The pattern emerges: Take a prominent (though not A-list) figure from mid-nineteenth-century US history. Explore that figure’s place in history through analysis of a wide variety of primary and secondary sources. Reveal how understanding that figure in that time helps us make sense not only of our own place in our time but of how we got from then to now, giving special attention to significant social, political, legal, and economic systems and transformations. Provide an ethically sophisticated, theologically attuned, and self-consciously reflexive set of interpretive lenses through which to interpret huge ideas like “time” and “violence.” Offer a chastened vision of hope (or, perhaps, a vision of chastened hope?) for Christians and others living in the West in the twenty-first century. Cite Walter Benjamin when possible.

In The New Measures: A Theological History of Democratic Practice, Ted did this with Charles Grandison Finney and helped us discover the sources of our contemporary Western, democratic, Christian selves. Now, in Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics, he’s done the same with the abolitionist John Brown. And here’s the first trick: in spite of the pattern, they’re very different books. Where the former reminds us of the types of practices necessary to sustain faith and shape citizenship under conditions of eschatological memory, the latter confronts us with the very practices we participate in that we would most like to ignore or deny and thereby highlights just how far we have to go in even understanding faith and citizenship, let alone living into them. The former ends with a call to let our politics be leavened with lightheartedness; the latter with the call to do politics under the sign of judgment revealed in Brown’s death. The cover of The New Measures pictures a camp meeting and revival; the cover of Weird John Brown a painting of John Brown on his way to the gallows. New life and old death.

Here’s the second trick: to pull off using this pattern, one needs to be a first-rate American historian, a sophisticated and wide-read social and political theorist, a theological ethicist par excellence, (probably) a practicing Christian, and a damned fine writer—and to have read and understood The Arcades Project and Illuminations at least. Very few people—at least that I know or know of—have all those qualifications in place and can use the pattern. Really just Ted. My wish that I did is matched by my curiosity about what Ted talks about when he teaches preaching—which is, after all, a considerable part of his day job. I’ve told others what I’ll now tell him: it’s a good thing that Ted is a good friend, a generous conversation partner, and a really decent guy, or he’d really piss me off, as he does everything I do (better than I do) and some things I don’t on top of that. Ted’s range and depth, so clearly revealed in Weird John Brown, makes offering substantive reflections on the book—a book that has been described by a number of very smart people at different times but within my hearing as a “game-changer”—intimidating. Still, where angels fear to tread . . .

All I want to do here is offer three challenges to the book’s title: a challenge to “Divine Violence,” a challenge to “the Limits of Ethics” and a challenge to “Weird John Brown.” I would hasten to add that I intend these challenges neither to be snarky (certainly, a risk when taking such an approach) nor cliché (the fear of academics everywhere). Instead, I offer the challenges as ways of getting to the heart of Ted’s arguments rather than dancing around their margins. Hopefully, such an approach not only accurately names Ted’s arguments but, in its own way, advances them.

First, a challenge to “Divine Violence.” Ted’s basic argument runs thus: the sovereign (modern) state was established as a rejection of religiously-motivated violence which was, itself, mimetically dependent on theological visions of divine violence. To effect this rejection, twin narratives had to become compelling. First, the state, through its monopoly on violence, could restrict violent actions to those that reasonable persons would pursue for the benefit of social stability and advancement. And, second, that reasonable persons can work out of an ethic that is immanently framed, not only obviating any need to justify actions on theological grounds but establishing a system of law that is a sufficient basis for social stability and advancement. The problem, as Carl Schmitt, saw, is that the modern state relies on tacitly theological arguments to address those limit-occasions in which its own sovereignty is threatened. (One wonders that Ted didn’t take up Karl Barth and his use of grenzefall cases as a conversation partner here—though even Ted can only do so much in a single book.) In such limit-occasions, there aren’t really any rules because rule-making is a reason-based and immanent project. Thus, at such times, the state must be willing to play God (or at least impersonate a particular vision of an almighty, unbounded, and occasionally wrathful deity) and allow its own unique access to violence to trump and/or complete the law as a way of ensuring justice. Walter Benjamin saw the problems of such an approach and offers us a way out by replacing the state’s myth of violence with a story of divine violence based not in the full-grown obligation(s) of history but the incompleted indicative of a messianic age perpetrated not on bodies but systems of relationship. That is, divine violence functions as the negation of the state’s myth of violence, thereby shaping a new relationship to law—and, therein, to pardon and sacrifice. And while John Brown didn’t get it right when he murdered people in Kansas or seized Harper’s Ferry, his actions help us see the space between the state’s mythic violence and Benjamin’s divine violence.

So: Schmitt vs. Benjamin. Mythic violence upon which the modern state and its laws are founded vs. divine violence which reveals the gap between the law and the state and undermines claims about the supra-legal necessity of violence by the state. History lumbering toward eternity vs. a perpetually inbreaking messianic age that both negates and completes history. I think I get the contrasts.

I worry, though, that on both sides of the contrast violence remains a cipher. Benjamin is right to highlight the aporia of using violence to eliminate violence—and, implicitly, condemning all the common and misdirected advocacy of, e.g., just war thinking and capital punishment when they grow out of mythic violence. Ted’s use of Benjamin highlights not only the conceptual failings of mythic violence but funds opposition to violence. Mythic violence certainly needs negating, and Benjamin/Ted’s ideas about divine violence do that. But isn’t there an aporia in Benjamin as well? Benjamin, via Ted, describes divine violence as both negation (“The task . . . is rather to see divine violence—the moment when the fabric of the polity is torn open, when goods, processes, and institutions of a juridical order are revealed to be finite—in the negation at work in every moment. And it is to see this negation, this secularization of the political, as participating, indirectly, in the work of redemption” [81].) and in peculiarly positive ways (“Because Benjamin’s divine violence does not destroy or even suspend law, it does not remove the law as a resource for political reasoning . . . [it] therefore frees people for a new relationship with the law, one that combines freedom and fidelity” in which “nihilism is not itself ultimate [but] operates within a larger eschatology in which the pursuit of mortal happiness, precisely because it is fleeting, plays its part in the work of redemption” [82].). But by the time I’m done with that last quote, I wonder, “Where is the ‘violence’ of divine violence?” I suppose I can see a kind of violence in negation and a kind of negation of negation in the positive moment (and, therefore, distributively, a kind of constructive violence in that positive moment), but by then, I’m wondering what the term means. In a lovely criticism of just war thinking, Ted reveals the flaws of the tradition when it is built on mythic violence (160–63). Until he lays out an equivalent criticism of pacifism, though, I’m not sure where violence continues to play a role in divine violence.

After all, one of the reasons that mythic violence functions is that, as process, it actually achieves certain goods. Its coercive power can shape order out of chaos, enforce justice in the face of injustice, and even clear space for the disciplines of love in apathetic and misanthropic times. It does all these things imperfectly, certainly, and, in those imperfections, it always is judged. But can such judgment simply be an expression of negation? Wouldn’t those goods be negated as well? Instead, isn’t the judgment an expression of both the need for and possibility of violence’s transformation (instead of its negation, alone)? Why shouldn’t we hope after an uncorrupted violence much as we hope (eschatologically, of course) after a better order, a greater justice, and a more perfect love? Or, to say that all differently, why think of divine violence as the negation of mythic violence rather than its transformation? Ted would probably have to surrender a bit of Benjamin to do so, but I don’t think that would hurt too much.

There are obvious conceptual and practical problems with thinking in terms of transformed violence. What could transformed violence look like? How does violence exist in the kingdom of God? This side of that kingdom’s consummation, how can we create space for imagining transformed violence without sliding back into mythic violence? And, above all, what will we do with a violent God (or, perhaps more troublingly, what will a perfectly violent God do with us)? But those problems would seem to exist in Ted/Benjamin’s notion of divine violence as well. After all, in the rich contrast between Romulus and Cain (136ff.), violence remains. And it seems to me that “transformation” language leans toward a more emaciated and fundamentally incomplete dualism than negation language (even including “negation of negation” language) does. The nuances of transformation, after all, seem more Pauline than those of negation.

But now I’m into my second challenge: that to “the Limits of Ethics.” There is vagueness in the phrase that I’m glad for but that makes me wonder about intentionality. “Limits” is plural. The subtitle could be “Divine Violence and the Limit of Ethics,” which would be both aesthetically less pleasing and imply a set of ideas foreign to the book. But by using the plural, the subtitle at least hints at two (or more) kinds of limit. One of them—call it Limit₁—has to do with the failings of any ethic that functions wholly within an immanent frame of reference. And Ted certainly wants to highlight such failings (he’s a great reader of Charles Taylor in this). But, following Taylor, we might recognize that such a frame of reference is symptomatic of the secular age in which most of us in the West live and, therein, also recognize that not everyone has lived in (or currently lives in) such an age. There were ethics before there was modernity and one doesn’t need Kant to have a vision of obligation any more than one needs Mill to do ends-oriented reasoning (or Hegel to attend to history).

Yet the turn to divine violence signals something bigger than a critique of modernity. It points toward a profoundly existential question that redounds throughout the ages: How can mortals begin to understand, let alone assess, the mighty and peculiar acts of God? Job is as much a book about the limits of ethics as Weird John Brown is, after all—and they are definitely different kinds of books. The distinctive eschatological vision that frames Ted’s description of politics is a vision that will escape the constraints of any particular age. And in that vision, ethics will always face limits because we ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but not the tree of life. Call this Limit₂.

So what is the relationship between Limit₁ and Limit₂? I’m not sure this is clear in the book. On the one hand, most of the particular concerns of the book—about the modern state, about that state’s use of law, and about race 1—are concerns about ethics and Limit₁. On the other hand, Ted’s exploration of the higher law, and of pardon and eschatology, theologically considered, move well past problems with Limit₁. Sometimes—as in Ted’s reading of Geuss (158–60), it seems like Ted would be content to criticize a wholly immanent ethics, albeit from within a social imaginary that has been immanentized. Other times—as in Ted’s description of “A Politics of the Open Wound” (153–55)—Ted wants to do more: to suggest a way of existing in the world that is always necessarily open and in which God works in and beyond ethics. Sometimes, Ted uses Limit₂ to point to the failings of Limit₁. Other times, Limit₁ just sounds like the latest expression of Limit₂. The vagueness of the relationship between the two kinds of limits, though, leaves me feeling a bit vertiginous—as if trying to teach ethics under conditions of both limits didn’t do so already.

I don’t know that this question about the relationship between the limits of ethics actually needs to be settled just now. But if Ted continues to explore the limits of ethics in arenas beyond those having to do with violence (as he has suggested to me that he might do), I do hope he’ll help us work through some of these relations more systematically.

The reason I don’t think the question needs to be settled just now is that I’m much more interested in what Ted does do in the book, which is use John Brown as a means to make sense of the senselessness of (or pursue coherence in the face of the incoherence of) violence in modern society. Which takes me to my third challenge.

Weird John Brown. Ted begins the book telling us that the adjective comes from Herman Melville’s poem “The Portent” and that he (and Melville) mean “weird” in the same way that the three sisters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth are weird: otherworldly, portent-laden, peculiarly powerful creatures, our understandings of whom never quite get settled because they don’t fit our settled categories. Don’t lose the paradox here: Ted starts the book saying that John Brown is a sign we can’t really interpret and then spends good portions of the book interpreting Brown, frequently by addressing bad interpretations of Brown. Accepting neither the “freedom fighter” nor “fanatic” narratives usually used to describe Brown, Ted ultimately reveals Brown as a God-fearing, Bible-quoting, oddly charismatic but unsuccessful businessman whose concerns about the status of dark-skinned persons in the United States drove him to zealous and violent actions that failed to achieve the goals he pursued but who, almost in spite of himself, ignited revolutionary social change.

Well . . . that sounds pretty human to me. For that matter, it sounds almost stereotypically American. Religious in a way unlike most persons in comparable (i.e., non-American) Western societies? Check. Faith shaped by an academically unsophisticated but socially significant way of reading Scripture? Check. Charisma-driven leadership that trumps careful business practices and conventional wisdom? Check. Struggling to make sense of / deal with race? Check. Prefers revolutionary change to gradual reform and willing to use violence toward achieving those changes? Double-check. Effected social transformation, but in ways he didn’t anticipate? Check. Ted gives us a Brown that isn’t weird so much as paradigmatic.

Of course, the reason Ted does so is that Brown’s very paradigmatic-ness reveals just how weird American society was (and is). The paradoxes Ted points toward aren’t really paradoxes in Brown or in tales about Brown; they’re paradoxes in American society. We’re captured by immanent frames of reference (revealing just how modern we’ve been since our founding) while continually celebrating a kind of exceptionalism that says, “We refuse to be captured by anything—especially history.” We reject any polity that gives too much power to the state while acceding to a myth of violence (or, perhaps, myths of violence) that are premised on the state’s monopoly on violence. We celebrate freedom and good-heartedness while being peculiarly and troublingly punitive and ungracious. We white folk spend enormous amounts of psychic and social energy explaining why we’re not racist while perpetuating racist structures that benefit us and so must go unnamed. Or, to say all that differently, we’re otherworldly because we refuse to accept the natural limits of the world even as our refusal tightens the unnatural constraints of immanent frames of reference around us, we’re portent-laden because we vigorously reject the interpretations of ourselves that make the most sense, and we’re peculiarly powerful precisely because we’re so vigorous in rejecting those interpretations even as we throw an enormous amount of political, military, economic, and racist weight around. Or, differently still, we can see John Brown as weird only because he’s holding a mirror.

I’m writing this reflection still feeling haunted by Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, having read that book earlier this year. The argument Alexander makes there—that race has played a central and determinate role in shaping a penal culture so enormously misshapen as to make the United States an international embarrassment and induce even prominent members of the “law and order” party, the GOP, to call for its transformation—reveals just how good we are at concealing the obvious from ourselves in order to maintain our manifold prejudices, many of which are funded by the very unnamed theological convictions Ted draws out in the latter chapters of his book. The two books are provocatively contrapuntal. Alexander, for instance, seems quite convicted by the very understanding of pardon-as-justice that Ted undermines. And Ted’s insistence on incompleteness (including the incompleteness of narratives about living in incomplete times such as those advanced by just warriors and pacifists) are probably not likely to be especially interesting to Alexander. Whatever their differences, though, both books touch on a common if discordant melody: we are a weird society.2

More troublingly, I’m writing just days after the murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white man who believed deeply in portents, was preoccupied by race, and was willing to use violence to start a war. I note this not to draw lazy analogies between John Brown and Dylann Roof; the disanalogies are far more significant. After reading Weird John Brown, though, it is hard to ignore the failings of the rhetoric that have followed from the shootings or to link those failings to society’s weirdness. Commentators are busy expressing outrage and righteous confusion at Roof’s actions (replacing, perhaps, “fanatic or freedom fighter” with “evil or mentally ill,” but still with the purpose of distancing Roof from their society). They’re offering subtly—and sometimes not so subtle—racist expressions of condolence and identification with the victims (as if it took nine black murder victims to understand that the confederate flag is offensive or as if finally paying attention to that particular symbol can substitute for the myriad ways that racism pervades penal, educational, economic, and political culture in nonsymbolic ways). They’re gawking at these few Christians at Emanuel AME Church and their capacities for forgiveness and love in the face of outrageous acts (as if forgiveness and love aren’t commanded of all Christians as a way of structuring an ethic big enough to at least begin to address systems of violence). We throw away the thesaurus and then go searching for synonyms.

Instead, then, I bring up Charleston and note my location in time and space in order to highlight just how necessary books like Weird John Brown are. Until we can learn to name the forces at work that make American society weird, we are caught in the cycles of inexplicable violence, racist rhetoric, and disingenuous ethics that characterize the modern state. Ted’s book helps us in that naming. That, in itself, makes it a game-changer.

In 2006, I was a first-year doctoral student in the Graduate Department of Religion and in the Theology and Practice (T&P) program, with a focus on social ethics, at Vanderbilt University. At that time, Rev. Dr. Ted A. Smith was an assistant professor of ethics and homiletics and the director of the T&P program. During our first T&P seminar, Dr. Smith introduced the class to W. E. B. Du Bois’s book, John Brown. That book opened up a discursive space for Dr. Smith and me to engage in an ongoing conversation about John Brown, theology and ethics, and Brown’s use of violence to confront the monstrous evil that was American chattel slavery. I am honored to submit this essay in response to a book that is an impressive addition to the theological scholarship on Brown and provocative in its exploration of the limits of ethics and the relationship between religion and violence.

In Weird John Brown, Smith demonstrates the “limits of ethics for thinking about the violence done to and by John Brown, shows the costs of forgetting those limits, and stirs theological imaginations that can remember Brown and the nation that tells his story as weird” (3). The universalizable immanent moral obligations that matter for ethics share three features:

1. They apply equally to all moral agents in all situations;
2. They have a moral quality that is first over other kinds of goods; and,
3. They come to life within immanent (inherent) networks of cause and effect.

Because universalizable immanent moral obligations limit our ability to understand situations, Smith suggests that we need to cultivate the ability to reason about situations that leave room for exceptions, that don’t reduce all goods to moral obligations, and that don’t fit within an immanent frame. Smith argues further that the notion of divine violence can enrich our understanding of the world and our reasoning about how to live together in it.

The Limits of Ethics for Practical Reasoning and the Relationship between Religion and Violence

Smith asserts that Brown occupies an outsized place in American political imaginations in part “because of his ability to figure sovereignty,” which Smith defines as a kind of authority or righteous power that can legitimate, limit, exceed, or even overturn the law. Is there a higher law that legitimates actions which defy the laws of the state? Smith answers: “Instead of taking the state’s sovereignty for granted, I assume the sovereignty of God” (39).

When modern states exclude any talk of divine violence, they occlude their own mythologies and in so doing legitimate their own brands of sacred violence. In order to limit violence, we must have “conversations with reasoning about divine violence at the center” (42). Keeping politics and theology separate not only fails to solve the problem of extralegal violence, it also serves to underwrite new violence, especially violence to protect politics from religion and religion from politics. Smith suggests further that while the rule of law is a cornerstone of American national identity, situations arise that are not legal but are necessary for the survival of the nation (47). And yet, the rule of law as ideal has no place for any kind of sovereign power beyond the law (61). Still, we should have reasoned discourse about exceptions, gaps, and fissures (political theology).

Response: Who is “we”? Who are the people who should have conversations with reasoning about divine violence? I imagine reasoned, intelligent, informed conversations about political theology in undergraduate, seminary, divinity, journalism and law school classrooms, among journalists and commentators who cover religiously-inspired violence, and among members of certain theological guilds. In our broader culture, it seems to me that “reasoned discourse”—depending upon your perspective—is already happening on the far right fringes of political thought in the United States. What do we do with political discourse by religionists that incites, foments, and encourages “divine violence” by anti-abortion crusaders like the November 2015 shooter of the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood office who is a self-proclaimed “warrior for the babies”? What do we do with organizations who practice political theology of a kind who see it as their divine mission to systematically dismantle Roe v. Wade in the courts and in the streets by intimidating others through killing patients, friends, and caregivers who provide medical care to women?

At this point in the text, I think the insertion of a case study that takes up modern-day “higher law” killers of abortion providers (i.e., Scott Roder, John Salvi) would test these concepts with twenty-first-century practitioners of divine violence while also concretizing and contextualizing key concepts like higher law, divine violence, political theology, and sovereignty for readers.

For twentieth-century Jewish philosopher and critical theorist Walter Benjamin, “for law to be law, violence outside the law has to be destroyed, denied, or absorbed into justified law. Divine justice manifests itself only in destruction, which Benjamin calls divine violence, and divine violence, which destroys structures of legitimation, principalities, and power (and sometimes bodies) is the only way that justice manifests itself in this world.” As relief of law, divine violence neither revokes the commandment (thou shalt not kill) nor create a new commandment. Rather, it creates a free, responsible, and deliberative space between the commandment and action. For Smith interpreting Brown, divine (sacred) violence reveals the limits of ethics. Into the space between commandment and action, we’re left with politics and a reminder “of how even great criminals can find themselves caught up in God’s great work of redemption” (84). What do we do when that deliberative space is funded, populated, and dominated by partisans, the irresponsible, cranks, common criminals, and conspiracy theorists?

Whether he’s seen as bogeyman or inspiration, Brown plays an outsized role in American political imaginations. Brown’s inspirational sources for his agitation around the higher law include, but are not limited to, the Bible (especially the Golden Rule), the US Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence. Brown used key texts from American civil religion, the Hebrew prophets (including Jesus), his own experience in the abolitionist movement, and, most importantly, relationships with his black brothers and sisters in the struggle in order to derive truth and execute the judgments of a higher law in order to “begin the war that ended American slavery and make this a free Republic” (F. Douglass).

I want to argue that a seminal, anti-slavery text—David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829–1830)—helped animate and fund Brown’s political and theological imagination. Written by a free black man and pitched toward black people, the Appeal itself was inspired by the founding of the autonomous AME Church, and the insurrections of the enslaved, including Gabriel (1800) and Denmark Vesey (1822). Walker preached hope and inspiration, and prophesied the eventual destruction of the American status quo. He argued, as did Brown, that slavery, white racism, and hypocrisy were essential features of American life; that God is a God of justice to all creatures; and that the work of and call to black freedom would lead to a violent, bloody cataclysm.

While there were no great insurrections in the immediate aftermath of The Appeal’s publication, Frederick Douglass would remember it as one of the key abolitionist works, and later historians would find, in Walker’s apocalyptic passages and contempt for whites as his natural enemies, the intellectual funding for black nationalism and the ministry of Malcolm X. And, unlike Brown, Walker’s hopeful vision of redemption, and his alliances with white allies and commitment to a revolutionary kind of American democracy, would echo in Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of and work for full black emancipation in America.

The Significance of Race for Any Truthful Story about the United States

Should John Brown (and the raiders) be pardoned? Smith argues that an exceptional pardon would declare that Brown and his raiders were not right, but were forgiven. Unlike a pardon, which would be fraught with problems, forgiveness would enable Americans “to tell a more truthful story and make possible a more just politics by refusing to let slavery’s cycles of violence continue to determine national memory. In so doing, it would make possible a different set of relationships and a different kind of polity” (146). The accompanying penance would include significant reparations for “the monstrous crime of slavery.”

In spring 2016, I’ll be co-teaching an MDiv seminar on violence as a power and a principality to seminary students and United Methodist pastors who minister in the greater Chicago urban area. I will use concepts from Dr. Smith’s book—divine violence, higher law, exceptions, and forgiveness—in my teaching. We’re locating the class at a church on the South Side of Chicago, where street violence is at epidemic and crisis levels. I needed Dr. Smith to spend more than one-fifth of the book on the criminal legacies of slavery for African Americans and contend more expansively with those of us who hunger and thirst for justice in the imperative now, not just in the indicative time to come. For example, who should be telling a more truthful story, what kinds of relationships would be different, and how would a polity riven by permanent ideological polarization, primordial racial divisions, and instinctive animus against “blackness” (e.g., a majority of the American church) be different? How would a pardon of Brown make a nation which has spent considerable energy (theological, civil, secular, pagan) denying the wages of sin and death that are the American Holocaust acknowledge its past (and present and future) wrongful crimes? It seems to me that in order to arrive at a different set of relationships we (who is we?) need to be honest and repentant about a white, American history that features the longest running crime against humanity in the world over the last five hundred years (Robinson) and make concrete the connections between the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children, and various other acts meant to deny black people the right to secure and govern our own lives, liberties, labors, and lands. 1 It is in the prosecution of 246 years of chattel slavery and 104 years of de jure discrimination (lynching, restrictive covenants, mortgage discrimination, job discrimination, housing discrimination, etc.) and segregation as crimes against humanity that would/will make possible a different set of relationships and a different kind of polity. That prosecution could begin with forgiveness of the Raiders and Brown and include a program of reparations to African Americans for as many years as there was and are enslavement and de jure discrimination and segregation: 350+ years.

Ted Smith has given us a weird book—strange and provocative in the best possible ways. Does old John Brown still matter? Can the events of the raid on Harpers Ferry which happened some 156 years ago still be productive for how we think about the relationship between the political and the theological, religion and violence, sovereignty and the exception, justice and law, and America’s ongoing original sin of racism? Through an engagement with an eclectic host of dialogue partners—Carl Schmitt, Gorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Charles Taylor, Raymond Geuss, W. E. B. Du Bois, Gillian Rose, and others—Smith’s book clearly demonstrates that the answers to these questions is yes. Along the way, however, he accomplishes his task by provoking deeper, less straightforward questions whose answers remain elusive if not still productive. What does it mean to read parabolically? Can we read events in history as parables of the kingdom of God? What criteria and attentive practices would be necessary to allow an event to speak parabolically or typologically? Since the image (and language) of the kingdom of God in the Christian gospel necessarily belongs to the realm of sovereignty, to learn to read events in history as parables of God’s kingdom is to engage in a political act. If we were to learn to read in such a way, how might such parables reshape our political imagination, our understanding of divine presence in the world, and how we might engage in common action today? Weird John Brown is a kind of thought-experiment moving along the channel of these questions. It offers what amounts to a negative political theology that is attuned especially to the peculiar challenges of the democratic polity that is the United States.

In lucid prose Smith recounts the events of October 1859, and their subsequent interpretation, revealing a history wherein Brown and his companions have functioned as a touchstone for thinking about the entwined relationship of religion, politics, violence, and racism. Almost immediately after the failed raid on Harpers Ferry two dominant interpretations of Brown appeared: he was either a fanatic or a freedom fighter. As Smith shows, these options presented themselves for a variety of reasons. Brown’s assault on the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry for the cause of liberating enslaved African Americans necessarily raises questions about the relationship between law and justice and whether violence was a legitimate tool whereby the two could be reconciled. The theological register in which Brown articulated the means by which he meant to overcome the opening between law and justice also raises profound questions about the relationship between religion and violence.

Initially described as a lunatic by both Southerners and Northerners, the more flexible category of fanatic eventually became preferable. Brown’s fanaticism was rooted in his willingness to use violence outside the law, choosing instead to appeal to a “higher law” not subject to the rationality of immanent legal obligations; the pursuit of a politics of purity as opposed to a politics of the possible. The opposing view, “Brown as freedom fighter,” was inspired in part by an element in Brown’s own self-interpretation. Brown sought to write himself into the founding violence at the origin of the American Republic: “Brown cast himself not as a fanatic but as the sane heir to the American Revolution” (29). Deeply aware of the power of symbols, Brown had drawn up a “Declaration of Liberty” which echoed the Declaration of Independence; had managed to secure and carried throughout the raid on Harper’s Ferry the sword that Fredrick the Great had presented to George Washington, the nation’s first president; and had requested that the tombstone of his grandfather—Captain John Brown, who had died in 1776 in the Revolutionary War—be removed to North Elba, New York, so that Brown could be buried under it. In other words: “Brown was seeking to be inscribed into the legacy of revolutionary violence that had founded the country” (30). In this interpretation Brown is configured as a hero of the nation, his actions are assimilated into the founding violence of the country, and he is acquitted of the unfortunate but necessary means he employed to realize freedom for all.

Smith, however, is not interested in adjudicating between these two assessments of Brown. Rather, his goal is to allow the case of Brown to function as a kind of rough touchstone, which when it rubs up against the legitimacy of the state monopoly on violence and the rule of law reveals the substructure of the secular order. The real violence done by Brown is not that which can be mapped by forensic science, but a divine violence which calls into question the fated necessity of the status quo. To make this point, Smith shows that notwithstanding the differences between the two interpretations of Brown, both are at root expressions of a single form of reasoning, one that is disciplined by and sequestered in an immanent frame of cause and effect. As he notes, “those two options seem to exhaust the field only because the prevailing social imaginary is so deeply structured by the twin assumptions that violence should be considered within the bounds of ethics alone and that the state should have a monopoly on legitimate violence for political ends” (12). Both interpretations share in what Smith names the “disenchantment of violence,” wherein violence can only be countenanced if it contributes in some way to an immanent account of human flourishing; that is, does the violence under consideration fit within, or contribute to, the rule of law?

The rule of law, so the story goes (pace Mark Lilla and others), has risen to ascendancy because it represents the enlightened disciplining of human violence, especially so-called “religious violence,” which threatens to tear society apart. This ascendancy occurred when theological and religious appeals were removed from political discourse during the early modern period and the “great separation” between politics and religion was secured through the founding of a secular order. In this account, religious violence represents a direct threat to the social order and must be contained by the twin axioms of the rule of law and the state’s monopoly on violence. State violence represents violence sanctioned by law for the necessary purpose of upholding the law and thereby securing human community. Thus, secular violence is understood as necessary to human flourishing; it is enlightened and rational.

Such accounts of the relationship between law and violence, however, elide the role of exceptional (i.e., extra-legal) violence in the founding of the social order itself, a fact that the case of John Brown makes remarkably clear. The particular social order that is the United States came into existence through an extra-legal act of violence (i.e., the American Revolution). This is the exception which founds the law, an exception which takes on a kind of mythic quality. “Mythic violence” a category that Smith borrows from Walter Benjamin, is the “expression of an order imposed by fate” (71). Such founding, mythic violence is an expression of the legal order itself. It is the originary or exceptional space, wherein the legal order is birthed, which in turn sanctions violence for the sake of continuing the existence of the legal order. The collusion of law and violence in the founding of the legal order named by the concept of “mythic violence” raises the thorny question of the rationality and therefore legitimacy of the current regime. If the present regime is founded by an act of extra-legal violence, what makes it legitimate?

In Brown’s context, the legal system was an arrangement of injustice, for the law of the land justified slavery, which legitimated “murder, rape, kidnapping, forcible servitude, torture, humiliation, and other evils on a massive scale” (7). The assault on Harpers Ferry re-performed the dynamics of the sovereign exception that founded the law, and therefore produced a moment of disruptive crisis. In an appeal to a “higher law” he rejected the legitimacy of the present social order as well as the state’s monopoly on violence. Notwithstanding Brown’s own self-understanding and attempt to figure himself within the narrative of revolutionary violence, what makes Brown important for Smith is that he represents a moment in which the structure of the social order is exposed and called into question by an act which is of the same order as that which had founded the social order. His assault mimics the founding of the Republic, but for the purpose of undoing the arrangement of injustice. Benjamin had opposed “mythic violence” with another concept, “divine violence,” which referred to the destructive intrusion of an exceptional action into an immanent realm whose effect was to call into question the legitimacy of that order. On Smith’s reading, Brown’s appeal to a “higher law” and raid was just such an exceptional action.

The notion of divine violence is what Smith means by negative political theology. It expresses the conviction that divine presence/action can only relate to the world in the form of negation; in the form of judgment. Thus, the politico-theological does violence not through the typical tools of violence, but by calling into question the legal political order itself as well as its mythic-violent foundations. Smith does not deny the ambivalent nature of this claim in regard to Brown, who clearly did take up the typical tools of violence. However, he does help to qualify Brown’s use of those tools, thereby freeing Brown to function as a kind of “Great Criminal,” whose actions cannot be justified, but whose significance cannot be denied. Qualifications such as the fact that Brown’s plot had little chance of success; that Brown appears to have assumed that his death bore an atoning significance for the sins of the nation; and that much of Brown’s earlier life was remarkable not for its violence, but for its refusal to conform to the logic of the American racial regime. Smith details Brown’s lived-experience with African Americans in the small town of North Elba, where he attended a mostly African American church, and lived among freedmen, embodying the free commerce and rich fellowship that was meant to mark all human relations. Though these qualifications place Brown’s violence in an ambivalent light, ultimately Brown’s intentionality seems not to matter in regard to the formal argument that Smith wants to make—that Brown represents, perhaps unwittingly, an expression of divine negation which is ultimately revelatory of the arbitrary violence at the base of our society.

Smith has given us a complex and brilliant meditation on Brown, composed of numerous elements, which would be impossible to do justice to here. I was especially drawn to his account of the indicative character of the “higher law,” as opposed to the imperative notions which produce a kind of code fetishism that seems necessarily to fall prey to violence. From a Christian theo-political vantage, the law is fulfilled by messiah Jesus, which places it in the category of the indicative. Such a conception no longer imagines the “higher law” to which one might appeal as a code that must be realized by us, but as the announcement of a fulfilled, reconciled reality which stands outside the law. Appeal to such a state of affairs is precisely what loosens the legal bonds forged in violence, setting the community free to imagine and improvise a free response to God and neighbor. The free space created by the indicative evokes ethical responses, but does not build a new law in the place of the old.

What I found wanting more of was a properly theological account of the exception and its effects, notwithstanding the provocative reflections on a politics of pardon. It is from the life, death, and resurrection of the concrete person Jesus that we discern that nature of the exception and its effects. For the life-history of Jesus was nothing less than the apocalyptic confrontation with the powers and principalities, which not only called into question their existence, but in a number of vignettes in the life of Jesus and especially in his trial and unjust murder exposed the violent and arbitrary basis of human (i.e., Roman) law. Furthermore, though the whole life-history of Jesus is certainly an exception to the law (in the sense that Smith means it), he has also become a “life-giving Spirit,” to use Paul’s language (1 Cor 15:45). In the gospel narratives, Jesus’ apocalyptic confrontation is not merely an act of judgment, it is also an event filled with new life—a new form of life whose content is often filled out in the unremarkable practices of hospitality, forgiveness, and healing. His unqualified identification with the poor and the oppressed was an expression of God’s definitive identification with sinful humanity in the death and resurrection of the Jew from Nazareth. To Smith’s point about the indicative character of the theological exception, in the life-history of Jesus the ethical and the doxological are entwined. The event of Jesus Christ is both an event of judgment and an event of new life—cross and resurrection. It is here that two critical corrections need to be added (or perhaps made explicit?) to Smith’s account: (1) in view of the life-history of Jesus the divine must be understood to intersect with the here and now not merely negatively, but also positively; and (2) contra Benjamin, the divine violence which has been (and will be?) done to human regimes of power, is not sequestered either at the origins or ending of history, but has irrupted in its very midst.

In the “between times” (zwischen den Zeiten) or the aftermath of Jesus, the role of those people who have heard the announcement of reconciliation is to begin to perceive the new way of being toward God, neighbor, and earth made possible in Jesus, which in shorthand, we might describe as one not marked by violent exclusion. Such an imaginative act is marked by a release for creative political phronesis (à la Smith), but is also prophetic (and perhaps primarily so?) and bearing some relation to the directionality displayed in the concrete life of Jesus. I would name such imaginative acts something like an improvisational parable or parabolic improvisation. Jesus is the prototype (ikon) or forerunner whose life-history offers the standard off which Christian communities can riff both doxologically and ethically. Such riffing or improvisation can claim neither direct identity, nor absolute nonidentity with the divine, but exists in something like a parabolic correspondence—a playful movement of venturing forth and returning wherein pneumatically charged Christological motifs are present in the jars of clay that are human relations.

I don’t know if Smith would disagree with my account, but what I would wish to hear more about from him is a substantial theological account of the directionality of the prototype whose life-history marks “the fulfillment of the law” (and perhaps some discussion of precisely what this means vis-à-vis Jesus would also be helpful?); in other words, I would love to hear more about the submerged Christology that clearly informs, but is obscured from view in Smith’s project. The absence of such an account often leaves the reader wondering if the theological is ultimately only an appendage of the immanent frame, of which it is the exception. Within a Christian political theology the messianic is not simply a formal category of disruption, but a concrete person whose history has specific contours, and whose reality precedes the immanent frame in which our political and ethical reasoning are sequestered. It is precisely an account of the Jesus who provides us the necessary ethical and doxological criteria for discerning (and enacting) parables which remains elusive in Smith’s project. Such an account of Jesus would help, for instance, to tease out the deeper similarities and differences between Brown and a movement like Black Lives Matter, which I would argue is an even more faithful parable of the kingdom, irrupting and disrupting the violent racial logic in our society and its attendant indifference. Furthermore—and notwithstanding his very appropriate suspicions of freighting human action with divine meaning—does he imagine a role for the Spirit of the Crucified in reorienting our theo-political thought and energizing our doxological and prophetic, but rightly circumspect, attempts to live in the light of the reality of God’s reign which comes toward us from the future?

These, of course, are requests for another, perhaps different book; a fact that evidences the productive quality of Smith’s provocative and brilliant monograph! We are indeed indebted to Smith for teasing out the theo-political parables in our midst, which if we attend to them, have the ability to fire our political imagination anew, so that we might journey more playfully and resolutely toward the beloved community that beckons us.

Over 150 years after his execution, John Brown remains provocative because his legacy involves issues that concern today’s world, including race, religion, and terrorism. Nearly two years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Brown led a band of whites and freed slaves in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Their goal was to seize weapons and lead a guerrilla war on slavery. The plan failed. Brown and his accomplices were captured, tried, convicted, and executed. This was not Brown’s first assault on slavery. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 turned the Kansas territory into a battleground between proslavery and antislavery forces, Brown did his part to create a “Bloody Kansas.” In May 1856 Brown led a nighttime attack on five proslavery men, seizing them from their homes and murdering them with broadswords.

Such attacks, Brown believed, were necessary to defeat slavery, an evil yet legal system that only violence could defeat. As historian James McPherson wrote, Brown had “the glint of a Biblical warrior in his eye”—his war against slavery was a holy war.1 It’s no wonder, then, that Brown has proven to be one of the most divisive figures in American history. We admire his zealous opposition to slavery. But what about his use of religion to inspire violence? Does abolitionism justify “terrorism,” or any violence, against the state?

These and other questions are at issue in Ted A. Smith’s groundbreaking book, Weird John Brown. Smith does not claim to be a historian: he attempts neither to “to dig up new facts about Brown’s life” nor to recount “a history of the interpretation of” Brown. Instead, Smith’s goal is “to add to the history of interpretation” of Brown as a means of showing “the difference that a theological imagination can make for questions of religion and violence.”2

“Freedom Fighter” or “Fanatic”

Smith takes his title from a line in Herman Melville’s poem “The Portent.” Here Smith finds a “weird John Brown” who seems to be “in the world but not entirely of it.” 3 In making the case for Brown’s weirdness, Smith contests the two leading interpretations of Brown: a celebration of Brown as a freedom fighter, and a dismissal of Brown as a fanatic.

Both views of Brown emerged before he hung from the gallows. At the time of his execution, many in the North regarded Brown as a champion for the noble cause of abolition or even a martyr. This was the view of Henry Ward Beecher, whom historian Mark Noll has called “the Billy Graham of his era.”4 One month before Brown’s execution, Beecher said, “Let Virginia make him a martyr.” Brown’s hanging would transform “Brown’s failure with a heroic success.”5

Henry David Thoreau agreed: “Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung.” Christ’s crucifixion and Brown’s execution were “the two ends of a chain,” and Brown transformed from “Old Brown” to “an angel of light.” Brown “was a superior man” and was “the most American of us all,” according to Thoreau.6

As recently as 2009 a similar view of Brown as a freedom fighter made it to the New York Times. David S. Reynolds, a professor of American literature and American studies, appealed to President Obama and the governor of Virginia to pardon Brown. In Reynolds’s view, Brown was no fanatic, but rather “freedom’s martyr” who had been “despised by history.” Brown had a realistic plan for a slave revolt that would expand through Appalachia. He hoped to terrorize Southern whites into abandoning slavery. Most impressively, African Americans such as Frederick Douglass admired Brown. Rightfully so, wrote Reynolds, because “Brown did not have a shred of racism.”

“Justice would be served,” Reynolds concluded, “if President Obama and Governor Kaine found a way to pardon” Brown, thereby “rescuing John Brown from the loony bin of history.”7 Few scholars were better positioned to argue Brown’s case; Reynolds had published a biography of Brown in 2006. Reynolds’s ambitious subtitle summarizes his argument: in Reynolds’s telling, Brown was “The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights.”8

As impressive as Reynolds’s argument was, not everyone agreed. Reviewing Reynolds’s book, Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz disputed each point in Reynolds’s subtitle. Did Brown really “kill slavery”? No, Wilentz responded, “Abraham Lincoln, the Union Army, and the framers of the Thirteenth Amendment killed slavery.” Was Brown the one who “sparked the Civil War”? No. “Lincoln’s victory in the election of 1860 did that, and would have done it regardless of Brown’s assault.” And if Brown had something to do with inspiring the civil rights movement, Wilentz stated that Brown’s influence was no more important “than thousands of other Americans—women and men, blacks and whites—who agitated for equal rights as well as emancipation long before 1865, and before Harpers Ferry.”

In Wilentz’s view, Brown was a fanatic, not a freedom fighter. He “was a violent charismatic anti-slavery terrorist and traitor, capable of cruelty to his family as well as to his foes.” Far from being a hero, Brown was instead the sort of zealot to whom modern-day terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh might plausibly appeal.9

“Divine Violence”

There are good reasons why Americans gravitated to one of these two interpretations of Brown. One interpretation dismisses Brown, and turns his story into a cautionary tale about the dangers of mixing religion and violence. The other brands Brown a hero, and honors the nation for following his lead in abolishing slavery. Both views are similar, Smith argues, because they honor the nation and protect its monopoly on violence: the dismissal of Brown rejects him in part because his actions were criminal in his own day, while the valorization of Brown celebrates the strength and even violence of his conviction in light of the nation’s subsequent turn to violence to address the issues that animated him. Smith’s Brown fits neither of these accounts. Brown’s violence is neither dismissed nor celebrated. It is weird because Brown’s violence does not fit neatly within the earthly political frames that would make his violence either strictly criminal or unequivocally praiseworthy. Brown’s violence is otherworldly: Brown’s witness “asks what, if anything, God might make of violence.”10

Smith rejects the claim that Brown was an insane biblical zealot. Brown cited Scripture, but not only Scripture. His biblical arguments carried with them ideas about liberty learned from the American Revolution. As Frederick Douglass said, Brown believed “the Declaration of Independence to be true, and the Bible to be a guide to human conduct, and acting upon the doctrines of both, he threw himself against the serried ranks of American oppression, and translated into heroic deeds the love of liberty and hatred of tyrants.”11

Although Brown’s mixture of biblical interpretation and revolutionary zeal turned violent, that Brown mixed the two did not make him “insane”; it merely made him “American.” From the revolutionary era forward, many Americans took violent biblical texts to heart when waging war against Britain and defending the new nation. Brown’s endorsement of the biblical ideal of blood sacrifice in wartime was typical. What made Brown atypical was that he was a white man who took this biblical idea of blood sacrifice to extremes in a war against slavery.

As James McPherson wrote, Brown resembled Samson, “who slew his enemies with the jawbone of an ass,” although “Brown favored more up-to-date weapons” to punish God’s enemies.12 Brown admired both Samson’s viciousness and his self-sacrifice. Captured and blinded by his Philistine enemies, Samson’s final act was pushing down the pillars of a Philistine temple, collapsing it and killing himself and countless Philistines, which the author of Judges celebrates by writing, “So the dead which [Samson] slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life” (Judg 16:30b KJV). Brown pondered Samson in his final days, hoping that, like Samson’s, his death could “be of vastly more value than my life is.” Frederick Douglass analogized Brown directly to Samson: “Like Samson, [Brown] has laid his hands upon the pillars of this great national temple of cruelty and blood, and when he falls, that temple will speedily crumble to its final doom, burying its denizens in its ruins.”13

Similarly, Brown closed a letter from prison with his famous words, “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”14 In Brown’s appeals to Samson and to expiation of sins by blood, Smith sees the “language of sacrifice, atonement, and ritual purification—the language of divine violence.”15

Almost any suggestion of divine violence is controversial today. Especially since 9/11, many people contend that religiously-inspired violence is the worst kind and that any mixture of religion and violence threatens peace. Smith recognizes these concerns and shares them. But he contests the idea that religion is uniquely prone to violence. Throughout history, Smith observes, we find examples of deplorable violence and total war that had nothing to do with religion. Here Smith cites the famous example of General William Tecumseh Sherman, who ravaged much of the South in the Civil War. General Sherman escalated the conflict and burned Atlanta not because he believed in an abolitionist higher law, but because of his “commitment to the rule of existing law” and effective military strategy.16

In addition to this negative claim that religion is not a necessary condition for high-intensity political violence, Smith also stakes a positive claim for political theology, that “appeals to a higher law can restrain violence.” Without any possibility of appealing to higher laws, the laws of the nation assume an ultimate status, irrefutable and beyond challenge. Such laws become “mythic,” Smith argues, adopting the terminology of Walter Benjamin. “Mythic” laws and nations assume something like a sacred status, and any level of violence is justifiable to defend them. Smith argues “that modern states, in the process of excluding any talk of divine violence, have tended to occlude their own mythologies and so legitimate their own brands of sacred violence.” Smith wants to “help break this spell” with a political theology that will prevent modern states from sacralizing themselves.17

The concept of divine violence is not limited to God-inspired violent acts, and more generally, divine violence is the sovereign power that reveals the “mythic violence” that supports the state. Divine violence is “the moment when the fabric of the polity is torn open, when the goods, processes, and institutions of a juridical order are revealed to be finite,” Smith writes.18

An awareness of divine violence suggests the relevance of Brown for today. Smith stops short of calling Brown’s attacks on slavery divine violence. Smith prefers to say only that Brown’s attacks might or might not be divine violence, cautioning all the while against overconfident identifications of any one violent act with the divine will. However, Smith believes we can say with some confidence that Brown was at minimum what Benjamin called “a ‘great criminal.’” Brown was a criminal, and we need not condone his actions. But whether ethical or not, Brown’s violence had value in revealing the violent nature of the state itself. The raid on Harpers Ferry occurred “in a time of state-sanctioned slavery, a form of life so wrong and so pervasive that it not only damaged people’s moral vision but also put them in situations in which the application of an abstract morality—even one that might be good in other circumstances—would lead to collusion with established evil.” Brown’s greatness came from showing “the ways that the world was ‘out of joint.’” For Smith, John Brown illustrates “the limits of ethics” in “a world gone badly wrong.”19

Smith is quick to admit that the plausibility of this last evaluation of Brown depends in part upon how one defines ethics. Smith’s interpretation of Brown is intended to challenge “one particular but pervasive mode of ethics, a mode marked by its granting of a privileged place to universalizable moral obligations that play out within immanent networks of cause and effect.” Smith is very successful in positioning Brown as a counterexample to this sort of pure, worldly deontology. Readers accustomed to thinking of normative ethics as a more pluralistic endeavor may not find Smith’s Brown quite so weird or so vexing for the limits of their own ethics. But these readers will still benefit from Smith’s argument that Brown’s historical significance may not lie solely or even primarily in the moral evaluation of Brown’s actions, but rather in Brown’s witness against a political order that, having monopolized authority, countenanced and supported the evil of slavery.20

Smith wants Brown to be pardoned, but not in a way that sets a precedent or claims that such attacks are justifiable under the law. Instead he wants Brown to be pardoned as an exception to the law. So he “would not argue that the raiders were right.” Instead, he “would declare that they are forgiven.” Such a pardon as exception could be “a way of saying No to the power of the slave system to define the social order.” This pardon is needed because “the mythic violence of slavery” continue to plague the United States. It is the “original sin” that continues to mar the nation.21

Pardoning Brown and his raiders “would transform them from fanatics who had to be expelled and executed into members of the polity who deserve to be reckoned with.” It would change our memory of the Civil War, in which Robert E. Lee was pardoned but not John Brown. If Brown were pardoned as well as Lee, “the national memory would shift significantly.” The nation’s historical memory “would acknowledge slavery itself as a state of madness and war, all the more fanatical because it was established in law and custom.” Pardoning Brown would name slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War and of the war’s death and destruction, thereby challenging slavery’s enduring but often unacknowledged hold on our national identity and politics.22

Smith’s comparison of Brown and Lee resonated with Northerners following the Civil War. In a sermon following Lincoln’s assassination, Frederick Starr, a Presbyterian pastor from Penn Yan, New York, criticized the nation for pardoning Lee instead of Brown. Starr argued that the Confederates committed treason much worse than Brown’s offense, yet the nation “let noble, true, holy John Brown die!” Starr prayed to God that the nation would not be so counterfeit as “to make our national history declare, in the face of the universe and of eternity, that, in all the period” there was only “one citizen base enough to be a Traitor, and worthy to die for Treason— the Christian Martyr, John Brown!!!”23

Of the interpretations of Brown, Smith seems to prefer that of W. E. B. Du Bois. In his biography of Brown published in 1909, Du Bois called Brown “the man who of all Americans has perhaps come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.” Du Bois also asked, “Was John Brown simply an episode, or was he an eternal truth? And if a truth, how speaks that truth to-day?” According to Du Bois, Brown’s actions stemmed from his belief “that all men are created free and equal, and that the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.” Until Brown died, “this doctrine was a growing, conquering, social thing.” But the year that saw Brown’s death also saw, coincidentally, the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Among the alleged political implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution—implications primarily developed by other late Victorian intellectuals since labeled “social Darwinists”—were the doctrines that inequality among people and races was natural and unavoidable and that progress in civilization was a war between the weak and the strong, with the strongest surviving in the end. “With this interpretation has gone the silent assumption that the white European stock represents the strong surviving peoples, and that the swarthy, yellow and black peoples are the ones rightly doomed to eventual extinction.” John Brown’s influence waned; he became “an anachronism in the age of Darwin.”24

In an age and order that continued to accept grotesque political inequality, Du Bois argued that “the memory of John Brown stands to-day as a mighty warning to this country.” Brown saw slavery’s evil and threat to the nation, and he knew that the longer the nation allowed its injustice to thrive the more disastrous its effects would become. Du Bois ended by repeating Brown’s warning: “You may dispose of me very easily—I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled—this Negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet.”25

Smith agrees. “Du Bois described a divine violence made manifest at Harpers Ferry that shattered the system of relations that legitimated the violence of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the United States as well as the moral obligations that bound their citizens.” Brown’s violence broke “the death grip with which slavery and the nation held one another” and opened “space for a new freedom in relation to that which had been destroyed.” Smith concludes by arguing that John Brown was neither a freedom fighter nor a fanatic. Instead, “he was a broken, bleeding body,” a “portent” for present-day Americans who “are among the people set free to do politics under the sign of judgment revealed in his death.”26

Smith’s book is moral history at its best: it demonstrates ways in which history is morally fraught, both in its own time and in its durable implications for succeeding generations. Meticulously researched and historically astute, Smith’s Weird John Brown exemplifies the relevance of sound historical reflection for contemporary moral and theological discourse.