Jonathan Edwards Owned a Slave (and Other Moral Incongruities Among Church Leaders of the Past) by Chris White

Actual Irishmen not pictured

And so it begins with a story:

 Three Irishmen are sitting in the pub window seat, watching the front  door of the brothel over the road.

 The local Methodist pastor appears, looks up and down the street, and quickly goes inside.

 "Would you look at that!" says the first Irishman. "Didn't I always say what a bunch of hypocrites they are?"

 No sooner are the words out of his mouth than a Rabbi appears at the door, looks up and down the street, knocks, and goes inside.

 "Another one trying to fool everyone with pious preaching and stupid hats!" They continue drinking their beer roundly condemning the vicar and the rabbi when they see their own Catholic priest knock on the door.

 "Ah, now dat's sad." says the third Irishman. "One of the girls must have died."

It’s interesting how we can be so clear about the moral failings of others and yet be blinded to our own or those in our own society.

As someone who has been a serious student and teacher of church history for many years, one of the constant issues I have grappled with is what to make of some of the decisions, behaviors, and ideas of some of the church’s great luminaries.  Here are people of great vision and piety and theological imagination who at the same time do things that seem radically at odds with their Christian commitment.

A few well known examples:

Martin Luther in exile

Martin Luther had a strong tendency towards anti-Semitism that at times was quite vicious.

Constantine, the great Christian emperor, ordered the death of one of his sons and his wife.

John Calvin, no stranger to persecution by Catholics, was responsible for having a teacher holding heretical views burned at the stake in downtown Geneva.

Jonathan Edwards, one of America’s greatest thinkers and theologians, owned at 3 slaves during his lifetime and even justified his holding of them when confronted by other church leaders for doing so.

John Wesley and George Whitefield virtually abandoned their wives to pursue their preaching careers.

Constantine the Christian Emperor

Of course there are more, many more, examples if time and space permitted.

So what are we to make of these things and how should we respond to them towards critics of the faith or the church?  Let me make 3 suggestions:

1.  Approach historic figures charitably and not judgmentally.  It is certainly not my original thought (I think I may have got it from C.S. Lewis or R.C. Sproul) but we must exercise a Christian charity not just to the living, but especially the dead for they are unable to defend or explain themselves.  Brendan Manning speaks to this quite eloquently: “None of us has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we don't know we can't do anything more than suspect what inspires the action of another. For this good and valid reason, we're told not to judge. ..Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become.” With historical figures we often know what they did but are often left without a shred of evidence about why they did something.  Sometimes historical context sheds light, sometimes the person leaves a memoir explaining (or justifying) themselves, but many times it is still conjecture.  We can’t walk a mile in their shoes, we don’t understand their particular sin matrix, we know nothing of the fears and prejudices that fed their thinking.  What we do know for certain is that Christians are people and people are sinners and sinners need the grace of God.

2. Recognize cultural myopia; theirs and your own. Myopia is another word for near-sightedness where things up close are very clear but anything in the distance is quite blurred.  Every one of us is shaped by our times and culture and this does in fact color our sense of ethics and values.  Truth be told, it even shapes the interpretation of scripture.  Mark A. Noll presents a clear example of this in his book The Civil War as Theological Crisis.  How could a nation which was at the time predominantly Christian, Protestant, Bible-reading, and Church-going literally plunge into the dark hole of fratricide over slavery when slavery is clearly unethical by the standards of Jesus?  Among many things, Noll points out that habits of Bible reading and interpretation of the day tended to support slavery because verses were often read in isolation from one another.

To read a summary of this book go to: http://soulepigraph.blogspot.com/2010/03/civil-war-as-theological-crisis-by-mark.html

But this applies to many things besides scriptural interpretation.  We live in a time of consumerism, leisure, sex-saturation, and obsession with choices and independence.  We know these things, but we know them like a goldfish knows it lives it water.  Jonathan Edwards (who lived in colonial America) owned a slave(s) but so did a lot of other ministers in New England.  Unlike George Washington who actually set his slaves free upon his death because his conscience was troubled by his ownership, Edwards did nothing of the sort.  We are grieved by the blindness of this great man of God who had a fierce intellect and was so devoted to preaching and holiness in his community.  But no doubt Edwards would be grieved to meet our generation with so little concern for pleasing God and that wastes so much time fiddling with telephone apps and looking at sex and violence on television.  We think nothing of it!

I'm sure Edwards would be amused with phone apps!

What will future generations say of us when we are the people in the graveyard?  Evil is still evil and Jonathan Edwards (and all the other examples I mentioned) was definitely blind to that species of sin, but that does not mean that God couldn’t or didn’t use them for a good purpose.  We are all works in progress and if anything it reveals the patience and grace of God through all the ages.

3. Learn from their mistakes without justifying their evil.  When we encounter these terrible blemishes on the records of great men, we need not shrug them off or worse yet adopt their sinful behavior.  We should learn the moral lesson their lives offer.  We should be humbled by the fact that if great people who serve Christ are capable of making really bad choices and doing evil things, what of ourselves?  None of us is so faithful as to never fail.

St. Paul exhorts all of us to “examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test? (2 Corinthians 13:5-6).”  Let us not judge one another, but examine our own life that we may be pleasing to Christ in every respect.

For a great practical devotion on how to put this verse into practice go to:
 http://www.raystedman.org/daily-devotions/2-corinthians/how-to-examine-yourself

 

A Christian View of History by Chris White

What has been is what will be,
    and what has been done is what will be done,
    and there is nothing new under the sun.
 Is there a thing of which it is said,
    “See, this is new”?
It has been already
    in the ages before us.
 There is no remembrance of former things,^[d]
    nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
    among those who come after.

-- Ecclesiastes 1:9-11

“I heard, but I did not understand. Then I said, “O my lord, what shall be the outcome of these things?”  He said, “Go your way, Daniel, for the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end.”

    --Daniel 12: 8-9

There is no end to people’s opinions about the subject of history.  For some it is a dull and lifeless pursuit without any relevance.  “I’m living in the present” such would say, “what happened in the past is unimportant to me.”  For others, history is means of moral instruction or problem solving or even a comforting connection with our ancestors.  Recently my wife and I went on a trip to Slovakia and Poland to visit the ancestral villages of my wife’s family.  It was so very interesting and moving to stand in churches where we know family members were baptized and married and worshipped and to see the landscape that they would have looked at for centuries.  For the news media and educational institutions, history is rarely a source of moral instruction, but rather a study in causation which is tracing the root system of current events.  But these points address the uses of history more than a view of history.  What I would like to describe here is a particularly Christian view of history.  I know there are some intervening points, but above I have placed two verses which considered separately represent opposite poles of thinking while taken together form a distillation of reality and Christian truth.

The view of Ecclesiastes is that “there is nothing new under the sun”.  In a broad context what is being said here is that history repeats itself with endless cycles.  In a sense, this point of view is baked into the passage of time as we go through the seasons of any given year or we look at the lifespan of a person.  There is conception, birth, development, decline, and death and seedtime, growth, fruition, and harvest.  This cycle is also seen in the development of civilizations.  Paul in his sermon at Mars Hill says quite specifically that God has ordained seasons where different nations will thrive and inhabit a given locale and then like all things fade away (Acts 17:26).  Of course other civilizations such as the Mayans built their calendars around the idea that catastrophic destruction would take place at the end of a cycle of years and the world would be reconstituted.  This cyclical theme also informs many religions and philosophies which teach variations on reincarnation.  We also see cycles in history where ideas are repeated and reconstituted.  A few years ago I read a book called The Victorian Internet which discussed to development, spread, and use of the telegraph.  Things which we think are new developments in our day like email, internet dating, instant messaging and the like were all practiced in the 19^th century using the technology of the day.  Many social issues we face today are ones that previous generations faced.  Unemployment, immigration reform, rebellious youth, illegitimacy, and the list goes on.  History does repeat itself and there really isn’t anything new under the sun.

I hold the view that part of the reason history repeats itself is the human tragedy known as original sin.  While I won’t take the time to rehearse this Christian dogma (if you are interested there thousands of resources that have been written on the topic), I will say that one of its implications is that humanity’s mind and perception has become quite degraded from what it once was and thus we rarely value things rightly.  What is evil we will declare good, what is good we will consider evil with many points in between.  I have written before on this but I give it again as an example, war is neither good nor virtuous.  This is not to say that war is inappropriate in every circumstance or that individuals involved don’t act heroically or virtuously, but just to acknowledge in the end, our blood and treasure is poured out for the unobtainable.  True peace and justice come from the heart and any compulsion by way of gunpoint, diplomacy, or law are merely temporary measures at best, and exercise in futility at worst.  Another great example is our discovery of atomic energy.  Here we have a great source of energy that if done well could be a blessing to all nations and yet it’s more popular use is as a weapon of mass destruction.  Current statistics (2013) show that America alone has 65 nuclear power plants from coast-to-coast and over 5000 nuclear warheads.  What could be used for good is largely used for evil.  This to say we will do things as a race that are largely counterproductive and then never learn from our mistakes because we have a general inability to do so.  When I read the pages of scripture and the pages of history what I see is humanity recycling the same problems ad infinitum.  We facing the same issues the ancients did because through human generation we inherited their DNA and their folly.

But there is a second dimension of history given in the scripture, namely that history is moving to a specific and desired end.  This idea runs through the entire scope of the Bible from the earliest prophets to Jesus Christ and on through the apostles.  Put another way, history will be swallowed up by eternity and with that will be redemption, judgment, and God’s direct rule here on earth.  It actually will be the mythical “golden age” that so many cultures have longed for or once had and lost.  But as this touches on history, while mankind tends to live in and create cycles, God is acting at the same time in a linear fashion to carry out his plan and bring things to a good conclusion.  In Romans chapter 5, St. Paul writes “at the appointed time Christ died for the ungodly”.  The appointed time here references a season or moment where God in His providence brings something to pass that furthers His purposes.  Put another way, God was moving in human history in such a way that the events of the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection happened exactly as he desired.  Humans were certainly thinking and acting and choosing, but God was directing these things to a very specific end.  God’s plan continues to unfold throughout human history, not that He baptizes our evil decisions as His will, but rather He brings good out of them despite their evil intent through his sovereignty and then punishes the evil either in time or eternity (or both).  In other words, God carries on His plan with us or in spite of us depending on the person.

Bringing this full circle, I am of the conviction that the Christian view of history should be cyclically-linear.  Cycles do repeat themselves, but they are moving in a definite direction under the provident eye of a loving and sovereign God.

On Saibarites and Gyrovagues Pt.1

“Saibarites” and “Gyrovagues” are words used by St. Benedict of Nursia to describe two kinds of Christians that are still alive and with us 1400 years after he wrote his famous Rule. A Saibarite, according to Benedict, is someone who determines right and wrong, spiritual or unspiritual according to their own personal taste. If they happen to like something or agree with it, it must be true and spiritual and worthy of pursuit. If they find something disagreeable or offensive to their sensibilities, then it must be wrong or unspiritual and be dismissed immediately. This is not to say that sometimes the very reason we dislike something is because it really is wrong and unspiritual. Many years ago I had a friend in Bible college that made racial slurs about black people. I find bigotry in bad taste but also quite sinful according to the teachings of Christ. But there are some people who tend to think that anything in conflict with their personal point of view is wrong and dismiss it quite uncritically. What is wrong with this line of thinking is that as Christians our truth comes from outside of ourselves. Man is a fallen creature in need of rescue not only from the flames of hell but also his own stupidity. Our minds and capacity to discern truth apart from the assistance God’s Holy Spirit, the Bible, and the community of the faithful is almost nil. We alone with unaided human reason as our guide consistently make the wrong choice (consider your investment history or how many unhappy married people there are). King Solomon wisely noted that there is wisdom in a multitude of counselors (Prov. 15:22) precisely because we need perspective outside of ourselves in order to discern the truth. Sometimes there’s an even darker motivation behind a Saibarite: pure, unmitigated, intellectual laziness. It is astounding how many of us suffer from an insatiable lack of curiosity about why things are the way they are. It’s like the bumper sticker I saw on a car recently that read “God said it, I believe it, that settles it!”. Although I can appreciate the well meaning sentiment about loyalty to God’s Word, I have a nagging suspicion the reality is more like “don’t bother me with any hard questions, because I don’t want my faith or assumptions about life disturbed!” The prescription for the Saibarite is really quite simple: take time when you hear a point of view that you don’t readily agree with and explore the reasons others might hold it. You may come to the same conclusion anyway, but at least you will have an understanding and perhaps even a greater toleration of people different from yourself. In some cases you might even have your mind changed completely which I would contend is truly one of life’s little miracles.