The 400th anniversary of the Jamestown colony is big news, at least here in Virginia. The visit of Queen Elizabeth II excited a flurry of comments on proper protocol, and at least one TV reporter wondered aloud why Governor Kaine would address the media without a necktie. The Queen was greeted by gospel choirs, bluegrass bands, boisterous school children and, more solemnly, by a Native American in full ceremonial dress.
That last image encapsulates a difference between this year's memorial and all the rest, a difference in remembering. In their remarks, both the Queen and President Bush acknowledged that Jamestown was the beginning not only of the hopeful side of the American experiment but of its grimmer side as well — the displacement of the continent's native people and the enslavement of kidnapped Africans.
Did we remember falsely before? No. But we did not remember fully. Or, to put it a different way, more people are being allowed to remember. And as more remember, the story grows more complex.
It was the novelist Allan Gurganus who, while researching Oldest Living Widow Tells All, observed the remarkable number of freed slaves who remembered having seen Abraham Lincoln — a number far more than possibly could have. Was this merely wishful thinking? Were their memories false? The answer, I think, is that on a profound level, they were remembering truly. Lincoln played so crucial a role in their emancipation that in their imaginations they were present with him.
Such a way of “reading history” is by no means alien if we move to other contexts. When Jews celebrate Passover, the youngest child is directed to ask, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The Mishnah explicitly requires that every participant in the Passover meal view him- or herself as one who has come out of Egypt.
This issue of remembering has been pressed recently by the departure — or return — of evangelical philosopher Francis Beckwith to Roman Catholicism. Beckwith, a professor of church-state studies at Baylor University who also resigned as president of the Evangelical Theological Society, said the Catholic view had more explanatory power of the Church's historical understanding of salvation.
He elaborated, “[M]uch of what I have taken for granted as a Protestant — e.g., the catholic creeds, the doctrines of the trinity and the incarnation, the Christian understanding of man, and the canon of Scripture — is the result of a Church that made judgments about these matters and on which non-Catholics, including Evangelicals, have declared and grounded their Christian orthodoxy in a world hostile to it.”
The response to Professor Beckwith's move has been predictable, ranging from charges of bad faith and theological error to calls for a recommitment to “Baptist heritage.”
It is this last response that concerns me most. Speaking as one whose professional and devotional life has been enriched through my association with the Catholic Church, I maintain that Baptists still have a distinctive word from God to speak to the world. Discerning what that word is and how it is to be spoken must involve the recovery of the richness and depth of the Baptist past. And this will involve more than appeal to the usual “distinctives” of Baptist history — soul competency, freedom and so forth. It will involve the faithful remembering of our place within the church universal.
We remember well when we remember that we are not only Baptists but also members of the larger Body of Christ, brothers and sisters with all those saints who have gone before us. When Jesus calls his disciples, he is also calling us. Like the slaves and Lincoln, we too say that we have seen Christ.
“As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, [now] crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death” (Heb. 2:8-9).
The more richly and fully we remember, the more able we are to embrace the future.
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— Beth Newman is Professor of Theology and Ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. [email protected]