The great nineteenth century Baptist preacher, C.H. Spurgeon, once confessed: “On a sudden, the thought crossed my mind—which I abhorred but could not conquer—that there was no God, no Christ, no heaven, no hell, and that all my prayers were but a farce, and that I might as well have whistled to the winds or spoken to the howling waves.”
Murray references the fact that Dabney was opposed to reunion with Northern Presbyterians “on two grounds” but says “I’ll mention only one of them,” namely, the issue of new methods in evangelism that Dabney was opposed to. Murray conveniently leaves out the other reason: his white-supremacy.
Slavery was no “blind spot” for Robert Lewis Dabney — it was a foundational cornerstone in his entire ideology, intellectual, theological, spiritual, philosophical, and political.
Reading through the letters, one can see the breadth of Dabney’s whole-hearted support for slavery, and its roots in venomous white-supremacy. This was no “blind spot” for him—it was foundational to his entire ideology, intellectual, theological, spiritual, philosophical, and political.
At the time, I wasn’t able to track down all of the citations, but recently, as I’ve been examining how and why a white-supremacist like Dabney was commended to our generation as a “great theologian,” these kinds of endorsements have come under greater scrutiny. The question of this particular post is this: Did Herman Bavinck really consider Dabney to be “one of the leading theologians in America”? Or is this another historical blunder like the misattribution to Archibald Alexander [Hodge]?
In 1860, the Christian Watchman and Reflector, a Boston Baptist newspaper, secured Charles Spurgeon as an exclusive correspondent. Over that year, Spurgeon wrote 15 letters to the paper... in the midst of this series of letters, Spurgeon paused to write out his thoughts on American Slavery.
The separation of the Free Church from the Church of Scotland meant that funding needed to be found. One source was fellow Presbyterian Churches, including those in the American South. Money was accepted from slaveholders, which did not go unnoticed by abolitionists.
The unity of the human race is therefore made in Scripture not merely the basis of a demand that we shall recognize the dignity of humanity in all its representatives, of however lowly estate or family, since all bear alike the image of God in which man was created and the image of God is deeper than sin and cannot be eradicated by sin; but the basis also of the entire scheme of restoration devised by the divine love for the salvation of a lost race.
Our humility is an argument in itself for the truthfulness of our beliefs. It shows we take seriously the words of Christ, and that they have transformative effect on our lives.