Slavery was forbidden, for example, in new territories through the Northwest Ordinances of 1787 and 1789. And, the importation of slaves was to end by 1808. Slavery was enshrined and protected in the original colonies, but would be prohibited as the new nation expanded.49 While there was a growing consensus on the immorality of slavery, there continued to be a gap between belief and action. Washington, for example, 11 Paciic Journal used the army to prevent slaves who had fought with the British from leaving the United States. Jefferson had a long-term relationship with a slave named Sally Hemings50 and was capable of great cruelty when punishing his slaves.51 Some northern churches, such as Methodists and Presbyterians, denounced slavery, but did little to enforce the position. This gap between belief and action, in part, can be explained by the commonly held view that Africans were sub-human creations with an uncivilized nature, intellectual inferiority, and darkness of complexion.52 In theory, slavery was wrong—it was an embarrassment and abomination—but, in practice, it continued to be acceptable because Africans were inferior. This belief even impacted the abolitionist movement. While northerners came to believe that slavery was wrong, this did not mean that they believed that black Africans should live freely amongst them. This mirrored the beliefs of British Christians who helped establish Sierra Leone for blacks discharged from military service as well as runaway slaves. In 1816, Rev. Robert Finley (a Presbyterian minister from New Jersey) founded the American Colonization Society to promote the emigration of free blacks to Africa. The rationale for these societies was that “blacks and whites” should not live together and that the removal of blacks would protect Americans. This view was held by James Monroe and James Madison, who helped establish the nation of Liberia where some ifteen thousand blacks emigrated to establish a nation for ex-slaves. Of course, the colonization approach did not win the day, but it highlights the problems associated with abolition. As the United States emerged, religion again took a backseat to economics. This was particularly pronounced in the new territories where the focus was on free (or cheap) land, not religion. The rejection of religion moved many, especially Methodists, to action. Between 1800 and 1840, Charles Finney and other leaders of this Second Great Awakening expected that transformed lives would lead to a changed society because the Gospel was meant to do more than just get people saved. It was also to clean up society.53 Inluenced by British Christians who had established reform groups to address societal ills in the 1780s, American Christians from various churches organized hundreds of societies that touched every aspect of American life. One of these causes was the abolition of slavery. Charles Finney proclaimed, “Let Christians of all denominations meekly but irmly come forth, and pronounce their verdict . . . and there would not be a shackled slave, nor a bristling, cruel slave driver in this land.”54 As the 1830s progressed, the great revival and the anti-slavery movement at times became one and the same in the northern states as slavery was declared to be sin. “Sin could not 12 The Tragedy of Slavery be solved by political compromise or sociological reform . . . it required repentance . . . otherwise America would be punished by God.”55 Abolitionists established newspapers and distributed pamphlets to persuade slaveowners to repent and free their slaves. While northern abolitionists had little effect on the South, anti-slavery societies helped change the northern churches’ positions on slavery. The hope was that if the churches saw the truth they would encourage and, ultimately, require members to give up slavery. Tensions within denominations increased in the 1830s and 1840s, leading to several divisions that would ultimately mirror the split in the Union. For example, the Baptist movement was split into two large factions between 1841 and 1844 as southern members formed the Southern Baptist Convention. The Methodist Episcopal Church divided in 1844 when anti-slave clergy and laity formed the Wesleyan Methodist Church.56 In the northern states, some churches became strong advocates for abolition. But, there was very little movement by southern churches.57 Early opposition to slavery on moral and religious grounds gave way to pragmatic necessity. The economy of the southern states was primarily agricultural and was dependent upon slave labor. Even the 1808 ban on the importation of slaves had little effect as slave women continued to be viewed and used as “breeders” to increase the supply of needed workers. But, the evil extended far beyond this as thousands of slave women “were not only whipped and mutilated, they were also raped” by their masters.58 “Sexual exploitation of enslaved women was widespread in the South. The presence of a large mulatto population stood as vivid proof and a constant reminder of such sexual abuse.”59 While the churches did not approve widespread sexual promiscuity between white males and black females, this behavior was seen as the slaves’ own fault or that it was not happening despite the evidence all around. As Mary Boykin Chestnut testiied: God forgive us but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resembles the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but their own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.60 Slaves were the lifeblood of the southern economy and culture. While state governments enacted laws to protect slavery, southern churches provided the moral justiication. The churches turned to “the curse of Ham” along with other passages in the Old Testament (e.g., Lev. 25:44-46; Ex. 13 Paciic Journal 21:2-6, 7-11, 20-21) and New Testament (e.g., 1 Tim 6:1-5, Titus 2:9-10, 1 Peter 2:18-29) to demonstrate slavery was initiated by God. The Bible was used to prove that black Africans were inferior and meant to be slaves. Although at irst resistant, just as in the North, the biblical commission to convert “heathens” did lead the southern churches (especially the Baptist and Methodist churches) to eventually evangelize slaves. As conversions occurred, the churches took care to emphasize verses in the Old and New Testaments that supported slavery. However, they hesitated teaching slaves to read. Literacy might lead to discontent and discontent to revolution. One of the worst crimes a slave could commit was learning to read.61 Yet, an important part of Protestant Christianity is the need for each person to read the Bible and make a decision about whether to follow God. This led some southern Christians to covertly teach slaves to read. But, again, care was taken to emphasize verses that supported slavery. The concerns of slaveowners proved accurate. As slaves learned to read, they resonated with biblical stories like Exodus, related them to their own experiences, and gave them entirely different interpretations. White Christians saw themselves as the chosen people led to the to fulill a divine mission. African Americans interpreted the story through their own life circumstances. “America was more akin to Egypt than to the Promised Land, the irm belief was that God and God’s agents would deliver them from bondage.”62 The slaves saw much hypocrisy. Frederick Douglass, a mulatto slave who escaped and became a powerful voice for abolition, described his experience to an audience in Scotland, “It is quite customary to brand slaves . . . all this done by men calling themselves Christians; and not only this, but deeds of darkness too revolting to be told, and from which humanity would shudder.”63 African-Americans gradually developed a sense of personal, if not social, equality with the slaveholders and worked for freedom. Without the support of the majority of churches, it would have been dificult to condone, encourage, and participate in one of the most deplorable forms of slavery in human history. African slaves were kidnapped, sold like livestock, and forced to perform backbreaking work. Families were torn apart as young children were sold and sent away from their parents to distant places and husbands and wives were separated. Slaves were forced to endure beatings, rape, castration, branding, maiming, and murder. There was no legal recourse because slaves were not human beings; they were private property.64 It is dificult to say whether the churches led or followed societal opinion. 14 The Tragedy of Slavery Most likely, the churches did both. What seems clear is that from the early colonial period through the 1820s, the majority of churches were, at best, silent and, at worst, complicit on the issue of slavery. Of course, there were individuals who dissented, but for two hundred years, the majority of Christians did little to bring about the abolition of slavery. Signiicant change occurred through the outgrowth of the Second Great Awakening, when individuals and eventually entire denominations spoke out and acted. The early American abolitionists hoped to end slavery through moral persuasion. But, unlike the experience in Britain, this approach did not work in the United States. As the moral and religious attacks intensiied, southern churches and Christians deepened their defense. North and South used the Bible as the basis for contradictory positions. The nation and the churches were at an impasse with no acceptable middle ground. Many framers of the Constitution hoped that their compromises would lead to the gradual elimination of slavery. Early abolitionists hoped for a peaceful resolution through moral persuasion or legislation. But, the struggle to end slavery was headed for a violent resolution. Frederick Douglass summed things up in 1857: “The whole history of progress of human liberty shows that . . . if there is no struggle, there is no progress . . . Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will . . .”65 The South would not concede because slavery was central to the southern culture and economy. The North would force concessions through its power and army. These differences over slavery had religious overtones. 66 While there were other signiicant causes of the Civil War, the beginning of the end of slavery came through the death of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians during this national conlict. Conclusions The tragedy of slavery is multi-layered and immense. Millions of black Africans and, subsequently, African-Americans suffered brutality. The pain caused by slavery did not end nor disappear with its abolition. Today, most Christians see slavery as a sin, but the church’s role and response to slavery has been complicated and disjointed. In general, the church supported, promoted, and defended slavery when there was a close connection between state and church. When the church and prominent Christians gained economic and political power, they worked to retain it. From the time of Constantine through the nineteenth century, individuals and entire groups misused the Bible to justify subjugation and oppression. 15 Paciic Journal Some denominations and individuals did not remain silent. The Catholic Church eventually spoke out against slavery. Many British and American Christians acted against it and some denominations used the Bible to argue against slavery, even as individuals often ignored these calls. While the role of Christians and different denominations was crucial, the lack of a uniied Christian voice against slavery is part of the tragedy. The residue of slavery remained for more than a century with Christians on all sides. Even after slavery was abolished, some Christians supported segregation and civil rights infringements through Jim Crow laws. Other Christians worked to end discrimination and usher in Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s. There is still a segment of the evangelical Christian population that continues to support anti-miscegenation as a general principle.67 As late as 1976, President Jimmy Carter’s home church, in Plains, Georgia, refused to allow black people to be members. While much has been accomplished, African-Americans still experience discrimination in areas such as education, employment, and home loans. The lack of a uniied Christian voice still haunts America. As the Christian community relects (and repents) on the connection between Christianity and slavery, there may be lessons to learn and apply today. Namely, it takes both churches and individual Christians to speak out and act against injustice. It would be easy to assign slavery to the pages of history as a lesson learned, but slavery continues today with millions of people enslaved in different parts of the world.66 The classic form of chattel slavery still persists. The human crisis in Sudan is, in part, due to the revival of a racially based slave trade where armed militias raid villages. In Mauritania, Arab-Berber masters hold as many as one million black Africans as inheritable property as a result of a chattel system established 800 years ago. The most common form of slavery, however, is debt bondage. In povertyravaged areas, many families must borrow simply to survive. Human beings are used as collateral for these loans and, unlike most industrialized nations where debt dies with the debtor, debts are often inherited and generations are ensnared in slavery. In countries like Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, it is estimated that ifteen-twenty million people are enslaved to pay off debts that may go back generations. In Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe the most common form is sex slavery where girls and young women are kidnapped, lured by offers of good jobs, or forced into prostitution to earn income for the family. If they resist, captors will rape, beat, and humiliate to break them down. Often, these vic16 The Tragedy of Slavery tims are moved frequently and kept isolated with no documentation. They become sex slaves for tourists. In the United States and other developed countries, the most common form is forced labor, where people are promised good jobs but instead are enslaved and forced into prostitution, domestic work, garment sewing, or agricultural work. Living in fear and ignorance, unable to speak the language, these terriied individuals wait to be freed. The slaves of the past were seen as valuable commodities. Today, with booming populations and staggering poverty, there is an unending supply. Slaves are cheap. They are used then discarded. Slavery is eficient and profitable. It continues, and will always be, good business. People of conscience need to awaken to denounce and act against all forms of modern slavery. Each of us can help stop the practice by buying “fair trade” products guaranteed to be slave-free (and conlict free) and giving producers a fair price, investing in companies that do not use forced labor, and supporting groups working to end slavery. The lesson of history is that it takes individuals, churches, and governments to speak out and act against injustice. Will the majority of churches and Christians remain silent or will there be a uniied voice to denounce and act against all forms of slavery? NotES 1 Craig Kenner, “Subversive Conservatism: How could Paul communicate his radical message to those threatened by it?” Christian History XIV (3) (1995): 35. 2 Henry Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society: From Galilee to Gregory the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 3 Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion from Paganism to Christianity (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1997). Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 4 Mary Cagney, “Patrick the Saint,” Christian History XVII (4) (1998): 14. 5 Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (New York: Doubleday, 1995). 6 Gregory I. (c.600). The Book of Pastoral Rule. In Phillip Schaff, Leo the Great, Gregory the Great, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. XII (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2004). 7 W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1920). Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000). 8 Marshall G.S. Hodgeson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization Vol.2 The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 17 Paciic Journal Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Giles Milton, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). 10 Rodney Stark, “The Truth about the Catholic Church and Slavery,” Christianity Today, July 14, 2003. 11 Ibid. 12 Ralph Austen, “The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: A Tentative Census,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Slave Trade, ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979). 13 Rodney Stark, “The Truth about the Catholic Church and Slavery,” Christianity Today, July 14, 2003. 14 Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993). 15 Basil Davidson, The Search for Africa: History, Culture, Politics (New York: Random House, 1994). Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Plume, 2000). 16 Basil Davidson, The Search for Africa: History, Culture, Politics (New York: Random House, 1994). 17 David Richardson, “West African Consumption Patterns and English Slave Trade,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Slave Trade, ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979). John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 18 Nicholas V. (c. 1452), Dum Diversas, in European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648, ed. Francis Gardiner Davenport (Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917: 75-78). 19 Joel Panzer, The Popes and Slavery (New York: Alba House, 1996). Rodney Stark, “The Truth about the Catholic Church and Slavery,” Christianity Today, July 14, 2003. 20 Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographic Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Period,” William and Mary Quarterly, 54(1), January 1997. 21 Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000). 22 Kevin A. Miller, “Why Did Columbus Sail? What your history textbooks may not have told you,” Christian History, XI (3): 9-16. 23 Paul III, Sublimis Deus (1537), http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Paul03/p3subli.htm 24 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995). 25 Richard Turtis, “Race beyond the Plantation: Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Santo Domingo,” (New Haven: Yale University (unpublished paper), 2005). 26 Justo L. Gonzalez, “Lights in the Darkness: As sincere believers marched to subjugate a continent, other Christians had to oppose them,” Christian History XI (3): 32-34. Rodney Stark, “The Truth about the Catholic Church and Slavery,” Christianity Today, July 14, 2003. 27 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995). 28 William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1974). Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steele: The Fate of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 9 18 The Tragedy of Slavery: The Church’s Response 1999). 29 Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993). 30 Richard N. Bean and Robert P. Thomas, “The Adoption of Slave Labor in British America,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Slave Trade, ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979). 31 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995). 32 Basil Davidson, The Search for Africa: History, Culture, Politics (New York: Random House, 1994). Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995). 33 William W. Hening, The Statutes at Large; Laws of Virginia, volume 2 (New York: R & W & G Bartow, 1823). Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975). Leon A. Higginbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 34 David D. Humphreys, An Historical Account of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts Containing Their Foundation, Proceedings, and the Success of Their Missionaries in the British Colonies, to the Year 1728 (London: Joseph Downing, 1730). Charles F. Pascoe, Two Hundred s F. Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G.: An Historical Account of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701-1900 (London: S.P.G. Ofice, 1901). Daniel O’Connor et al., Three Centuries of Mission: The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701-2000 (London: Continuum, 2000). 35 John Robinson, The Testimony and Practice of the Presbyterian Church in Reference to Slavery (1852). Maurice W. Armstrong, Lefferts A. Loetscher and Charles A. Anderson, The Presbyterian Enterprise: Sources of American Presbyterian History (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956). 36 Henry E. Jacobs, History of Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1893). 37 Marcus W. Jernegan, “Slavery and Conversion in the American Colonies,” American Historical Review 21 (April 1916): 504-527. Mark A. Noll, The History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1992). Lester B. Scherer, Slavery and the Churches in Early America, 1619-1819 (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1975). 38 James D. Essig, The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals against Slavery, 17701808 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). Mark A. Noll, The History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1992). Mark A. Noll, The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002). 39 Joseph Walton, ed., Incidentes Illustrating the Doctrines and History of the Society of Friends (Philadelphia: Friends Book Store, 1897). J. S. Hartzler and Daniel Kauffman, ed., Mennonite Church History. (Scottdale: Mennonite Book and Tract Society, 1905). Commager, Henry Steele Commager, ed., Documents in American History (New York: F.S. Crofts & Co., 1944). 40 Olaudal Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudal Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African (New York: Penguin Group, 1789). 19 Paciic Journal Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., On Race and the Enlightment (London: Blackwell, 1997). Chris Armstrong, “The Amazingly Graced Life of John Newton,” Christian History XXIII (1): 16-24. 43 Garth Lean, God’s Politician: William Wilberforce’s Struggle (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard, 1987). Christopher D. Hancock, “The Shrimp Who Stopped Slavery,” Christian History XVI (1): 2-19. 44 Mark Galli, “A Proitable Little Business: The Tragic Economics of the Slave Trade, ” Christian History XVI (1): 20-22. 45 Ibid. 46 Morten Borden, The American Proile (Lexington: Heath, 1970). 47 Ernest Marshall House, Saints in Politics: The Chapham Sect (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974). Garth Lean, God’s Politician: William Wilberforce’s Struggle (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard, 1987). 48 William B. Allen, ed., George Washington: A Collection (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988). Adrienne Koch and William Peden, ed., The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Random House 1993). 49 James C. Juhnke and Carol M. Hunter, The Missing Peace: The Search for Nonviolent Alternatives in United States History, 2nd edition, (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora, 2004). 50 Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: W.W. Norton 1974). Diane Swann-Wright, chair, Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (Monticello: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 2000). 51 Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993). 52 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) http:www.yale.edu/lawweb/Avalon/pre18.htm. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1968). Winthrop Jordan, The White Man’s Burden (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). 53 “The Return of the Spirit: The Second Great Awakening,” Christian History, VIII (3): 24-28. 54 Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, ed. William G. McLoughlin (1835; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 302. 55 Tim Stafford, “The Abolitionists,” Christian History, XI (1): 21 56 Donald A. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 17801845 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). Christian History, “Broken Churches, Broken Nation,” Christian History, XI (1): 26-27. 57 Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Thomas V. Peterson, Ham and Japheth: The Mythic World of Whites in the Antebellum South (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1978). James Oakes, “Slavery as an American Problem,” in The South as an American Problem, ed. Larry J. Grifin and Don H. Doyle (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995). 58 Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 1981), 23. 59 Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), 122. 60 Mary Boykin Chestnut, A Diary from Dixie (Boston: Houghton Miflin Company, 1949), 21-22. 61 Mark A. Noll, The Old Religion in a New World (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002). Rudolph Lewis, “Up from Slavery: A Documentary History of Negro Education,” http// www.nathanielturner.com/educationhistorynegro6.htm. 41 42 20 The Tragedy of Slavery: The Church’s Response Mary R. Sawyer, The Church on the Margins: Living Christian Community (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2003), 87-88. 63 Frederick Douglass, “A Few Facts and Personal Observations of Slavery: An Address Delivered in Ayr, Scotland on March 26, 1846,” in The Frederick Douglas Paper, Series One - Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed. John Blassingame (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), vol. 1. 64 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995). Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Plume, 2000). 65 Frederick Douglass, “Speech Before the West Indian Emancipation Society on August 4, 1857,” in The Frederick Douglas Papers. Series One - Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed. John Blassingame (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), vol. 1. 66 Randall Miller, Harry S. Stout and Charles R. Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 67 Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995). 68 United Nations, “Fact Sheet No. 14: Contemporary Forms of Slavery” (New York: Ofice of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1991). http://www.ohchr.org/ english/about/publications/docs/fs14.htm.ibolish (2005). “Fact Sheet.” http://www.ibolish. com/today/factsheet.htm. 62 21 Paciic Journal 22 Response to Scott Key’s “The Tragedy of Slavery” Response to Scott Key’s “The Tragedy of Slavery: The Church’s Response” W. MARShAll JohNStoN Students in my classes usually agree that Hallo and Simpson’s deinition of history is the wisest way to take an evidence-based, inductive, positivist approach to the discipline they are studying: “a temporal analysis of causality through texts and other documentary remains of the past.” This deinition nicely explains how we (or many of us) do history, and what distinguishes it as a discipline; however, a student in the discussion will often interject that he or she feels we should be able to learn lessons to illuminate the present if history is to have real value. After all, history itself—the discipline—is simply a matter of constant revision as methods and evidence change. I tend to see my own pursuit of history as purely reconstructive or inquiry-based, and I ind myself blessed by student reminders of its larger function. I am blessed also to have been called upon to respond to an article that is similarly invested in using history to understand and educate the present; my colleague Scott Key (hereafter S.K.) and other faculty and students, in written and verbal exchanges, have shepherded me out of my parochial solipsism into an understanding of the need to see how each of our pursuits illuminates the present.* I heartily agree with S.K.’s conclusion and call to action. Slavery was and is a scourge. I would add that we can’t let the modern fascination with the perfectibility of man and belief in progress suggest that dangers of such evil institutions are past us—we must remain ever vigilant. We also must avoid whitewashing our own history because of a belief in American exceptionalism. S.K. points out the number of ways slavery still sears the modern world, a reality we in the West often fail to see in our own cities and ields: just last month there was the announcement of an Indonesian family held in slavery on Long Island. He is equally right about the unfortunate complicity of the church in the institution: as men lead the church, it is all too likely to be affected by the spirit of the day, and not look to the transforming spirit of the eternal truth. As to whether the state sponsorship of the church is especially to blame for such problems, I believe that is a subject for a separate study. Indeed, I think S.K.’s primary dificulties come in dealing with too big a picture. 23 Paciic Journal In consideration of both the church and slavery, S.K.’s case would have been stronger if he had grounded his comment in clear deinition. He addresses the history of slavery very broadly: from its ancient realities to the early modern transcontinental trade and its abolition by law. He enumerates forms of slavery from debt-bondage to serfdom to chattel status. It would be worthwhile to focus how he is deining the broad term, and then to explain the nuances of how the institution has functioned through the years. It is common practice among us ancient historians to deine slavery in the ancient world as, “being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Though slavery was indeed often a terrible condition, especially in such places as mines and quarries, it does give a different context to comments like those of Paul—there was not a clear belief that slavery was a lower status on a chain of being. If we look to slavery among the Greeks and Romans, we ind that some realities of the condition illuminate the more recent form of the institution by contrast. The Greeks believed they should not enslave other Greeks, but even that idea was imperfectly followed. In any event, in the ancient world slaves were visually indistinguishable from free people. It certainly was the case that barbarians were thought more appropriate for slavery, but they were still valued for their ethnic origin and skills. Persian subjects, for example, were considered especially servile primarily because their land lacked the freedom of Greek city-states; as Aristotle said, man is an animal that belongs in a polis (a uniquely Greek way of living). In the Roman world slaves could be educators and run households perfectly comfortably within their social system. The Romans understood the advantages of a Greek education: as a Roman poet said, when Greece was conquered by Rome, she in turn conquered the conqueror. Slaves frequently could win or work to their freedom, and they were at times paid a small amount: the word “peculiar” derives from the slave’s purse. Thus, while slavery was usually bad luck, it did not always mean a bad life. My upbringing in the American South has made clear to me how different the status of slaves in this country was from what had prevailed elsewhere in history. To this day (and even more so in my youth) there is still an attempt to explain what had happened in the time of slavery and Jim Crow by means of convenient ictions. We have—in many cases also to this day—ignored the role of the Klu Klux Klan in our cities and towns. When I have heard southerners talk about the institution and its aftermath, I have encountered tortured efforts to ameliorate what happened: “in the South no one minded 24 Response to Scott Key’s “The Tragedy of Slavery” living near a black person, they just wouldn’t elect them to ofice. In the North, blacks gained ofice, but were ghettoized.” Of course the reality is that—again, to this day–there are communities of blacks near southern towns that are essentially living in subsistence conditions. This result of slavery has yielded another offensive rationalization in the South: the slaves (and exslaves under Jim Crow) “need our help” to run their lives and households. Of course I should point out that the North was complicit in these social conditions by having effectively condemned the South—blacks and whites alike—to a century of poverty. Thus, the legacy of what a race-based slavery has done to us makes for a very troubled prism through which to look at the history of the institution. It is often said that we historians look into the well of time and see ourselves— our preconceptions—looking back up, and the understanding of slavery is an example of this problem. Though slavery was throughout history an unfortunate social status, how it was practiced in this country and in the “New World” was a very different matter. This practice may have been socially, historically, and geographically determined (according to some modern theoretical approaches), but nonetheless it gives us cause to be aware of how blind and destructive human institutions can be. We at FPU experienced how the sequel to slavery and the church continues to be a baneful inluence this semester: a student who was trying to understand African-American history in the U.S., when asked how the vast majority of that community could be Christian, could only respond that current society is constructed in such a way that the identiication can’t be avoided. The realities of American slavery of course make the church’s complicity even more reprehensible, and they call us to be even more aware of ways in which the church might continue to use its interpretation of Scripture to treat minority groups unfairly. S.K. is very wise to point out that the church was not monolithic in its complicity. I would like to have seen him dwell more on how Scripture was used to support slavery, though he does get at the basic method: a confusion of the social conditions of the New Testament period with the transcendent message of Scripture. I would like to see, however, an overview of how the “curse of Ham” could gain the currency it did. Certainly such inquiry would provide a useful background to discuss issues in the present church such as the roles of women and the poor: S.K. nicely touches upon the radical message of Jesus in this area. If we are to understand our role as Christians dealing with a history of acceding to this institution, we should irst look to the evangelist Matthew 25 Paciic Journal and understand that a blind legalism may well lead us astray when the Holy Spirit requires of us a higher calling. Matthew would have us not simply proof-text the law, but exceed it as followers of Christ. The dangers of not doing so are illustrated by our spiritual ancestors, the Hebrews: while they seem to have had an idea that all Hebrews had an equal role in the covenant, they nonetheless allowed forms of Hebrew slavery within some limitations. Then, by the time of the eighth-century prophets, it seems that the rich had sidelined the role and identity of the poor in the polity. There had come to be an idea that certain people were “less Hebrew”—and the kingdoms had prophets to speak the truth on the matter, much to our enlightenment if we have ears to hear. S.K. also could more speciically deine what we should think of as the church. He points out that at times the hierarchy of the church was indistinguishable from state interests. It is, however, the case that the idea of the monolithic Church is a tough one to use historically. He speaks of a change from the church of the martyrs to a state religion: that change was equally as much—at least conceptually—a change to a church of ascetics and missionaries as it was to a state organ. Though Constantine liked the idea of organizing the church by state parameters, and that organization is visible to this day in dioceses and hierarchy, he was unsuccessful, for example, in his main goal at Nicaea: agreement on core theology. Perhaps if S.K. had said that at various times institutional churches—Roman Catholic, Protestant, or Anglican (he only touches upon the Eastern Churches)—involved in colonization had complicity in allowing practices that were seldom adequately resisted (he does cite some good examples of resistance to the zeitgeist), we would have a little more ground for agreement. However, how the complicity worked is a little slippery: S.K. points out that the popes were often quite anti-slavery in their views, and clearly had little control a world away. I guess my largest concern here is that the church is the body of all believers: He indeed calls us to be one and to work for His Kingdom. And yet we are fallen people. Thus there will always be institutional tension between the prophetic and the worldly. The proit motive for slavery is a further area in which I would like to see S.K. more robustly support his ideas. He takes as source material very speculative, and theoretically driven, authors such as J. Diamond and H. Zinn, and we do not get a clear idea of why, or if, their narratives are compelling. In the ancient world the emergence of gigantic farms (usually called latifundia) in the Hellenistic period initially led to big slave economies, but 26 Response to Scott Key’s “The Tragedy of Slavery” it is generally agreed that these farms in the early Roman empire tended to become share-cropped (to use a modern term), because it was cheaper to pay a pittance to a semi-free person than take care of a slave. Now, this concern might have been lessened by the supply of slaves brought to the New World, but even if so, can proit be the entire explanation? For a piece with which I very much agree, I obviously have a few reservations, but I’m sure many can be seen as quite idiosyncratic. I would, for example, not use decades-old textbooks to support points unless the piece was overtly historiographic (that would be an interesting study!). I also fear that without irmer grounding in the primary sources and treatment of the differences among epochs, the piece appears encyclopedic rather than argumentative or advocatory, and it seems clear that S.K. wants (quite correctly) to convey advocacy and admonition. I commend S.K. for the hard work he has done bringing together this history, and I hope to see this conversation continue as we consider the church and its relation to slavery. I am most intrigued by how we can learn from the rationalizations that were used for slavery in order to listen to what the Holy Spirit is telling us about the church today. * In carrying out this response, I am indebted not only to the hard work of Scott Key, but also to incisive review by, critique from, and conversation with Pamela Johnston, Richard Rawls, Rod Janzen, and Daniel Crosby. 27 Paciic Journal 28 The Two Faces of Racism The Two Faces of Racism—Undeserved Discrimination and Undeserved Privilege ZENEBE ABEBE Note: This article was originally envisioned as a collaborative effort with Mary Ann Larsen-Pusey. Soon after we began work, on the morning of July 14, 2005, Mary Ann was found slain in her home. She was passionate about racism and taught a class on the topic for many years. I will always remember her strong interest in the topic and her support. I wish to dedicate this article to her. “So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Gen. 1:27 (NRSV) Introduction This article is about racism within the context of Christianity’s inluence in the world. Given the breadth of the subject matter discussed, I will begin with several rhetorical questions. First, since Christianity’s emergence some two millennia ago, how have Christians, particularly those in positions of power, viewed persons not sharing the same external physical characteristics? What role did the construct of race play in Christianity’s approach to such persons over the centuries? Though there is no speciic biblical reference to race as a way to classify humans, institutional Christianity has had a mixed record on the issue of race. The Scriptures only speak of tribe, people, language, and nation, not of race. I propose to show how institutional Christianity has both supported and opposed racism. I also want to probe the confusing stance many Christians today continue to take in their approach toward people who have been deined in some way as being from a different racial group. Since racism continues to be a pervasive and chronic problem in this country,1 the aim here is not only to look at what happened in the past, but also at the current climate of racism in the United States. The broad spectrum of opinion quoted in this article may be provocative, but it represents the range of experiences and expressions of racism today. Racism, both within and outside of the church, continues to be a painful reality for people of color. White Americans need to realize that the Civil Rights movement has not wiped out racism. Racism is alive and well and continues to disrupt the daily lives of people of color. 29 Paciic Journal In this article I will deine race and racism; trace the inluence of Christianity, the responses of Christians as individual believers and of the church as an institution to this tragedy; delineate how race is used as a tool for both evil and good; and inally, I will examine the effects of racism in our world both on the victims and on the perpetrators. In the Christian Scriptures one can ind a rejection of identifying believers on the basis of race or any other category. From Genesis to Revelation, God’s position on anti-racism has been documented. Perhaps drawing inspiration from the creation of mankind in God’s image (Genesis 1:27) numerous Christian passages (Acts 17: 26, Galatians 3:28-29, Ephesians 2:11-18, and Revelation 7:9) show that God’s plan was for people to live without dividing walls, that together they would bring glory to Him. While there have been instances of racism throughout the world, the focus of this article will be on the racist ideologies of Westerners through the centuries and racism in the United States in particular within the context of the modern Western constructions of race. The impact of this upon the Christian churches cannot be ignored. What is racism? The term race as a category primarily referring to skin color was irst used by Francois Bernier, a French physician, in 1684. This was during a period of European expansionism throughout the world and helped European countries justify their domination of people in the burgeoning empires. Early categories included labels such as Mongoloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid.2 The term white was irst used in 1691. This terminology replaced earlier designations of people by nationality or ethnic group. By the 1700s, race began to supplant the prior division of humans as either Christian or pagan. It was during this same period that Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German naturalist and anthropologist, divided the human species into ive races: Caucasian or white race, Mongolian or yellow race, Malayan or brown race, Negro or black race, and American or red race. Color labels such as red, brown, and yellow, black, and white persist in the English language of the Western (Christian) world. We see that these classiications persist in the twenty-irst-century Christian churches. The Myth of Race 3 classiies race as: Caucasoid (Caucasian or white from Mt. Caucus), Negroid (black), Mongoloid (yellow from Mongolia) and Australoid (brown from Australia). As in this video and elsewhere, the shift from geographical to a hierarchical ordering of human diversity has to be the most dangerous transition in the history of Western science. 30 The Two Faces of Racism However, today, the term race/racism is not only designed to divide people by color from whites socially, but it is used to confuse and divide and to insure domination by whites. It is a tool to provide opportunities, power, and privileges for whites and to systematically marginalize and provide nothing but disadvantage to people of color. For instance, in working with students, I ind that most of them confuse the terms race, diversity, ethnicity, culture, and nationality, as well as prejudice and racism. I believe that they are not alone in this confusion. Census Bureau surveys use terms that include race (black, white, Negro, Caucasian), as well as ones that relate to ethnicity, culture, or national origin (Hispanic, Asian, Asian Paciic, Mexican, Mexican American, etc.). Therefore, it is important to have a clear understanding of the term race and how it differs from culture, ethnicity, or nationality. According to Katz & Taylor, in the 1937 edition of Webster’s unabridged dictionary, the word racism was not even included. By 1949, however, it clearly had entered into the lexicon, probably because of the racist philosophy of Nazi Germany. In the 1949 edition of Webster’s Intercollegiate Dictionary, the term is deined as the “assumption of inherent racial superiority or the purity and superiority of certain races and consequent discrimination against other races.” 4 At the core of the race-related issues is the difference between individual prejudice and the institutional advantage of one group over others. Joseph Barndt has deined racism as “race prejudice plus power.” 5 I believe, as others do, that there cannot be racism without power. Here, I am talking about a misuse of institutional power that makes the impact of racism highly consequential. Caleb Rosado 6 not only sees racism as the most important and persistent social problem in America and in the world today, but he makes a clear distinction between prejudice and racism: “Racism goes beyond prejudice (an attitude) to structure this power advantage politically, economically, culturally and religiously within a social system, whether it be simple (as in personal bias) or complex (as in the role apartheid played in South Africa), which gives social advantage to some at the expense of others perceived to be inferior and undeserving.” All humans have prejudices. We hold preferences that steer us toward that which is familiar rather than to that which is exotic or foreign. Most of us also tend to form our judgments about others without extensive knowledge. Given the dynamics of social patterns that are the legacy of institutionalized racism in the Western world, it is not surprising that most people do not know people from cultural or ethnic groups other than their own. In this 31 Paciic Journal sense, prejudice is not the same as racism. Perhaps we can simply say that prejudicial attitudes could be limited to an individual behavior, but racism in the words of Barndt is, “a collective responsibility rather than personal guilt.” 7 The collective responsibility becomes institutional responsibility— what we call today institutional racism. Most social institutions suffer from the legacy of “institutionalized racism.” Constantine & Wang Sue 8 and others have described institutional racism as racism that is embedded in our social structures, granting different treatment to groups of human beings based on skin color and physical features. There is ample evidence that in all social institutions (health care, economics, education, etc.) people of color receive inferior treatment than people who are considered “white” (Hacker, Obama, West). 9 For example, in the United States, the study of disease concentrates on illnesses that aflict primarily “white people,” with less attention granted to diseases of people of color. In the ield of education, it means that less-experienced teachers and fewer resources are provided to schools that are predominantly composed of students of color. Economically speaking, people of color pay higher interest rates when securing loans, pay higher prices for consumer goods, and are less likely to hold positions of power in industry, education, and business. Frequently, they are the last ones hired and the irst ones ired. Racism is about economics, although its roots and results are also deeply cultural. In addition, he states that racism has extensive psychological, sexual, religious, and political repercussions. As demonstrated by Adelman, 10 there is no known scientiic measurement to deine race. We also know that the Bible does not recognize the term race. However, for the most part, the outcome of the research is no more than politically and socially motivated investigation, without any useful scientiic information about race. Plous 11 noted that throughout the past century, research on prejudice has closely relected the ideological leanings of society, telling us as much about the personal biases of the scientiic community as about prejudice itself. As documented by Barndt, Lang, Obama, and Constantine & Wing Sue, 12 persons of color (African American, Asian American, Native American, and Latinos) in the United States encounter daily mistreatment and discrimination simply because of color of their skin. When it comes to employment, education, and public services, this group receives less recognition and beneit compared to white people in this country. Whether they are at government institutions, private or church-related institutions, or public institutions, the treatment is the same. It is not unusual to hear persons of color complaining 32 The Two Faces of Racism about a multitude of barriers keeping them from obtaining positions at all levels in companies, corporations, and higher education institutions. Stithcalls this condition “the glass ceiling.”13 The glass ceiling as described by Stith is an artiicial barrier, based on attitudinal or organizational bias, that prevent qualiied individuals from advancing upward in their organizations into management level positions. Since such treatment of people of color is practiced by institutions, there is no one individual to blame. Ethnicity, nationality, and race play a role in preventing persons of color from achieving their God-given potential. Christianity’s mixed record on race Historical examination reveals how Christians have differed in the nature of interaction with those not of their own group. They have based their actions, including empire building, on both their interpretation of Scripture and their worldview as inluenced by other factors such as culture and ethnicity. The Crusades were fought in the name of Christ. The “conversion” and enslavement of indigenous people of the western hemisphere was done with the cross in one hand and the sword in the other. The English colonists readily slaughtered indigenous peoples of North America as they sought their conversion to Christianity. (Of course, many more were also killed by diseases.) Many Christians justiied enslavement of people with black skin as being in accordance with God’s will. During the Civil War, many Christian groups supported slavery and opposed its abolition. During the era of Jim Crow in the United States, the “white” church seldom took an open stand against the separate and unequal treatment of blacks in the South or the discriminatory housing and education policies in the North. On the other hand, there were English colonists who treated the indigenous peoples with dignity and respect in the name of Christ. A Catholic bishop, Bartolome de las Casas, criticized the Spanish crown for its treatment of indigenous peoples. Unfortunately, this had the inadvertent result of increasing the African slave trade. In 1688, Pennsylvania Mennonites were the very irst in colonial America to protest the buying and selling of African slaves as a violation of the Ten Commandments. In the 1800s, Christian groups such as the Quakers spoke out against slavery, and many of the abolitionists were avowed Christians. In the twentieth century, the Civil Rights movement was based on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s interpretation of Christian teachings. So why do Christians have such a mixed record in regard to racism? Let us examine further the origins of the construct of race as we know it today. 33 Paciic Journal Eloise Hiebert Meneses 14 notes that nineteenth-century anthropologists, inluenced by Darwinian evolutionary theories, searched for similar explanations regarding human physiological morphology. Just as biologists were classifying previously unknown species of plants and animals, anthropologists (Christian or not) attempted to classify populations of people according to physiological differences. Today, society continues this practice of dividing humans into categories based on skin color and physical features, despite recent discoveries that DNA structures reveal a greater difference within racial groups than between groups. 15 A growing body of research has indicated that race is no longer a physiological reality; however, race continues to exist as a social construct. Over one hundred years have passed since Darwin’s theory appeared in The Descent of Man. 16 Today scientiic studies clearly have shown that the race theory is cultural rather than biological. However, white people continue to beneit from race classiication or the “whiteness” ideology. In the words of Hacker: Hence the weights Americans have chosen to give to race, in particular to the artifact of “whiteness,” which set a loor on how far people of that complexion can fall. No matter how degraded their lives, white people are still allowed to believe that they possess the blood, the genes, the patrimony of superiority. No matter what happens they can never become “black.” White Americans of all classes have found it comforting to preserve blacks as a subordinate caste: a presence, which despite all its pain and problems, still provides white with some solace in a stressful world. 17 Just as Hacker did, other scholars and social activists in the ield of race and racism continue to show that the majority of white people in this country not only believe on the superiority of whiteness, but they also understand the beneit that comes by supporting the institutionalization of the idea. A PBS documentary Race: the Power of an Illusion 18 revealed that most of us continue to believe that people have innate biological differences, that we enter this world divided into categories of red, black, white, or yellow. This particular program follows a dozen students, including African American athletes and Asian string players, who sequence and compare their own DNA. The participants of the study were surprised by the results. They said, “One by one, our myths and misconceptions about racial differences are tak- 34 The Two Faces of Racism en apart...” This documentary suggests that when looking at skin color differences, disease, human evolution, even genetic traits, we learn there is not one characteristic, one trait, or even a single gene that distinguishes all members of one race from another. The Apostle Paul speaking to the people of Athens afirmed the idea “one humanity” in Acts 17:26, when he said: “From one person God made every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, and he decided the allotted times and the boundaries of their habitation.” Yet due to this fabricated idea race, Christian churches and many of their members still believe in and practice racial separation. Dr. King, speaking from his experience, said: “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, the same hour when many are standing to sing in Washington.” Segregation was so prevalent that in 1964, the National Council of Churches formed a commission on religion and race to work on desegregation of the northern mainline churches. Findlay 19 states that the program never got off the ground and in less than a year it disappeared altogether. He further notes that this was testimony to the powerful presence of racism in northern communities, through it manifested itself more openly and forcefully in the South. This philosophy of separation is rooted in the ideology of tolerance rather than acceptance. It is not hard to imagine that segregation is fueled and encouraged by institutional racism. Today there is debate on whether Christianity is a segregated religion. Barndt 20 asserts the fact of racial separation. Schmidt, 21 on the other had, declares that Christianity is not a segregated religion. The NBC Evening News on September 24, 2000, reminded Americans that in parts of the United States institutionalized racism clearly continues to be the law of the land. For some of us with close ties to denominations and church agencies, we know that today’s church-related institutions would not escape the blame of institutional racism, for they, too, have been using their “institutional” power to marginalize, exploit, and control people of color for years. Stith asserts the lingering effect of such institutionalized racism in this way: …Blacks and other minorities are still feeling the symptoms of “institutional racism.” For more than four hundred years racism has existed in our country. It consists of written and unwritten laws and public policy designed to discriminate against black and other minorities. It was known as institutional racism because it was acknowledged and openly practiced by reputable institutions including public and private business, law enforcement, colleges, government oficials and agencies… 22 35 Paciic Journal Whites are socialized to be racist through a public discourse that continually bombards them with the desirability of whites (Barndt, Constantine & Wing Sue). 23 Even though there are governmental laws against the violation of equal opportunity policies, individual and institutional racism still persist. I admit that for persons of color, confronting individual, institutional, or cultural racism is not an easy task. Similarly, Christians avoid mentioning racism as sin and a misinterpretation of God’s teaching. Moreover, the issue of race in America is a sensitive topic that many people prefer to avoid. No one wants to be called a racist. As Clarence Page wrote in Mazel: “Racism is a sensitive word. Americans often avoid mentioning it, even when it is relevant...it is a sensitive word because it exposes so much, institutionally and personally. It is a Rorschach word, a linguistic inkblot test. How you deine it reveals something important about you, how you see the world and your place in it.” 24 Rosado asserts that racism consists of the culturally sanctioned strategies that defend the advantages of power, privilege, and prestige. To this end he writes: “Ever since the European restructuring of the world from the sixteenth century on, racism has become afirmative action for whites. It is both an attitude and an act of structural superiority, which justiies its very existence by given biological differences such as language, religion, ethnicity, or accent a negative value and meaning” 25 Racism goes beyond prejudice and discrimination. I believe, as others do, that racism is an ideology that transcends even bigotry, hatred, and violence. It is an assumption through which whites have used economic and political advantage for centuries at the expense of people of color. For the most part, white individuals are supported and encouraged by the current system that exploits the privilege that comes with whiteness. As Manning Marable is quoted as saying, “whiteness in a racist, corporate-controlled society is like having the image of an American Express Card…stamped on one’s face: immediately you are ‘universally accepted.’” 26 This clearly illustrates the complexity of racism today, how settled and hidden it is and how dificult for people of color to do any thing about the problem. When people of color are asked to deine racism, they tend to list institutions and systems that deny them education, employment opportunities, and upward mobility where they work. This does not mean individuals are not capable of racism. the effect of racism It is not dificult to understand the impact of racism on people of color in 36 The Two Faces of Racism the United States and elsewhere in the world. Historically, it has involved the way society has designed the government and non-governmental institutions to exclude people of color. Katz & Taylor are particularly direct when writing about some of the historical effects of racism on all people: Many American groups have suffered discrimination in various forms. But once again, the phenomenon for blacks is different, made so by their being the only group to experience the conluence of race, slavery, and segregation. It is race, as socially deined by British tradition, that deines black American… 27 The problem of racism generally speaking, and what it did to people of color in particular, is not only historical, but as Joe Klein reported in TIME, the problem persists. According to Klein white racism is the original American sin; it helped create the culture of poverty that existed in places like New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. He goes on to say that “George W. Bush’s Republican Party was reborn in racism, having sided with Southern segregationists in the 1960.” 28 Racism is entrenched in social systems and institutions such as schools, government agencies, banks, and church organizations. In the words of Mazel: “Racism is not simply about the attitudes, dislikes and motivation of individuals or individual acts of bigotry and discrimination. Instead, racism refers to the way society as a whole is arranged, and how the economic, educational, cultural and social rewards of that society are distributed. It is about collective injustice.” 29 While racism does not negatively affect whites as much as it does people of color, the effect of racism on whites is more perceptual and has little effect in their lives. As a result, some are unable to see all the tragedies that the black community has suffered. Racism has created a white blindness that cannot grasp the impact of racism. Many cannot see a problem with the current state of racial relations, and simply believe that blacks are in charge of their own destiny. As one student in class put it, “Many whites feel that African Americans are ‘milking’ the slavery issue and that the civil rights movement has eliminated the woes of the African Americans.” There is a tendency to mistakenly believe that racism is the problem of the past and that blacks and whites have no reason not to live together in peace. On account of such assumptions and mindset, there is a racial gap between black and white that does not exist between any other races in the United States. Many white Americans will never fully understand the crisis that exists or even begin to imagine the crisis, because they do not feel the impact of inequality caused by racism. Some even may say they are not aware how it operates in our 37 Paciic Journal current world. Because racism hides itself very effectively, white people can live their lives without even noticing any racism. There is a need to somehow dispel the myth of racism’s demise so that all people, black and white, realize that racism is still a very strong force in our society. Writers and social activists alike have documented that the effects of racism on people of color, regardless of the time period in this country’s history, remain the same. The effect of such injustice is white supremacy, with its uneven distribution of privilege and wealth. These injustices are, of course, readily perceived and decried by people of color. Gerzon quoted a seventyyear-old African American, Sherwood Sanders, who stated: I believed, in essence, that there was a white power structure that existed off the blood, sweat, and tears of black people. I didn’t think about other races much at the time. It was a kind of modern, urban slavery. Whites, as I saw it, were either evil or incapable of feeling. They don’t know, or don’t want to know, the pain and suffering that they are causing …30 38 Meanwhile, today’s racism at the institutional level, although perhaps less blatant and more sophisticated, results in a painful reality for persons of color. Church-related or not, institutional racism is everywhere and it cuts across the board. At some church-related higher education institutions, attempts to introduce anti-racism training and diversity training have not only failed, but frequently have been undermined. A case in point is that at the time of this writing, I wish to relect on my employment history of 20-plus years at church-related higher education institutions. I know too much to be quiet, am too connected not to care, and I am passionate about the issue. I am a member of Mennonite Church USA. Through the years, I have expressed my concerns about the issue of racism to my colleagues, and to presidents, deans, and board chairs. I have not only spoken about the evil of racism, but have taught classes, planned workshops, and conducted anti-racism trainings. Because of the passive-aggressive tendencies within my church culture and because of my academic freedom, I have not been silenced; however, my voice has not readily been heard. My church, Mennonite Church USA, and the denomination that operates Fresno Paciic University, Mennonite Brethren, have talked more than most about addressing racism from the perspective of peace and justice. But I have also discovered that, church owned or not, there is no noticeable difference in the behavior of institutions when it comes to racism. A report from Mennonite Education Agency, which oversees six church colleges and universities, revealed that in the past 100 years, none of these colleges/universities and seminaries:31 The Two Faces of Racism • Has had a person of color as a president. • Has a person of color serving at the president’s cabinet level. • Not one of them has a person of color serving as chair on the board of trustees. • There are only three persons of color with full-time tenured faculty status in all eight church institutions. The student population in the two denominational church-owned college/ universities and seminaries (total of nine) relects even greater disparity: • Only one university (because of its geographical location) has about 25 percent of its student population made up of Latino students. • The other eight institutions barely show more than 3-5 percent of the student body populations who come from any one of the student of color groups in any given year. While there are well-qualiied, highly-educated people of color with years of experience at these church institutions, top leadership continues to be occupied overwhelmingly by white males. I observed that these top-level positions are traditionally illed, for the most part, by less educated, less experienced white males aged 40-50. In my opinion, this clearly is institutional racism that contributes to the promotion of white supremacy. When I contacted the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, an association of evangelical institutions, for similar data, my indings are even more revealing: • Out of 120 institutions in the United States, there are no persons of color serving as president. • Only ive persons of color are at chief academic dean’s level (three African American and two Asian American). This data shows that the leadership of church colleges and universities remains in the hands of white people and is systematically segregated in many ways. When I reviewed the mission statements of some church institutions, all seem to suggest that they are about preparing leaders for the church and the world. That is, of course, well and good in theory; however, the question then is what church and which world? Will these institutions continue to think of leadership in “the white church or white world”? A truly modeled, Christian-rooted leadership must be about change that corrects past mistakes, gives hope to the hopeless, and promotes equality and peace and justice for all. Johnnetta B. Cole stated best it when she said, “Leadership is about decisions and the speed with which one can follow a wrong one by making one that works.” While most writers on race-related issues have focused on people of color, a few are beginning to document the effect racism has on white people. Jo39 Paciic Journal seph Barndt wrote about this impact. 32 His work served as the basis for the Damascus Road training as it was developed by Crossroads Ministry for the Mennonite Church. This approach agrees with a discussion by Cornel West. He says: “To engage in a serious discussion of race in America, we must not begin with the problem of black people, but with the laws of American society, laws rooted in historic inequalities and longstanding cultural stereotypes.” 33 As I discuss more and explore the effect of racism with white friends who are concerned about the evils of racism, it is not unusual to hear guilt-loaded comments or confessional speeches. Some come right out and say how guilty they feel about their white privilege. Some tell powerful stories from their experiences, and the way they feel now. Nothing more is revealing than the words of McIntosh: “As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.” 34 There is evidence to suggest that some whites have moved beyond guilt and are involved in anti-racism work, joining hands with people of color to make a difference for the new generation. People are beginning to notice racism’s impact on white people and a few white brothers and sisters are even taking leadership in some anti-racist endeavors. For example, Barndt wrote, “…we will become aware of the ways in which racism hurts and destroys us, and how it uses us to hurt and destroy others.” 35 A student in my “Analysis of Racism and Power” class explained the effect of racism this way: “Many white Americans will never fully understand the crisis that exists or even know that a crisis exists, because they are not feeling the inequality biases of our society.” Another student stated: My eyes were opened to a problem I hardly realized still existed. I’m embarrassed to say that prior to the class I thought racism was a problem of the past. Little did I know that even though it is now illegal to discriminate based on race, a more dangerous and more lethal form of racism has emerged since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. 36 The following are additional unedited quotes from “Analysis of Racism and Power,” a course I taught during the past six years at two Mennonite institutions. The ongoing effect of racism on all people came alive when our students began to relect on their experiences in a weekly journal that they kept. Their reaction to correct information or misinformation, fears, frustrations, hope or the lack of it, in their own world is surprising: 40 The Two Faces of Racism “I have to strip away all the propaganda that has been fed to me for years so I can start from the beginning.” “Learning more about white privilege has helped me understand my own experience of racism better.” “It is hard to focus on the hope for change when dealing with such a massive dilemma.” “I’d like to do the impossible, which would be to pair everybody up with someone of another race and make him or her hang out and be friends.” “Perhaps the best way for me to combat the hopeless feelings that America’s racial situation today leave me with is to dive in and get involved.” “I think it is a problem when our institutions follow and abide by constitutional practice, yet do not ind all people with equal opportunity.” “It was fascinating for me to learn that scripture seems to not only denounce anything along the lines of racism, but race is not even a concept.” “Now I know why Malcolm X had such a deep hate for us Christian whites.” Based upon these relections, I recognize that racism is not simply a temporary belief that one will outgrow, but rather it is a hard-core ideology passed from generation to generation that preserves white power, unearned rights, and undeserved privileges. It is a learned behavior that is generally unnoticed by its beneiciaries until they examine it more thoroughly. However, it is clear that recognizing and dealing with racism may be a painful experience for both whites and people of color, but racist thinking is a behavior that can be unlearned. For example, Yancey witnessed the evil treatment of African Americans by whites in the 1960s. He describes the lingering effects of racism on himself as a white observer: Today I feel shame, remorse and also repentance. It took years for God to break the stranglehold of blatant racism in me—I wonder if any of us gets free of its more subtle forms—and I now see that sin as one of the most poisonous, which has perhaps the most toxic societal effect. When experts discuss the underclass in urban America, they blame in turn drugs, changing values, systemic poverty, and the breakdown of the nuclear family. Sometimes I wonder if all these problems are consequences of a deeper, underlying cause: our centuries-old sin of racism. 37 When most people think of the problem of racism, some consider it a sin, and others simply brush it off, believing that it will go away. Of course, as 41 Paciic Journal we have seen so far, racism is still a major societal problem that this country that has yet to deal with effectively. I believe that for Christian churches to support and culturally endorse race as a biological difference among God’s people is outright dishonest; worse yet, promoting “white supremacy” ideology is even immoral. Racism is a vocabulary that communicates not only ideology but a territory that limits certain people from reaching certain opportunities. Speaking of opportunities, (on November 26, 2004) relecting on his past experience while narrating “Eyewitness to History,” Tom Brokaw framed the past and present state of racism in America this way: “When I irst began my journalism career, if my skin color was one shade different from what is now, I know then, I would not have been given all the opportunities, and I couldn’t have gotten where I am now in my career. Things have not changed much now.” I believe what he said is true, and yet in my opinion what Mr. Brokaw told is only half of the story; about the other half, I am left to wonder whether he contributes to the problem or not. The inluence of institutional Christianity I believe that Christianity is good for all of us if practiced as it was meant to be. Christianity must be about equality, healing, and hope. It is about making things right and working for justice for everyone. For example, as we recently witnessed, Christian organizations from nearly every denomination were actively involved in the recent Tsunami relief work, providing food, medical supplies, and housing to those in need. In addition, the impressive response by Christian churches and agencies coupled with non-governmental organizations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is further evidence of addressing racism. This outpouring of help and hope occurs in the name of Christianity after many other catastrophic events as well. 38 However, as recently as 100 years ago nations colonized, enslaved, and exploited many people in the name of Christ. In the United States, social movements of the 1950s and 1960s made some progress in moving society toward an interest in social justice. Christian churches, however, limited their involvement and did little to create awareness of equity and justice for all. The notable exception was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Although Christianity may not be different than other faiths when it comes to social involvement and direct action, it is worth noting that in 1963 it was the Protestant churches and the National Council of Churches that irst became supporters of “direct action” and direct involvement with the national black community in the struggle for racial justice. 39 However, in the United 42 The Two Faces of Racism States white Christians were seldom cognizant of or attentive to racism until the 1960s. Evidence suggests that Christianity as an institution has been the instigator of much injustice committed in the name of God. For example, as West states so eloquently: “as the Christian church became increasingly corrupted by state power, religious rhetoric was often used to justify imperial aims and conceal the prophetic heritage of Christianity.” 40 West further pointes out some of the Christian church’s collective past behavior: “…This terrible merger of church and state has been behind so many of the churches’ worst violations of Christian love and justice—from the barbaric crusades against Jews and Muslims to the horrors of the inquisition and the ugly bigotry against women, people of color, and gays and lesbians.” 41 Perhaps the behavior of white churches in the South was best understood by Dr. King when he noted that white churches were uninvolved in the struggle. In King’s words, “…where were their voices when a black race took upon itself the cross of protest against man’s injustice to man? Where were their voices when deiance and hatred were called for by white men who sat in these very churches?” Out of his frustration Dr. King even questioned if white churchgoers of the South worshipped the same God he did. I recognize that individual Christians were involved in the civil rights movement and some even gave their lives. However, as an institution, the Christian church not only remained uninvolved, but continued to act on its racist views, showing little interest in the lives and well-being of people of color. In the words of Yancey: Yes, we have examples of St. Francis of Assisi trying to halt the Crusades, of monks who outdo Gandhi’s asceticism, of missionaries who serve the suffering, of Quakers and Anabaptists who oppose all violence. But by and large the history of European Christianity is the record of a church that relies on wealth, power, prestige, and even coercion and war to advance its cause. 42 Jesse Jackson’s account of racism in the South is even more explicit. He notes that as recently as 35-40 years ago Christians remained loyal to the racist system, turning away from involvement in the Civil Rights movement. In Jackson’s words: … the insult of racial segregation remained an institution for nearly a century. Created by an economy of exploitation and greed, sustained by the politics of divide-and-rule, defended by the pronouncements of law that had no moral 43 Paciic Journal foundation, nurtured by the religion of white supremacy, it was enforced, on a daily basis, by a police state. This is one of the fundamental lessons of the American national experience. (emphasis mine) 43 Jackson’s observation is a good reminder that racism is imbedded in systems and institutions. The construct of race created false assumptions about the human condition. As a result racism and white supremacy lourished, giving rise to a great evil on the part of white Christians of the United States. In addition, it became a missed opportunity by Christians and Christianity to follow a biblical invitation (Romans 12:15-18) to live peaceably with all God’s people, without regard to human-created divisions. Today, the residual of racism may be present in many forms and in many countries. To some extent, however, Christians worldwide, particularly those from the West, will not escape the blame for the origin of racism in our society. Though slavery formally halted in the U.S with the ratiications of the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), degradation of people of color continues. Furthermore, white nations continue to exhibit oppressive behavior toward black ones, even today. The late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia spoke against racism to world leaders. On October 4, 1963, he gave a speech to the United Nations, speaking out against racism: …until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is inally and permanently discredited and abandoned; that until there are no longer any irst and second class citizens of any nations; that until the color of a man’s skin is of no more signiicance than the color of his eyes; that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all—without regard to race—until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the role of international morality will remain but a leeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained… 44 Today, 44 years after Emperor Selassie Ethiopia appealed to the world nations, asking for equality of all people, racism is still spread widely across society and all institutions. White institutions, large and small, have the privilege to not let their guard down and disregard institutional racism for one simple reason: “power.” It is the misuse of collective power that makes racism work. As Dr. King once said, “There is nothing essentially wrong with power. The problem is American power is unequally distributed.” We have the opportunity to be part of the solution. As Christians, we are called to do something about it. Perhaps it is important to note that the process of dismantling racism cannot be done in a short period of time. The 44 The Two Faces of Racism fact that it existed for more than 500 years and that it is entrenched in history means that it may take a generation or longer. It may not be possible to redeem the nation from the sin of racism without dismantling racism. As Barndt says, “we cannot build a pluralistic society without tearing down the walls of racism.” 45 A multicultural institution may be a goal, but it will not be a possibility without eliminating institutional racism. Collectively, Christian churches must see un-doing racism as their vocation and promote peace and justice. Peace without justice will be a remote possibility in our time. In a world of today, we cannot continue to separate and isolate some because of the color of their skin. Christians are called not only to meet the spiritual needs of people, but the physical, social, and political needs of everyone. The mistakes and hurt of the past will take time to heal. The process of peace and healing from the sin of racism will even take longer, and we may run out of options, but now is the time to make things right. Conclusion I argue about the ever-persistent problem of racism in our nation and in the Christian churches. I also seek to encourage acknowledgment of the issue, solicit help in promoting greater understanding of racism, and request partnership in discontinuing its vicious cycle. Most of all, this is an invitation to all Christians and Christian institutions to re-examine their views of race and to begin to teach against the sin of racism for the purpose of healing and hope among all people. In addition, it is an invitation to respect and honor all of God’s children as equals and to live peaceably with all people. Perhaps the challenges to all of us will be how to respond to those who say “we are equal—there is no problem.” However, evidence shows that we are not equal in all things that matter: in the distributions of power, in the distribution of resources of income, and in the way we perceive whiteness and blackness in our society. We have the opportunity to repent of our sins and make it right. Christianity and the institutional church must embrace the task of reconciliation. It is possible to complete the uninished work of the Christian Church and to engage humanity in the work of reconciliation. The time has come for the Christian church to begin institutional change and provide creative leadership that promotes love not hate, collaboration not selishness, and most of all, human equality not superiority. As Dr. King said, “Light has come into the world, and every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructiveness.” Christians have unique 45 Paciic Journal opportunities to systemically change the way most white people control, use, and abuse the power of institutions they created and operate. The country is divided by wealth, race, and ethnicity due to practice of white supremacy. We need to think of an inclusive model of leadership that does not discriminate based on skin color. The persistence of human suffering, poverty, and inequality in “this so-called Christian nation” depends partly on the quality of future leadership that the Christian church provides. This new generation of leaders must be sensitive to the needs of all God’s people. Churches can and should begin the development of future leaders by identifying the problem of racism. I hope that the Christian church of today and its members are ready for the challenge, prepared to acknowledge past mistakes, and poised to move forward to develop a new generation of church leaders. Acknowledging and naming the problem will take us one step closer to inding the solution. A case in point: President George W. Bush, in his speech during the 50th anniversary of Supreme Court Decision Brown v. the Board of Education named the problem, and he said, “the habits of racism in America have not been broken.” His acknowledgment of a major societal issue by a national leader will give our country the impetus and legitimacy to change the pattern of entrenched racism. It will make it easier for people to discuss an issue that most people do not want to talk about publicly. Bush also appointed African American and other persons of color to key cabinet posts. Today it is not unusual to ind churches and church institutions that oppress people of color by undermining their presence and disempowering them structurally. Recognizing and naming the problem may be the irst positive step toward peace, but more is needed to dismantle the sin of racism. For Christians who believe in white supremacy to change, and for people of color to forgive, is to move in the right direction toward rebuilding the broken relationships. However, without change in the power structure, people of color cannot challenge the ideology of white supremacy in our culture. Central and critical to this anti-racism process is the transformation of the church and the church’s power structure. The church’s teaching the theology of peacemaking without providing the tools for anti-racism process is not suficient. Finally, moving white Christians from being non-racist to engaging them in anti-racism endeavors will be dificult and will take a long time. Meaningful anti-racism work is possible if Christian churches will move away from a false biological identity, which is whiteness, and exclusive cultural identity, which is European, toward an inclusive theological and spiritual identity, 46 The Two Faces of Racism which is the family of God. In Acts 17:26, Paul provides such a model when he said in Athens: “From one ancestor he made every nation to inhabit the whole earth.” Now all Bible-reading Christians must face and confess if they don’t understand what is not included in the term “every”. Unless Christians choose to believe Scriptures selectively, the Bible is clear that the word “every” means all humans without labeling them by color. Racism that is not confronted will continue to harm all people and ultimately hinders our earthly goal: the expansion of God’s kingdom. It has been said that race may be an illusion but “racism” is real. NotES Madonna G. Constantine & Derald Wing Sue, ed., Addressing Racism: Facilitating Cultural Competence in Mental Heath and Educational Settings (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006). 2 Berel Lang, ed., Race & Racism in Theory & Practice (New York: Rowman & Littleield Publishers, Inc., 2000), 5. 3 “The Myth of Race,” Damascus Road Anti-Racism Training Production (Akron: The Mennonite Central Committee, 2000). 4 Phyllis A. Katz & Dalmas A. Taylor, ed., Eliminating Racism: Proiles in Controversy (New York: Plenum Publishers 1998), 6. 5 Joseph Barndt, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1991). 6 Caleb Rosado, “The Web of Culture: Prejudice and Racism—the under girding actor is Power: Toward an Understanding of Prejudice and Racism,” http://www.rosado.net. 7 Joseph Barndt, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1991). 8 Madonna G. Constantine & Derald Wing Sue, ed., Addressing Racism: Facilitating Cultural Competence in Mental Heath and Educational Settings (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006). 9 Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: McMillan Publishing Company, 1992). “The Myth of Race,” Damascus Road Anti-Racism Training Production (Akron: The Mennonite Central Committee, 2000). Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). 10 Larry Adelman, executive producer, C. Herbes-Sommers, episode producer, Race: The Power of an Illusion, PBS documentary, 2003 (Burlington: California Newsreel). 11 Scott Plous, ed., Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003). 12 Joseph Barndt, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1991). Madonna G. Constantine & Derald Wing Sue, ed., Addressing Racism: Facilitating Cultural Competence in Mental Heath and Educational Settings (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006). Berel Lang, ed., Race & Racism in Theory & Practice (New York: Rowman & Littleield Publishers, Inc., 2000). “The Myth of Race,” Damascus Road Anti-Racism Training Production (Akron: The Mennonite Central Committee, 2000). 13 Anthony Stith, Breaking the Glass Ceiling, Sexism & Racism in Corporate America: The Myth, The Realities & The Solution (Toronto & Los Angeles: Warwick Publishing, 1998). 14 Elois H. Meneses, “Race and Ethnicity; an Anthropological Perspective,” Race, Sex and Class, (1994):137-146. 1 47 Paciic Journal Larry Adelman, executive producer, C. Herbes-Sommers, episode producer, Race: The Power of an Illusion, PBS documentary, (Burlington: California Newsreel, 2003). 16 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., 1952). 17 Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: McMillan Publishing Company, 1992), 217. 18 Larry Adelman, executive producer, C. Herbes-Sommers, episode producer, Race: The Power of an Illusion, PBS documentary, (Burlington: California Newsreel, 2003). 19 James F. Findlay, Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950-1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 78. 20 Joseph Barndt, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1991). 21 Alvin J. Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001). 22 Anthony Stith, Breaking the Glass Ceiling, Sexism & Racism in Corporate America: The Myth, The Realities & The Solution (Toronto & Los Angeles: Warwick Publishing, 1998), 64. 23 Joseph Barndt, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1991). Madonna G. Constantine & Derald Wing Sue, ed., Addressing Racism: Facilitating Cultural Competence in Mental Heath and Educational Settings (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006). 24 Ella Mazel, And Don’t Call Me a Racist! (A Treasury of Quotes on the Past, Present, and Future of the Color Line in America) (San Francisco: Argonaut Press, 1998), 13. 25 Caleb Rosado, “The Web of Culture: Prejudice and Racism—the under girding actor is Power: Toward an Understanding of Prejudice and Racism,” http://www.rosado.net, 3. 26 Ella Mazel, And Don’t Call Me a Racist! (A Treasury of Quotes on the Past, Present, and Future of the Color Line in America) (San Francisco: Argonaut Press, 1998), 98. 27 Phyllis A. Katz & Dalmas A. Taylor, ed., Eliminating Racism: Proiles in Controversy (New York: Plenum Publishers, 1998), 24. 28 Joe Klein, “In the Arena: Let’s Have an Antipoverty Caucus,” TIME, October 3, 2005, 29. 29 Ella Mazel, And Don’t Call Me a Racist! (A Treasury of Quotes on the Past, Present, and Future of the Color Line in America) (San Francisco: Argonaut Press, 1998), 13. 30 Mark Gerzon, A House Divided: Six Belief Systems Struggling for America’s Soul (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1996), 75. 31 In 2006 Fresno Paciic University named an African American to the position of Provost. 32 Joseph Barndt, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1991). 33 Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 3. 34 Scott Plous, ed., Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 191. 35 Joseph Barndt, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1991), 66. 36 Sarah Yoder, “Lesson from a class on racism and power,” The Mennonite, September 2003, 16. 37 Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 16. 38 “The Myth of Race,” Damascus Road Anti-Racism Training Production (Akron: The Mennonite Central Committee, 2000). 15 48 The Two Faces of Racism James F. Findlay, Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950-1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 40 Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). 41 Ibid., 148-49. 42 Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 162. 43 Pete Seeger and Bob Reiser, Everybody Says Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), xi. 44 Lance Seunarine, The Lion Roars: Selected Speeches and Letters of Haile Selassie (New York: Trican Books, 1998), xi. 45 Joseph Barndt, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1991). 39 49 Paciic Journal 50 Response to Zenebe Abebe’s “The Two Faces of Racism” Response to Zenebe Abebe’s “The Two Faces of Racism” hoNoRA hoWEll ChAPMAN “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free [person], nor is there masculine [thing] and feminine [thing]; for you all are one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28 “Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcision and foreskin, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free [person], but all things and in all is Christ.” Colossians 3:11 1 How many people these days think of themselves as a “foreskin”? Probably very few. And nowadays there aren’t many people, whether Christian or not, expressing pride in their Scythian roots, either. Ways of categorizing people in the West have deinitely changed in the last two thousand years. There are, however, many today who identify with the other categories Paul delineates in his exhortations to unity within the burgeoning Christian communities of the mid-irst century. As his letters attest, Paul was passionate about stamping out divisiveness. In Paul’s vision of a church of the new creation (Galatians 6:15), there simply cannot exist distinctions based on ethnicity, physical and gender characteristics, or political status. In fact, for him the unity of the church as one body in Christ absolutely depends upon this rejection of supericial differences. It’s not that Paul is trying to deny the physicality of his fellow believers; instead, he is pressing them to look beyond these banal categorizations of their physical existence and to embrace what makes them ultimately special: their spiritual belief in Jesus as the Christ. Despite the clarity of Paul’s message on this point, institutionalized Christian churches and their related organizations, such as universities, have found ways to marginalize or exclude people based on the very distinctions that Paul sought to downplay for the sake of unity. Zenebe Abebe has clearly shown how the construction of race by skin color as a categorical deinition of humanity since the seventeenth century has had an insidious effect upon the lives of people who have not fallen into the “white” category. None of us can deny the horrible impact of slavery, segregation, economic deprivation, lost opportunities, and other social ills upon those who have fallen into the “Negro,” “black,” “Indian,” or any other dreamt up non-white category. Christian churches, even when consciously 51 Paciic Journal attempting to help others and to spread the Gospel, have not been immune to this tendency to categorize and thus are complicit in this degradation of fellow human beings, including other Christians. How strange it is that Christians have not wholeheartedly embraced the example of the apostle Philip, who had no problem sitting next to, conversing with, and then baptizing the eunuch of the queen of the Ethiopians (Acts 8:26-40). The racism that lingers in American churches hardly exists in a vacuum. It is shocking to think that anyone living in the United States over ifty years after Brown v. Board of Education (and over 135 years after the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution2) still fosters racially based exclusionism, but old habits and outlooks die hard. CNN.com reported on April 23, 2007, from Ashburn, Georgia: Students of Turner County High School started what they hope will become a new tradition: Black and white students attended the prom together for the irst time on Saturday. In previous years, parents had organized private, segregated dances for students of the school in rural Ashburn, Georgia, 160 miles south of Atlanta. “Whites always come to this one and blacks always go to this one,” said Lacey Adkinson, a 14-year-old freshman at the school of 455 students—55 percent black, 43 percent white. “It’s always been a tradition since my daddy was in school to have the segregated ones, and this year we’re inally getting to try something new,” she said.3 I could end here with a happy story of integration, but in fact, life is just not that easy: But not everyone in the town of 4,400, famous for its peanuts and Fire Ant Festival, was breaking with the past. The “white prom” still went on last week. “We did everything like a regular prom just because we had already booked it,” said, Cheryl Nichols, 18, who attended the dance. Nichole Royal, 18, said black students could have gone to the prom, but didn’t. 52 Response to Zenebe Abebe’s “The Two Faces of Racism” “I guess they feel like they’re not welcome,” she said. Nichols said while her parents were in support of the integrated prom, some of her friends weren’t allowed to go.4 [emphasis mine] This prom may seem frivolous in the big scheme of things, but it points to something more important. Notice that Cheryl Nichols’ parents see a different future, “something new” as Lacey Adkinson puts it, but other parents do not; many of the latter probably consider themselves good, church-going Christians. I suspect that it will take another three generations for these segregationist tendencies to die off, when everyone who can remember Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal”—and their children—are dead and gone. What Paul said almost two thousand years ago still pertains: people have to see themselves as part of a new creation if they are going to enjoy unity as a church in Christ, but when they cling to the old ways and deinitions out of tradition, malice, or ignorance, they not only harm themselves but also others. Abebe has argued vigorously for race as a socially and historically constructed category,5 and he has rightly called upon Christian churches to reject this artiicial divide between people. Paul argued essentially the same thing when he denied the importance of identifying people as Greeks, Jews, or Scythians, which is the closet thing Greco-Roman antiquity had to the early modern category of “races.” Paul as a Jew had been raised to think of everyone who was not a Jew as belonging to ta ethne, the [foreign] nations, and in Galatians he even refers to non-Jewish Galatian Christians with this terminology, while calling the Jewish Christians who were promoting circumcision “hoi Ioudaioi,” the Judeans/Jews (Gal. 2:12-13).6 Paul may not have had “race” as a skin-color category, but he and his society certainly had various ideas about ethnic categories and their characteristics. Paul and his contemporaries could also see differences between the Jews and the rest of the nations, because besides abstaining from pork and observing the Sabbath, the Jews practiced full male circumcision.7 So, when the Roman state was hunting down people evading the iscus Iudaicus tax on Jews towards the end of the irst century A.D., the authorities used visual evidence for determining a man’s Jewishness, as the biographer Suetonius (Domitian XII. 2) reports: “I remember as a young man being there when a ninety-year-old man was inspected by a procurator and a very crowded court to see whether he had been circumcised.” Thus, ethnic identity as a Jew did, in fact, have a physical, observable manifestation, though usually kept covered unless at the public baths or latrines. If only modern Christians 53 Paciic Journal could heed Paul’s call for spiritual unity and ignore all physical markers that set people apart—including physical disabilities—and concentrate instead on what really matters. Abebe has wisely chosen a passage, Acts 17:26, as a paradigmatic statement of Paul’s position on “the idea of ‘one humanity.’” 8 What is fascinating is to see in this chapter of Acts how Paul tries to reach out to his overeducated Athenian audience by quoting soon after this verse directly from one of the recognized classics of Greek didactic poetry, Aratus’ Phaenomena: “For we are indeed his offspring.” Aratus in this poem on constellations and weather is talking about humans descending from Zeus, but Paul (or the author of Acts narrating this scene) shows his cleverness and cultural sensitivity by trying to bridge the gap between the two ethnic groups, Greek and Jewish, and their respective teachings in order to prove that they share common roots. Paul, however, in his sweeping drive for universalism, stepped beyond just the boundary of ethnicity when building his new Christian communities around the Mediterranean. He also exhorted his newly minted fellow Christians to disregard the other categories that divide people. In his day, legal status and gender were two other very obvious ones besides ethnicity/national heritage.9 People became slaves through warfare, debt, and birth, and under Roman law they were literally “things”—property to be bought and sold. Paul tells the recipients of his letters in Galatia and at Colossae10 to transcend their labels of “slave” or “free” and to concentrate on what matters most: their faith. In another letter, he asks Philemon to think of his slave Onesimus as a “beloved brother” (Philemon 16), yet Paul never denounces slavery as an institution, to the dismay of anyone who cherishes a society where everyone is free. Furthermore, in Galatians Paul rejects gender as a deining element of a person in a Christian community. He refers to the genders in the neuter form (arsen kai thelu), which has the effect of distancing these biological categories from the male and female-identifying people to whom he is talking. It’s as if he is pushing them towards gender neutrality with his very word choice, or least downgrading the importance of gender distinction. Imagine all modern Christian churches doing the same, not just in their words but in their actions, too! Abebe has demonstrated that “Christianity must be about equality, healing, and hope.” What, then, can we do with twenty-irst century individuals, 54 Response to Zenebe Abebe’s “The Two Faces of Racism” churches, and institutions that continue to cling to categorizing people in a variety of ways, a practice that Paul himself dismissed so long ago? As Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke’s Gospel (15:11-32) so vividly shows, forgiveness and unconditional love are the key to being one with God.11 This applies not only to individuals but also to Christian organizations, as Paul (or his imitator) explains: Put on, therefore, as chosen ones of God, holy and loved, compassion, kindness,…; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so also you [should forgive]. And above all these, [put on] love, which is a bond of perfection. (Colossians 3:12-14) Hopefully, those who have found themselves discriminated against for a variety of reasons within their own Christian churches and institutions can forgive those who have perpetrated this injustice and separation, and communities as a whole can start to “put on love”—a daringly simple solution to all of society’s ills. NotES Translations are my own, based on the Greek text of the Nestle-Aland 26th edition. Notice that the Fifteenth Amendment speciies both race and color in order to eradicate any gray areas of categorization when granting suffrage: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” 3 http://www.cnn.com/2007/us/04/23/turner.prom/index.html. 4 I thank my son, William Chapman, for alerting me to this story. 5 This constructionist viewpoint is within the mainstream of current academic scholarship. See, for instance, the review article by Nancy Appelbaum, “Post-Revisionist Scholarship on Race,” Latin American Research Review 40.3 (2005) 206-217; the books she discusses might further enhance Abebe’s argument by extending its scope to the other Americas, where the construction of race has played different roles than in the United States. 6 Furthermore, for his ethnically Greek readers, Paul is tapping into the Greek view of the rest of the world by using in his list of categories the term “barbarian,” i.e., all the rest of the world’s population who babble in a non-Greek language. 7 On types of circumcision in antiquity and Paul’s strong rejection of forcing it upon men who wished to become Christian, see H. Chapman, “Paul, Josephus, and the Judean Nationalistic and Imperialistic Policy of Forced Circumcision,” ’Ilu, Revista de Ciencias de las religiones 11 (2006), 131-155. On Jewish nationalism in this period, see D. Goodblatt, Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 8 Interestingly, the Liddell, Scott, and Jones, Greek-English Lexicon entry for “genos,” the word Aratus uses for “offspring,” gives many English equivalents, of which “race” is the irst, but this term in Greek does not connote color; to use “race” in a translation would, as Abebe has shown, lead one possibly to think in terms of skin color. 1 2 55 Paciic Journal Notice, however, that Paul does not mention the rich/poor dichotomy in Galatians 3:28, which would have been very apparent in society as a whole; does this indicate that Paul’s Christian communities were not economically diverse enough to make this an issue? 10 This letter might not have been written by Paul; see S. Mason and T. Robinson, Early Christian Reader (Peabody: Hendrikson, 2004), 151-166. 11 St. Augustine uses this parable as a running theme in his Confessions to describe his journey towards God. A recent movie, The Second Chance (2006), does the same while dramatizing the interaction between two Christian pastors—one black, the other white. 9 56 The Church and Women The Church and Women: Power, Participation, and Language in Christian Institutions hoPE NISly In the late twentieth century, the institutional church began to make much-needed, long-overdue progress in the formal inclusion of women in its structure and life. To be sure, women had always been part of church life, but generally with a silent role and/or forced to create their own spheres of inluence without oficial acknowledgment or access to power. Even with recent changes churches, at best, appear ambiguous on issues of inclusion and, at worst, remain misogynist and conining. It is important, therefore, to discuss the role of women in matters of faith, and to ascertain how women have carved out niches within structures that have long marginalized their position and presence. It is equally important to note that despite changes promising fuller inclusion there is ongoing resistance, in both subtle and overt ways. I grew up in a church (in the Conservative Mennonite Conference) that required women to cover their heads at all times in symbolic submission to the “godly” chain of authority. The order was explicit and clear: God, Jesus Christ, man, woman. By the time I was an adolescent several things were apparent: First, the rules of my church had the greatest impact on women and they were a burden despite assurances that these strictures were actually a protection for females, denoting respect and honor. Furthermore, I noticed that there were women around me who seemed at least as competent as the male leaders, yet their participation in oficial church business was restricted. They could teach other women or they could present an essay at the Sunday evening service. In the main worship service on Sunday morning, however, women could speak only few words of testimony.The scenario referenced was from a different time and place, and there are signiicant differences between that and twenty-irst century church practice. Yet today, when I sit with female colleagues from church institutions and churches (even ones that ordain women and hire them for management positions) I continue to hear about struggles to be heard on an equal basis with male colleagues, about being scrutinized and held to more rigid standards than men, and of the dificulty in inding and retaining positions. I hear from women whose institutional evaluations include comments on their style of clothing 57 Paciic Journal along with actual performance assessment. I observe churches that make a distinction in whether women can be associate pastors or lead pastors.1 To be sure, the landscape differs from my Sunday morning experiences and observations at age thirteen. Church organizations have women in some upper-management positions. A few churches ordain women without major debate. There is the occasional church or denomination that encourages speaking of God in images that are not solely male. There may even be denominations where the “mommy wars” are not perpetuated in the name of God and the Bible, and where women ind support for whatever decision they make regarding home and career. The fact that these things have to be acknowledged, however, indicates the tenuous nature of the progress toward full inclusion. In addition, there has been a retrenchment of positioning that makes it necessary to continue to discuss the topic. After all, we have no need to discuss the query: “Has the church been good for men?” That question has a quality that renders it irrelevant. So the debate churns on over ordination, women’s roles in home and church, and whether one can conceive of God as anything other than “he.” The church enters these debates with too little sense of history, with scant knowledge of the construction of gender roles and how they have limited women’s lives with the explicit guidance and sanction of the church. Even so, women in the churches (usually at the margins, and prior to institutionalization) have found ways to participate. They have seldom done this without opposition, but nevertheless, they have done it. Does that mean that the church has been “good for women?” I have to reiterate that the institutional church has not been good for women unless one considers the church at its origin and the churches at the margins. It is there where change happens and where, yes, the church can be good for women. The issues, if they can be sorted out at all, are many. Is it about women in leadership? Is it about how we speak of God? Is it how we understand gender roles at any level of society and church? Is it how we view female (and male) sexuality? Is it about more than access to power—i.e. how are the daily lives of women impacted by church decisions and mandates? Why is violence against women as prevalent within the church as without? Finally, how do we tell the stories of the church in ways that relect lived experience alongside ideological mandates? When Mary spoke to the angel saying, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word,” (Luke 1:38) she exhibited readi58 The Church and Women ness to take her place in the community. A Jewish woman with few temple rights who was in the uncomfortable position of an inexplicable pregnancy, she was willing, nevertheless, to assume a public role. As a prophet, Mary “went with haste” to Elizabeth, who recognized in her a woman with a vital part in a larger plan, embodying the best of their tradition. The lyrics of Mary’s song foresaw a shift in power that her son would soon portray. Her words illustrate the potent impact faith can have on the lives of those who live (as Mary did) at the margins of society. The power to which she referred would bring, “down the powerful from their thrones, and lift up the lowly.” This power would not entrench itself in maintenance of the status quo, but rather allow each person to ind his or her own place, regardless of social status. In the ensuing development of Western civilization, the story of women’s participation in the church followed a circuitous path, one that too often relected societal fears and ambiguities regarding women’s sexuality. Yet, the impact of Jesus’ model of an “upside down” power ran deep, surfacing in unusual places and potent ways. Women, along with other marginal groups, saw in Jesus’ life a call to ministry in many ways, while the institutional church generally limited them. Authentic faith, however, can not be suppressed indeinitely. Despite wounds of exclusion, being burned as witches, or banished simply for being outspoken, and within an overwhelmingly patriarchal structure, women (and at times, a few men around them) searched for the ideal of the early Jesus movement. The church marginalized women (and other groups) and the subsequent historical record eliminated their stories. I will highlight a few examples where women played an important role in the life of the church in the Western tradition. These are the exceptions to the rule, but it is in the exceptions where hope resides. I have chosen only two examples, with the acknowledgement that I have omitted major parts of the world and other eras for lack of space. In addition, I chose to look only at women in the Christian tradition and not to compare their experiences to that of women in other cultures and religions. It is a worthy study to determine why the historic treatment of women is poor among all world religions.2 However, I ask that those of us who are Christians hold ourselves to our own best standard as set by our own Scripture and prophetic voices. This article looks at the ideal set by Jesus and his early followers, highlights several places where women took active roles in church life, and discusses implications for the twenty-irst century church. 59 Paciic Journal Each story is fraught with the complexity of human experience. We are, of course, affected by more than faith. Faith is always informed by societal mores, political institutions, economic structures, and more. In most cases, women anchored change within the predominant patriarchal rhetoric and structure. The cultural and ecclesiastical establishment prohibited a radical deviation from the norm even when (as with Anabaptists) people were discarding the prevailing foundations in favor of one determined to be more purely New Testament in structure. When women assumed different roles but acquiesced to cultural rhetoric, analysis is challenging. For the purpose of this article, I note simply that women altered their roles at great cost and with enormous effort. Searching church history for women’s contributions involves uncovering obscure names, revealing forgotten stories, and developing alternative frameworks of history and theology. The recovery of women’s voices illuminates some of the best of Christian tradition, for it is in lives on the margin where we ind the powerful impact of authentic biblical Christianity. The story of the progress of the church is uneven, even painful. Nevertheless, it is the story of the possibility of redemption, in the re-creation of Jesus’ ideal where the church is willing to listen to the people on the edges and all voices are incorporated into church dialogue on any given issue. Women in the Early Jesus Movement With biblical roots, the Christian church has viewed itself as a place of redemption, where hurting people can turn for healing and hope. At its best, the church has served as a sanctuary from injustice. For all the times when the church has used the Bible to justify injustice (slavery, subjugation of women, warding off peasant revolts), there are those places where it has turned to its roots in the life of Jesus and elicited the best of its possibilities. For good and for bad, Christianity has affected the everyday lives of people, hidden beneath a broader structure of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. The biblical record reveals the depth and breadth of the possibility of the difference Christianity can make. Jesus modeled and voiced a new life of egalitarianism with full participation by everyone in the society. For the most part, Jesus never spoke directly to the subject of women’s roles, yet his actions provide an ample and eloquent example of an alternative way of living. In the irst-century society under Roman rule, life was dificult for peasants and small farmers. The imperial system nearly destroyed community and family structures. There were ethnic and class tensions. Roman oficials 60 The Church and Women disdained the Jewish people, seeing them as it only to be Roman subjects or slaves. It was a world lacking in individual dignity and justice.3 Into this chaos came Jesus with an alternative worldview. At the intersection of Roman, Greek, and Hebrew worlds, core values included honor and shame, lack of individual identity, and purity laws with a “place” for everything, including women. In ideology (although not always in practice) women’s identity rested with the men in their lives. In theory, they could bring honor or shame on their household without deserving honor.4 Lived experience, however, does not always relect ideology, and despite being restricted in their rights to speak theology and enter parts of the synagogue, women of the time were elders and prophets and leaders.5 Alongside this reality of women as elders and leaders, there was an ongoing debate regarding the appropriateness of women taking part in public worship. Jesus and his earliest followers, however, emphasized right relationships and community, advocating for an inclusive and egalitarian society and family. Warren Carter speaks of the Gospel as a “counternarrative, a work of resistance.”6 This “counternarrative” extended to the role of women. The community Jesus modeled embraced new gender roles as well as economic and political ones. In fulilling the best of his own Jewish tradition, Jesus provided an alternate emphasis on healing, hope, and inclusion of the marginalized. He called women into service for him, listened to them, and offered respect even when they disagreed with him. In his preaching, Jesus used examples from the lives of women and employed images that come from women’s experiences of life. These were no small things in this society where gender roles were clearly delineated and where women’s virtues centered on the private sphere and included obedience, silence, and chastity while men’s were public and based on courage and honor.7 In the twentieth century, lay theologian and Christian apologist, Dorothy Sayers wrote: Perhaps it is no small wonder that the women were the irst at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this man—there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never lattered or coaxed or patronised; . . . who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them . . .; There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity . . . 8 61 Paciic Journal In other words, Jesus granted women dignity they had not known. There was no talk of submission. He called everyone alike to life in a new community where people respected and served each other. He expected everyone to live with love and to lead with justice. Ultimately, the political and social implications of this message, which would turn power on its head, led to his death. In the early church, there is a mixed presentation of women’s roles. This has led to tension in the church throughout the centuries. Paul supported women’s leadership in church and society, but he also spoke about a subordinate role for women. One passage that subsequent generations interpreted to mean that women are to be subject to men (I Corinthians 11), also contains the suggestion that women can prophesy (v. 5) and issues a call for mutual submission (v.11). Amy-Jill Levine suggests that the problem may be less about the misogyny of Paul and more related to issues of interpretation.9 The prevailing societal structure informed Paul and his contemporaries. And yet in the world of early Christianity, roles within the early church were based on faith rather than gender, in line with Jesus’ teaching. It was a radical statement (Gal. 3:28) to say that in this emerging movement that there was no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. This passage was a key to the early church’s understanding of itself.10 Female converts helped build the church, with Paul calling them his co-workers, referring to them as apostles and prophets. However, Paul’s writings also relect “injunctions of a patriarchal reaction which, on theological grounds, decree the subordinate role of women.”11 Alongside the message of subordination, the early church provides examples of women in leadership. Lydia, the “seller of purple,” was a wealthy business woman. She asked to be baptized, then became a leader in the church. Lydia opened her home to meetings and led new believers in an exploration of the implications of Jesus’ words. Paul spent time in her home and Lydia used her wealth and inluence, to support his missionary work.12 Priscilla also opened her home to the community of gathering believers. She and her husband taught Apollos regarding the resurrection and meaning of Jesus’ death. Wahlberg likened this to someone informing Billy Graham that he had a lawed understanding of the Gospel.13 The question is always how we interpret the New Testament, as well as how we remember history. It makes a difference whether we emphasize Paul’s radically new model of peoplehood in Galatians or stop with his words of subordination and submission. Georgia Harkness notes, “The irst of the these two sides of the paradox has been largely overlooked, while the 62 The Church and Women second has been very inluential through the centuries in keeping women in subordination to men in both church and society.”14 Paul caught the vision of new possibilities, but he was still a product of his time and place. The women of the early church lived within the reality of this paradox, but saw a new vision. Interpretation of the texts continued to relect the patriarchy that Jesus opposed. Then as the irst generations of the church struggled for survival, along with recognition and credibility, the process of institutionalization led it into forcing women out of roles of leadership.15 It even debated the words that were acceptable regarding the image of God, leading away from the feminine (Sophia) and toward the masculine (Word.)16 It is Jesus’ vision to which we return when we record and interpret Christian history, where the Spirit is given to all (Acts 2:17); where there is neither male nor female (Gal. 3:28); where we heed Mary’s song (Luke 2:52) and turn power upside-down. Anabaptist Women The paradox of Paul’s words continued to manifest itself throughout the following millennia of church history, often with the church choosing to follow the Pauline proclamations for women to keep silence. There were exceptions, however, when parts of the church followed a different path. Too often the recording of history has minimized or omitted those exceptions to the rule. Recovering Jesus’ ideal for women is, therefore, more than a theological issue; it is also about the re-telling of our past. The Anabaptist movement of the sixteenth century provides one glimpse of an alternative view of women’s place. The names of many martyrs are familiar. What descendent of the Anabaptists does not know that Felix Manz was the irst martyr drowned in the Limmat River? On the other hand, Anneken Heyndricks, Maria of Monjou, Anna of Freiburg, and Margarette Preuss are less recognizable, even though The Martyr’s Mirror relates the stories of these women, and many others, alongside the men. In the conclusion to the accounts of martyrs of the sixteenth century, the writer states, “We have presented to you, kind reader, many beautiful examples of men, women, youths and maidens, who faithfully followed their Saviour, Christ Jesus, in the true faith, feared God from the inmost of their soul, and with a pure heart sought eternal life…”17 For Anabaptists, the place of a martyr was one of honor. Anabaptist women left their families and followed the directives of their new-found 63 Paciic Journal faith to their deaths. They gave their testimonies, printed and distributed the movement’s ideals, and ultimately, died for their faith alongside the men. While they did not openly challenging the principle of male leadership, they followed their consciences. The call to discipleship superseded even the call to care for their families. Placing Christ irst, led them to the highest show of Christian commitment—martyrdom.18 The prophetic voice of the Anabaptist movement espoused discipleship and the “priesthood of all believers,” positions derived from reading the Bible and attempting to return to a New Testament model of the church. These women and men took their new-found theology seriously, leading them to places where practice diverged from cultural and spiritual norms of the time. In order to follow this call to radical discipleship, Anabaptist women had to study Scripture and theology thoroughly. When it came time to stand before the judges who questioned their faith, they spoke with conviction and clarity. As is often the case, the ideas on women’s roles varied. Menno Simons commanded women to be obedient and prescribed subordinate roles for them. Dirk Phillips, however, was critical of reformers for omitting women from their teaching. From prison, Jerome Segers wrote a letter to his wife, Lijsken, in which he declared, “And though they tell you to attend to your sewing, this does not hinder us; for Christ called us all, and commanded us to search the scriptures . . .”19 As Anabaptists recaptured a New Testament ideal for the church, women spoke freely and condemningly to their captors. They were teachers in the movement, they printed and disseminated Anabaptist materials, and they established congregations. With Jesus as their model, the theology was egalitarian. Martyrdom was an honor accorded to women as well as to men. Slave Women in the United States The experience of slave women in the United States provides another historical example of women’s involvement in the church. Born into slavery, denied even the right to raise their children and establish families, black women created communities founded on faith and rooted in the churches. Isabella Van Wagenen was one such woman. An illiterate slave woman who was forced to marry only to have her children sold away from her, Isabella became a compelling preacher whose sermons combined calls to Christ with abolition and women’s suffrage. She boldly preached her message to everyone, changing her name to Sojourner Truth to relect her journey and mission. 64 The Church and Women Black women from the time of slavery onward were spiritual leaders within their churches. They preached and wrote, often combining their ministries with abolition, civil rights, and women’s suffrage. Despite debates on the roles women should play, individual congregations of many denominations often supported and encouraged the women to follow their callings. Mission, leadership, and ministry were often a lawless part of social rights movements. Sojourner Truth, whose spiritual revelation led her to become a compelling preacher of salvation and abolition, is well known, but she was not alone. Maria Stewart was another minister who spoke for the rights of black women and openly criticized male clergy. Slave women such as Mother Suma and Aunt Hester preached and converted, even among their owners. Jarena Lee, the irst female preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, received the endorsement of the bishop, but was refused a formal pastorate and became an itinerant evangelist. Still others went to the mission ield through their churches.20 Within restrictions, they did the work of the church for which they often were excoriated. For black women in ministry, there was always an additional restriction. The African-American church was the one place where black men exerted inluence. Women frequently held themselves back to allow men the power they lacked elsewhere. Despite obstacles, slave women paved the way for women who became ministers, evangelists, and theologians after them. They drew on their African traditions and images of God, incorporated Christian beliefs, worked within their particular context of slavery and violence to create a religious tradition of unbounded strength and hope. Where Do We Go From here? The stories of the power exerted by Christianity in women’s lives lies in the lives of many women. Throughout the centuries, women found many ways to carve out their own worlds, to participate in the life of the church, to form their own spiritual traditions. From mystics such as Jane Lead to twentieth century Mennonite Brethren missionary Paulina Foote; from Joan of Arc to Simone Weil to Pentecostal women ministers in the early years of the movement; from Quaker abolitionists to Catholic lay leaders such as Dorothy Day; women laid claim to the power of the Gospel. We know some of these women, others are hidden in history. Paulina Foote, a Mennonite Brethren missionary to China, wrote in her memoirs, “What a surprise to me when Elder Foth in his sermon at the or65 Paciic Journal dination proved with Scripture passages that women should preach.” Foth used the biblical example of Mary Magdalene being the irst at the cross and the irst to “tell the greatest story of all stories” of the resurrection.21 Foote provides a moving description of her own internal debates regarding the implications of being a single woman in ministry. Within the revival movements, men such as John Wesley and Charles Grandison Finney granted women the right to speak when the spirit moved. Finney wrote, “...I urged females both to pray and speak if they felt deeply enough to do it, and not to be restrained from it by the fact that they were females...”22 In societies that did not allow women to speak authoritatively in mixed groups, women found their own ways to take part. That usually meant they could become missionaries (like Foote) or join a new Christian sect. It was in new sects, particularly ones with holiness-style inclinations, where women could speak in public. However, as these groups moved into the mainstream, the institutionalizing process forced women into a role that prescribed “silence in public.”23 There is a common thread in these stories, as disparate as they might be in time, place, and social orientation. First, inclusion of women occurred at the margins of church and society, in emerging sects or in outcasts from the mainstream. The most noticeable moments of inclusion happened at times when the church was in unusual circumstances and needed a broader pool of leaders (such as the Anabaptists or the slave churches.) Generally, people continued to employ the prevailing rhetoric of subordination. Finally, when the group moved toward the mainstream in an effort for recognition and/or survival, the church forced women out of leadership roles. So what does this say to us? In June 2006, the Presbyterian Church USA approved a document on the Trinity, in which the writers afirmed traditional language (God as Father, Son, Holy spirit) while expanding the image to embrace the full mystery of God. Traditional language, they noted, served to uphold a view of God as male and women as subordinate. “Faced with the alternatives of never speaking of the Trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and only speaking of the Trinity as Father, Son and, Holy Spirit, we see a way that is more consistent with the scriptures and theological and liturgical tradition.”24 This document came to my attention through an editorial in a local newspaper. The writer, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, believed that the document reduced church beliefs to a “sorta-holy trinity.” She went on to state, “What’s wrong is that we live in anti-father, mad-at-daddy times,” 66 The Church and Women and she reduced the document to a polarized “women good, men bad” dichotomy.25 How can one respond when our society reduces many things to polar extremes? When we allow this kind of reduction of concerns we miss so much, just as this columnist missed the afirmation of traditional language and imagery upheld by the document. The writers of that document recognized the futility of polarization and called their church to greater faithfulness. That is the best of a Jesus-based faith, a move away from our tendency to see everything as “either-or.” So how does this illustration involving trinitarian language inform the church? Before we can address any issue facing the church, it is important to learn to sidestep polarization. Then we can look at areas of concerns such as women in leadership and women’s economic issues of work and pay. We should reconsider how we discuss topics such as abortion and parenthood, and we can speak candidly about violence against women. We might consider and analyze ongoing resistance to expanding the language and imagery about God. There has been some progress. Ordination of women is more common. Women have expanded work opportunities. People are more aware of language and how it undergirds our understanding of women’s roles. Even so, there continues to be resistance to women in full leadership roles. A glass ceiling continues to exist, while women and children make up the largest portion of the working poor, and “mommy wars” needlessly pit work-for-pay women against stay-at-home moms. Violence against women is as prevalent as ever and the church is hesitant to address this reality. Many continue to resist the idea that language both relects and perpetuates societal attitudes. The best, most biblically authentic agenda for the church will gather the voices of all the marginalized: women, people of color/non-western cultures, those who are not heterosexual, and the poor. These voices are the ones with much to offer to the church precisely because they have experienced the pain of isolation, disenfranchisement, and suffering. It is in this effort that the church gives its best. The church must not make a few gains and then halt. With each step forward, it must analyze candidly (facing the discomfort this elicits) its own power structures for gaps and weaknesses. It must compare itself to its own best traditions and prophetic voices. It must examine the past and uncover hidden stories, while formulating future goals. The church should examine its sermons, its literature, its history-telling. It should analyze library collections, scrutinize its language. Church colleges and universities should train youth to understand power and privilege in gen67 Paciic Journal der, race, and class, striving to determine “what would Jesus really do.” The theology of submission might be seen as non-hierarchical in the best biblical model. In the end, there are more questions than answers. That is, I believe, how it should be. It is only in continuing to ask the pertinent questions (despite resistance) that we will make any progress. The particulars of how the church accomplishes this lies in the individuals, the denominations, and the church institutions that make up its core, as we learn to talk to each other through the screens of our differences. NotES 1 Barbara Brown Zikmund et al., Clergy Women: An Uphill Calling (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 1998) is one study that supports this anecdotal evidence. 2 See for example, Joan Chittister, “Religions Have Some Repenting to Do,” National Catholic Reporter, http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/fwis/fw031104.htm. 3 Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire: Initial Explorations (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2001), 46-50. 4 Ross Saunders, Outrageous Women, Outrageous God (Alexandria, Australia: E.J. Dwyer, 1996), 4-20. 5 Karen Torjesen, When Women were Priests (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco), 19-26. 6 Carter, Matthew and Empire: Initial Explorations, 53. 7 Torjesen, When Women were Priests, 115. 8 Dorothy Sayers, Are Women Human? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co.), 47. 9 Amy-Jill Levine, A Feminist Companion to Paul (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2004), 1. 10 Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, In Memory of Her (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 199. 11 Rosemary Radford Reuther and Eleanor McLaughlin, Women of Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 37. 12 Rachel Wahlberg, Jesus and the Freedwoman (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 130-144. 13 Ibid., 147. 14 Georgia Harkness, “Women in Church and Society,” in Women of Spirit, ed. Rosemary Reuther and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 62. 15 Karen Torjesen, When Women were Priests, 38. 16 Leo Lefebvre, “The Wisdom of God: Sophia and Christian Theology,” Christian Century, Oct. 19, 1994, 951; Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1997). 17 Thieleman J. van Braght, The Bloody Theater or Martyr’s Mirror (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1950), 1098. 18 Lois Barrett, “The Role and Inluence of Anabaptist Women in the Martyr Story,” Brethren Life and Thought, Spring 1992, 87. 19 Ibid., 90. 20 Delores C. Carpenter, “Black Women in Religious Institutions,” The Journal of Religious Thought 46:2 (Winter 1989/Spring 1990): 7. 21 Paulina Foote, God’s Hand Over My Nineteen Years in China (Hillsboro: M.B. Publishing House, 1962), 26. 68 The Church and Women Nancy Hardesty et al., “Women in the Holiness Movement,” in Women of Spirit, ed. Rosemary Reuther and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 230. 23 Barbara Brown Zikmund et al., Clergy Women: An Uphill Calling (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 12-15. 24 Presbyterian Church USA, “The Trinity: God’s Love Overlowing,” http://www.pcusa.org/ theologyandworship/issues/trinityinal.pdf. 25 Kathleen Parker, “Church Beliefs Should be More Solid,” Fresno Bee, July 5, 2006, Local & State section. 22 69 Paciic Journal 70 Response to Hope Nisly’s “The Church and Women” Response to Hope Nisly’s “The Church and Women: Power, Language, and Institutions” VAlERIE REMPEl As Hope Nisly suggests, relecting on the question of how the church has been good for women is far from an irrelevant question. While most Christians would agree that the Gospel itself is good news for all people, the church as an institution is often lawed and thus has a mixed record in regards to women. If one were to deine “good” as primarily about access to power and decision-making, than the church’s record is, indeed, dismal. As Nisly points out, while women have often been active in new expressions or movements of Christian faith, their voices and roles have generally been restricted as those movements became institutionalized. That was true of the early church experience and has been more recently true of the Pentecostal movement. Leaders within the Christian tradition have often allowed themselves to be shaped as much by larger societal patterns as by the liberating words of the Gospel. It must be noted, however, that women have exerted a great deal of power in the creation of parallel worlds within the institutions of the church. For example, monastic houses throughout Christian history have frequently been places of scholarship and service in which women formed strong bonds and developed effective ministries. During the nineteenth century women created a network of missionary societies and organizations that helped inance and staff protestant missionary efforts around the world. In fact, some scholars have argued that the leadership skills nurtured within the evangelical tradition gave impetus to the women’s rights movement. More recently, scholars are beginning to examine the contemporary women’s ministries that are congregationally based, as well as para-church organizations such as Women Aglow, and pointing out the ways in which women exercise power and develop skills for leadership. While not without problems, these are ways that women have worked at the margins of the church to create meaningful space for themselves. Any answer to the question of whether or not the church has been good for women must include the area of spirituality. Here the record is more positive. Many women have found a rich and authentic spirituality within 71 Paciic Journal the Christian tradition. The intimacy of conversation with God, an afinity with the sufferings of Jesus, and a sense of the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit have empowered many women. Within the Catholic tradition, Mary the mother of Jesus and the female saints have provided a counterpoint to the overwhelmingly male imagery of the church. The Protestant tradition’s emphasis on Bible reading and prayer has helped nurture a sense of personal relationship with God. These have been possible because of the church’s own teaching and spiritual practices. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the language of submission has been used in ways that have deeply perverted the Gospel. Many women have experienced the Gospel message as mediated by the church to be deeply harmful to mind, body, and soul. Curtailing education, limiting participation in the ministries of the church, and emphasizing a particular creation order have often resulted in the oppression of women in church and society. All too often the institutional church has ignored the reality of domestic violence or implied that if women would only “behave” such problems would go away. The language and practices of the church have often been used in ways that diminish women’s own humanity and distort the image of God. That women have been able to work within oppressive institutions and structures gives witness to the power of God to work in ways that challenge the limits of our own structures. This does not mean we can say a simple, “yes, the church is good for women,” or rest content. Instead, it calls us to continually examine the patterns we set in place and to judge them by the liberating message of salvation. 72 What’s in a Name? What’s in a Name? lARRy WARKENtIN The intent of this article is to reine and augment the material written about the name Warkentin. Genealogists and historians seem to have been stymied when tracing the origins of the name. Some historians place the name in the Dutch-Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition while others assign it an Old Slavic-German origin. Of particular interest is the way in which this discussion contributes to the long-standing debate regarding the origins of the Mennonite communities in Prussia (Poland) and South Russia (Ukraine). Are they originally from Holland (The Netherlands) or from Northern Germany? Johan Postma, a Dutch historian, proposes that Warkentin is, “a diminutive of a very old Zeeland irst name, Warrekin.”1 He sites evidence that Warrekin can be found as early as 1227. But he doesn’t explain adequately where the tin sufix originates. If it is a Dutch diminutive meaning little Warrekin, are there children today with this name in the Netherlands? When did it become a family name? Are there other examples of Dutch family names with the tin sufix? Does the name ever appear in Dutch histories or legal documents as a family name? Without answers to these questions, his suggestion is at best hypothetical. The Mennonite Encyclopedia skirts the issue by suggesting that Warkentin is “a common Mennonite name of Prussian background.”2 It is true that the name has a Prussian-Mennonite history. In 1667 Arendt Warckentyn married Sortjen Tamsen in the Danzig (Flemish) Mennonite church.3 This is the earliest occurrence of the name in Prussia. Arendt must have been comfortable with the Dutch language since this congregation worshipped in Dutch until at least 1750 and Dutch-language hymnbooks were in use well into the eighteenth century. The Brandregister of 1727 identiies Mennonite landowners in Poland. Among those listed are Jacob Warckentin in Tiege, Andres Werkentin in Heubuden, and the widow of Johann Warkentin in Ladekoppe. Individuals who were taxpaying landowners in 1727 would have been born around 1700 or earlier and would have lived in the area for some time.4 John Thiesen’s transcription of the Heubuden (Poland) Mennonite church records lists Arend Warckentin (1706-1777) of Heubuden and Peter Warckentin (1705-1786) of Siemonsdorf. 5 This Peter Warckentin is possibly the 73 Paciic Journal same individual who is named in the royal privilege granted by Augustus III, King of Poland in 1736. Moreover, we promise on our own account and that of our most serene successors that neither we nor our most serene successors shall remove or alienate from the possession of the aforesaid property the aforesaid honest men, Martin Tornis, Jacob Conrad, Isaac Conrad, Peter Warckentien, Jacob Penner, Peter Classen, Jacob Dyk, Jacob Conrad, Isaac Dyk, Francis Conrad, and Christina Barbara (widow Sassow), and their legitimate heirs and successors; . . . 6 (italics mine) After 1790, when Poland was partitioned between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, the area in which most of the Mennonites lived was taken by Prussia.7 German language was made mandatory and military service became obligatory. In reaction to military conscription many Mennonite families decided to accept the invitation of Catherine II to move to South Russia. “Stumpp records that 27 families named Warkentin left West-Prussia for Russia.”8 From there the name spread to North America, South America, Germany, Siberia, and various provinces of the former Soviet Union. This brief history of the name in Prussia substantiates the assertion in the Mennonite Encyclopedia that the name, “is a common name of Prussian background.” But that is certainly not the entire story. Peters and Thiessen add the following information: “Penner, the West Prussian genealogist, suggests that it is a name of residence, based on the place name of Parkentin, in Mecklenburg. In this region, bordering West Prussia, the surname of Parkentin and Warkentin can be found.”9 This is intriguing. The name in the principality of Mecklenburg apparently predates the arrival of Mennonites in Prussia. Many immigrants from other parts of Europe had been settling in Prussia because of the religious toleration of its rulers. “Up to the year 1703 twenty thousand Huguenots and thirteen thousand Protestants from other countries had settled in Brandenburg and Prussia.”10 This could account for the appearance of the irst Warkentin in Danzig in 1667. According to Peters and Thiessen the Warkentin name is associated with the village of Parkentin in Mecklenburg. In fact, the suggestion is that Parkentin may have evolved into Warkentin by some highly unusual consonant shift. That this is extremely unlikely will be shown in the following paragraphs. However, we must irst look critically at Horst Penner’s statement: “The Warkentins apparently come from the small market town of Parkentin, 15 74 What’s in a Name? km west from Rostock. As early as the 16th and 17th centuries there are a large number of Werkentins (Warkentins) especially in Güstrow, which is near Parkentin.”11 Clearly the name is present in this area and is unquestionably found near Parkentin. But Penner leaves several uncertainties. He only speculates that the name has its origin in this area, and the name just happens to be near the village of Parkentin. Penner goes on to show that Parkentin and Warkentin families migrate to Prussia and both names appear in Mennonite church records. “Whether the Parckentins/Warkentins all came to Westprussia as baptizers [anabaptists] one cannot say.”12 Penner never states unequivocally that the two names actually became one, and it would be wrong to make that assumption. Additionally, Penner mentions that Rostock University, which is only 15 kilometers from Parkentin, includes several Warkentins in its matriculation list. This opens a fascinating door. The city of Rostock holds a strategic location at the mouth of the Warnow river. It served as a port for ships sailing around Denmark into the Baltic. As a member of the Hanseatic League Rostock beneited greatly from the tax and duty that was gathered from produce brought up the river from the agricultural areas of Northern Germany, and the goods that were brought by ship from The Netherlands, England, and Spain. Before the Reformation the region was under the spiritual administration of the Bishop of Schwerin. Long before Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation in Wittenberg or Menno Simons had brought the Anabaptist teachings to nearby Wismar, Rostock had gained a reputation for religious dissent. Daniel Borberg describes several of these pre-reformation personalities in his article, “Die Einführung der Reformation in Rostock.” Among the most inluential were Rutze, Krantz, and Pegel.13 Nikolout Rutze, who studied at Rostock University between 1477 and 1485, was a strong advocate of the writings of John Huss. Rutze’s book, The Three Strands: living faith, hope and love, inluenced the students and the citizens of Rostock toward a more personal expression of faith. He stressed the importance of a pure heart, rather than rituals. Albert Krantz, another inluential teacher in the university, was also immersed in the teachings of Huss. In the early sixteenth century humanist scholars Konrad Celtes (1487), Herman von dem Busch (1507), Ulrich von Hutten (1512), Johannes Hadus (1515), and Nicolaus Marschalk (1510) were associated with the university. Marschalk had worked at Wittenberg University before coming to Rostock. The humanists introduced the idea of 75 Paciic Journal studying Scriptures in their original languages. The most inluential teacher in Rostock during this period was Konrad Pegel. He opposed the control of Rome and argued that the only mediator between man and God was Jesus Christ. Pegel was appointed by Duke Heinrich of Mecklenburg to be the tutor of his son, Magnus. This permitted Pegel to shape the future of the principality as it embraced the Lutheran reformation. Rostock University was founded in 1419 and its matriculation book lists more than 40,000 names of students, dignitaries, and professors who participated in the life of the institution. A transcription of the register was published in 1904 and reprinted in 1976.14 Penner apparently consulted this publication when he identiied Gabriel Werkentin from Goldberg who attended the university in 1621 and two Warkentins from Güstrow who attended in 1632. Penner did overlook several facts from this list, which may have tempered his inference that Warkentin and Parkentin are somehow linked. First of all, he overlooked several earlier Werkentins on the list. Johannes Werkentin from Sternberg is registered in 1574.15 This is the earliest written record of the Werkentin name so far discovered. Two decades later, in 1594, Gabriel Werkentin from Sternberg is listed.16 Then follow the names mentioned by Penner: Gabriel Werkentin from Goldberg (1621), and Jacob Warckentin and Michael Warkentin, both from Güstrow (1632). Arguments over the exact spelling of the name seem irrelevant since these two come from the same village in the same year yet have different spellings. They do represent the more common spellings which would become ubiquitous in Prussia. The pronunciation and spelling of Warkentin changed with its national and linguistic setting. In Plaut-Deetsch (Low German), a dialect that had no written form until the twentieth century, it is pronounced Woajtenteen with a v and a distinct diphthong on the oa. The jt is a uniquely Low German sound similar to the tch that begins the name Tchaikovsky.17 In America most people pronounce the initial syllable wor with a long o. In German it would be var as in varnish. The Plaut-Deetsch oa made an easy transition to wor in America since English prefers the long o as in a military war. In Rostock University records it was written Warckentin or Werkentin and would have been pronounced Varkenteen. The university list is written in Latin and most of the names are given a Latin ending. For example, when the son of Martin Luther is listed in 1567, only seven years before Johannes 76 What’s in a Name? Werkentin appears, he is recorded as, “Paulus Lutherus, Martini Lutheri ilius. Artis medicae doctor.”18 But the Warkentin name, no matter how it is spelled internally, never appears with the Latin us ending. In Prussia the teen sufix was clearly indicated by spelling the name Warkentien. However, many German place names continue to use only the i to indicate a long e sound. Stettin, which is near Rostock, is pronounced with a long e in the inal syllable. Even Berlin is pronounced in German with a long e in the inal syllable. And no Renaissance scholar would pronounce Georg Spalatin other than with a teen inal syllable. The family of Aron Aron Warkentin, who was born in Prussia in 1777, may serve as a sample of how the name changed over time: Aron Aron Warkentin b. 1777, Prussia Aron Warkentin b. 1807, Ukraine (South Russia) Aron Warkentin b. 1862, Ukraine (South Russia) Aron Warkentin (1862-1931) arrived in America as a sixteen-year-old boy in 1879 and the Americanization of his longstanding surname began to evolve. His father died in Russia in 1875 and his mother remarried Jacob Graves. Aron was on his own to ind his way in America. On his marriage certiicate, August 31, 1884, Aron’s name is written six times and each time it is spelled Warkentine. This would appear to be an attempt to accommodate an English pronunciation of the name. The word routine would justify this decision, unfortunately, it also leads to the possibility of a long i in the inal syllable, as in the word mine. However, when his name appears as a witness to the marriage of his son, Dietrich, in 1908, it is spelled Warkentien. And on the same document Dietrich spells his name Warkentin. In each case the handwriting appears to be rather formal and may have been the work of a court scribe. Nevertheless, Aron and Dietrich would have been aware of what was written and father and son approved two contrasting spellings. When Aron’s wife, Helena (Mackelburger) died in Fairview, Oklahoma, in 1931 the notice in local papers identiies her as Mrs. A. M. Warkentien, and one article written in the irst person by Aron clearly spells his name Warkentien. This same article lists all eight sons and in every case they are identiied as Warkentien. It is no wonder then that his sons chose three different spellings: Warkentin, Warkentine, and Warkentien. But all preserved the teen pronunciation. Other Warkentins in America changed the spelling to Workentine, while some gave the inal syllable the American pronunciation tin as in tin metal.19 77 Paciic Journal Each of the villages with which the Warkentins in the Rostock University list are identiied is in the area of Parkentin and near Rostock. But this does not necessarily conirm Penners theory that Parkentin and Warkentin are linked. Other names on the list cast an even darker shadow on his theory. A host of students with names such as Roggentyn, Scharentin, Sankentin, Dubbertin, Bechentin, Buckentin, Techentin, and Barkentin, along with Parkentyn, attended Rostock University with the Warkentins (Werkentins). The region is sprinkled with villages whose names have the tin ending. Daniel Schlyter lists forty-two villages with tin as their inal syllable in his Web-based Mecklenburg Gazetteer.20 Two of these villages deserve special attention. Wargentin was a village near present day Malchin and Basedow. The village is irst mentioned in documents as early as 1215, though it may have existed even earlier. It no longer exists as a village; however, there is a street in Malchin named “Wargentiner Strasse” and the Wargentin village site is still marked by a grove of trees.21 The second village of special interest is Wargen in East Prussia. It might be the source of the name Wargentin in Mecklenburg. There is also a town of Varchentin in the Mecklenburg Gazetteer. This town still exists and shares its name with two lakes in the vicinity. In German the v is usually pronounced as f. When pronounced, rather than seen, Varchentin sounds very much like the typical pronunciation of Warkentin. Names such as Wargentin and Varchentin are possible sources of the name Warkentin. This would be more likely than that the name evolved from Parkentin. The dificulty is that all of these names claim a Slavic-Wendish origin that does not seem consistent with the Warkentin family Low-German Mennonite history. Language alone cannot be used as proof of ethnic background. Many Warkentins in America speak only English and it took less than three generations for their German linguistic roots to disappear. It is entirely possible that a person who grew up speaking Dutch in seventeenth-century Mecklenburg would have grandchildren who spoke only German in eighteenth-century Prussia. Abraham Friesen, in his fascinating book, In Defense of Privilege: Russian Mennonites and the State Before and During World War I, explores at great length the origins of Anabaptists in Prussia-Poland. Although his argument seems to favor a Dutch origin, he references many authorities who claim that a major portion came from Germany. This controversy concerning the Dutch or German origin of the Mennonites took on heightened importance during the early twentieth century when the Soviet government decided to disenfranchise people of German background. 78 What’s in a Name? If truth be told, there were some German citizens who converted to the Anabaptist perspective. Who could argue that a name like Mackelburger did not come from Mecklenburg? Yet Aron Warkentien married Helena Mackelburger in 1884 in Jansen, Nebraska. They shared Mennonite faith and communicated in Low German. And just as certainly names such as Patzkowsky, Rogalsky, and Schapansky entered the Mennonite tradition during the Polish-Russian interlude in Mennonite history. Friesen summarizes the question in his reference to a study by Felicia Szper: The scholarly opinion, both Mennonite and non-Mennonite, on the matter of the ethnic origin of the Prussian Mennonites was therefore remarkably uniform prior to World War I. This unanimity was punctuated by Felicia Szper’s 1913 study entitled Nederlandsche Nederzettingen in West-Pruisen gedurende den Poolschen Tijd (Dutch Settlements in West Prussia during Polish Rule). Setting the coming of the Dutch Anabaptists in the sixteenth century into the larger context of DutchPrussian contacts, trade, even the occasional settlement, going back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Szper sought to determine the date on which Dutch Anabaptists made their irst appearance in Prussia and the precise regions in the Netherlands from which they came. And in an appendix she reproduced some twelve documents, beginning with one dated 1555 and ending with another dated 1766, that consistently spoke of these settlers as coming from Holland.22 A surprising argument for the German origin of Mennonites appears after World War I: “The divided opinion of the Russian Mennonites on this question after the war contrasts sharply with the virtually unanimous verdict of the scholars before the war.”23 This debate, however, never suggests that Anabaptist-Mennonites came from the Wendish-Slavic ethnic tradition even though a name such as Warkentin appears in a context where many Wends lived. In fact, the Rostock-Wismar-Lübeck branch of the Hansa was called the Wendish League. The German term designating people of Old-Slavic origin is Wendish. There is a possibility that Warkentin originated in this Slavic tradition, but there are many stronger facts that point to a Dutch origin, as will be shown later in this essay. Most Wends embraced the Lutheran reformation and became conservative followers of this tradition. They maintained a unique language, which has its origin outside the German-Dutch-Saxon tradition. A large group of Lutheran Wends immigrated to Galveston, Texas, and remain committed to the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church.24 79 Paciic Journal None of this Wendish identity seems consistent with the later history of the Warkentin family. They spoke Plaut-Deetsch (Low German). The Low German spoken in Poland by Mennonites was somewhat different than the language commonly referred to as Low German in the northern provinces of Germany. Yet both dialects had their origin in Dutch-German-Saxon languages, not in the Slavic tradition.25 Many, but not all, of the Warkentins embraced the radical reformation of Menno Simons. And they migrated to Poland rather than remain in the Lutheran-dominated area near Rostock. As usual, when migration of a group is described, it is necessary to acknowledge that not all Warkentins participated. The Warkentins who have no connection with the Anabaptist history can be found in the Rostock region to this day. A Web search of the Rostock telephone directory shows several families with the Warkentin name.26 Some Mecklenburg Warkentins migrated to the United States in the nineteenth century. For example, Ronald Dean Warkentien, who lives in Illinois, is the descendant of Ernst Christian Warkentin who was born in 1778 in Lüdershagen, Güstrow, Mecklenburg, Germany. His son, Christian Wilhelm Warkentin, emigrated from Güstrow to America in 1850. His children were baptized in a Lutheran church: Ernst Christian Warkentin 1778-Güstrow Christian Willhelm Warkentin 1812-Güstrow (1850 to USA) Frederick Charles Johann Warkentien 1852-Cook County, Illinois (baptized Lutheran) Walter A. Warkentien 1901-Starke County, Illinois Ronald Dean Warkentien 1932 27 If the Warkentin name is not of Slavic origin, then what is its origin? One clue is the sufix tin, which many Mecklenburger names have in common. The name Roggentyn, for example, is among the earliest names on the Rostock University list. It has been most thoroughly researched. According to the name advice center at the University of Leipzig, Roggentyn is a place name. The sufix in indicates, “from the place of ....”28 Not all students with names ending in tin are associated with villages that match their name. For example, Baltzar Parkentyn29 is not from Parkentin, but rather from Hannover. Marcus Techentin30 is not from Techen, but rather from Lübeck. There is a small community of Techentin near Goldburg in Mecklenburg, and a town in central Germany named Techen, so it is possible that the tin sufix indicates, “from the place of Techen.” Apparently, Marcus chose to be identiied with the larger city of Lübeck rather than the small 80 What’s in a Name? community of Techentin, or perhaps his family had moved from Techen to Lübeck. That the sufix tin might be added to a place name is clearly shown by the case of Georg Spalatin, who was a friend of Martin Luther. Georg was born on January 17, 1484, to the Burkhardt family in the village of Spalt, southeast of Nürnberg. He completed his baccalaureate degree at the University of Erfurt in 1499, where he is listed as Georius Borgardi de Spaltz (Georg Burkhardt from Spalt). He attended newly founded Wittenberg University in 1502 and was among the irst group who completed a master’s degree there in 1503.31 In 1508 he was ordained as a priest by Archbishop Johann von Laasphe, the same cleric who had ordained Luther; however, he did not meet Luther until 1513.32 As at Erfurt, he registered at Wittenberg under a latinized name: Georius borkhardus de spalt.33 The slight difference in the spelling may be an indication of the relaxed attitude toward spelling which is found throughout Europe in this period. However, this bright young student decided to give his name a more universal status upon graduating with the master’s degree. He may have been inluenced in this decision by his mentor, Nicolaus Marschalk, who later in 1510, went to Rostock University where the Warkentin name irst surfaces. Among the group of fourteen students who completed the degree on February 2, 1503, listed as number eleven, is the name, Georgius Spalatinus.34 Georg Burkhardt never used his family name again in his professional writing, and in the history of the Reformation he is always remembered as Georg Spalatin (George from Spalt). A more famous name ending in in, and one that clearly comes from a Slavic source, is that of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. He wanted a name that indicated strength, grandeur, and Russian background. So he added in to the Siberian river name Lena and became Vladimir Lenin. This may not be a strong argument for the origins of the Warkentin name, but it does indicate that in Slavic traditions place names can be claimed by adding in. In the case of the Roggentin family name mentioned above, it would appear that the tin ending comes from the Slavic (Wendish) tradition. Historians agree that people of Slavic background migrated to the Baltic region as early as 600. Their linguistic inluence is evident in Poland and the Baltic states. Hans Bahlow, in his comprehensive book, German Names, lists Warkenti(e)n as being derived from a Slavic place name.35 However, the Slavic origin of tin can hardly be applied to Georg Spalatin, who came from Bavaria near Nürenburg in Southern Germany and, even if his heritage 81 Paciic Journal might be traced to the very early settlements of Slavs who can be found in Bavaria, it is evident that he chose the tin ending after attending university. The example of Spalatin, the Dutch-Mennonite connection, and the LowGerman linguistic history in the Warkentin family argue against a Slavic origin. One can conclude that Warkentin means “from a place named Warken.” But there are a number of locations to be considered. Warken, Werken, Werchen, Verchin, Wargen, and Workum can be found on the map of northern Europe. And there is a concentration of villages in Mecklenburg with tin as their inal syllable. This tin ending has an Old Slavic linguistic origin and the presence of Slavs in this region is well documented. Theirs was a pagan tradition and the Christianization of this region around 1100 forced them to convert, depart, or die.36 Scholars have logically, but perhaps too easily, assigned an Old Slavic origin to every name ending in tin. The example of Georg Spalatin puts that practice to the question. The most direct origin of Warkentin may be the village of Wargentin, which appears in documents around 1250 and disappears from maps after 1800. A Dutch-published map of Mecklenburg from 1645 shows Wargentin south of Rostock near the town of Malchin.37 Yet, it is not a completely satisfactory place of origin since the name Werkentin appears not far away at Rostock University in 1574 with a k and never with a g. Evidence can neither conirm nor deny this as the place of origin, and there are other places which deserve equal or greater consideration. A family might have come to Mecklenburg from Workum in The Netherlands where Anabaptists were well established and then changed their name to Warkentin. But that would require a number of consonant shifts and there is a more logical, though often overlooked, possibility that we shall pursue. There is a village named Warken in Gelderland, The Netherlands. Is this merely serendipity, or can a connection be made between Rostock in Mecklenburg and Warken in Gelderland? Certainly such a connection can be made on the basis of circumstantial evidence. As early as 1150 people from Flanders had been invited by Albert the Bear, Margrave of Brandenburg, to settle along the Baltic near Rostock. “They received bigger farms than the Slavs retained, were practically exempt from taxation and enjoyed such a high degree of secular and ecclesiastical favour, as compared with the Slav population, that a large proportion of such natives as had survived the slaughter of battle left the country.”38 82 What’s in a Name? The princely sons of the Slav leader, Niklot, died in their attempt to retain their territory in Mecklenburg and Pomerania. Pribislaw, the elder son, declared war on Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, in 1164. His speech rallying his troops at the castle of Ilowe clearly identiies people of Flanders as unwelcome foreigners in his realm: You all know how much injury and disaster the violent rule of the Duke has brought upon our people. He has robbed us of the inheritance left by our fathers and bestowed it everywhere upon foreigners, Flemings, Dutchmen, Saxons, Westphalians and others.’39 (italics mine) It is also evident that the people of Flanders and Holland thought of the Baltic coast as a place of hope and refuge. The “Shakespeare” of Dutch literature, Joost van der Vondel (1587-1679), sets his most famous play, Gijsbrecht van Aemstel in the fourteenth century, and has his hero escape from war-torn Holland and resettle in Danzig.40 Such an escape from the problems in Holland did not seem unrealistic to Vodel’s seventeenth-century audience. And it must be noted that Vondel was an Anabaptist-Mennonite in 1650 when he wrote this drama. A century after Gijsbrecht supposedly escaped to Danzig, the presence of Netherlanders is again noted in Mecklenburg. The Rostock University matriculation list names several students who claim cities in the Netherlands as their home. Gisebertus Nicolai41 is from Leyden, Bernhardus Lewerdianus42 is from the state of Friesland and probably from the town of Leeuwarden, as his family name implies. This establishes the fact that students from The Netherlands did attend Rostock University. But can such a clear argument be made for a student coming from the village of Warken? This will depend upon additional circumstantial evidence. Warken is a small community of several hundred people in Gelderland. It is situated ive kilometers east of Zutphen and since 2005 it has been incorporated into that larger municipality. According to Dutch historian Michel Groothedde, Warken was spelled Wercken during the 14th and 15th centuries.43 Dutch etymologist, Jan ter Laak, believes that Warken means “curve in the river.” Warken is located on the Warkense enk near the river Berkel and is named after the curve in this river. Excavations in nearby Eme and Leesten reveal that the site has been occupied by farmers for more than 5,000 years.44 Zutphen, which would have been the governmental center for Warken, has a well-documented history. It is the ninth-oldest city in the Netherlands, receiving its city rights in 1190. It is located in the state of Gelderland and 83 Paciic Journal since it is one of the last major cities in the south where the terrain becomes a fen it has been given the name “south-fen.” Zutphen had a Mennonite community in the eighteenth century, but that is the earliest mention of their presence.45 That no earlier Mennonite congregation is found in the written record may be due to the fact that under Philip II new congregations were forbidden. So any Anabaptist congregations in the Zutphen area would have had to be secret. There was enough religious turmoil in the region to produce martyrs like Anne of Utenhoven, who is recorded in The Martyrs Mirror, and to precipitate an invasion by Philip II in the late sixteenth century resulting in the massacre of citizens in Zutphen.46-47 It was one of the Hansa cities and therefore had economic connections with Lübeck, Rostock, Danzig, and other cities along the Baltic coast. The rivers and canals lowing through Zutphen lead to the Dutch coast and from there to all the major ports of the Baltic. At the peak of trading activity in the fourteenth and ifteenth centuries as many as 1,200 ships annually made the voyage between The Netherlands and ports of the Baltic.48 Establishing the year when a Dutch-speaking family would have left Warken and relocated in the Rostock area may be impossible. But the name, Verken, deinitely appears in Rostock in the late Middle Ages. The inancial and political success of Rostock was dependent on the cooperative relationship it had with other exporting cities in the region. As early as 1257 Rostock was in negotiation with Wismar, Lübeck, and Ribnitz with the goal of establishing rights of commerce. One concern was the active presence of pirates and thieves along the coast.49 The relatively small ships used for commerce in the late Middle Ages required navigation by visual landmarks, keeping them near the shore and susceptible to piracy. The oldest city records of Rostock are on several undated parchment pages. Thierfelder has determined that these pages predate the City Record of 1261.50 Fragment I-3 records a legal transaction regarding Nicolaus Verken, his daughter Margaret, and Herman of Blisecov.51 This transaction deinitely predates 1261 and most likely was recorded in 1258. Nicolaus Verken was living in, or near, Rostock in 1258 and was old enough to have a daughter, which would place his birth around 1230. In the late Middle Ages family names (surnames) had not yet developed a standard taxonomy. A person may be known as Johann the isherman, or Johann son of Heinrich, or Johann of Lübeck, or simply as Johann. It may be only accidental that Nicolaus Verken is not recorded as Nicolaus “de” Verken. Even without the insertion of “de” one can conclude that the inal 84 Name of Article Here name indicates a place of origin since it is neither a father’s name nor a vocational name. Werken in both Dutch and German means “to labor, work,” but it would be quite unusual for a verb to become a family name. Spelling of names is not standardized in this early Rostock document. For example, Walter is spelled Walterus, Walderus, Wolterus, Wolderus, and Volterus. 52 It is therefore not surprising that the village in Gelderland, which today is spelled Warken, was spelled Wercken during the Middle Ages. And just as the w may morph into v so does the ck easily become k. And the great variety of spellings of Warkentin (Werkentin, Werckentin, Warckentien) demonstrates the shift between a and e. It is also consistent with geographic and economic history that there would be migration within the region known as the Low Countries. This label is not conined to the area presently comprising the state of The Netherlands, but is applied to the entire northern area from Emden to Danzig. Into this region all the major rivers of northern Europe low, making for eficient transport of inland produce to the Baltic coast. Even though the Hanseatic League was not yet fully developed by 1250, there was already signiicant trade between cities along the Baltic coast and cities along the shores of Western Europe. The Rostock city records of the thirteenth century mention cargo such as wheat, rye, barley, oats, malt, hops, lumber, potash, wax, honey, dried salted herring, lour, cloth, linen, copper, iron, fur pelts, salt, cement, and farm animals that were exported from its port on the Warnow river.53 Thierfelder has created an alphabetical list of family names found in the Rostock city register.54 It is clear from this list that many families had found their way to the area around Rostock from Flanders, where the village of Warken is located. There are seven entries, some including several family members, with the last name Flamingus, Flamincgus, or Flemingus, clearly indicating their origin as Flanders. Other names that may have origins in The Netherlands include Brabantinus, Brant, Vollandi, and Harlendie. The cities of Zwolle and Utrecht (Traiecto) are also mentioned as places of origin.55 That Nicolaus Verken would not have been the only person of Dutch origin living in Rostock in 1260 is clearly shown by the presence of these other names on the list. It is historically possible that his name refers to the village of Wercken (Warken) in Gelderland since Zutphen and its satellite village, Warken, have a history dating back to 1190 and existed as an agricultural area reaching back ive thousand years. Many names in Thierfelder’s summary of the Rostock Register would later ind their way into the Mennonite tradition. Perhaps these are simply 85 Paciic Journal common Germanic names, but it is more than coincidental that so many of these names have survived in the Mennonite-Anabaptist tradition that swept through this area two centuries later. The following names, which can be found in twenty-irst century Mennonite congregations, are recorded on the Rostock list before 1273: Medieval spelling Bloc Born Bouman Brant Bulle Voghet Friso Gunterus de Hagen Heince Heinricus Herderus Hildebrandus Heyer de Lawe de Lippia Martinus Reimarus Sibertus Symonis Slichtinc Sroder Wibeken Modern spelling Block Born Bauman Brandt Buller Vogt, Voth Friesen Günther, Gunther Hagen Heinze Heinrichs Harder Hildebrandt Heier Loewen Lepp, Loepp Martens Reimer Siebert Siemens Schlichting Schröder Wiebe But why should one look for migration from Flanders to Mecklenburg so early in history? It has usually been assumed that Mennonites led from The Netherlands to Northern Germany and Prussia as the result of religious persecution in the sixteenth century. However, the matriculation list from Rostock University and the earliest Rostock city records show that this assumption may be only partially correct. In addition to the “Mennonite” names listed in the thirteenth century city records, the university register in the ifteenth century lists the following names, which can be found in twenty-irst century Mennonite congregations. These families lived in Mecklenburg long before the Anabaptist message took root:56 86 What’s in a Name? As listed Lowe Berken Voghet Conradi Schroder van Epen Bulle Bolt Symonis Mertens Borchman Brand Smyt Radyke Kruse Block Pletze Goldbeke Reymer Berch Decker Gortzen Flemingh Dreger Yseken Knake Suderman Eyttzen Funke Zukow Langhe Bergh Vlamynk Sperling Schulenborch Modern spelling Loewen Bergen Vogt Conrad Schröder Epp Buller Bolt Siemens Martens Barkman Brandt Schmidt Radke Kruze Block Plett Goldbeck Reimer Berg Decker Goertzen Flaming Drieger Isaac Knack Suderman Eytzen Funk Sukow Lange Berg Flaming Sperling Schellenberg The fact that the irst Werkentin does not appear in the register until 1574 might lead to the conclusion that his migration from Warken occurred in the late sixteenth century and may, indeed, have resulted from religious persecution. However there is another possibility. In 1456 a student named Bernardus Verken attended Rostock University.57 The only information given about Bernard Verken is that he came from the village of Hagen. There are several villages and cities of this name in 87 Paciic Journal Germany but the one closest to Rostock is most likely his home. It is located northeast of Rostock on the large island of Rügen, along the Baltic coast. The Verken name was long established in the Rostock area since Nicolaus Verken has been shown to be there in 1260. And there is also a village southeast of Rostock which is named Verchen on modern maps, but on earlier maps is spelled Verken. Since Bernard was of university age in 1456 he was probably born between 1430 and 1440. Rostock University, established in 1419, would have been an attractive place for a young man of ambition. A university education was a good entrance to a more successful life and Rostock University was the most prestigious place of learning along the trading routes of Northern Europe. With many families in the region using the sufix tin to indicate their place of origin, it would be a logical progression for the Werken family to add it to their name just as Georg Burkhardt from Spalt became Georg Spalatin. Bernard Werken attended the university in 1456, and in 1574, a century later, Johannes Werkentin registered. And it should be noted that Nicolaus Marschalk, who was Spalatin’s mentor at Wittenberg University in 1503, came to Rostock University in 1510 before the irst appearance of the Warkentin name. Is it possible that he inluenced a student from Warken to change his name to Warkentin? At any rate, by 1574 the family name was irmly established as Werkentin with the sufix tin indicating their place of origin. This would explain why the name in its full form has not been found earlier in any other place. Further research may add valuable information concerning the names and locations of Werken and Werkentin in the Rostock region. A family well enough established to send their son to a university most likely had other children and possibly relatives in the region. The Rostock matriculation list gives only a very selective view of families. Surely, not every young man named Werken or Werkentin was able to attend the university. At present an attempt is being made to test DNA samples from Warkentins in the Prussia-Russia-Mennonite line and from Warkentins in the Mecklenburg-Lutheran line. The results should indicate the common ethnic origins of the name. Bahlow may be correct when he writes that Warkentin is based on an Old Slavic place since there are several villages in Mecklenburg with similar sounding names. However, that would still not prove that people carrying the name are of Slavic origin. Without question people of FlemishDutch ancestry have lived in the Rostock region for more than ive hundred 88 What’s in a Name? years. They might have brought the name with them, or they might have acquired the name from villages in Mecklenburg. One intriguing question can be answered satisfactorily. If Bernard Werken lived in Mecklenburg before 1500 he would have been a baptized Catholic. Rostock had several large Catholic churches and monasteries. Any one living in the area before 1500 would have been devoutly, or at least tacitly, Catholic. How did the Werkentin family and the many other families with Mennonite ethnic names become associated with the Anabaptist-Mennonite Christian tradition? Menno Simons, after whom the Mennonite tradition is named, came from Witmarsum in the Dutch state of Friesland. He spent the last ifteen years of his life in the region where the name Warkentin is irst recorded. According to Harold S. Bender in Menno Simons’ Life and Writings, Menno led Holland because a bounty was on his head for being a religious heretic who did not follow the strict teachings of the state church. In the Baltic north he would be under the sovereignty of the more tolerant King of Denmark. In 1553-54 Menno lived in Wismar, which is between Lübeck and Rostock.58 In this town in 1554, he participated in a theological conference with the leaders of the Mennonite (Anabaptist) churches. During these years he worked on a translation of his Dutch writings into the provincial Low-German dialect spoken in the Baltic region. Menno died in 1561 on the estate of Bartholomew von Ahlefeldt in the village of Wüstenfelde, which is located between Lübeck and Hamburg. It is likely that the Warkentins and many of the other Mennonite-related names on the Rostock matriculation list were converted to the Anabaptist view of Christianity by Menno himself, or by his most inluential disciple, Dirk Philips, who also worked in this region. As stated earlier, the irst Warkentin in Prussia is Arendt Warckentin in 1667, and his name is recorded in the Danzig (Flemish) Mennonite church, of which Dirk Philips was the founder. The Warkentin name irst appears at Rostock University in 1574 in the principality of Mecklenburg. Evidence suggests that it evolved from the place-name Warken by the addition of the sufix tin, which indicates a place of origin. And the logical place of origin is the village of Warken in Gelderland, The Netherlands. The family became Mennonite Anabaptist and moved to Prussia before 1667. Evidence clearly shows that the name predates the Prussian era and it indicates that not all Mennonites in the “Dutch” tradition came from The Netherlands as the result of religious persecution. The presence of Flemish people in Mecklenburg well before the Refor- 89 Paciic Journal mation precipitates an interesting question. Even if DNA evidence shows a Dutch origin for a person of Mennonite background, is it reasonable to claim Dutch privilege if the family lived in “Germany” for centuries? If the Warken family moved from Flanders to Mecklenburg as early as 1200 can they claim Dutch heritage? This would be comparable to a descendant of a Maylower family claiming privilege as a citizen of Great Britain. The search for a name’s origin never ends. But the search itself opens windows into history, politics, economics, geography, faith, and faithfulness, and provides insights for living in the present. What Tennyson wrote of a lower in a crannied wall, can be said of a name: but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is. NotES 1 Johan Postma, Das niederländische Erbe der preussisch-russländischen Mennoniten in Europe, Asian und America (Leeuwarden: A. Jongblood c.v., 1959), 102 #532. 2 Cornelius Krahn, Warkentin, vol. 4 of Mennonite Encyclopedia. (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1959), 887. 3 Horst Penner, Die ost-und westpreussischen Mennoniten in ihrem religiosen und sozialen Leben in ihren kulturellen und wirtschaftlichen Leistungen Teil I 1526-1772 (Weierhof: Mennonitischer Geschichtsverein E. V., 1978), 353. 4 Glenn H. Penner, trans., Brandregister of 1727, http://www.mennonitegenealogy.com/prussia/Brandregister_1727.html. 5 John Thiesen, www.bethelks.edu/jthiesen/prussian/heubuden.html. 6 Peter Klassen, trans., from manuscript from the Gdansk National Archive for a forthcoming book by Peter Klassen (Fresno: 2006). 7 Sidney B. Fay, The Rise of Brandenburg-Prussia to 1786, rev. Klaus Epstien (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1946). 8 Victor Peters and Jack Thiessen, Mennonitische Namen: Mennonite Names (Marburg: N. G. Elwert Verlag 1987), 132. 9 Ibid. 10 Hermann Schreiber, Teuton and Slav: The struggle for central Europe, trans. from the 3rd German edition by James Cleugh (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 241. 11 Horst Penner, loc. cit. 12 Ibid. 13 Axel Borberg, Die Einführung der Reformation in Rostock, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, Schrift 58, XV. Jahrgang. Vereinsjhar 1897-1898, (Halle: 1897), 35. Hans Bahlow, German Names, trans. and rev. Edda Gentry (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 535. 14 Adolph Hormeister, vol. 1-4 of Die Matrikel der Universität Rostock (Rostock: Commission der Stillerschen Hor-und Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1891, Kraus Reprint, 1987). 90 What’s in a Name? Die Matrikel vol. II, 182 #35. Die Matrikel vol. II, 246 #14. 17 Peters and Thiessen, loc. cit. (additional discussion of Low-German pronunciation is available in the introduction of Jack Thiessen’s Low-German Dictionary and other Mennonite names may be studied in Gustav Reimer, Die Familiennamen der westpreussischen Mennoniten. (Weierhof: Mennonitischen Geschichtsverein, 1963). 18 Die Matrikel vol. II, 163 #28. 19 The materials relating to Aron Warkentin (1862-1931), my great-grandfather, are in my personal collection. 20 Daniel Schlyter, Mecklenburg Gazetteer, http://www.progenealogists.com/germany/mecklenburg/meckgaz.htm. 21 Die Stadtgründung Malchin-Mecklenburgischen Schweiz, www.absolut-mecklenburg.de/ root/ll_00_00006/index.php?seite=301. 22 Abraham Friesen, In Defense of Privilege: Russian Mennonites and the State Before and During World War I (Winnipeg: Kindred Productions, 2006), 306. 23 Ibid. 24 Schwausch Wendish History, www.netmastery.com/ancestors/whatsawend.html-7k. 25 Jack Thiessen, Mennonite Low German Dictionary: Mennonitisch-Plattdeutsches Wörterbuch. Studies of the Max Lase Institute for German-American Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003), 27-30. 26 Rostock directory available at http://www.teleauskunft.de/. 27 Ronald Dean Warkentien family genealogy available at http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/ cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=vortext155&id=l1052). 28 Roggentin family history available at http://www.alfred-roggentin.gmxhome.de/page6.html. 29 Die Matrikel 1522 vol. II, 83 #27. 30 Die Matrikel 1567, vol. II, 164 #28. 31 Irmgard Höss, Georg Spalatin: 1484-1545 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1956), 14. 32 Albert Hauck, ed., Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung,1906), 547. 33 Georg Spalatin 13. 34 Georg Spalatin 14. 35 Hans Bahlow, German Names, trans. and rev. Edda Gentry (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 535. 36 Marija Gimbutas, The Slavs (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971). 37 Meklenburg map of 1645 at UCLA, http://www.library.ucla.edu/yrl/reference/maps/blaeu/ meklenbvrg.jpg. 38 Herman Schreiber, Teuton and Slav: The struggle for central Europe, trans. James Cleugh (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965). 39 Teuton and Slav 59. (Quoting Helmold, Geschichte der Slaven, II.2.). 40 Jost van den Vondel, Gijsbrecht van Amstel, trans. Kristin P. G. Amerce, Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation (Dove house editions, 1991). 41 Die Matrikel 1490 vol. I, 213 #77. 42 Die Matrikel vol. II, 102 #36. 43 Michel Groothedde, personal correspondence with the author, 2006. 44 Jan ter Laak, personal correspondence with the author, 2006. 15 16 91 Paciic Journal 45 Zutphen-Gelderland, #0108887 (Family History Center, Salt Lake, Utah) Craig Harline and Eddy Put, A Bishop’s Tale: Mathias Hovius Among His Flock in Seventeenth-Century Flanders (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). 47 C. Bruneel, The Spanish and Austrian Netherlands in History of the Low Countries, ed. J. C. H. Blom and E. Lamberts, trans. James C. Kennedy (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999). 48 Johannes Schildhauer, The Hansa: History and Culture, trans. Katherine Vanovitch (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1985), 39. 49 Hildegard Thierfelder, Das Älteste Rostocker Stadtbuch (ca. 1254-1273) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Rupert, 1967), 348. 50 Älteste Rostocker 18. 51 Älteste Rostocker 74 #23. 52 Älteste Rostocker 338-339. 53 Älteste Rostocker 241. 54 Älteste Rostocker 292-319. 55 Älteste Rostocker 240. 56 Die Matrikel vol. 1, 1419-1499. 57 Die Matrikel vol. I, 110 #85. 58 Harold S. Bender, Menno Simons’ Life and Writings (Scottdale: Mennonite Publishing House, 1936), 42. 46 92 PAUL TOEWS, Literature Review: Recent Titles in Russian History PAUL TOEWS Literature Review: Recent Titles in Russian History DAVID REMNICK lenin’s tomb: the last Days of the Soviet Empire. New York: Random House, 1993. 588 PAgES. ANNE APPlEBAUM Gulag: A history. New York: Doubleday, 2003. 677 pages oRlANDo FIGES Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural history of Russia. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002. 728 pages. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union a remarkably rich collection of books has resulted from the opening of archival holdings that were previously inaccessible to Western scholars. A number might be of interest to readers not particularly steeped in Russian history: David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (Random House, 1994); Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (Doubleday, 2004); and Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (Henry Holt and Company, 2002) are all good reads. Remnick and Applebaum received the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Figes, while not winning a Pulitzer, has received other notable awards. From 1988-1992 Remnick, as the Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, had a front-row seat for observing the collapse of the Soviet Empire. He arrived in Moscow shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev had announced his policy of “glasnost” or openness. That policy, perhaps Gorbachev’s greatest achievement, also opened up Soviet history in a way which had not occurred since its beginnings in 1917. One of Remnick’s theses is an important reminder about the power of historical investigation. He argues that no people could face the past that was opened up in the 1980s. Unmasking the past undercut the lingering legitimacy of the Soviet system. The self-righteousness of the Lenin idealism and sense of the invincibility of the totalitarian state were destroyed. The state, it turned out, had survived only through a war against its own people. The “new history” also gave legitimacy to the nationalist claims that subsequently made it easier for republics of the Union 93 Paciic Journal of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) to move toward independence. Remnick analyzed the end Soviet period and the years of change through engaging interviews with hundreds of people. We get a glimpse of the texture of the lives of important and nameless people, party functionaries and dissidents under the Soviet system. These interviews reveal many things—the determination and capacity for people to carve out personal spheres amidst a very totalitarian society, the way in which commitments are shaped by personal and familial values, and the endless and subtle ways in which they either ignored the dictates of the state or consciously undermined its expectations. The composite is a lively accounting of the events that contributed to the sudden unraveling of what had been perceived by many as a powerful and enduring state system. Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History is not about the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet it does describe one of the features that surely led to its collapse. The history of the gulag is best known through work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (published both in Russia and the West in 1962) and the Gulag Archipelago (a three-volume work) initially published in the West in 1973 and in the Soviet Union only in 1989. Solzhenitsyn’s work could be published only following Khrushchev’s attack on the system in 1956. Applebaum followed Gorbachev’s 1987 more extensive attack on the repressive system. While Solzhenitsyn traced the gulag’s origins back to Lenin (earlier it had generally been assumed that Stalin was the initiator), Applebaum inds antecedents in Czarist Russia and similarities with prisoner camps established earlier by Western nations. Solzhenitsyn’s work effectively ended in 1956. Applebaum carries the story to the closure of the system under Gorbachev. Running throughout are comparisons with the Nazi death factories. While at times they acted in similar ways, Applebaum repeatedly notes that the Soviet camp system was different in that it was designed to build a state through terror and to help industrialize the empire. Of prime importance was that the gulag population it into a camp production plan and fulill a work norm. And so prisoners of the gulag cleared forests and built roads, railways, dams, and new cities and made everything from missiles to children’s toys. Many suffered along the way, but that was a by-product rather than the intent of the system. Solzhenitsyn’s work could not see the end of the equation. Applebaum does and is intrigued with the contrast to the end of the Nazi camps. For the crimes and injustices of the gulag there have been no trials of those responsible and no oficial investigations. There is no national museum of repression, no national monuments, and little public memory, as there is in 94 PAUL TOEWS, Literature Review: Recent Titles in Russian History Germany. She observes many reasons for the difference. Most importantly is the continuing dominance of leaders with roots in the Soviet past who have interest in concealing some of its worst features. Natasha’s Dance is a very different kind of work. This is a grand cultural overview. If you want a quick and enchanting entry into the history of Russian culture from Peter the Great’s opening to the West in the early eighteenth century into the mid-twentieth Soviet story, then this is the book. Natasha is a blue blood out of Tolstoy’s War and Peace who, when visiting an eccentric relative, inds some of the Russian peasantry in her own soul. In the encounter Figes, a professor of history at the University of London, inds a metaphor for the complexity of Russian identity. It leads us to the polarities of the ensuing cultural story: the Asian soul and the European mind, Moscow and St. Petersburg as competing intellectual centers, Westernized nobility and traditional peasantry, and artist and politician in the fashioning of Russian identity. Figes argues that for the past two hundred years the absence of a free press and inclusive and representative political institutions meant that the debate about national identity was carried on in the arts. The literati, alienated from the state functionaries by their political aspirations and from the peasants by their education, poured their energy into the quest for understanding the nationality ideal. As a consequence writers, artists, and musicians were endowed with unusual moral authority. In the introduction Figes writes, “Nowhere has the artist been more burdened with the task of moral leadership and national prophecy nor more feared and prosecuted by the state.” From Peter the Great (1700) through the Napoleonic wars (1815) the quest for identity among the intelligentsia, both national and personal, largely took its cue from the West. Following the Napoleonic invasion and the willing sacriice of the peasants to defend their land the cultural elites began a search for identity within Russian traditions. It is this tension between the foreign and the indigenous that has nurtured some of the greatest writers, poets, artists, and composers of modern history. Writers like Leo Tolstoy, Fedor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, and Alexander Pushkin; artists Marc Chagall and Ilia Repin; muscians Nickolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Rachmaninov, Pytor Tchaikovsky, Sergei Prokoiev, and many others drew on fashionable European forms and themes and the sentiments or rhythms of oriental Russia and its peasant culture. By the mid-nineteenth century a widespread conviction assumed that Russian art and music needed to liberate itself from imitation of European 95 Paciic Journal forms. Only by incorporating the native traditions could Russian cultural life emerge from the shadows of Europe. As Vladimir Stasov, a towering igure in nineteenth-century Russian cultural life, described it the time had come for the “hoopskirts and tailcoats” of St. Petersburg to give way to the “long Russian coats” of the country. (p. 178). The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 encouraged an embrace of peasant virtues as the embodiment of a distinctive nationality. Figes traces many nineteenth century examples of the artistic reach from the recent Westernized past to the more ancient Slavophile elements of the Russian psyche. Ilia Repin’s famous painting, The Volga Barge Haulers (1873), idealizes the human dignity of the peasant. Musorgsky’s operas incorporate folk music of the steppe and the people not yet disturbed by the appearance of the railway. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) recreates ancient rituals of harmony. Fedor Dostoevsky’s four great novels—Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov—Figes contends, were all variations on the theme of the Western educated man inding fulillment by becoming a Slavophile. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 creates a deep chasm in this cultural story. Some artists became the keepers of the memory of the European civilization which was largely swept away, others became engaged in the construction of the new Soviet person and still others emigrated. The inal chapter—“Russia Abroad”—chronicles the yearnings of the diaspora who led initially to Berlin and Paris and often on to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. A cluster came to Paris, including Prokoiev and Stravinsky, where they sought to continue the cultural life of St. Petersburg. Here, Figes suggests, they sought to accentuate the European elements of their cultural inheritance while minimizing the peasant and Asiatic strains. For some who found Paris the “outlet to the West” in the immediate years following the revolution, the United States became a more permanent home. The poignant longings of the émigrés for the homeland ill the last chapter with pathos. The style of Natasha’s Dance is anecdotal and biographical. There are revealing glimpses into the lives of the artists and their patrons. We meet them in their cultural contexts and as part of the Russian quest for self-understanding. The book is enhanced by the presence of twenty seven color reproductions of some of Russia’s most celebrated and distinctive art. Paul Toews Fresno Paciic University 96 DOMINIQUE JANICAUND, On the Human Condition DOMINIQUE JANICAUND On the Human Condition, translated by Eileen Brennan. NEW yoRK: RoUtlEDGE, 2005 (FRENCh EDItIoN, 2002). 71 PAGES. A translation of L’homme va-t-il dépasser l’humain? (Will Man Overcome the Human?), Dominique Janicaud’s On the Human Condition is a cautionary meditation and “critical relection.” Fluidly translated by Eileen Brennan, this short work is enhanced by an extended introduction from Simon Critchley. Concern for the, “unprecedented uncertainty about human identity” (1) generated this posthumously published legacy of the relatively ill-known French philosopher. Janicaud sums up his concern under the banner of humanism, but the reader should not comprehend the humanism of a former time that identiied itself in part as antireligious, antitheist, or anti-Christian. This is expressly repudiated in Janicaud’s dismissal of any kind of humanism that would evoke Comte and positivism. Quoting Sartre to champion his perspective, our author writes, “The cult of humanity ends in Comtian humanism, shut-in upon itself, and—this must be said—in Fascism. We do not want humanism like that” (8). Devoting his irst chapter to a consideration of humanism as a last defense of human integrity before the twin dangers of inhumanity and the hubris of a superhumanity that would betray the foundational humus of homo sapiens, Janicaud, energized by the insight of Martin Heidegger, is forced to confront the accusation that the Structuralism of Levi-Straus and Foucault conspires with the enemies of humanity. Ensuing chapters patiently face an assortment of challenges to the human species as it has been known throughout our cultural epochs. The great specter is “mankind,” itself, and precisely because one has the potential of being human, “man is, of all creatures, the only one who, through his violence, his barbarism and his sadism, can really show himself to be inhuman to the point of heinousness…” (19). Most sobering is the realization that the very attempt to “perfect” and thus overcome the burdens or limitations of our condition has so often issued in the monstrous, frequently responsible for one radical evil or another. If Janicaud appeals, in this irst instance, to a iction that has obtained, he tells us, the status of a myth—Mary Shelley’s 97 Paciic Journal Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus—it is to highlight the, “powerful, near irrepressible, impulse that [is] virtually imposed upon [us] by the scientiic spirit itself” (22). If this scientiic and fantastic power to manipulate life once produced classical forewarnings in the dreams of iction, it has matured into the nightmares of contemporary possibilities. Science and technology, the author alerts us, are capable of an imaginary enterprise beyond all ictional powers that risks, “an inhumanity aggravated to the point of monstrousness” (22). In his litany of cautions, Janicaud speaks of electronic, transgenic, or “bionic” attempts of technology to improve or transform humanity. He pays special attention to the theoretical suspicions of Jean-Michel Truonig that creative experimentation will produce a Successor to the race, founded upon an artiicial “inhuman” intelligence that in due course will surpass human sapience and pass into a new form of life, impervious to the entropy that is the “death instinct” of our species. From science iction, the author borrows an optic that suggests the myth of today is so often the reality of tomorrow. Here, he confronts the cyborg, a mixed being that is both man and robot all at once. “Man”: homo but not humanus, as Heidegger might say, completely lacking in humanitas. While the cyborg might simply remain a “big toy,” it could very well be, “that bioengineering and nanotechnologies, combined with new advances in miniaturized computing, allow for the perfection … of extremely robust, almost immortal, ‘human specimens’” (32). Such a wish-fulillment would only evidence that we remain unstable and fragile beings, unwilling to accept our margin of liberty. Thus, Janicaud concludes, “That which endangers humanity, then, really derives from itself: a freedom that turns against itself” (34). The gap between iction or fantasy and reality has been bridged by relatively recent clonings. The prospect of a mass production of, for example, military clones is overwhelmed by the greater conundrum that “cloning could strain the very principle of the individual singularity of human beings” (36). Nevertheless, nothing guarantees, our author observes, “that reproductive cloning would lead to the depths of inhumanity; nothing guarantees the contrary either” (39). A more repugnant consideration is that some future catastrophic necessity will provoke the species into a bioselection of the best of our “human herd” for stockbreeding in human parks or zoos. This “anthropotechnology” evokes the terrors of a still too recent war and the horrors of self-imputed masters who revealed themselves as wretchedly inhuman. So many attempts 98 DOMINIQUE JANICAUND, On the Human Condition to overcome humanity’s imperfect wherewithal have issued in grossly crude inhuman permutations. If so much of our inhumanity is predicated upon a lust for power, especially the power to be invincibly beyond restraint, then, our author warns (employing the insight of Ernst Junger), our situation is extremely grave since “man is in the process of liberating cosmic energies of which he is less and less the master”(43). Janicaud opens his ultimate chapter wondering if it is not the divine but the superhuman that now summons us from potentia to potency. The issue may be, the reviewer might interject, not the question of power or indigence but of the quality or kind of power we seek. If Heidegger speaks of, “a powerless superior power” the reader, at least a religious reader, cannot help but call to mind that power that is made perfect in weakness. Janicaud simply queries, “Can man ind the dimension of Transcendence in himself?” (44) Suspending this conjecture to remain in a modest “critical relection” prior to stratospheric ontology or faith, the author acknowledges Malraux’s assertion that we live, “in the irst ‘atheistic civilization’, understood as a technician civilization” (44), which, in lieu of the sacred, values only eficiency. It is in this context that the call of the superhuman arises and seemingly drowns out that still quiet voice interfacing our contingency with the divinely transcendent. If our world has, “no god other than the future” and the unforeseeable to which the techno-scientiic powers are leading us, the question begs to be asked, asserts our author, whether or not this life beyond our creaturely limitations is really a superior one or merely a liberation for the mediocre and banal. “A humanity that has no horizon other than the amassing of quantitative results or the purely technical increase in its physical and mental capacities collapses, loses all energy,” no longer equal to the task of human existence (49). The great terror, as centuries attest, is that the superhuman is always a call for the privileged elite who inevitably abdicate consideration and kindness, if not all morality or ethics. If “the most probable penalty for these ‘overcomings’ is the regression into new forms of the inhuman” (50), asks the author, are we not urged to modesty—not to say humility—and restraint? Janicaud’s conclusion makes clear what “overcoming” signiies. It is simply an escape, or attempted escape, from humanity itself. Whether we identify our condition as one of (biblical) creatureliness, contingency, initude, or limitation, our mortality weighs too grievously upon fragile bones. It is our tenuousness that haunts, tempting us toward overweening omnipotence. The paradox of the human enigma is that its only solution is not theoretical 99 Paciic Journal or scientiic or technological but experiential. If G. K. Chesterton is obnoxiously cute in asserting that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; rather, Christianity has not been tried, he has nevertheless uttered an appropriated truth about our humanity. If Kierkegaard is correct that it is only in becoming human that we are human, or may be human, a never ending task, then it is clear that humanity has not been tried and found wanting. To make explicit Janicaud’s leitmotif, we—humanity—must always transcend but can never overcome. This transcendence, Christians scandalously believe, is solely via the divine dunamis or power or Spirit and—paradoxically—energized by this divine (we may even say Trinitarian) wherewithal to relate, we discover we can even relate to ourselves, contingent, inite, and imperfect as we are. This is an extraordinary transcendence that, rather than overcome ourselves, permits us to embrace ourselves and what one author has termed, “the earth of our humanity.” Janicaud’s work concludes modestly. Instead of prescriptions or solutions, he has found it suficiently rewarding to highlight the assorted issues we ourselves are. In other words, knowing what is at stake, we have the opportunity of being the—or an—answer to the issues and questions of our own human enigma. Janicaud is content to espouse a two-fold strategy throughout his work. On the one hand, to caution against inhumanity, providing defenses against the inhuman, while at the same time remaining open to that which “passes man” (4). In other words, to the ambiguous call of the “superhuman,” or that which calls us to be “more,” to remain open to the authentic summons while sagely interpreting the dangers and misdirections of its mysterious allure. We have translated this as an open and humble—incarnating—transcendence, as opposed to an overcoming escape. Janicaud summons the insight of Pascal, rearticulated in our day by Eric Voegelin, to alert us that our path and province lie between the twin perils and poles of beast and angel. We are neither, or to put it so beautifully in the words of Martha Nussbaum in The Fragility of Goodness, “There are certain risks . . . suspended as we are between beast and god, with a kind of beauty available to neither.” Ernest Carrere Reference and Research Librarian Fresno Paciic University 100 LISA HANEBERG, Focus Like a Laser Beam. LISA HANEBERG Focus Like a Laser Beam. SAN FRANCISCo: JoSSEy BASS, 2006. 153 PAGES. In our fast-paced, immediate culture, multitasking has become the norm. We seek to do more tasks in a 24-hour period than is possible. We are a fragmented, stressed out, frenetic culture. Thus, Lisa Haneberg’s insights in Focus Like a Laser Beam remain intriguing as she discusses the importance of improving one’s ability to focus in order to achieve greater productivity and eficiency. Since customers from all sectors of business want services and products quickly, fresh ideas to address these needs are required. She has concentrated her book on ten strategies to help people sharpen their ability to improve clarity, thinking, and results. Her end result is an increased productivity in whatever environment one happens to ind oneself. Haneberg divides the book into three parts: 1) Excite and Energize, 2) Tune Your Dialogue, and 3) Zoom In. Part One emphasizes the importance of building and understanding the relational aspect of focusing. In the forward of the book, Haneberg observes, “Leadership is a social act. It occurs in conversations. It makes sense, then, that leaders need to be master conversationalists, because this is the currency by which they produce results” (v). She includes in this section some important concepts, such as maintaining a universally shared vision of what is important, practicing methods that reinforce focusing, working together on tasks that are relevant, and aligning tasks and the organization for relevant work. Haneberg also includes the importance for an organization to be selfcorrecting—to discuss issues, assessing what has worked and what has not. As part of this, she emphasizes the signiicance of knowing one’s employees and having fun at work. Haneberg states, “To build intimacy, people need to get to know one another on a deep level. Employees want to connect with their managers and feel they are trustworthy. Leadership should show interest in their employees, too. Building and maintaining relationships is necessary for a focused and high-performing team” (25). Haneberg concludes this section by acknowledging the stress many individuals experience. To be focused, she asserts, one needs to relax. Stress thus remains an impediment to new ideas and focusing. Part Two suggests the need to narrow the conversation at work to what is relevant. Haneberg deines relevance as that which leads one to success. This 101 Paciic Journal deinition requires individuals to assess organizational meeting times: Are meetings focused and dynamic with a purpose? Do they encourage thought and participants to remain connected? Are attendees ready to participate? As part of this process of assessment, she emphasizes the need to engage in dialog that tests the everyday. She notes, “Challenges bring out the best in people and enable them to focus. The best leaders thrive on challenge and remain open to learning from people at all levels within the organization” (79). As one possible response to this challenge, she encourages the concept of collaboration or “huddling to improve conversation and clarity of purpose and to keep a team ‘calibrated’” (93). Haneberg’s inal part discusses the “how tos” of focusing. She gives dificult, but important ideas: stop multitasking, say no with greater frequency to projects and tasks, focus on doing one great thing a day, and let go of those projects and tasks that are no longer central to the purpose of the organization’s success. Haneberg therefore declares, “Focus suffers when leaders don’t say no to good but nonessential tasks” (123). Her strategy to focus is to perform well on fewer tasks as opposed to doing poorly on many—a strategy that requires personal discipline to carry out. Focus Like a Laser Beam presents information from both qualitative and quantitative paradigms. The book is easy to read as it weaves the quantitative research into the story narrative. It may appeal to multiple audiences, including those seeking to improve their executive ability, leadership and management skills, and organizational effectiveness. The book presents critical information to improve our current organizational life. Janita Rawls Fresno Paciic University 102 B. M. LAVELLE, Fame, Money and Power B. M. LAVELLE Fame, Money and Power: The Rise of Peisistratos and “Democratic” Tyranny at Athens. ANN ARBoR: UNIVERSIty oF MIChIGAN PRESS, 2004. 370 PAGES. The subtitle of this new work by Lavelle (henceforth “L.”) immediately captures the interest of the prospective reader. The classic deinition of a tyrant (Greek tyrannos) as “one who seizes power unconstitutionally” seems to preclude the adjective democratic, “pertaining to rule by the people.” Those who take up L’s work looking for a sustained discussion of this oxymoronic entity are bound to be disappointed, however, as the notion of a “democratic” tyranny is treated only briely and (to my mind) inconclusively. However, anyone interested in a close reading, and carefully documented synthesis, of the source material concerning Peisistratos’ rise to power will ind much within that is valuable. With ive chapters and eight appendices, and almost one hundred pages of notes, it is a dauntingly detailed and intricate work, but most Greek is translated and/or transliterated for the Greekless reader. Peisistratos’ place in the overall span of Athenian history is usually bracketed on one side by the unsuccessful attempt at tyranny by the Olympic victor Cylon (c. 632 BC) and the reforms of the lawgivers Draco (c. 621) and Solon (probably 594/3), and on the other side by the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes in 507. After two failed attempts (probably to be dated to 561/0 and 556), Peisistratos was in his third try (546) successful at establishing a tyranny that would be continued by his two sons Hippias and Hipparchos until the death of the latter in 514/13 BC and the expulsion of the former in 511/10 BC. The ancient historians Herodotus and Thucydides both speak favorably of the Peisistratid tyranny; Herodotus (writing in the mid-ifth century BC) noting that during his rule Peisistratos “did not alter the existing ofices or change the laws, but governed the city according to established principles, arranging matters well and fairly” (1.59.6). Thucydides notes that under the Peisistratids Athens “enjoyed the same laws that had been laid down previously with the exception in that they took pains that one of their own was always in the ofices” (6.54.6). This evidence will be important for L.’s contention that Peisistratos was a “democratic” tyrant (90-92). Chapter one (Introduction) grounds the study, takes a brief look at the 103 Paciic Journal (admittedly) scanty sources available for the Peisistratid period, and lays out L.’s methodology. L. is right to acknowledge both the usefulness and the limitations of Herodotus as his main source of information, although he makes perhaps too much of the idea that Herodotus’ narrative is an apologia for Athenian acquiescence to the tyranny: “The aim of the [Peisistratid] logos was surely to revise the history of Peisistratos’ rise apparently in order to absolve the Athenians to some degree for allowing it” (10). This is understandable given L.’s previous work (The Sorrow and the Pity: A Prolegomenon to a History of Athens under the Peisistratids, c. 560-510 B.C), which sought to show that the historical record concerning the Peisistratids was tainted by revisionism, resulting in a ifth-century “myth of resistance” to the tyranny. The second chapter deals with Peisistratos’ early life and rise to prominence through his role in Athens’ war against Megara in the 570s-560s. L. meticulously develops the argument that the Peisistratids used to great advantage their family’s connection to the mythical royal house of Pylos (1829). It is in this chapter also that one can most easily see the care with which L. develops his narrative, painstakingly leshing out the meager sources with excruciatingly detailed arguments. One example is illuminating: in a single sentence of Herodotus (1.59.4), we are told that Peisistratos while general of the Athenians “took Nisaia [from the Megarians] and performed other great deeds.” The writer of the Constitution of the Athenians (14) noted simply that Peisistratos “had distinguished himself in the war against Megara.” L. is able to expand this into a section on the “Peisistratan Phase” of the Megarian War covering nearly twenty pages (46-65), arguing persuasively for the idea that it was Peisistratos, not Solon, who was responsible for securing the important island of Salamis for Athens (64). Chapter three, on Peisistratos’ irst attempt at tyranny, is the heart of L.’s thesis. Here he claims that Herodotus (1.59.3-60.1) is incorrect in his representation of three, essentially geographic, parties in conlict at the time of Peisistratos’ rise to power: the “men of the plain” led by Lycurgus, the “men of the coast” led by Megacles of the Alcmaeonid family, and the “men from beyond the hills,” who chose as their leader Peisistratos. Instead, based on Solon’s identiication of conlict between two groups in Athens (Solon fr. 5), the “commons’ (demos) and “the wealthy and powerful,” L. argues that the mid-sixth century struggle from which Peisistratos eventually emerged as victor is better understood along those lines. Are we to see in this dichotomy, as L. would have us (78ff), a full-blown two-party Solonic system, which can then be extrapolated into the politics of the mid-sixth century? 104 B. M. LAVELLE, Fame, Money and Power This seems especially problematic considering how little of Solon’s poetry is actually preserved. Yet, in this revised view, the struggle is re-cast as that of the wealthy elite (led by Lycurgus) against the people (led by Megacles). Peisistratos is successful because of, not in spite of, Megacles, who as “bankroller” (86) supports the outsider in his bid for power. One point upon which L. is insistent is that the people “elected” Peisistratos as tyrant by giving him a bodyguard (15, 68, 71, 86, 106). What L. terms the “deception strand” (86) of Herodotus’ account—that Peisistratos tricked the Athenian people into granting him a bodyguard, oblivious to the consequences—cannot be trusted. Instead, he argues, the voting of the bodyguard should be seen as a de facto vote for the tyranny, one which the demos later regretted and attempted to whitewash, as L. claims can be deduced from Herodotus’ account. Likewise, the event leading to the second attempt at tyranny, in which “Athena” herself (played by a very tall Paianian girl named Phye) rides into Athens in her chariot and convinces the populace to return Peisistratos to power (a ruse which Herodotus, 1.60.2-61.2, inds incredible), is actually a bit of pageantry, a coup de theatre enjoyed (but certainly not believed) by all (105). The subject of chapter four is Peisistratos’ exile to Eretria and Thrace, his money raising-activities while there, and the battle of Pallene (near Marathon) in 546, which restored him to power for the third, and inal, time, until his death in 528/7. L. expands the tightly compressed narrative of Herodotus and the author of the Ath. Pol. by the same type of careful exegesis as in chapter two, and is especially successful in his reconstruction of the topography of the battle of Pallene (143-150). Once again, L. attributes contradictions in Herodotus’ account of the battle to the Athenians’ desire to suppress unpleasant memories of the defeat: “Herodotos’ (source’s) remedy for the memory of Pallene is brevity and vagueness—no glory for either side” (149). Chapter ive is a inal summary of the key points of the work, treating in turn the three themes of the main title: fame, money, and power. L.’s (over)insistence on the importance of the fame earned by Peisistratos’ exploits in the battle of Nisaia for his political career is certainly weakened by the fact that fame alone was not enough to secure his power in the irst two attempts. L. asserts, “Nisaia was the pivotal moment in Peisistratos’ early career”; “Peisistratos’ success indicates in fact that by the end of the war he had become Athens’ most outstanding war leader” (155). Money (chremata) is supplied by Megacles, hence making possible Peisistratos’ irst and second tyrannies (158); while Peisistratos’ own wealth acquired in Thrace allows him to “root” the third tyranny (159). L. describes the third element, 105 Paciic Journal power, not as “the naked power of oppressive force” (although it is not until oppressive force is used at Pallene that Peisistratos manages to hold onto the tyranny), but rather as “the power of further success and gain” (161) whatever that is supposed to entail. Similarly opaque is the statement that Peisistratos, “failed in his irst two attempts to sustain his place in politics because he lacked the means of its enrichment” (167). Perhaps most disappointing for those who turn to this book for a discussion of the intriguing concept of the “democratic tyrant,” it is not until the end of the work that we get an explicit explanation for L.’s terminology: “For that sharing [i.e. of success and gain], because he continued the ofices and elections and so did not disrupt traditional government, and most of all because he would continue to react to the demos and its wishes, he was in essence a democratic tyrant” (162). However one may argue to the contrary, pandering to the people makes one not a democrat, but a demagogue. Pamela D. Johnston Fresno Paciic University 106 The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization BRYAN WARD-PERKINS The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. oxFoRD: oxFoRD UNIVERSIty PRESS, 2005. 239 PAGES Bryan Ward-Perkins’ Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization is an iconoclastic treatment challenging the last forty years of scholarship on the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. The historiographical traditions, which view the Empire’s western decline as less than cataclysmic, provoke the author into spasms of virtual apoplexy. Ward-Perkins (hereafter W.P.) views Rome’s demise neither as a peaceful transition to Germanic rule nor as a transformation of the ancient world into the early medieval world (as recent scholars suggest), but rather as a horrible era when marauding bands of Germans “invaded” the Roman Empire and inaugurated the Dark Ages. His thesis is therefore simple and lacking nuance: the people experiencing Rome’s decline, “would be very surprised, and not a little shocked, to learn that it is now fashionable to play down the violence and unpleasantness of the invasions that brought down the empire in the West” (13). He takes it as a duty to emphasize the horrors. Challenging antiquated orthodoxies and interpretations remains the duty of scholars, and W.P. does an admirable job of establishing the orthodoxy he intends to slay. His irst chapter (1-10) and concluding comments (167ff.) provide a cursory but good summary of the interpretive paradigms to which he objects. The problem with these pages is that they give far too simplistic a summation, as if an international group of historians has conspired in unison to whitewash Rome’s fall in 476. In fact, the scholars in the last forty years who have questioned the traditional view of post-Roman Europe as “dark” have done so for a variety of reasons, with a number of contrasting interpretations, and using different types of evidence and interpretive paradigms. Contextualization of literary evidence remains one of W.P.’s biggest weaknesses. Chapter 2, which could have been written to great effect, bounces from battle to battle, barbarian group to barbarian group, and forward and backward in time with little explanation and to dizzying effect. It reads as if it were a laundry list of barbarian crimes against humanity. He makes no effort to engage the sources, explain them, or even tease out the nuances of the authors reporting the era’s vicissitudes. For example, many of the authors were Romans writing under barbarian kings. They maintained a vested interest in making their barbarians sound as civilized as possible while si107 Paciic Journal multaneously portraying other Germanic tribes as the most violent and rustic hicks, a fact that W.P. inally recognizes with the Ostrogoths. Although he mentions the work of Walter Goffart, he omits Goffart’s Narrators of Barbarian History, which would have helped with the interpretive intentions of sixth and seventh century Roman historians. W.P. remains on irmer ground when analyzing the archaeological record. He seems most cognizant of the evidentiary weaknesses, too. For example, pottery in the centuries preceeding Rome’s collapse continued to be of outstanding quality. However, the decline of certain kinds of pottery following Rome’s fall does not necessarily prove conclusively that life had taken a turn for the catastrophic worse. He similarly observes, “We cannot take the apparent lack of post-Roman sites at face value, as unequivocal evidence for a cataclysmic collapse of population in post Roman times” (142). Notwithstanding this and similar protests to the contrary, he cannot resist discerning the decline of civilization based on a few friable Anglo-Saxon pots. Even when the evidence is solid—as for example with Visigothic coinage—he remains too ready to dismiss it without probing what it can reveal. Another problem with W.P.’s book is that it fails to prove its point. Despite his assertions, he admits a number of facts detrimental to his argument: foreign troops within the Roman Empire were almost always loyal (38); the Goths of the ifth century sought to share the wealth and safety of life inside of the empire, not destroy it (52); and the imperial authorities in the West often settled barbarians in the interests of solving imperial problems, while at the same time creating troubles for the locals (54-55). In other words, the interests of the center and the peripheral failed to coincide. W.P. needed to spend more time addressing this last point, especially since very little changed for most land-owning Romans in the post imperial world (66). Some ifth-century Romans in the provinces had scarcely seen imperial authorities, and when they did the authorities were often greedy and rapacious. W.P. needs to demonstrate why provincial Romans should have preferred Roman authority to that of barbarian kings, and he neglects to do this. He recognizes that many Romans served barbarian kings, but he does not provide enough evidence to persuade this reader that, all else being equal, these Romans would have really found life better under an imperial administration that ruled in abstentia. He argues persuasively that Late Antiquity witnessed a decline in material culture, but he cannot demonstrably conclude that barbarians were responsible. A fatal weakness of W.P.’s book is its sweeping generalizations, both an- 108 The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization cient and modern. His claim that the Visigoths maintained the Gothic language well into later centuries—and that this is evidence they had never fully assimilated—lies in the face of what amounts to a scholarly consensus. The Visigoths by the end of the sixth century had for all intents and purposes ceased speaking Gothic as the language of preference. Although it is true that Gothic words survive in the legal codes, it is also true that the proceedings of the Third Ecumenical Council of Toledo (589 C.E.) were written in Latin, not Gothic. King Sisebut (612-621) composed a saint’s life in Latin, not Gothic, and St. Isidore of Seville (Roman father and Gothic mother, 560636) wrote his treatises in Latin. W.P.’s further assertion that the Visigoths did not abandon Arianism until 587 demonstrates his ignorance about the role of Gothic bishops within the Catholic Church prior to 587. Finally, his Eurocentric critique of North American scholarship cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged. He asseverates that “One has to look to Europe to ind a community of historians like me, with an active interest in secular aspects of the end of the Roman worlds, such as its political, economic, and military history” (180). This statement overlooks the books of North American scholars such as Thomas Burns (Barbarians Within the Gates of Rome and Rome and the Barbarians), Ralph Mathisen (Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul and Law, Society and Authority in Late Antiquity), and Michael Kulikowski (editor, Hispania in Late Antiquity and author, Late Roman Spain and its Cities), who rely on the archaeological record and have focused on military and political organization. W.P. further assumes that Europe has not produced its share of scholars focusing on religious or intellectual transformation. The last I checked, Peter Brown was educated and raised in the United Kingdom. Once again, the picture is far more complex than W.P. portrays it. The contribution of W.P.’s thesis deserves an honest assessment, and W.P. is to be congratulated for questioning recent assumptions about Rome’s demise in the West. The book is highly readable, capable of being used in advanced undergraduate as well as graduate level courses, and it contains helpful notes, chronology, and bibliography. Although the book’s 187 pages of text remain far too slender to tackle the issues to which it points, it nevertheless suggests that this will not be the inal treatment of the topic. Richard Rawls, Fresno Paciic University 109 Paciic Journal 110 Name of Article Here 111