The Rod and the Hand

On Providence, Slavery, and Why Being Used by God Has Never Been the Same Thing as Being Forgiven by Him

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I believe God used slavery to bring my ancestors out of idolatry and into the knowledge of Jesus Christ. I believe He knew what the ships were before they were built, that He permitted what He did not author, and that I am sitting here in possession of a faith that reached me by the worst road any people has ever traveled.

I know how that sounds. I have heard it called an insult to the dead. I am going to make the argument anyway, because I believe it, and because the version of it that gets condemned is not the version I hold.

Before I go further I have to deal with one of the witnesses I intend to call, because I have not been fair to him, and not in the direction anyone would expect. I have been too generous with Booker T. Washington. I have written admiringly about what he built and about what he concealed, and I have not once made him answer for what has been charged against him, some of it charged by men whose judgment I respect and some of it true. If I am going to put him on the stand, he has to be cross-examined first.

I AM NOT THE FIRST TO SAY THIS

Phillis Wheatley wrote it in 1773, while still enslaved in Boston, in a poem that opens by calling it mercy that brought her from her pagan land. She was roughly twenty years old and she had crossed on a ship named for a prophet.

Booker T. Washington wrote a version of it in Up from Slavery. Having catalogued the cruelty in plain terms, he argued that American Black people had nonetheless emerged in a stronger condition, materially and spiritually, than any comparable population anywhere on the globe, and he read the hand of Providence in that outcome.

Neither of them was excusing anything. Wheatley spent her life petitioning for the freedom of her people and died in poverty. Washington was secretly financing lawsuits against Alabama's disenfranchisement while he wrote those words. These were not people making peace with slavery. They were people insisting that God had not lost control of the ship.

CROSS-EXAMINING THE WITNESS

W. E. B. Du Bois brought the central charge in The Souls of Black Folk, and it deserves to be stated in his own terms rather than softened. Washington's program, Du Bois wrote, asked American Black people to surrender three things: political power, the insistence upon civil rights, and higher education for our young. And in the years that followed we received the disenfranchisement of the Black man, the creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority, and the steady withdrawal of aid from institutions of higher training. Du Bois did not claim Washington caused those outcomes. He observed that Washington had asked for the concessions and that the concessions had been taken.

The second charge is worse, and it comes from the same files that revealed the secret lawsuits. Washington ran what historians call the Tuskegee Machine. He placed informants inside the Niagara Movement to report on Black men organizing against his leadership. He secretly subsidized Black newspapers so that they would attack his critics in print. He used his control over white philanthropy to starve rival institutions of money and to keep Black men who crossed him out of positions. What happened to William Monroe Trotter in Boston in 1903 does not read well for him.

Set the two records side by side and they are difficult to hold. The same man was quietly paying attorneys to sue Alabama on behalf of the race while quietly wrecking the careers of other Black men who disagreed with him about how the race should be led. Both hands were his.

The third charge is silence. Washington was the most listened-to Black man in America during the worst years of lynching in this country's history, and he largely did not use that platform to say so.

I do not have a rebuttal to any of that, and I am not going to manufacture one. What I have is a scale, and two things to put on it.

The first is that a man's public performance and his actual record are two different objects, and we have already established that in his case they pointed in opposite directions. That cuts against him here as much as for him. If the accommodating speech concealed a litigator, the benevolent educator concealed an operator who fought dirty. Both concealments are in the same files. Honesty requires taking both.

The second is what is still standing in Macon County, Alabama. Tuskegee University is the only college campus in the United States designated a National Historic Site by act of Congress. It is the only historically Black college with a fully accredited veterinary college granting the doctorate, and it has produced more than three quarters of the Black veterinarians in the world. It originated the Tuskegee Airmen. It has produced more Black general officers than any institution in the country, including the service academies. Ralph Ellison studied there. George Washington Carver worked there for forty-seven years and is buried on the grounds.

And most of the buildings still holding that school up were built by its own students. The bricks came out of the kiln that failed three times before it held.

I will name the other thing myself rather than let someone else name it for me. The United States Public Health Service ran its syphilis study in Macon County from 1932 to 1972, and the institute was involved in it. That is seventeen years after Washington was in his grave and it is not his act. It belongs in any honest accounting of what that name has carried, and I am not going to pretend otherwise in order to protect a point I am trying to make.

So here is where I land on the witness. Washington was not a saint and I have no interest in canonizing him. He was a strategist operating in Alabama at the precise moment when a Black man could be killed for less than a sentence, and he made hard choices, some of which I would not defend, and some of which were plainly self-serving. What he also did was build a thing that has outlasted every one of his critics and every one of his defenders, and which is educating American Black children this morning.

That is the man whose testimony about Providence I am about to rely on. I would rather you know exactly who he was.

WHAT I AM NOT SAYING

There is a doctrine that must be separated from mine before I go one sentence further, because for three centuries it was preached from American pulpits and it is the reason this argument makes people flinch.

Slaveholders taught that the ninth chapter of Genesis, where Noah curses Canaan, marked Africans as a race divinely appointed to servitude. That reading is exegetically false, since the curse falls on Canaan and not on Ham, and Canaan's descendants settled in the land that bears his name rather than in Africa. It was also morally monstrous, because its entire function was to justify the act itself. If God has appointed a people to be slaves, then the man who enslaves them is doing God's work and has nothing to answer for.

That is not my argument. That is the opposite of my argument.

The Ham doctrine justifies the deed. What I am saying is that the deed was wicked, that the men who did it were wicked in doing it, and that God brought something out of it which they did not intend and would not have permitted had they known. Those two positions are not neighbors. They are enemies.

THE ARCHITECTURE

Three passages carry the weight.

The first is Genesis 15, where God tells Abraham, before Isaac is born, before Jacob, before Joseph, that his descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs and will be afflicted there four hundred years. God does not merely permit the bondage in Egypt. He announces it centuries in advance to the man whose family will endure it. Foreknowledge is settled by that text and cannot be argued away.

The second is Genesis 50, where Joseph stands in front of the brothers who sold him and says that they meant it for evil but God meant it for good. Read that sentence slowly, because everything depends on the two verbs having two different subjects. The brothers intended one thing. God intended another. The same act carried both intentions, and Joseph does not collapse them. He does not tell his brothers that what they did was secretly fine. He tells them what they meant, and he uses the word evil to say it.

The third is in Acts, where Peter tells a crowd in Jerusalem that Jesus was delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, and that they took Him and by wicked hands crucified and slew Him. One sentence. Divine appointment and human guilt, joined by the word and rather than separated by the word but. If the crucifixion itself can be both ordained and murder, then the objection that ordination excuses the ordained instrument has already been answered in the text at the center of the faith.

THE ROD AND THE HAND

The chapter that settles it is Isaiah 10.

God calls Assyria the rod of His anger and sends that empire against a nation He intends to chastise. Assyria goes and does exactly what God sent it to do. And then, in the same chapter, God says He will punish the king of Assyria for the pride of his heart, because Assyria did not mean it that way. Assyria meant conquest. God meant correction. The empire executed the divine purpose without intending it and is judged for the intention it actually had.

Then comes the image the whole doctrine hangs on. Shall the axe boast itself against the one who chops with it? Shall the saw magnify itself against the one who moves it? The rod does not get credit for the blow. It also does not get acquittal.

Habakkuk contains the same movement. The prophet complains about the violence in Judah, God answers that He is raising up the Chaldeans, the prophet is appalled that God would use a people more wicked than the one being punished, and God's reply is a series of woes pronounced against the Chaldeans. Used, then judged. The pattern does not vary anywhere in Scripture.

THE OBJECTION, STATED FULLY

James Cone argued that any theology reading providence into Black suffering makes God complicit in it, and that a God who would ordain the Middle Passage to accomplish some further purpose is not a God worth worshipping. Delores Williams pressed further, questioning the Exodus framework itself on the ground that our story did not end the way Israel's did. Israel walked out. We were emancipated into sharecropping, into peonage, into the terror that followed Reconstruction. Where is the Red Sea in our account?

These are not frivolous objections and they are not made by unbelievers. Cone was a churchman. Williams was a churchwoman. They watched the providential argument used by the men holding the whip and concluded that the argument itself was contaminated.

I take the contamination seriously. I do not accept the conclusion.

A GOD WHO CANNOT ORDAIN SUFFERING CANNOT JUDGE

Here is where the objection fails.

To say that God cannot ordain suffering without being implicated in evil is to say that God cannot judge, because judgment is ordained suffering. It is the flood. It is the plagues. It is the destroyer passing through Egypt at midnight in Exodus 12. It is the armies of Assyria and Babylon dispatched against Israel and Judah. It is, at the end of the book, the seals and the trumpets and the bowls poured out at the command of the throne.

Strip God of the authority to ordain affliction and you have not protected His goodness. You have removed His office. What is left is a God who sympathizes and cannot act, who weeps with the oppressed and can do nothing to the oppressor, which is not the God of Scripture but a comfort object with no power to settle a single account.

I want a God who can judge. A God who can judge is necessarily a God who can ordain suffering. And a God who can ordain suffering can ordain the crossing.

THEN EGYPT WAS JUDGED

Now the part that costs something, and I am not going to leave it out to keep the argument comfortable.

If Egypt held Israel by divine appointment, Egypt was still judged. Ten plagues fell on it. Its firstborn died in a single night. Its army drowned in the sea it had chased them into. Being the instrument bought Egypt nothing.

If Assyria was the rod of God's anger, Assyria was still judged for the pride of its heart. If Babylon carried out the exile, Babylon still received its woes. If the crucifixion was ordained before the foundation of the world, the men who carried it out are still described as wicked hands.

The pattern is unbroken, and it does not stop at the edge of my own comfort. If I am going to say that God used the American slave trade to bring the gospel to my ancestors, then I am obligated by my own reasoning to say what follows. America occupies Egypt's position in this account. Used, and accountable. Every man who bought a person, every man who sold one, every man who wrote the statute and every man who preached the Ham curse to keep a congregation docile stood in exactly the place Pharaoh stood.

I have said before that I do not condemn Americans for slavery, and I need to correct myself, because my own theology does not permit that sentence. Joseph forgave his brothers. Joseph did not pretend they were innocent. He told them to their faces what they had meant, and then he fed them. Forgiveness and acquittal are two different transactions, and only one of them is mine to give.

So I will say it accurately. I do not carry hatred toward the descendants of the men who did this, because the sons do not inherit the guilt of the fathers. I do not believe the wickedness is settled, because God settles it and He has not asked my opinion about the timing. And I will not stand in front of that ledger and pronounce it closed on His behalf.

JOSEPH WEPT

There is one more thing in the Joseph account that the people who quote it usually leave out.

He wept. Repeatedly. He turned away from his brothers and wept when he first recognized them. He wept in another room and washed his face and came back out pretending. When he finally told them who he was, he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard him and the news carried into Pharaoh's house. This is a governor of Egypt, the second most powerful man in the ancient world, sobbing hard enough that the palace staff heard it through the walls.

Providence did not cancel the grief. Knowing that God meant it for good did not mean the pit had not been cold, or that the years in Potiphar's house and the prison had not been stolen from him, or that his father had not spent decades believing him dead. Joseph held the theology and the wound at the same time, and the theology did not close the wound. It gave him somewhere to stand while it bled.

That is the posture I am after. Roughly twelve and a half million people were loaded onto those ships. Nearly two million never reached the other side. There is no reading of Providence that makes that arithmetic acceptable, and I am not attempting one. What I am saying is that God was not absent from the water, that He was not defeated by it, and that He brought something out of it that the men who filled those holds never intended and would have prevented if they could.

They meant it for evil. He meant it for good. Both clauses are true, both have subjects, and neither one cancels the other.

And I intend to say so with my whole heart, while weeping like Joseph, because the man who could say that sentence best was the one who had the most cause to weep when he said it.

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