Jubilee's Apocalyptic Theology Of Slavery

The force of Jubilee’s theological critique of slavery is brought into relief alongside Douglass’s political frustrations with the Union expressed around the same time. For Douglass, the Republican party was only “opposed…the political power of slavery, rather than…slavery itself.” To the extent that it entailed an antinomy between God and slavery, Jubilee theology, by contrast, provided Douglass with the resources for a critique not of the excesses of slavery, the vicious practices of certain masters, or its political power; rather it entailed a fundamental critique of slavery. Jubilee names the fact that the untold calamity slavery is at odds with God’s imminently arriving new order. III. Douglass’s apocalyptic theology of Jubilee occasioned hope within an atmosphere of
Cyril O’Regan importantly notes that in identifying different forms of apocalyptic theology a signal marker is what scripture is being appealed to. In its Protestant form, contemporary apocalyptic is almost uniformly Pauline, drawing on the legacy of J. Louis Martyn, and in the long view, Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans. Yet—and here I make an assertion and not argue for—Pauline apocalyptic tends to angle the speculative dimensions against material and concrete concerns. Maintaining a singular accent on the cosmic dimensions of God’s militant grace, to borrow Philip Ziegler’s term, seems to abstract from. In this setting, Douglass’s apocalyptic theology of Jubilee is instructive because it draws from elsewhere in scripture (its canon being Leviticus 25, Isaiah 61, or Luke 4) in such a way to materialize apocalyptic theology. For, as Douglass writes it, the premise of Jubilee theology is the abolition of human slavery and exploitative relation to