The Power of a Good Story

Luke 24:13–35 is one of my favorite biblical narratives about the aftermath of Jesus Christ’s resurrection. Two followers of Jesus encounter the risen Savior in the form of a stranger who accompanies them on their journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus. When the stranger asks the two downcast travelers about their conversation, one of them, whose name was Cleopas, initially responds with incredulous annoyance because he is surprised at the stranger’s oblivious ignorance.

I relate this moment to my experience as a parent of two teenagers when I ask them about teenage happenings, idioms, and interests. A year or so ago, I asked them why so many young people enjoyed viewing Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos. More recently I asked them about the chicken jockey meme from “A Minecraft Movie.” Like my patient children, Cleopas and his companion proceed to answer the stranger’s question with a recounting of their trauma due to the crucifixion of Jesus and ongoing confusion with rumors of their fallen leader’s empty tomb.

New Testament scholar Raj Nadella finds that the narrative power of the gospel of Luke lies in its full (versus flat) presentations of complex characters and features such as dramatic reversals, a range of emotions, and open-ended stories. In Luke 24, the concept of “theoxenia” (divine beings appearing on earth in the form of a stranger) would have been familiar to Greco-Roman readers, but Nadella observes that the story contains a striking reversal because the resurrected Christ is a divine being who desires to serve humans, rather than being served by them, in table fellowship. After Jesus incognito talks with the two travelers, he takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and serves it to them. The two followers then realize the identity of the stranger and exclaim to one another in Luke 24:32, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”

The Power of History

As an historian of Christianity in the United States, I find the Emmaus narrative also provides meaningful and applicable lessons for teaching church history. In 1997, Joyce Appleby stated the following about the power of history in her presidential address to the American Historical Association: “History is powerful because we live with its residues, its remnants, its remainders and reminders. Moreover, by studying societies unlike our own, we counteract the chronocentrism that blinkers contemporary vision. That’s why we cannot abandon intellectual rigor or devalue accuracy.” Appleby compares historians to cultural translators. Historians immerse themselves in the past, just as cultural translators study the customs of a foreign country, and historians help their contemporaries comprehend how past developments have shaped the present contexts they inhabit.

I therefore believe we should teach church history with honesty and fullness. Just as the Emmaus narrative provides readers with a story that engages a range of emotions, such as anger, despair, and perplexity alongside awe, joy, and hope, so too should the teaching of church history.

One obstacle to full presentations of church history is the highlight reel trap. In Sunday school and seminary classrooms, church history is taught for the primary purpose of imitable inspiration. Courageous and righteous Christians, such as abolitionists working to end transatlantic slavery in the nineteenth century, are emphasized because their actions and convictions are worthy of our reflection. But this pedagogical approach leaves little room for depth and nuance, and the educational experience is akin to watching a highlight reel of isolated Christian moments devoid of context and light on content.

Teaching the Histories of Abolitionism and Proslavery Christianity

The histories of abolitionism and proslavery Christianity in the United States are vital to our practices of faith, witness, and worship today. In the same way one cannot understand the making of American democracy without beholding its advances, ideals, compromises, and contradictions, we need a fuller understanding of Christian history in this country. The best and worst of American Christianity manifested in the efforts to end slavery and the terrible yet real Christian defenses of this grave injustice. Here are three examples that provide further context and illustrate how we can more deeply comprehend the story of American Christianity.

William Lloyd Garrison and His White Christian Critics

In 1860, William Lloyd Garrison responded to the longstanding accusation that the abolitionist movement was atheistic and anti-Christian. Garrison’s activism began when he delivered antislavery speeches in the late 1820s and more formally when he launched what become the most well-known abolitionist newspaper, “The Liberator,” in 1831, and white Christians were consistently among Garrison’s fiercest critics. Garrison explained that he was not surprised that his most ardent detractors were white Christians. Every nation had distinct social injustices that were difficult to reform, precisely because they had grown so large as to become engrafted to its foundations. Garrison noted that proslavery Christianity spawned an ecumenical movement that brought together people of faith from a wide array of denominations and traditions like no other issue. These Christians argued over innumerable doctrines, such as predestination, free will, and whether infants should be baptized, but they agreed that American slavery was divinely ordained and assailed abolitionism as blasphemous and unbiblical.

White Clergy’s Arguments for and against Abolition

In 1792, the white Presbyterian pastor David Rice delivered a speech before the Kentucky state legislature denouncing slavery on the grounds that it was “inconsistent with justice and good policy.” Rice laid out the simple argument that his state should abolish slavery because it was morally wrong.

Yet in the following years and decades, it became harder, not easier, for many white American Christians to profess this fundamental truth. The white Presbyterian pastor Frederick A. Ross accused the abolitionists in 1857 of what he regarded as a severe crime: They were twisting the Bible into “an abolition Bible,” and remaking the Christian God into “an abolition God.” The white Episcopal bishop Stephen Elliott similarly charged four years later that Christian abolitionists were in fact “infidels—men who are clamoring for a new God, and a new Christ, and a new Bible.” The sad and perverse irony is that proslavery Christians were the ones who had manipulated Christianity to uphold their unjust system.

Black Christian Abolitionists’ Denunciations of Proslavery Christianity

In 1845, the formerly enslaved Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass elucidated his righteous anger at the failures of white American Christianity in his autobiography. Douglass differentiated between “Christianity proper” and American Christianity. He hated how Christian enslavers and supporters of slavery wielded their biblical interpretations as weapons to combat abolitionism. Douglass asserted: “I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

Maria W. Stewart, one of the first African American woman activists, also weighed the liberative principles of Christianity alongside the racial oppression in the United States. In her lecture delivered at Boston’s Franklin Hall in 1832, Stewart called out the sinful hypocrisies of slavery and racism and encouraged her Black and white listeners to enact the gospel message by dismantling slavery in the southern states and racial discrimination across the United States. Garrison supported Douglass, Stewart, and other Black abolitionists by publishing their writings, arranging speaking opportunities for them, and amplifying their insights, with proper attributions, in his own works.

The Fullness of Church History

My brief survey of abolitionism and proslavery Christianity is an illustration of how fuller presentations of church history can help Christians better understand the past and the present contexts they inhabit. A flat presentation of Christian abolitionists such as Douglass, Garrison, and Stewart would isolate their faithful witness and ignore their ferocious criticisms of the Christianity that enslavers and supports of slavery practiced. Such a presentation of selective highlights would likely be inspiring for learners, but it would also be misleading and potentially inaccurate if the only Christians mentioned were those opposing slavery.

The purpose of church history is to take Christians on a journey akin to what readers of the Emmaus narrative experience. The fullness of church history engages a range of emotions and aims to inform, inspire, infuriate, and illumine. Our teaching informs people of faith when it is intellectually rigorous and provides accurate information about the past. Our teaching inspires people of faith when it features thorough portrayals of Christian history that include stories of courage and moral clarity alongside narratives of compromise and failure.

To behold the historical realities of compromise and failure is infuriating, and it should infuriate people of faith. The notion of proslavery Christianity is simultaneously an oxymoron—because the two words stand in contradiction to one another—and a historical fact—as many white Christian individuals, churches, and denominations defended slavery with scriptural appeals and theological arguments.

But the pursuit of a more complete history need not be a fatalistic task that results in hopelessness and despair. Rather, teaching the fullness of church history illumines fresh understandings and new pathways to enact the love and justice of God in our faith, witness, and worship today. We learn from the past when we reject false doctrines, comprehend how those doctrines came to be, and discern how we participate in ministries that continue the work of the Christian ancestors we admire. The best way to honor their legacy is to practice what they preached in our lives.

Additional educational resources based on William Yoo’s book, “Reckoning with History: Settler Colonialism, Slavery, and the Making of American Christianity,” are available at https://www.wjkbooks.com/reckoning-with-history-study-reflection-resources/.

Featured image of “Masthead of ‘The Liberator,’ January 11, 1861” is by Hammatt Billings and engraved by Alonzo Hartwell and available as public domain at Wikimedia Commons