Were those wise men on to something when they gave frankincense to the baby Jesus? Could it cure cancer? According to a BBC report, some doctors think so, and are carrying out research to prove it.
John Richardson and Dave Walker both post the full text of a letter from Reform, a conservative evangelical pressure group in the Church of England, to the General Synod of that Church which is meeting this week. The letter is signed by “50 incumbents of Church of England churches”, two of whom I know personally. I suspect John is not a signatory only because he is not technically an incumbent.
The letter is a contribution to the ongoing debate over women bishops in the Church of England. As the Bishop of Manchester reported to the General Synod yesterday (his draft text here, see also this report), the committee discussions have proved more complex and time-consuming than expected, and so the final decision has been delayed. But the outline now seems clear of the way ahead which will be put to a vote at the next meeting of the Synod, in July. As reported in The Times today,
any women consecrated bishops will be asked to “delegate” authority to another bishop, such as a suffragan, to carry out confirmations and other episcopal duties in parishes that refuse to accept her ministry. …
even where opponents opt for the ministry of the bishop delegated to look after them, there will be no alternative hierarchical structure of oversight that could make it appear as though the mother church of the Anglican Communion was being half-hearted about women bishops, or in any way doubting the integrity of their orders.
This is good news for the supporters of women bishops, who have seen rejected by the committee various proposals for more formal alternative episcopal oversight.
But it is this situation which prompted a strong response in the letter from Reform. The letter starts with a defence of Reform’s unreformed position on women in leadership, with appeals to Scripture interpreted in a particular way – a way which, as regular readers here will know, I have good arguments for rejecting. The authors make one interesting point here:
we emphasise again that we are NOT for a moment saying women are less valuable than men, and nor does the Scripture. … For the Bible separates roles and worth: our Lord Jesus himself submitted to the Father, but is, of course, no less God than he is.
Well, yes, but Jesus submitted himself voluntarily and temporarily, and so this cannot be used as an argument to force women to accept only submissive roles against their will and permanently.
The Reform letter writers then go on to explain how they might respond if the Church of England introduces women bishops without the kinds of safeguards they are demanding:
At the moment we are encouraging young men into the ordained ministry … However, we will be unable to do this if inadequately protective legislation is passed. The issue that will then arise is how to encourage these men to develop their ministries if they cannot do so within the formal structures of the Church of England. The answer must be to encourage them to undertake training for ministries outside those formal structures, although hopefully still within an Anglican tradition. We will, of course, have to help them with the financing of their training. …
Since we cannot take an oath of canonical obedience to a female bishop, we are unlikely to be appointed to future incumbencies. We see nothing but difficulty facing us. In these circumstances we will have to discuss with our congregations how to foster and protect the ministry they wish to receive. This is likely to generate a need for the creation of new independent charitable trusts whose purpose will be to finance our future ministries, when the need arises.
In other words, if they don’t get their own way, that is, if the democratically elected Synod rejects their position with a two-thirds majority, they will set up their own parallel ministry “within an Anglican tradition” but outside the Church of England system. They continue:
These twin developments will need to be financed from current congregational giving. This will inevitably put a severe strain on our ability to continue to contribute financially to Diocesan funds. Where we are unable to contribute as before …
In other words, they will fund their new parallel ministry by not paying what they are expected to pay to their dioceses. Potentially they could withhold the £22 million they have contributed between them over the last ten years.
So this letter can easily be perceived as an attempt to pervert the democratic processes of the Church of England by making financial threats.
But how real would these threats be? The potential loss to the dioceses averages out at £44,000 per parish per year. But much of that loss could be offset by the diocese by not replacing or making redundant the incumbent and any assistants they (well, in this case “he”) might have, thereby saving their stipends; by selling or letting the clergy houses; and by cutting off any grants those parishes might benefit from. And the percentage of the total diocesan budget under threat is probably quite small – after all, those signing the letter are only 50 clergy out of 12,000.
The greater threat to the Church of England is probably from the new structures, training institutions and “independent charitable trusts”, which Reform proposes setting up. While parish infrastructure is not mentioned, in practice the Church of England can never allow an independently trained and financed group of ministers to lead congregations within its buildings. So the route which Reform is starting on can only lead to a new group of local churches, in other words, to schism. Recent developments in the USA and in Canada have shown a way in which this schism might develop.
While the Church of England could survive the loss of 50 parishes, the danger is that many more, perhaps the majority of its evangelicals, might decide that the new structures are more supportive of them than the old ones are. At a time when many Anglo-Catholics are departing, the C of E could hardly survive the loss of its entire evangelical wing.
So what is to be done? The Church could submit to these threats from Reform and turn back from allowing women bishops at all. In fact it only needs just over one third of General Synod to see that as the best course for any proposals to be defeated in July. This now seems more likely than that Synod will choose to allow women bishops with the kinds of safeguards which Reform might accept.
But a better response is no response at all. The General Synod should simply ignore these veiled threats from Reform and treat them as what they are, a rather small pressure group. And if some of them do leave, the church authorities should be very careful not to do anything which might alienate that great majority of evangelical Anglicans who, even if they are uncomfortable in various ways, don’t see women bishops as a compelling reason to leave the Church of England. In this way there is a future ahead for the Church of England in which, in retrospect, it has lost a few troublesome extremists and gained new strength and unity as well as the benefits of women as well as men in its top leadership.
It is not often that I hear a clear exegetical error in a sermon in my church. But I heard one last night. The preacher at the evening service, not the pastor, claimed that faith was a gift of God, and appealed to Ephesians 2:8 for support:
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God …
Ephesians 2:8 (TNIV)
Well, it is not surprising that the preacher interpreted the verse in this way. (I don’t remember which Bible version it was quoted out of, perhaps NIV whose wording here is quite similar to TNIV’s.) In the English it certainly looks as if “this” refers back to “faith”, or else perhaps to “grace”.
But in the Greek text of this verse the word translated “this”, touto, cannot refer back to the words for “faith”, pistis, or “grace”, charis. That is because touto is a neuter pronoun, and cannot agree with either of the feminine nouns pistis and charis.
If you doubt that this can be so clear, consider this English sentence: “With John’s help Mary gave me what I need – it was wonderful.” If someone (probably someone who didn’t know much English) said that “it” here referred to Mary, or to John, then we English speakers would immediately know this was wrong, as “it” cannot refer to a person – and so in this sentence must refer to the whole situation.
Similarly in the Greek of Ephesians 2:8 the neuter pronoun touto can only refer to the whole situation. What is described here as the gift of God is not faith, or grace, but the entire process of the readers’ salvation.
The problem is really with how this verse has been translated. As English does not make gender distinctions in the same way as Greek, a straightforward English translation of this verse is misleading. RSV, NRSV and ESV do somewhat better than NIV and TNIV here, with “this is not your own doing”, as “doing” cannot easily refer back to faith. But to make the point really clear the whole verse needs to be rephrased, perhaps like the following:
God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God.
Ephesians 2:8 (NLT)
Now our preacher last night was not using this verse to prove Calvinism or something similar. But it has in the past been misused in this way. There is a possible argument from 1 Corinthians 4:7 (already used by Augustine of Hippo) that faith is a gift. And certainly faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12:9 – but this faith is usually understood as something different from saving faith in Jesus Christ. However, if you want to argue this point, that saving faith is a gift from God, you need to find evidence other than Ephesians 2:8.
As I mentioned in passing yesterday, there has been quite a row here in the UK about what the Pope said about British equal rights laws. Meanwhile from quite a different angle I was challenged about the limits of freedom of religion in a comment at Debunking Christianity, from Gandolf who is an atheist or at least an agnostic from New Zealand. He or she wrote (in part):
At which case Peter i ask you do you feel laws of religious “freedom of faith” is so fair? or (HONESTLY completely inline in keeping with the genral golden rule?)
Because right at this very moment somewhere in Africa today EVEN in the year 2010!,somebodys likely even being hunted down to be WRONGFULLY killed!! as a witch.
Simply because humans worldwide still support and even promote,the (willy nilly)! promotion of laws of “freedom of faith”.
So should something that CAN often effect all our lives so very serriously,be promoted to be allowed to be run so willy nilly Peter?.
In reply to this I wrote:
Gandolf, I certainly believe in freedom of religion, even for those whose “religion” is witchcraft. But there must be limits to that religion, e.g. that religion must not be used to harm others – so no Christians hunting down witches, and no witches making spells (regardless of their effectiveness) to harm others.
On that “regardless of their effectiveness” point, even from an atheistic world view (according to which spells are ineffective) African witchcraft cannot be considered harmless, because it often involves intimidating people with spells which they believe to work, and intimidating people is harming them.
Yes, there must be a limit to the freedom of religion when the freedom is claimed to harm others. But who is to define what might be called harm? The Pope is probably concerned about the proposed legislation here in Britain which would, among other things, force churches to offer equal employment rights to practising homosexuals – to extend to youth workers, if not to clergy. (This proposed clause has been rejected by the House of Lords, but may be reintroduced in the Commons.)
Now it is surely fundamental to freedom of religion that a church, or other religious organisation, can select those who uphold its own teaching to work with its own young people. But does this harm gay and lesbian youth workers by limiting their employment prospects? Maybe. I can hardly imagine them wanting to take a job in which they could be required, by the clergy or church board, to teach that homosexual practice is wrong.
But how small an inconvenience can be called “harm”? Some people in this country have tried to have churches closed down on the grounds that they can hear worship music in the street outside, or because of the traffic generated on an otherwise quiet Sunday morning. Clearly some perspective is needed here. If the great British tradition of tolerance and human rights is to be maintained, we must allow that some people will sometimes be inconvenienced by this. But we need to draw a line between inconvenience and harm. The problem is, where do we draw that line?
I decided I had had enough fun taking on the toothless lions of modern atheism. So I found new opponents to spar with (not enemies, but people to have a bit of fun with) in the Roman Catholics, and on this matter probably also the Anglo-Catholics.
No, I am not getting involved in the row about the Pope’s forthcoming visit to Britain, and about what he said about British equal rights laws, not least because I agree with him on this matter.
However, I have expressed by disagreement with Brant Pitre, a Roman Catholic professor of theology in New Orleans. Brant asks a question at The Sacred Page: Does Hebrews Envision a New Ministerial Priesthood? That was how that epistle was interpreted at the Council of Trent in the 16th century – very likely in reaction against Reformation scholars who argued that there was no support in the New Testament for a specific class of Christian priests.
The Council of Trent found its support for a new priesthood in Hebrews 7:12. But it could only do so by wrenching that verse entirely out of context. For it is clear from that context that the “changed” priesthood of that verse is that of Jesus Christ – and that one of the main changes is from having many priests to having just one (7:23-24).
Brant finds a positive answer to his question not so much in 7:12 as in 13:10, where he sees the new altar and the mention of eating as a reference to the Eucharist, which to him, as a Roman Catholic, is a sacrifice and implies a priesthood.
This verse again needs to be seen in context:
Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings. It is good for our hearts to be strengthened by grace, not by the eating of ceremonial foods, which is of no benefit to those who observe such rituals. 10 We have an altar from which those who minister at the tabernacle have no right to eat.
11 The high priest carries the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp. 12 And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. 13 Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. 14 For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.
Hebrews 13:9-13 (TNIV)
Here is my first comment in reply to Brant:
Surely (at least it seems sure from my Protestant perspective) the altar in Hebrews 13:10 is the one in the new holy place described earlier in the book. Chapters 8-10 spell out how the Jerusalem temple has been replaced not by church buildings with altars but by a heavenly sanctuary of which the temple was just a copy (8:1-6), a “greater and more perfect tabernacle that is not made with human hands” (9:11). It is in this sanctuary, and so presumably on its altar, that Christ was sacrificed once (9:24-28). So the author proclaims the end of the old system by which priests offer daily sacrifices in a man-made building (10:11-14). Thus there is no way that in this author’s thinking the altar of 13:10 is one for daily sacrifices like the mass. He or she may have been thinking of the cross as the “altar” on which Christ died, but more likely of the altar in the heavenly tabernacle, from which flows the grace, contrasted with ceremonial foods (13:9), by which Christians alone are fed and strengthened.
If there is a reference to the Eucharist at all in this letter, I would suggest that it is in the “strange teachings” about the benefits of “ceremonial foods” mentioned in 13:9.
In reply to a further comment from Brant, I wrote:
Brant, I will grant that the “ceremonial foods” of 13:9 are “the earthly food eaten in the earthly Temple from the earthly altar”. But they are contrasted not with the Eucharist but with “grace”. So surely the same contrast is continued in 13:10, and on into verse 12: what the old priests could not eat but we can is this same grace. Of course we eat this only metaphorically. I can grant that the elements of the Eucharist are a sign or sacrament of this grace, but not that they are the literal referent here.
This chapter goes on to explain that there are sacrifices which Christians should offer: praise (v.15) and good works (v.16). But it is not through these sacrifices, but only through the blood of Christ (v.12), that we are made holy and worthy to come into God’s presence.
Yes, I can accept some kind of allusion to the Eucharist at 13:10. But I see it as a complete misunderstanding of Hebrews to see it as arguing for replacement of the Aaronic priesthood and sacrifices with a class of Christian priests offering the sacrifice of the Mass. Such a thought could not have been further from this author’s mind. He or she makes the main point very clearly: in the New Covenant there is just one priest, Jesus Christ, who offered one sacrifice, his own death on the cross.
And yes, there are the sacrifices of praise and of good works mentioned in 13:15,16. But these do not make us acceptable to God; rather they are the response to him of people who are already holy in his sight. And they are not to be offered by a special caste of priests but by all Christians, who are in that sense a “royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9) of all believers.
While I have been arguing that atheist arguments prompted by the Haiti earthquake are toothless, my friend and fellow blogger John Richardson, the Ugley Vicar, has been questioning whether they are really rational. John looks from the perspective of an atheist (although he is in fact a Christian minister) mainly at what Richard Dawkins has written about Haiti. He finds in Dawkins’ article anthropomorphic language and an anthropocentric perspective. He finishes by condemning Dawkins for irrationally calling for aid to be sent to Haiti, when the rational response from an evolutionary perspective is to let even more Haitians die, to reduce the world’s overpopulation which threatens the survival of our species. Read it all here.
Of course John’s tongue is firmly in his cheek here. And he is perhaps attacking a straw man version of atheism in response to the way atheists often attack straw man versions of Christianity. But he shows how the thinking of people like Dawkins is in fact firmly based in the Judeo-Christian morality whose roots they want to pull out. Do Dawkins et al really want human society to go where their rationalism seems to lead it? They may be playing with fire. Is it really rational for our society to pay a pension to Dawkins, who is no longer productive or (I presume) reproductive? Wouldn’t it be better in evolutionary terms to have him put to sleep?
It is interesting to see how atheists like Dawkins and John Loftus seems to have as a basic presupposition that human death is the ultimate evil. They use it as an argument that God cannot exist because otherwise he would not have allowed multiple human deaths. But what is their ethical basis for that judgment? It is not originally a Christian one, as Christians have always held, at least in theory, that it is better for them to die and be with God than to suffer in life. It is not an evolutionary one, for as the Nazis infamously argued the survival of the species is enhanced by the death of the less fit and of those past the age of childbearing. It is not even the ethics of a popular culture which is increasingly coming to the view that the terminally ill should be allowed to die. So why are today’s atheists still presupposing that human death is the ultimate evil?
Their intentions were the best, but between them Joel Watts and Glenn Peoples have managed to throw me and my blog into a lions’ den, atheist John W. Loftus’ blog Debunking Christianity. I already reported on John’s first response to my post on Haiti. Since then he has responded twice more, here and here, with increasing length in each of his three posts.
In a comment on the second post John writes:
Peter, nice to see your comment but prepare to get fried. If the regular visitors here at DC don’t do this, I will later.
So he can hardly complain at me changing the imagery from a frying pan to a lions’ den. Or perhaps I should have gone for an earlier chapter of Daniel and the burning fiery furnace.
Now as a Christian I trust as Daniel did that God will protect me in the lions’ den. But I feel safe in this particular lions’ den not just because I trust in God but also because, as far as I can tell so far, there is only one lion in it, and perhaps a few cubs, and the lion and its cubs seem to have no teeth or claws. John Loftus is hitting me with childish arguments. He tries to pretend that they have some force, but they have none at all. I have already demolished most of them in my various comments on his posts.
As far as I can see, John’s main argument centres on a rather obscure point. He insists that God could have forced King Charles X of France to change his mind, about imposing reparations on Haiti, without violating that king’s free will. His evidence for this proposition is that some people in the Bible sometimes did what God asked them to do. He completely ignores my point that a lot of other people persistently refused to do what God wanted, and God did not force them to do it. So, John’s argument seems to run, since God did not force the king to repent, God cannot exist, QED. Or have I missed some step in the argument? Can he really not see how weak and full of holes this is? He doesn’t seem even to allow consideration of the possibility that God chooses to let people disobey him, that he has chosen to give us free will.
John claims on his profile page that
I have three master’s degrees in the area of the Philosophy of Religion along with some Ph.D. work. I majored under William Lane Craig and earned a Th.M. degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1985.
My first reaction to this is to despair of the quality of American education, including at TEDS, if they give master’s degrees to someone who has apparently failed to master even the basics of the philosophy of religion, who does not demonstrate any understanding of metaphysical libertarianism or compatibilism – I link to Wikipedia articles which could help to introduce John to these subjects. Or perhaps he is not really ignorant of these things, only feigning ignorance as a debating tactic. Either way, that means it is a waste of time to debate with John, so I won’t do so any more.
magnumdb, commenting on John’s blog, linked to an interesting piece Why It’s So Tricky for Atheists to Debate with Believers, which describes
a pattern. Believers put atheists in no-win situations, so that no matter what atheists do, we’ll be seen as either acting like jerks or conceding defeat. … these “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” tactics aren’t really valid criticisms of atheism.
It seems to me that John Loftus has found a way to respond to these tactics: if you can’t beat them, join them by copying them. I already noted that by him I would be “damned whatever I write”. It seems he wants me to “be seen as either acting like [a] jerk[] or conceding defeat.” Well, I am not going to play his little game. I am getting out of the lions’ den unharmed by his childish arguments and without conceding any measure of defeat.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I am happy that atheist propagandist (and #2 biblioblogger) John W. Loftus has linked to my post about Haiti, and has in fact quoted a large chunk of it. I am pleased that, in his own comment, he endorses the Avaaz.org appeal which I also endorsed, for the relief of Haiti’s debts.
But I get the impression from what John writes that I would be damned by him just because I am a Christian, whatever I might choose to say about Haiti. In my post I explicitly denied any intention of explaining why God allowed the earthquake to happen:
That is not an attempt to answer the question of why God allowed this natural disaster.
That is the only place in the post where I even mention God. John quoted these words, but then immediately wrote:
Yet, Christians still try to open any window to show their God is not to be blamed for anything.
Well, some Christians may do this, but I quite explicitly denied making any attempt in this post to show anything of the sort. I can’t help thinking that John would have taken anything I wrote about Haiti as an attempt “to show [my] God is not to be blamed for anything”?
But perhaps I should blame not John but Christian blogger (and #5 biblioblogger) Glenn Peoples for this misunderstanding. In a comment which John quotes Glenn describes my post as
a better representation of a Christian response to Pat Robertson’s unChristian comments.
Well, thanks, Glenn, but it was not really intended to be a Christian response. Apart from that one sentence mentioning God, I wrote nothing in the post which couldn’t have been written by an atheist. Indeed I challenged John to find anything in the post that he actually disagreed with.
In fact, here is my entire comment on John’s post, to which I have now been awaiting any reply for nine hours:
Thanks for the link to my post at Gentle Wisdom. But I can’t help thinking that I would be damned for anything I wrote about Haiti (and you happened to read), just because I am a Christian. After all, I didn’t mention God in this post except to say “That is not an attempt to answer the question of why God allowed this natural disaster.” Is there actually anything in this post that you disagree with?
But in answer to some of your questions, yes, God could have for example spoken to King Charles X (or for that matter to today’s bankers) and asked him to forgive Haiti’s debts. Very likely he did speak to him. But the king, as a selfish and sinful man (like all of us), didn’t do what God asked him, or would have asked him. God could have forced him to do it, but only by turning people into robots.
And he did show the Haitians that their country was an earthquake zone, through devastating earthquakes in the 18th century. But they went ahead and built unstable buildings there anyway.
How about this argument: Suppose you have a teenage child who goes out, with your permission, and commits some minor offence. Are you to blame? Well, you could have locked the young person up at home 24 hours a day, so yes, by the standards you apply to God, that anything you could have stopped is your fault, you are to blame. But is that responsible parenting? No, it is child abuse. Similarly God could lock us up 24 hours a day so we are unable to sin, but that would be to abuse us, not to be a responsible and loving Father.
If atheists like John Loftus and Richard Dawkins want their arguments to be taken seriously, they need to make an effort to understand and interact with what thoughtful Christians write, rather than offering only ad hominem responses to them and directing their only attempts at proper argumentation at extremists and straw men.
I feel quite honoured that within the last two days this blog, Gentle Wisdom, has been linked to by each of the top three blogs in the January list of bibliobloggers of the month.
#3 in that list is Jeremy Thompson, who has now taken over the biblioblogger listing from the mythical N.T. Wrong, who is apparently now not only resurrected but also ascended to heaven! Jeremy links to Gentle Wisdom as one of the several hundred biblioblogs he lists. On my first appearance in the old list last September my ranking was #58, but it slipped to #91 in October, #125 in November, and #199 in Jeremy’s trial listing on 10th January. That slippage is hardly surprising given how little I have been blogging in the last few months. But I am glad to see some recovery since Gentle Wisdom started to resume normal service, to #102 in the latest listings, for January.Will it climb still higher, perhaps into the rarefied heights of the Top 50? We will see – but I’m not going to make special efforts to get there.
By the way, the biblioblogger logo disappeared from my sidebar because the site I was linking to for it disappeared. I could restore it if someone gives me a new URL.
#2 in the January biblioblogger list is John Loftus’ site Debunking Christianity. I must say I wonder why this site qualifies as a biblioblog – it seems to be more atheist propaganda than study of the Bible. But John did honour me in a post yesterday with a link to my post on Haiti and a long quotation from it. I plan to respond to that in a separate post here.
January’s #1 biblioblogger is Joel Watts, with his somewhat presumptuously named blog The Church of Jesus Christ. Joel has inherited the top spot following the demise of Jim West’s old blog. Jim, like N.T., has been resurrected, as Zwinglius Redivivus, but this new blog hasn’t found any place in Jeremy’s biblioblog list – although with over 300 posts in the last three weeks of January Jim does seem to be making a determined bid to regain his #1 spot. Or will he too ascend to heaven before he gets there?
Anyway, Joel has also linked to and quoted from my post on Haiti, which he calls “A truly wonderful post”. Thanks, Joel!
My Haiti post may have attracted only 42 readers so far (according to WordPress statistics, but this excludes those who read it from my blog front page or from RSS feeds), but I can’t complain when two of those readers are the top two bloggers in this field.
UPDATE: January’s #5 biblioblogger Glenn Peoples has also linked here in the last two days. That makes 4 of the top 5! I didn’t spot Glenn’s link at first because it is only in a comment on one of his own posts – I found it because John W. Loftus quotes the comment. Glenn, thanks to you as well for the link, and the positive comment.
This morning I received an e-mail from Avaaz.org about a new campaign to drop Haiti’s debt, which has already attracted nearly 300,000 signatures, including mine. I was horrified to read (in the e-mail, the same text is in the “Tell Your Friends” box at the web page) that
even as aid flows in to Haiti’s desperate communities, money is flowing out to pay off the country’s crushing debt — over $1 billion in unfair debt racked up years ago by unscrupulous lenders and governments.
There was also interesting background which I had not been aware of:
After Haitian slaves rose up and won their independence in 1804, France demanded billions in reparations — launching a spiral of poverty and unjust debt that has lasted two centuries.
I decided to look into this in more depth.
In 1791, following the French Revolution, the slaves of France’s Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue rebelled against their white masters and seized control of a large part of the territory. Partly in response, in 1794 the French National Convention abolished slavery in all French colonies (it was not abolished in the British Empire until 1833), and eventually an uneasy peace was restored to Saint-Domingue. In 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte, now ruler or France, reimposed slavery in some colonies, but not in Saint-Domingue. However, this move prompted a new rebellion there which the French government was unable to put down. So when in 1804 the colony gained its independence and took the name Haiti, despite what is often claimed this was not technically the result of a slave rebellion.
Saint-Domingue, with an area of 27,750 square kilometres, had been only a tiny part, much less than 1%, of the French possessions in the Americas. Within living memory France had claimed almost half of North America, known as New France. The southern half of this area was called Louisiana. But in 1763 the French were forced to cede all of New France. The northern part, Canada, became British. Louisiana east of the Mississippi also came under British control before passing to the United States in 1783. Spain took the part west of the Mississippi, as well as New Orleans.
Bonaparte (who crowned himself the Emperor Napoleon in 1804) dreamed of a new French empire in the Americas. So in 1800 he imposed a treaty on Spain by which the part of Louisiana which had been under Spanish control since 1763 was returned to France. However, Bonaparte never took effective control of this territory. And by 1803, facing the loss of Saint-Domingue and a renewed war with Great Britain, he gave up his plans for a French empire in the Americas.
So, when in that year the young United States sent negotiators to Paris seeking to buy the city of New Orleans, Napoleon offered to sell not just the city but the whole of his newly regained territory, Louisiana west of the Mississippi, which consisted of more than 2 million km² of mostly good agricultural land. The Americans quickly agreed to this purchase, for a price of 78 million francs or $15 million, that is, “less than three cents per acre ($7.40 per km²)”. According to Wikipedia,
The purchase, which doubled the size of the United States, comprises around 23% of current U.S. territory. …
Napoleon Bonaparte, upon completion of the agreement, stated, “This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States …”
Indeed it did, if not “forever” at least up to 2010. This area, sold to the USA at a bargain price for political reasons, has become the breadbasket of the world and a major driving force of US economic strength over the last 200 years.
(Of course all this land, Haiti as well, had earlier been seized with little or no compensation from its Native American inhabitants. But that’s another story.)
Contrast the French response to Haiti. This tiny former colony gained its independence in 1804, but France did not at first recognise this independence. Again according to Wikipedia,
In July 1825, King Charles X of France sent a fleet of fourteen vessels and thousands of troops to reconquer the island. Under pressure, President Boyer [of Haiti] agreed to a treaty by which France formally recognized the independence of the nation in exchange for a payment of 150 million francs (the sum was reduced in 1838 to 90 million francs) – an indemnity for profits lost from the slave trade.
In other words, the Haitians were asked to pay twice as much for the freedom of their tiny mountainous republic than the USA was asked to pay for the Louisiana Purchase, of an area 77 times larger than Haiti. The people of Haiti did manage to pay the 90 million francs, estimated to be worth billions of dollars at today’s prices. But, according to this 2009 article from the Sunday Times (linked to by Avaaz.org), it took them over a century to do so:
In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.
It is no wonder that in recent years, as I discovered in this article, at least some
Haitians Demand Reparations
for the Ransom Paid for its Independence.
I can’t bear to summarise the picture of Haiti last year given in the Sunday Times article, of extreme poverty exacerbated by overpopulation and a series of rulers who have enriched themselves at the expense of their country.
Then into this ongoing disaster zone came this month’s devastating earthquake. Was this a natural disaster? Well, yes and no. The magnitude 7.0 earthquake was of course a natural event. But that was not the main cause of the loss of life. I have lived through a magnitude 7.0 earthquake in a major city, in Baku in 2000. (Well, they said at the time it was magnitude 7.0, but the latest data gives a figure of 6.8.) In that earthquake “26 people died as a primary result, but only three people in collapsing buildings”. The latest (28th January) confirmed death toll in Haiti is 170,000.
Why the huge difference? Yes, there were probably geological factors which caused the ground acceleration in Haiti to be higher than in Baku. But surely there is far more here. It must be the poverty and overcrowding in Port-au-Prince, and the poor standard of building work in a known earthquake zone, which have greatly exacerbated the damage and casualty rate. In addition poverty and poor infrastructure have hampered relief efforts.
That is not an attempt to answer the question of why God allowed this natural disaster. But it is intended to put the disaster in perspective.
So we can contrast here the continuing poverty of Haiti with the wealth of France which enriched itself from reparations from Haiti, with the wealth of my own UK which continued to enrich itself from slavery in the Caribbean for decades after the French liberated their slaves, and with the wealth of the USA which benefited so much from France letting them buy Louisiana at such a bargain price. These are some of the roots of continuing injustice in the 21st century world.
So I urge all of you to support the Avaaz.org campaign:
Petition to Finance Ministers, IMF, World Bank, IADB, and bilateral creditors:
As Haiti rebuilds from this disaster, please work to secure the immediate cancellation of Haiti’s $1 billion debt and ensure that any emergency earthquake assistance is provided in the form of grants, not debt-incurring loans.
This should be done not just as an emotional response to the earthquake but as a way of putting right the injustices of the past. And it should be a step on the way to cancelling all the debts owed by poor countries to the rich ones who have exploited them in the past and continue to do so.