{"id":553,"date":"2014-07-07T09:06:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T09:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/07\/unlearning-the-lies-from-the-theologians-of-slavery-part-1.html"},"modified":"2014-07-07T09:06:00","modified_gmt":"2014-07-07T09:06:00","slug":"unlearning-the-lies-from-the-theologians-of-slavery-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/07\/unlearning-the-lies-from-the-theologians-of-slavery-part-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Unlearning the Lies from the Theologians of Slavery-Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
Warren Throckmorton<\/a>\u00a0shares a bit more from historian Thomas Kidd on \u201cGeorge Whitfield and Slavery<\/a>.\u201d Kidd helpfully confronts the seriousness and enormity of this grim reality:<\/span><\/div>\n
\n
The most challenging issue for a biographer of George Whitefield (as with\u00a0Patrick Henry) is his identity as a slave owner. I admire Whitefield and Henry, as well as similar figures of their time such as Jonathan Edwards or George Washington, but their owning people as slaves remains an unavoidable moral problem.<\/span><\/div>\n
How does one admire a historical figure who kept slaves? How does an author fully convey his disapproval of American slavery, while not condemning an individual altogether?<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
That last question leads Kidd astray. In typical Southern Baptist fashion, it elevates the maintenance of a proper \u201cstance\u201d on a moral question above the importance of the moral question itself. That puts the focus on the author and \u201chis disapproval\u201d rather than on the evil being disapproved. And that, in turn, unhelpfully elevates the matter of guilt over the matter of responsibility.<\/span><\/div>\n
That spins Kidd away from the substance of the question he began discussing and into an unfortunate appeal to Hegel\u2019s Bluff:<\/span><\/div>\n
\n
I am not sure that I have gotten the balance exactly right, but we want to avoid two extremes.<\/span><\/div>\n
One extreme might suggest that Whitefield was a great man of God, and that harping on his owning of slaves denigrates his memory as a Christian hero.<\/span><\/div>\n
The other extreme might say that whatever Whitefield accomplished for God was fatally tainted by his owning slaves, so he is better forgotten or just used as a cautionary tale.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Yes, it would be foolishly extreme to think that the only possible approach here would be to either ignore Whitefield\u2019s defense of slavery or to ignore Whitefield. We certainly should avoid the foolishness of self-serving NABA NABA-ism (\u201cI don\u2019t own slaves so therefore I am Not As Bad As Thomas Jefferson and so therefore I must be good\u201d). And Kidd, to his credit, also seeks to avoid the dismissive, compartmentalizing approach that overlooks grave evil so as not to tarnish Whitefield\u2019s \u201cmemory as a Christian hero.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Warren Throckmorton\u00a0shares a bit more from historian Thomas Kidd on \u201cGeorge Whitfield and Slavery.\u201d Kidd helpfully confronts the seriousness and enormity of this grim reality: The most challenging issue for a biographer of George Whitefield (as with\u00a0Patrick Henry) is his identity as a slave owner. I admire Whitefield and Henry, as well as similar figures […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nUnlearning the Lies from the Theologians of Slavery-Part 1<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Warren Throckmorton shares a bit more from historian Thomas Kidd on \u201cGeorge Whitfield and Slavery.\u201d Kidd helpfully confronts the seriousness and\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/07\/unlearning-the-lies-from-the-theologians-of-slavery-part-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" 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