Here is the kind of thing that has happened - and continues to happen - when the cross is cut loose from its historical and social moorings and reduced to privatised, ideological, and in-group forms of faith:
“Speaking of his master who had found religion at a Methodist camp meeting, Frederick Douglas wrote: ‘I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before. Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty.’… No doubt the conversion was accompanied by much talk of the cross and singing about the blood of the Lamb!”
Theodore W. Jennings Jr., Transforming Atonement: A Political Theology of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), p. 238, n. 15.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
dh 06.04.10 at 9:55 pm
It is interesting that Frederick Douglas doesn’t look at these people as not having a “conversion”. That these people who supported slaveholding might not have had a conversion in the first place. Just because a person says they had a conversion doesn’t mean they had one. “By their fruit you shall know them.” Sounds like Douglas had a flawed understanding or observation by looking at other people who had a conversion who did not support slaveholding. Maybe if he observed those people he wouldn’t suggest that people before conversion were not as worse as the other?