George Whitefield - A Godly Man - and yet an owner of slaves Important Thomas Kidd in his recent biography of George Whitefield, addresses the issue of how do we reconcile the fact that this great man of God owned slaves? You write that Whitefield encouraged the expansion of slavery into Georgia, but he also preached to slaves, something few Christians were willing to do at the time. Whitefield was a middle-ground figure in his context, even though to us his advocacy of slaveholding seems shocking and reprehensible. Early in his career, when he started to recognize the appalling conditions for slaves in America, he published a really controversial letter that attacked the masters’ treatment of their slaves and called on the masters, especially on those who called themselves Christians, to treat their slaves in a benevolent way. He stopped short of saying that the problem was slavery itself. He would go on, in the 1740s, to become a slaveholder and the key advocate for getting slavery introduced into Georgia, where he had founded an orphanage. Slavery had been banned in Georgia for the first 10 years of the colony’s history. Whitefield never got to the point of questioning slavery itself. Part of the reason for that is because, however much we might wish the Bible were clearer about the immorality of slavery, the Bible never quite gets around to condemning slavery per se. Instead, it seems to give advice about the treatment of slaves. I always ask my students, “Where is ‘Thou shalt not own slaves’?” Whitefield couldn’t find that in his Bible, and that probably would have been required for him to come around to a fully anti-slavery position. It’s also important to realize that Whitefield had almost no one around him who was questioning slavery itself. He did have one or two pastoral colleagues who pushed him on the issue. But John Newton, who Whitefield did know, didn’t publish against slavery until long after Whitefield’s death. Neither did John Wesley. I like to think, being as charitable as I can, that maybe if Whitefield had lived 30 or 40 years later, he might have come around to being anti-slavery. That was just not a common position in his time. His position, in a nutshell, was that slavery was acceptable as long as Christian slave masters evangelized their slaves and took them seriously as people with a soul and an eternal destiny. Whitefield’s ideas about slavery definitely reflected his era, but the way he talked about the Holy Spirit seems much more contemporary. Was 18th-century evangelicalism more like 20th-century Pentecostalism than we’ve realized? There are a lot of resonances between the charismatic movement and the evangelicalism of the Great Awakening period. Of course, this is disputed, and it was disputed among participants at the time. For George Whitefield, especially early in his career, what strikes him as being new about his converted state and his walk with God is the ministry of the Holy Spirit in his preaching and also in his personal devotional life. One of the new discoveries I make in the biography is how central the Holy Spirit was to Whitefield’s whole understanding of the Christian life and his ministry. I looked at this unpublished Whitefield diary at the British Library in London. It’s relatively unvarnished, unedited—just Whitefield’s jottings about his early life and walking with the Lord. He writes in the diary, day after day after day, about how he was filled with the Holy Spirit. He would say, “Filled with the Holy Spirit for 30 minutes.” “Filled with the Holy Spirit for 4 hours.” I think that this struck him as the most distinctive and surprising aspect of his converted state. Throughout his ministry, Whitefield tried to open himself to guidance from the Holy Spirit on where to go, who to talk to, what texts to preach on. He would go to the preaching scaffold, and he would think that he was going to preach on one text, but then as soon as he got up there, the Holy Spirit would tell him to preach about something else. One time, in Philadelphia, the Holy Spirit told him to preach against Deism, which was a topic he had almost never talked about. Later that day, someone said, “You know, there was this group of notorious Deists in the audience.” And Whitefield said, “Oh, that’s why the Holy Spirit told me to preach about that.” The level of practical guidance and tangible presence that he expected from the Holy Spirit—or the Holy Ghost, as he called him—was very, very high. Yet what do others say about Whitefield? John Piper comments: Whitefield was relentless in his devotion to good deeds and his care for the poor—constantly raising funds for orphans and other mercy ministries. Benjamin Franklin, who enjoyed one of the warmest friendship’s Whitefield ever had, in spite of their huge religious differences, said, “[Whitefield’s] integrity, disinterestedness and indefatigable zeal in prosecuting every good work, I have never seen equalled, I shall never see excelled.” Slaveholder Before it was legal to own slaves in Georgia, Whitefield advocated for the legalization with a view to making the orphanage he built more affordable. In 1748, he wrote to the trustees of Bethesda, the name of his orphanage and settlement, Had a Negro been allowed, I should now have had a sufficiency to support a great many orphans, without expending about half the sum which hath been laid out. . . . Georgia never can or will be a flourishing province without negroes [sic] are allowed. . . . I am as willing as ever to do all I can for Georgia and the orphan house, if either a limited use of negroes is approved of, or some more indentured servants sent over. If not, I cannot promise to keep any large family, or cultivate the plantation in any considerable manner. In 1752 Georgia became a royal colony. Slavery was now legalized, and Whitefield joined the ranks of the slave owners that he had denounced in his earlier years. Ardent Slave Evangelist That in itself was not unusual. Most of the slaveholders were professing Christians. But in Whitefield’s case things were more complex. He didn’t fit the mold of wealthy, Southern plantation owner. Almost all of them resisted evangelizing and educating the slaves. They knew intuitively that education would tend toward equality, which would undermine the whole system. And evangelism would imply that slaves could become children of God, which would mean that they were brothers and sisters to the owners, which would also undermine the whole system. That’s why the apparent New Testament tolerance of slavery is in fact a very powerful subversion of the institution. Ironically, Whitefield did more to bring Christianity to the slave community in Georgia than anyone else. Whitefield wrote letters to newspapers defending the evangelism of slaves and arguing that to deny them this was to deny that they had souls (which many did deny). Harry Stout observes: “In fact, the letters represented the first journalistic statement on the subject of slavery. As such, they marked a precedent of awesome implications, beyond anything Whitefield could have imagined.” Whitefield said he was willing to face the “whip” of Southern planters if they disapproved of his preaching the new birth to the slaves. He recounts one of his customary efforts among the slaves in North Carolina on his second trip to America: I went, as my usual custom . . . among the negroes belonging to the house. One man was sick in bed, and two of his children said their prayers after me very well. This more and more convinces me that negro children, if early brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, would make as great proficiency as any among white people’s children. I do not despair, if God spares my life, of seeing a school of young negroes singing the praises of Him Who made them, in a psalm of thanksgiving. Lord, Thou has put into my heart a good design to educate them; I doubt not but Thou wilt enable me to bring it to good effect. Gary B. Nash dates “the advent of black Christianity” in Philadelphia to Whitefield’s first preaching tour. He estimates that perhaps 1,000 slaves heard Whitefield’s sermons in Philadelphia. What they heard was that they had souls just as surely as the white people. Whitefield’s work for the slaves in Philadelphia was so effective that Philadelphia’s most prominent dancing master, Robert Bolton, renounced his old vocation and turned his school over to blacks. “By summer’s end, over 50 ‘black Scholars’ had arrived at the school.” Sowing the Seeds of Equality From Georgia to North Carolina to Philadelphia, Whitefield sowed the seeds of equality through heartfelt evangelism and education—blind as he was to the contradiction of buying and selling slaves. Whitefield ended his most famous sermon, “The Lord Our Righteousness” with this appeal to the blacks in the crowd: Here, then, I conclude; but I must not forget the poor negroes: no, I must not. Jesus Christ has died for them, as well as for others. Nor do I mention you last, because I despise your souls, but because I would have what I shall say make the deeper impression upon your hearts. O that you would seek the Lord to be your righteousness! Who knows but he may be found of you? For in Jesus Christ there is neither male nor female, bond nor free; even you may be the children of God, if you believe in Jesus. . . . Christ Jesus is the same now as he was yesterday, and will wash you in his own blood. Go home then, turn the word of the text into a prayer, and entreat the Lord to be your righteousness. Even so. Come Lord Jesus, come quickly in all our souls. Amen. Lord Jesus, amen, and amen! This kind of preaching infuriated many slave owners. One wonders if there was a rumbling in Whitefield’s own soul because he really did perceive where such radical evangelism would lead. He went public with his censures of slave owners and published words like these: “God has a quarrel with you” for treating slaves “as though they were Brutes.” If these slaves were to rise up in rebellion, “all good Men must acknowledge the judgment would be just.” This was incendiary. But it was too early in the course of history. Apparently Whitefield did not perceive the implications of what he was saying. What was clear was that the slave population loved Whitefield. For all his imperfections and blindness to the contradiction between advocating slavery and undermining slavery, when he died it was the blacks who expressed the greatest grief in America. More than any other eighteenth century figure, Whitefield established Christian faith in the slave community. Whatever else he failed in, for this they were deeply thankful. The last Word Upon the death of George Whitefield, A 17-year-old black Boston servant girl named Phyllis Wheatley wrote in memory of him: Hail happy saint on thy immortal throne! To thee complaints of grievance are unknown: We hear no more the music of thy tongue, Thy wonted auditories cease to throng. Thy lessons in unequal’d accents flow’d! While emulation in each bosom glow’d; Thou didst, in strains of eloquence refine’d Inflame the soul, and captivate the mind. Unhappy we, the setting Sun deplore: Which once was splendid, but it shines no more; He leaves the earth for Heaven’s unmeasure’d height: And worlds unknown, receive him from our sight; There WHITEFIELD wings, with rapid course his way, And sails to Zion, through vast seas of day.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:07:18 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015