Denial, Desire, and the Proclamation of Scripture: Theological Reflections on 12 Years a Slave by Naaman Wood
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CRITIQUE 2015:2 CONTENTS EDITOR’S NOTE Welcoming 1 Strangers D ARKENED ROOM Denial, Desire, and the Proclamation of Scripture: Theological Reflections on 2 12 Years a Slave 2015 Issue 2 © Ransom Fellowship by Naaman Wood EDITOR Denis Haack ART DIRECTOR POETRY Karen Coulter Perkins 7 “Old Woman” BO ARD OF DIRECTORS by Scott Schuleit Steven Garber Director, The Washington Institute, Washington, D.C. Donald Guthrie Professor of Educational Ministries Director of PhD Program in Educational Studies Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Illinois Denis and Margie Haack Co-founders, Ransom Fellowship, Minnesota Bonnie Liefer Vice President for Marketing and Communications CCO, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Henry Tazelaar Chair, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology Professor of Pathology Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Arizona Paul Woodard Life Care Retirement Community Chaplain, retired St. Louis, Missouri C ONTACT CRITIQUE: www.RansomFellowship.org 5245 132nd Court, Savage, MN 55378 [email protected] A BOUT CRITIQUE: Critique is part of the work of Ransom Fellowship founded by Denis and Margie Haack in 1982. Together, they have created a ministry that includes R EADING THE WORLD lecturing, mentoring, writing, teaching, hospitality, feed- ing, and encouraging those who want to know more about Conversation what it means to be a Christian in the everyday life of the 8 twenty-first century. about Ferguson Except where noted, all articles are by Denis Haack. with Luke Bobo and ReCeV I E CRITIQUE: Critique is not available by subscrip- Greg Pitchford tion. Rather, interested readers can request to be added to Ransom’s mailing list, which is updated frequently. Donors to Ransom Fellowship, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, tax-deductible ministry, are added to the mailing list automatically unless requesting otherwise. Everyone on Ransom’s mailing list also receives Letters 17 from The House Between (formerly Notes from Toad RESOURCE Hall), a newsletter by Margie Haack in which she reflects on what it means to be faithful in the ordinary and routine Subjects with of daily life and gives news about Ransom’s ministry. Insight C OPYING POLICY: Feel free to make up to 50 copies of any article that appears in Critique for use with a small a review of Subjects with group. We only ask that you copy the entire article, note the source, and distribute the copies free of charge. Objects by James Disney HA E RTS & MINDS: Hearts and Minds bookstore donates 10% of your purchase to Ransom Fellowship if you mention us when placing your order. www.heartsandmindsbooks.com. EDITOR'S NOTE W elcoming Strangers As society has been atomized and motivators for learning, and even urbanized, Christine Pohl notes, “hospi- betrayal did not discourage our Lord tality as a term has diminished; it now from fulfilling his calling. Given the chiefly refers to the entertainment of context of these biblical imperatives, one’s acquaintances at home and to apparently not having time means we the hospitality industry’s provision of are too busy with unnecessary things. service through hotels and restaurants.” I do not know what will come of our This is not all bad, for reasons Pohl goes obedience in welcoming the stranger. on to discuss, but she is correct to insist I do know we can begin simply, be that Christians are responsible to show willing to learn, to experiment and hospitality to strangers. John Calvin, make mistakes, and when necessary she says, “warned that the increasing laugh at ourselves. Most of all, we can dependence on inns rather than on trust that God would infuse our feeble personal hospitality was an expression hospitality with some faint echo of the “Cain went away,” we are told in of human depravity.” welcome he extended to us when he the opening pages of scripture, frac- Hospitality to those unlike us—to welcomed us—outsiders and strangers turing the human race into “us” and strangers, to those outside our tribe— that we were—into his family. Who “strangers” (Genesis 4:16). The division always ratchets up our level of unease. knows what we will learn or what will involved both geography and belief, When we meet over some outside come of it? ■ and so violence spread like a cancer agenda—work, say, or a neighborhood Sources: Tennessee Williams quote across God’s good earth (6:11). Thus a project, or a political caucus—that online (www.brainyquote.com/ relentless pattern began and, ever since, agenda helps deflect our discomfort. quotes/quotes/t/tennesseew147303. there have been strangers in our world, When it is just the stranger and myself html#gA5FD7xj9UfoiEmr.99); Christine worshipping strange gods or none, in my home, however, there is greater Pohl in her excellent Making Room: adopting strange lifestyles, holding chance of misunderstanding, of giving Recovering Hospitality as a Christian incomprehensible values, and following offense, of embarrassment, of betrayal. Tradition (p. 36-37). strange customs. “We have to distrust Good grief, it can be hard enough each other,” playwright Tennessee to converse with a fundamentalist Williams observed. “It is our only Christian (or mainline, or Catholic, defense against betrayal.” or Orthodox—pick your poison), so Woven through this long tapestry imagine if we were to welcome a of distrust is a thread that came to be Muslim, a Hindu, someone of a different called hospitality, where people sit race, or a secularist. face to face, break bread, ask questions, The apostolic word to us is Designer's note about the cover: There's listen, and converse. Mere mortals like unambiguous: “extend hospitality to a theme running through this issue's poetry, me know we cannot bring peace to strangers,” St. Paul says (Romans 12:13) featured film, cover story, and reviewed the world, but the grace of hospitality and, in case that is not clear enough, book. All highlight the ways we successfully is within our reach. To despise it as the writer of Hebrews warns, “Do not see—or fail to see—one another. Racism is too little given the global patterns neglect to show hospitality to strangers” a destructive result of no-longer-seeing. It of division, suspicion, and death is (13:2). Discomfort and unease are good depends upon our tendency to re-envision, to mistake the significance of grace. to destroy and re-render until we're left Abram welcomed strangers with fresh with a flattened, false image that bears little bread, tender meat, and milk only to resemblance to what is real. Do not deceive discover the Lord was actually present yourselves. Look in, and look out. Keep your (Genesis 18). eyes open. And watch the news. ― Karen Coulter Perkins A MAGAZINE OF RANSOM FELLOWSHIP CRITIQUE 2015:2 1 D ARKENED ROOM Denial, Desire, and the Proclamation of Scripture: Theological Reflections on 12 Years a Slave by Naaman Wood life, particularly our proclamation of graciousness, and in the exchange, of scripture. the captor takes the torn, bloody one. 12 Years a Slave chronicles the story Northrup protests, “No, no. That’s of Solomon Northrup, a free black from my wife—,” but the white man American who was unlawfully sold into interrupts, “Rags and tatters.” He waves slavery. The opening of the film brings the bloody shirt at Northup and exits Northrup’s free life into stark contrast the cell, “Rags and tatters.” While the with his slavery. The film’s first images violence aimed to procure submission are of a sugar cane field, and a white from Northrup, his captors wove into man instructs a group of slaves on the that violence an ingenious and powerful particulars of the harvest. In the midst mode of re-description. His shirt is not of this slavery, Northrup remembers a gift from his wife. It is not an object his past life. As a working musician, with history or attachments. The shirt he remembers that his playing is not a shirt. It is re-described to him delighted audiences. As a husband as, “Rags and tatters.” The implication and father, he remembers the is subtle but clear. Northrup is like the affections of his wife and children. shirt. He has no wife, no history, no As a free man, he remembers the attachments. Northrup is not Northrup. would-be circus performers who lured Other instances of re-description, him to Washington D.C. with promised however, are not intentional, but it is musical performances. As a black man, precisely their accidental character that H arriet Tubman, the former slave Northrup arrives at the capital and makes them powerful. One key moment and leader of the Underground Railroad, white men capture him. He spends over occurs early in Northrup’s enslavement. once said, “I freed a thousand slaves a decade as a slave in Louisiana, many A man named Master Ford (Benedict and could have freed a thousand more if miles from home. Cumberbatch) purchases Northrup and only they knew they were slaves.” This From Northrup’s emotional point another slave, Eliza (Adepero Oduye). last clause, “…if only they knew they of view, the film plunges the audience The slave salesman (Paul Giamatti) were slaves,” suggests that many slaves into a world turned upside down. It is refuses to sell Eliza’s children to Ford, experienced a profound and damaging a world where white persons not only and the separation affects Eliza. Upon formation. That is, to convince a slave inflict abuse and denigration on black arriving at Ford’s plantation, Ford’s that she is not a slave would necessitate persons, but it is also a world where wife, Mistress Ford (Liza J. Bennett) a host of subtle and powerful actions. whites describe those horrors to blacks observes Eliza weeping. She says to her These actions would need to shape as though they were nothing of the husband, “This one’s crying.