Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн

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Box 3.4

This is important historical research. The author will bring together the ways in which proslavery Christians managed to evade the simple logic that the Golden Rule makes it impossible for you to support slavery.

James Henley Thornwell argued in 1850 that the scriptures demand only that slaves and servants be given that which is equal and just. The Golden Rule, then, “simply requires, in the case of slavery, that we should treat our slaves as we should feel that we had a right to be treated if we were slaves ourselves.”¹³ Jesus’s teachings on charity and the Golden Rule were seen as having only limited application based on social status and were not universal.

Because many white Americans had stigmatized African Americans racially as inferior, it is not difficult to understand why they would not desire to extend Christian charitable teachings to them in a universal way. Many white Christians did not see people of African descent as similar to them. Instead, they saw them as alien, foreign, and subhuman. Martha Nussbaum notes that people show compassion to those to whom they feel have possibilities and vulnerabilities similar to themselves.¹⁴ According to Nussbaum, “One makes sense of the suffering by recognizing that one might encounter such a reversal; one estimates its meaning in part by thinking what it would mean to encounter that oneself; and one sees oneself, in the process, as one to whom such things might in fact happen.”¹⁵ But if a white person could not imagine being mistreated and reduced to slavery in a society that identified with white superiority, then it would be very difficult for many to imagine having sufferings and vulnerabilities “similar to the sufferer.”¹⁶