EDE, Netherlands (ABP) — The story of an African-Caribbean Baptist slave's 19th-century revolt holds theologically liberating implications for all Christians, an international Baptist scholar said July 29.
Presenting a paper as part of the Baptist World Alliance Annual Gathering in the Netherlands, Caribbean-American scholar Delroy Reid-Salmon assessed the theological insights he gleaned from writing a book about Sam Sharpe, the main leader of the 1831-32 "Baptist War" slave rebellion in Jamaica.
Delroy Reid-Salmon presents paper at BWA annual gathering in the Netherlands. (BWA photo)
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Sharpe, a Baptist deacon, and hundreds of others were arrested and summarily executed for organizing a general strike at sugar-cane-harvesting time that turned into an attempted rebellion against their owners. Sharpe is now considered a Jamaican national hero.
Some accounts say that Baptist missionaries and pastors helped Sharpe stir the upheaval, which came after a series of prayer meetings and Bible studies in which the future rebels studied the liberation themes found in Scripture.
Reid-Salmon, a pastor in New York and fellow at Regent's Park College at Oxford University in England, said the work of God in history is evident in Sharpe's story.
"It is undisputable that this rebellion has played a major role in the abolition of slavery," he said. Abolition came to Jamaica and the rest of the British Empire a few years after Sharpe's rebellion and, nearly 30 years later, in the United States.
The slaves' decision to strike and, eventually, to revolt, was consistent with the Bible's passages on freedom, justice and oppression, Reid-Salmon said. "The biblical witness consists of the Exodus story, the prophetic tradition and of course the gospel of Jesus Christ," he said.
During the gathering's morning worship service in which participants remembered Baptist prophets, Reid-Salmon read part of Sharpe's defense of his actions.
"They may put some of us to death, but they cannot hang and shoot us all," he quoted Sharpe as saying. "In reading my Bible, I found that the white man had no more right to make a slave of me than I have to make a slave of the white man. I would rather go out and die on that gallows than to live as a slave."
After Sharpe was arrested, powerful white religious leaders told him he was wrong not to be content with the station in life in which God had placed him.
But accepting such oppression would not have been in line with God's nature, Reid-Salmon said.
"In the final analysis, Christians either behave as if they believe humanity is made in the image of God, or else they practice a theology that essentially asserts God is a creation of human freedom," he said. "Human beings take responsibility for re-ordering society in response to God's freedom."
Reid-Salmon delivered the remarks on the second day of the BWA's Annual Gathering in Ede, Netherlands. Hundreds of Baptists from around the world came to conduct BWA General Council business as well as observe the 400th anniversary of the Baptist movement, which began in the summer of 1609 in nearby Amsterdam.
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— Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.