{"id":74824,"date":"2021-08-24T02:17:13","date_gmt":"2021-08-24T06:17:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/?p=74824"},"modified":"2021-08-24T00:43:20","modified_gmt":"2021-08-24T04:43:20","slug":"john-piper-jonathan-edwards-slavery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2021\/08\/john-piper-jonathan-edwards-slavery\/","title":{"rendered":"John Piper’s “Wishful Thinking” about Jonathan Edwards and Slavery"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Jonathan Edwards was one of the most significant pastors and theologians in American religious history. He also enslaved other human beings.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m no expert on Edwards, but I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything new or controversial about either claim. Both are evident, for example, from George Marsden\u2019s <\/span>magisterial biography<\/span><\/a>, published almost twenty years ago. (If I mess up what follows, perhaps we can talk him into coming back to the Bench<\/a> to correct me!)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

But Edwards\u2019 slaveholding is back in the news because one of his best-known contemporary admirers, John Piper, wrote a controversial essay about it<\/a> earlier this month at his <\/span>Desiring God <\/span><\/i>site<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/iframe><\/p>\nIt\u2019s not the first time Piper has addressed this troubling dimension of one of his theological heroes. In 2013, he recorded <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.desiringgod.org\/interviews\/slavery-and-jonathan-edwards\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">a seven-minute interview<\/span><\/a> about Edwards and slavery for the same website. On that occasion he offered some wise pastoral advice that seems generally pertinent for Christians as they study church history. For example, Edwards\u2019 slaveholding warned Piper \u201cnot to idolize or idealize any man except Jesus. Something is going to show up and disillusion me if I pick out a dead man or a living man as somebody that I am going to idealize. There is no ideal man \u2014 except Jesus.\u201d And Piper recognized that if Edwards \u201chad blind spots on that issue, he may well have had blind spots on other issues, which means that I am going to read with some more care.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nIn 2013 Piper declined to try to explain <\/span>why <\/span><\/i>Edwards owned slaves, or to consider how he treated them. By contrast, last week\u2019s essay was entitled, \u201c<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.desiringgod.org\/articles\/how-could-jonathan-edwards-own-slaves\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">How Could Jonathan Edwards Own Slaves?<\/span><\/a>\u201d, a question that leads Piper to a troubling conclusion.<\/span><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_74839\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-74839\" style=\"width: 250px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jonathan_Edwards_(theologian)#\/media\/File:Jonathan_Edwards_(Princeton_Portrait).jpg\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-74839\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/168\/2021\/08\/Jonathan_Edwards_Princeton_Portrait-250x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"300\"><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-74839\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) \u2013 Wikimedia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nHe suggests that Edwards and his wife Sarah may have \u201cused their upper-class privileges (including the power to purchase slaves) for beneficent purposes toward at-risk black children.\u201d He thinks it possible that Edwards bought a teenaged girl named Venus (in Newport, Rhode Island in 1731) in order \u201cto rescue her from abuse,\u201d and later purchased a younger boy named Titus (named in the estate inventory at Edwards\u2019 death in 1758) to give him \u201chope.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nSo slavery, as Piper hopes Edwards participated in it, was not so much a malicious system of exploitation, held in place by violence and the threat of the same, but what Christianity had rendered \u201ca shell \u2014 a social structure whose inner reality was radically new. So much so that within this community, even if labels persisted, the structure was not what it once was. It was no longer property-owner slavery.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nI can\u2019t believe that Piper doesn\u2019t realize that his speculation about the \u201cbeneficent\u201d intentions of Edwards the slave owner sounds uncomfortably similar to the Lost Cause myth of kindly Christian plantation masters exerting a benign empire over grateful charges. He does allow that it could come off as \u201cwishful thinking\u201d:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>I do not wish for one of my heroes to be more tarnished than he already is. But perhaps it is not just wishful thinking. My wishes are not baseless, however unlikely they may seem against the backdrop of mid-eighteenth-century attitudes. All I know of the godliness that Edwards taught, and in so many ways modeled, inclines me to wish in just this way. It is the sort of dream that, if it came true, would not surprise me.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nI understand the appeal of historical wishfulness. Even when we know that we ought not idolize any fellow sinner, we find people to admire in the past, people whose actions inspire us and whose ideas influence our own thinking. It\u2019s tempting to minimize their shortcomings in one realm lest those weaknesses threaten what we\u2019ve built up around other aspects of their life and thought.<\/span><\/p>\nBut wishful thinking is not historical thinking. And the former can obstruct the latter.<\/span><\/p>\nSince \u201cwe have almost no direct evidence of [Edwards\u2019] attitude and action toward his slaves,\u201d Piper concedes, \u201c[t]he scope of what we do not know is very great.\u201d But we do know that Jonathan Edwards, though conflicted in his views on slavery and (more so) the slave trade, ultimately drew on his considerable abilities as a theologian and philosopher to justify a dehumanizing system to which he could envision no alternative on this side of the millennium. <\/span>(If you have access to the <\/span>Journal of American History<\/span><\/i>, see Kenneth Minkema\u2019s <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/2953884\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">1997 article<\/span><\/a> on Edwards and slavery, cited by Piper.)<\/span><\/p>\nAs Piper\u2019s allusion to \u201cthe background of mid-eighteenth century attitudes\u201d suggests, slavery was part and parcel of the white Christian culture of Edwards\u2019 America. He grew up around slavery, the son of slaveowner in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2016\/06\/21\/482874478\/forgotten-history-how-the-new-england-colonists-embraced-the-slave-trade\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">a New England culture<\/a> that expected even clergymen like Timothy Edwards to own other human beings. (Timothy pastored a church in Connecticut, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/Complicity\/Hax9XBAwkHkC\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">where<\/a> half of ministers owned at least one slave as late as 1790.) Christian apologies for slavery cut across theological divides in that age of evangelical awakenings. As a Pietist, I need to grapple with Nikolaus von Zinzendorf telling black Christians on the island of St. Thomas that \u201c<\/span>God has punished the first Negroes with slavery. The blessed state of your souls does not make your bodies accordingly free, but it does remove all evil thoughts, deceit, laziness, faithlessness, and everything that makes your condition of slavery burdensome. For our Lord Jesus himself was a laborer for as long as he stayed in this world.\u201d<\/p>\nQuoting this 1739 sermon, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/Rebecca_s_Revival\/dhM7mdH62UoC\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">historian Jon Sensbach<\/a> refuses to wish away Zinzendorf\u2019s statement as nothing more than an awkward concession to a governor nervous that Moravian missions would cause a social revolution. \u201cIn previous writings,\u201d Sensbach notes, Zinzendorf \u201cwas firmly on record as endorsing a divine social hierarchy, in which he had no trouble including slavery, and he fully agreed that the enslaved had no business seeking liberation.\u201d I\u2019ll come back to it before we\u2019re done, but let me briefly underline the importance of 18th century white Christians like Edwards and Zinzendorf seeing slavery in terms of a larger belief in the rightness of God-ordained hierarchy. \u201cWe can consider Edwards\u2019 attitudes toward slavery in the context of his hierarchical assumptions,\u201d George Marsden began his discussion of that topic. \u201cNothing separates the early eighteenth-century world from the twenty-first century more than this issue.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nBut not everyone in the 1700s shared such assumptions. Precisely because they were so common, it\u2019s all the more important to recognize those few Christians who refused to conform to the pattern of their enslaving world \u2014 and that Edwards was not one of them.<\/span><\/p>\nThat list has to start with enslaved Africans themselves. If we know relatively little about Jonathan Edwards\u2019 motivations for owning fellow human beings, we know far less about the experience of people like Venus and Titus. But it\u2019s surely not wishful thinking to imagine that they would have preferred to make free decisions about their lives and to receive fair compensation for their labor.<\/span><\/p>\nAmong white Christians, what Marsden calls \u201cthe first widespread revolution in attitudes\u201d about slavery came after Edwards\u2019 death in 1758. But some public questioning of \u201cthe unusual inequities of African slavery\u201d had been heard for decades. Edwards was probably unaware of the first <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.meetinghouse.info\/1688-petition-against-slavery.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">petition against slavery<\/span><\/a> in North America, since it was drafted fifteen years before his birth by an obscure group of German immigrants to Pennsylvania. But he may have known <a href=\"https:\/\/www.masshist.org\/database\/53\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">an antislavery tract <\/a><\/span>called <\/span>The Selling of Joseph<\/span><\/i> (1700), <\/span>since it was published by a Boston judge named Samuel Sewall, a friend of Edwards\u2019 maternal grandfather<\/span>. Much of what we know about Edwards\u2019 attitudes on slavery comes from an episode in 1741, when he defended another pastor whose parishioners criticized him for owning slaves (among other grievances). And it\u2019s impossible to write about Edwards\u2019 slaveholding without noting that he was born in the same year as another leader of the First Great Awakening: John Wesley, whose abhorrence of slavery requires no wishful thinking at all.<\/span><\/p>\nhttps:\/\/twitter.com\/drantbradley\/status\/1428819270587256834<\/p>\n(While Wesley\u2019s most fiery condemnations of trafficking and slaveholding came later in his life, as an abolitionist movement gathered in England, church historian Irv Brendlinger <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/digitalcommons.georgefox.edu\/cgi\/viewcontent.cgi?article=1116&context=ccs\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\">found antislavery to be<\/span><\/a> a consistent theme in that theologian\u2019s life: \u201cWhile he does not attack slavery head on until he is sixty-nine years old, he has numerous interactions with the topic throughout his life and not once does he speak favorably about it. When he does confront slavery, he leaves no doubt about his position. He gives no evidence that his position has changed and he continues to work to end slavery until his death, nineteen years later.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\nIn short, it was very difficult but not impossible for an 18th century white Christian to see slavery as an unnecessary evil. Not to say that I\u2019d have done any better than Edwards on this count, but he could have joined those few others in rejecting the values of slavery, opting out of its economy, or even seeking its abolition. Not in spite of Christian faith, but because of it. \u201c<\/span>There is a saying,\u201d wrote the Germantown antislavery petitioners in 1688, \u201cthat we shall do to all men like as we will be done ourselves [Matt 7:12]; making no difference of what generation, descent or Colour they are.\u201d Seventy years later, the annual meeting of Philadelphia\u2019s Quakers took an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.friendsjournal.org\/slavery-in-pennsylvania\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">official stance against slavery<\/a>, in the same year that Edwards died.<\/span><\/p>\nEdwards did seem to endorse the <\/span>spiritual<\/span><\/i> equality of all people, regardless of \u201cgeneration, descent, or Colour.\u201d Marsden reports that Edwards accepted black and Native American members to his church in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Piper adds Edwards\u2019 comment that master and servant \u201cboth have one Maker, and that their Maker made \u2019em alike with the same nature.\u201d His own son and others of his followers later supported abolitionism; \u201cin the logic of Edwards\u2019s ethics and epistemology,\u201d Piper argues, \u201cseeds of a unique antislavery ideology would be planted.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nBut \u201ctrue to his hierarchical instincts,\u201d concludes Marsden, \u201cEdwards pulled back from any politically disruptive implications of this evangelical Christian egalitarianism.\u201d It\u2019s the lingering power of those instincts \u2014 and Piper\u2019s own pulling back from another disruptively egalitarian implication of Christianity \u2014 that kept coming to mind as I read his essay on Edwards.<\/span><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_74834\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-74834\" style=\"width: 259px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/Category:John_Piper_(theologian)#\/media\/File:Photo_of_John_Piper,_Oct_2010_(cropped).jpg\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-74834\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/168\/2021\/08\/Photo_of_John_Piper_Oct_2010_cropped-259x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"259\" height=\"300\"><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-74834\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">2010 photo of John Piper preaching \u2013 CC BY 2.0 (Micah Chiang)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nRace-based chattel slavery has been confined to history\u2019s dust heap, and Piper <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.desiringgod.org\/books\/bloodlines\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">has made clear<\/span><\/a> that he rejects the superiority of one race to another. But other \u201chierarchical instincts\u201d endure, inspiring other unequal systems whose supposed beneficence Christians like Piper struggle to defend.<\/span><\/p>\nFor example, I\u2019m convinced by scholars like our own <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Making-Biblical-Womanhood-Subjugation-Became\/dp\/1587434709\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Beth Barr<\/span><\/a> and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Jesus-John-Wayne-Evangelicals-Corrupted\/dp\/163149905X\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Kristin Du Mez<\/span><\/a> that it is a hierarchical instinct that principally inspires Christian patriarchy \u2014 whether in the 18th century or the 21st. I don\u2019t know John Piper\u2019s writing and preaching well enough to know how much his complementarian understanding of gender roles depends on the life and teaching of Jonathan Edwards. But I don\u2019t think it\u2019s unfair to add one more observation from George Marsden: that Edwards grew up in a family that not only held at least one slave, but held his mother, Esther, as \u201ca subordinate in Timothy Edwards\u2019 household. For Puritans, as for almost everyone else, the axiom that the world was hierarchical was as unquestionable as that the sun rose in the east. Fathers were the heads of their households and their rule was law.\u201d Divinely ordained hierarchy \u2014 whether of race or gender \u2014 was not incidental to Edwards\u2019 worldview.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe white supremacist version of that axiom is now so objectionable that John Piper can\u2019t help but wish for a better version of his theological hero. But the rule of men remains \u201cunquestionable\u201d in too many churches. Under the power of those \u201chierarchical instincts,\u201d too few Christians who affirm an intellectual idea of spiritual equality translate it into social experience. And too many Christians continue to cast oppression as a mere \u201cshell\u201d encasing supposed kindness, continuing <\/span>to assume the best intentions of the powerful rather than simply empathizing with the powerless and condemning unreservedly the abuse they have suffered.<\/span><\/p>\n<hr>\nAs a postscript\u2026 I am not a Reformed evangelical, and it\u2019s evident that I disagree strongly with John Piper on many points. But if you want to read a stronger critique of Edwards from someone closer in theology to Piper, try <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thegospelcoalition.org\/article\/jonathan-edwards-support-slavery-lament\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">this 2019 lament<\/span><\/a> by Jason Meyer, who succeeded Piper as preaching pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis. <\/span>Of course, Meyer has been in the news this summer because <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1JG7h0Zp_eVI29dP0h-o1TJ8OKiGZ28pa\/view\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">he resigned that position<\/span><\/a>, part of <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/ct\/2021\/august-web-only\/bethlehem-bcs-minneapolis-resign-meyer-empathy-rigney.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">a complicated controversy<\/span><\/a> that involves disputes about racial justice and how church leaders dealt with allegations of abuse.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jonathan Edwards owned slaves and defended slavery. Why does John Piper think it’s alright to engage in “wishful thinking” about that topic?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2794,"featured_media":74836,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2974,45,404],"tags":[293,1240,3726,302,409,1166,8146,2849],"class_list":["post-74824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chris-gehrz","category-jonathan-edwards","category-slavery-2","tag-george-marsden","tag-great-awakening","tag-hierarchies","tag-historical-thinking","tag-john-piper","tag-john-wesley","tag-nikolaus-von-zinzendorf","tag-quakers"],"yoast_head":"\n<title>John Piper's "Wishful Thinking" about Jonathan Edwards and Slavery<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Jonathan Edwards owned slaves and defended slavery. 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I\u2019m professor of history at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I also help direct the Christianity and Western Culture program. You can also read me at The Pietist Schoolman and in my next book, The Pietist Option: Hope for the Renewal of Christianity (now available from InterVarsity Press).\",\"sameAs\":[\"http:\/\/pietistschoolman.com\"],\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/author\/cgehrz\/\"}]}<\/script>\n","yoast_head_json":{"title":"John Piper's \"Wishful Thinking\" about Jonathan Edwards and Slavery","description":"Jonathan Edwards owned slaves and defended slavery. 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I\u2019m professor of history at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I also help direct the Christianity and Western Culture program. You can also read me at The Pietist Schoolman and in my next book, The Pietist Option: Hope for the Renewal of Christianity (now available from InterVarsity Press).","sameAs":["http:\/\/pietistschoolman.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/author\/cgehrz\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}