Saturday Book Review: John Coffey

Enslaved Africans in America are known for their appeal to the Exodus and to the deliverance rhetoric that seminal event in Israel’s history created. Harriet Tubman was not the only African American called Moses and each of them embodied and found deepening resources for liberation in the Exodus narrative. Contrast that reading of the Exodus narrative with slave owner who could appeal to Moses and any number of places to insist upon social order, suppression of rebellion, and the use of violence to maintain God’s providential blessing of America. John Coffey’s masterful Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) locates the deliverance politics of African Americans – from the early slaves to the brilliant adaptations of Martin Luther King Jr and to the especially earliest speeches of President Barack Obama – into a story of Protestant uses of the Exodus story and the Jubilee theme as a way of anchoring a cause in the providence of God and, at the same time, learning even more how to change history. The Exodus story has become Protestantism’s archetypal narrative of “scriptural imagination” that can be brought into play to foment historical revolution.

While the African American use of the Exodus liberation narrative is well-known (esp. 145-177), that African Americans were adapting a narrative that began with Eusebius’ story of Constantine’s liberation of persecuted Christians but more especially at the beginning of the Reformation is less known but is on full display in Coffey’s patient, exemplary historical study. In fact, the “rhetoric of deliverance would generate a new kind of Protestant politics” (26-27). To be sure, Luther’s voice forced freedom into the spiritual world over against the socio-political, but for Calvin freedom/liberty was spiritual in relation to God and from the law yet, at the same time, Calvin was writing in a hothouse: his own French followers, the Huguenots, were growing and growing and sometimes politicizing. Coffey makes it quite clear that for Calvin the message of a socio-political freedom was under the surface but the act would a divine act and not the work of humans. Coffey says it well: Calvin “left a door slightly ajar that some later Calvinists [Dutch, English, Scottish, American] would fling wide open” (28). Not to be forgotten, straight from the heart of Geneva was the Geneva Bible decorated on the title page with a woodcut of the Exodus and words evoking that God was on their side in their battle to break the bonds of the Catholic Church’s strangling of the gospel. The woodcut surely fired up John Knox. In the colonies the Deist Thomas Jefferson, in 1776 and in need of a new seal for the colonies, opted for an Exodus theme and he was joined by Benjamin Franklin, but the Congress chose the Egyptian pyramid (69), and it is fair to say the Founders were often more indebted to classical literature than to the biblical models (73).

The downside of Coffey’s richly-detailed citations of one writer, preacher, poet and activist after another is how often leaders on either side of cause claimed the Exodus narrative as their own. Luther could use the prescriptions of Mosaic order against the Anabaptists who could use the Exodus narrative to tell their own story and awaken rebellion; the Protestants of England saw their hopes in the Exodus story to liberate them from the bondage of Roman Catholic authority while the Puritans could turn that same narrative against the Anglicans for enslaving them under the less-than-complete reforms from the Catholics and the Independents, like John Owen could throw his weight to Cromwell with evocations of Exodus dotting his sermons and writings; the Puritans could then use the narrative anew in the colonies when before long one leader after another, and then the African American leaders could see yet one more kind of Egypt in the Puritan enslavement of Africans.  So the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American revolution of 1776 and the Civil War each finds leading voices anchoring a vision in the Exodus.

Time after time African American leaders adapted the white Protestant leader’s archetypal story to liberate blacks: Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Louis Farrakhan, James Cone, Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama. The story then is one at times of deconstruction: the very narrative that precipitated hope and courage and action for Englanders to abandon the homeland to embark on forming a “city on the hill” became the precise narrative that slaves used against their now “liberated” and simultaneously enslaving owners, and Coffey’s meticulous work turns up facts not in favor of George Whitefield or Jonathan Edwards. Spiritual liberation and (white) liberation only slowly became a conscious liberation for enslaved blacks, and Coffey’s study of this transition documents the difficult progressions that had to occur. Important voices included George Fox, Anthony Benezet, John Wesley and neither can we ignore Wilberforce or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel –  voices that could not be confined to a spiritual liberation from sin and guilt. When that voice expanded to social liberation it was yet one more version of the same Protestant scriptural imagination fueled by the Exodus and the promise of Jubilee. That is, once unleashed by the Puritans in the colonies that story became a source of one wave of deliverance politics after another; and it became the preferred mode of political discourse. The way ultimately to frame a political story was to sink into the Exodus narrative. It was, as Coffey says it, “the conceptual fusion of Providence and liberation” (219). What is barely discussed in Coffey’s study is whether or not the Exodus narrative figures in the story Isabel Wilkerson recently told in The Warmth of Other Suns, namely, the migration of millions of southern blacks to the north and out of the Egypt of southern slavery and racism.

Shallow cynicism thinks it can deconstruct this massive collection of facts as nothing but politics raiding the Bible for religious support in a world that finds religious sanction more powerful. But Coffey over and over shows that the Exodus narrative was not only exploited but it was absorbed and absorbing: the narrativist not only used the Bible but the Bible took over the narrativist.  Exodus gave Calvin a resource for assessing how to foment reform in France while it also gave him criticisms of the overly zealous; Exodus gave Royalists hope for containing yearning for political revolution in England while it gave the Protestants sound categories for how God might once again set his people free as God accomplished his plans for history; the Puritans had the gospel in mind when they strove courageously into the face of Archbishop Laud’s desire to find the via media and keep the Catholics at bay and at peace. Luther may have argued vehemently that gospel liberation was purely spiritual but most knew the Bible’s framework of liberation expanded beyond reconciliation with God and freedom from sin’s corruption. As Coffey concludes, “Readers did not merely cite Exodus; they inhabited it” (217). All of Protestantism’s political activism for freedom might ultimately be derived from the deliverance politics of the Exodus.