What to the Gentile is Pentecost?

Acts helps us understand Frederick Douglass's July 4th dilemma

This Revolution 250 series article compares two speeches about July 4th that the statesman and runaway slave Frederick Douglass makes ten years apart.

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What to the non-Jew is Pentecost? She isn’t there when the apostles pray in the upper room. She isn’t there when the Spirit falls. Instead, the Spirit falls on “devout Jews drawn from every nation under heaven.”¹ It falls on the diaspora. The Gentile isn’t among them.

But the Spirit is getting close to the Gentiles. It has the disciples speak in the Gentiles’ languages on Pentecost. Their languages have been adopted by the diaspora living in Gentile nations. The Spirit does what the diaspora has previously done: it learns the Gentiles’ cultures and speaks in their languages.

What is the Spirit teaching us here? In his commentary on Acts 2, Willie James Jennings discusses what it means to learn a language:

To learn a language requires submission to a people. Even if in the person of a single teacher, the learner must submit to that single voice, learning what the words mean as they are bound to events, songs, sayings, jokes, everyday practices, habits of mind and body, all within a land and the journey of a people.²

The Spirit on Pentecost, in a sense, submits to the Gentiles by learning their languages, even though the Gentiles are still far off. Like Jesus on the cross, the Spirit humbles herself. The Spirit on Pentecost also honors the diaspora, who have preceded the gospel to these foreign lands. The Spirit, of course, is also coming for the Gentiles themselves, but Peter hasn’t visited Cornelius’s house yet. As Paul says, the gospel comes “to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”³

But as the narrative in Acts chapters 2 through 15 makes clear, the church takes much longer than the Spirit to include the Greek. Even after the church celebrates the Spirit’s confirmation of the Gentiles as fellow members in Acts 11, the church hears arguments in Acts 15 by one of its factions that the Gentiles should constitute what Paul elsewhere describes as second-class citizens.⁴

The journey to including the Gentiles takes up what Jennings calls “the ancient challenge”: “a God who is way ahead of us and is calling us to catch up.”⁵

What to the American slave is the Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass asks his white audience that question during a speech in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852. In it, he recites the history of American independence in glowing terms, but as David W. Blight points out, Douglass is careful to distance himself throughout his speech by using the second-person pronouns “you” and “your.”⁶ Here’s a sample, comparing Independence Day to Passover:

It is the birthday of your national independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance . . .⁷

Douglass speaks also of “your fathers,” “your” Fourth of July, “your Declaration of Independence.” Lincoln’s “electric cord”—the Equality Clause (“all men are created equal”) in the Declaration of Independence that Lincoln believes would “link the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together . . . throughout the world”⁸—has not reached the Blacks in America itself.

At the time of his Rochester speech, Douglass is a Garrisonian abolitionist, preaching the destruction of the Union and of the Constitution, the two things that Lincoln, by contrast, says must remain in place to protect the Declaration of Independence’s Equality Clause until its eventual fulfillment.⁹ In accepting Garrison’s view that the Union and the Constitution are essentially pro-slavery, Douglass acknowledges that, as a slave and then as an escaped slave, he would always be considered outside the American covenant by many of the whites inside it. Many of the whites inside the covenant see him as subhuman, as someone else’s property whom the Constitution rightfully requires the states to return to his owner.

But in two or three years, Douglass would convert to “political abolitionism,” which regards the Constitution as an essentially anti-slavery document and which focuses on using the Constitution’s main political process—the vote—to destroy slavery. In an 1855 speech, Douglass criticizes Garrison’s call to destroy the Constitution and to break up the Union. Douglass’s biographer summarizes the relevant portion of his 1855 speech in which “he left no doubt about his independence from Garrisonians. Their doctrines had become ‘plainly absurd’; they hated slavery sufficiently, but strict moral suasion and disunionism possessed ‘no intelligible principle of action.’”¹⁰

Which approach was correct, Douglass’s Garrisonian abolitionism or his later political abolitionism?

Two years after signaling his move to political abolitionism, Douglass’s choice to operate within political abolitionism and the American covenant seems to be sorely tested. Chief Justice Roger Taney’s Dred Scott Court holds that Blacks, slave and free, are an “inferior order” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Douglass meets the challenge a few months later by affirming the anti-slavery cast of the Constitution:

The Constitution, as well as the Declaration of Independence, and the sentiments of the founders of the republic, give us a platform broad enough, and strong enough, to support the most comprehensive plans for the freedom and elevation of all the people of this country, without regard to color, class, or clime.¹¹

Similar questions about Blacks’ participation in the American covenant play out during the Civil Rights era. Malcolm X and Martin King famously take diverging tacks that resemble, respectively, Garrisonian abolitionism and political abolitionism. Even within a single expression of the Civil Rights movement, the influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis and Robert Moses work to integrate Blacks into the American political system, while Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and H. Rap Brown (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) push for Blacks to develop political and economic power separate from white-dominated institutions.¹²

With Blacks’ place in the American covenant again under attack by the United States Supreme Court and many Southern state legislatures, I imagine this difference in approach to covenant will reappear in new forms in response to the attack. The ancient question, in this respect, is whether to act inside or outside of what Jason Frank calls “the relationship of the part with no part in relation to the whole.”¹³

Ten years after his July 5 speech in Rochester, in the middle of the Civil War, Douglass gives another July 4 speech. This time, he embraces the Equality Clause as his own. Douglass describes the Declaration of Independence as it is understood by Lincoln and the Republicans, and the Whigs before them, as “a full and comprehensive declaration of the equal and sacred rights of mankind.”¹⁴ He criticizes the South’s (and the Dred Scott Court’s) “heartless dogma, that the rights declared in that instrument did not apply to any but white men.”¹⁵

Douglass’s pronouns also change. Instead of referring to the American founders only as “your fathers,” for instance, as he had in 1852, he refers to them as “your fathers, and my fathers”:

We are only continuing the tremendous struggle, which your fathers, and my fathers began eighty-six years ago.”¹⁶

It is the first time, historians say, that Douglass calls the American founders his fathers.¹⁷

The outpouring of the Spirit at Cornelius’s home in Acts 10 is the Gentiles’ “equivalent of Pentecost,” says Joseph A. Fitzmyer.¹⁸ When Peter follows the Gentiles to Cornelius’s home, the Gentiles begin to come into the promise of the Holy Spirit, the “Spirit of adoption, enabling us to cry ‘Abba! Father!’”¹⁹

We Gentiles are joined to Israel, and Jesus’ Father is now our Father, too.²⁰ But such a summary can work to overshadow the narrative of how God’s covenant came to different peoples. Taken alone, it tends to collapse into a simple claim of “promise fulfilled” the church’s long struggle with accepting Gentiles into its covenant. Such a collapse of narrative would eliminate not only the memory of struggle but also the agency and lessons and tradition the struggle passes on to us.

Such a collapse of narrative also would camouflage the spaces where extremes meet, where the likes of Garrison and Taney tempt us to join them in setting fire to the covenant from which a ruling race or class has excluded us.

Such a collapse also would create a false universalism where Gentiles become Jews and Blacks become whites—a universalism that knows no tradition except the tradition approved by a covenant’s dominant nationality or race. Such a universalism tends to speak no language except that spoken by a covenant’s dominant nationality. We would no longer follow the Spirit’s example in submitting to oppressed peoples by learning from their cultures and learning of their political, economic and social struggles.

A belief that “all men are created equal,” if it remains aloof from the heroic and painful stories of the Equality Clause’s gradual expansion—as well as of its recent defeats—won’t lead to political action. Faith without works is dead, remaining aloof.

The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament contain not only covenants but also unflinching narratives about how the covenants were betrayed and renewed and betrayed again. We’d do well to follow these books’ examples by telling all the stories—everyone’s stories.

The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in my earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

1. Acts 2:5 REB.

2. Jennings, Acts, 29.

3. Romans 1:16 NNAS.

4. Galatians 4:17.

5. Jennings, 30.

6. Blight, Frederick Douglass, 232-33. Jason Frank makes the same point: “By establishing his own exclusion from the nation’s annual festival of self-regard, by establishing a sharp boundary between ‘you’ and ‘me,’ Douglass set himself apart from his audience.” Jason Frank, “Staging Dissensus: Frederick Douglass and ‘We the People,’” in A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass, ed. Neil Roberts, Political Companions to Great American Authors (University Press of Kentucky, 2018), 379-80.

7. Douglass, Essential Douglass, 50-51.

8. Abraham Lincoln, July 10, 1858 speech at Chicago, Illinois, Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1832-1858, 455-56.

9. Regarding Lincoln’s views about the necessity of the Union and Constitution for preserving the Declaration’s Equality Clause, see my article “How to renew America’s covenants.”

10. Blight, 213-16, 252.

11. Douglass, 125-26.

12. See gen. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Harvard Univ. Press, 2001).

13. Frank, 381.

14. Douglass, 169.

15. Douglass, 170.

16. Douglass, 165. Douglass’s statement contains a strong echo of Jesus’s message to his apostles via Mary Magdalene after his resurrection: “But go to my brothers, and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” John 20:16-17 REB. Jesus in John’s Gospel speaks of “the Father” and “my Father” a great deal, but only after his resurrection does Jesus speak of “your Father.”

17. Blight, 368.

18. Fitzmyer, Acts of the Apostles, 447.

19. Romans 8:15 REB.

20. Romans 4:11-12.