“Mr. Moderator, it has been repeatedly asserted in this meeting that the 'Declaration and Testimony’-party” (the representatives of the Louisville petition) “are working in the interest of secession, and are trying to call the body of slavery back to life. If this is true, if this is our motive and aim, then we richly deserve the severe punishment with which the majority evidently intend to rebuke us; indeed, I readily admit that we are then quite unauthorized, incapable and unfit in every respect to sit in a court of Jesus Christ or to perform even the slightest functions of Evangelical pastors. But let me ask, are the gentlemen certain that we are responsible for the agitation of these objects in the church? Did we start the conflict which has been raging in the Assembly for two weeks and which threatens to end in complete division? Sir, we had the premise that secession was ended by war. We had the premise that slavery would be [p. 3] abolished with the war, and what proof do you have that we ever refused to rest in the strict decisions of the sword? [the government’s ban on slavery, Emancipation Proclamation] What proof is there that we are dissatisfied with the result of the terrible struggle [of Civil War], that we are determined to take up the fight again, at the risk of separating the Church? None, absolutely none! Do you desire to know who has brought out these questions from the past to agitate our people to useless quarrels? Do you desire to know who drew Secession into our midst as a bone of contention? Do you desire to discover who dealt with calling the tattered body of slavery back into existence and making it a source of endless disputation and division? Sir, I believe before God, it was this General Assembly! … This alone, therefore, remains to be considered: 1. Was there sufficient ground for the protest which the Louisville Presbytery and others made in the ‘Declaration and Testimony’ against the proceedings of the Assembly during the last five years? 2. Did we have the right to protest (against the exclusion of the Louisville Presbytery without prior hearing)? And 3. Was the protest justified in spirit and form according to the exigency of the case and the perilous state of the church?” —
[Walther summarizes:] The speaker first shows that when the Assembly, in the early days of the war, in contradiction of former resolutions, condemned slavery as a sin in itself, its most eminent men stood up against it, as Word of God opposers; the same men who now walk with the Assembly. He continues:
“We have heard in the Assembly again and again that slavery is sinful, but not one word of evidence has been adduced, either here or by the Assembly in 1864, to substantiate this confident assertion. [LuW p. 215] ‘Sin is the transgression of the law of God,’ but it is a remarkable fact that a church council meeting in the name and authority of Jesus Christ adopted a lengthy written essay on slavery without, as far as I remember, once referring to the Bible. It was said to be sinful, but did not show it by calling on the law, which alone is the standard of righteousness.
To establish an opinion concerning the sinfulness of an action or a relationship, I need a higher authority than the prejudices and passions of men, I need the authority of the holy Word of God, and no assembly has a right to bind consciences or demand obedience without this authority … [p. 6] Let us see what this Assembly said when it was completely free from the control of passion and from the printing of public opinion. I read, sir, from the Digest (of 1845):
[p. 6] ¶ ‘The Church of Christ is a spiritual body, whose jurisdiction extends over the religious faith and moral conduct of its members. It cannot make laws where Christ has given no law, nor fix conditions of membership which He has not fixed. But the question which the Assembly is called to decide is this: Does the Scripture teach that slaveholding, apart from circumstances, is a sin, so that it should be made a condition of membership in Christ's Church that one renounce this sin?
It is impossible to answer this question affirmatively without contradicting some of the most unequivocal explanations of the Word of God. That slavery existed in the days of Christ and His Apostles is an accepted fact. That they did not denounce the relationship itself as sinful and incompatible with Christianity; that slaveholders were admitted to membership in the churches organized by the apostles; that while they were required to treat their slaves kindly and as rational, sane, immortal beings, and, if they were Christians, as brethren in the Lord, they were not commanded to emancipate them; that slaves were required to be ‘obedient to their physical masters with fear and trembling, in simplicity of heart, as to Christ’: all these are facts which the eye of every teacher of the New Testament encounters. This Assembly, therefore, cannot accuse slaveholding as a necessarily heinous and grievous sin, calculated to bring God's curse upon the Church, without reproving the Apostles of Christ for having fostered sin, introduced such sinners into the Church, and thus brought upon them the curse of the Almighty.
Not a sin, but importing a bunch of Africans was STUPID.
ReplyDeleteWe may think of it as “stupid” in today’s world with so much attention and controversy, and with modern farming practices. But a credible account of the early conditions in the agricultural South was given in a 1991 CPH book “Black Christians: the Untold Story” by Jeff G. Johnson. (https://search.worldcat.org/title/23356510) Some Austrian Lutherans (Salzburgers), who had been run out of their Catholic country, were encouraged to settle in the colony of Georgia and eventually found slavery to be a necessity for them to overcome the “difficulty of agricultural pursuits in that area”. On page 59, it was reported by a Georgia colony trustee “that [success in farming will be difficult to achieve because it is] observed that in Carolina the Negroes, as the only proper planters … are made use of, and that whenever white people are employed in that way of working, they die like flies”. The Salzburgers were initially against holding slaves themselves but succumbed to the agricultural reality. — On page 61, it was reported: “Thus began the Salzburgers unique experiment of mission work with slaves.”
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