In the decades leading up to the American Civil War, religious debates over slavery intensified. The nation’s largest religious denominations—the Baptists, the Methodists, and the Presbyterians—split over slavery, and pamphlet wars between northern and southern clergy ensued as each side marshaled religious arguments to support their positions.
Abolitionist clergy were forced to confront some 18 centuries of Christian understanding and practice along with a Bible whose Old and New Testaments acknowledge slavery as an acceptable human state. Consequently, they were forced to formulate new approaches to biblical interpretation and to articulate new ways in which the timeless truths of the faith ought be applied to the particularities of contemporary lived experience. Religious pro-slavery partisans leaned on tradition and biblical authority. Molly O’Shatz has helpfully traced these slavery/anti-slavery debates, and locates the roots of modern liberal Protestantism in the arguments of northern religious abolitionists (Sin and Slavery, 2011). Her work is instructive, but while she emphasizes the traditional and emerging views of biblical hermeneutics and authority, the impact of other theological perspectives on abolition and slavery is not part of her analysis.
The classic divide between Arminians and Calvinists pre-date the late 18th and 19th Century slavery debates, and when Arminians and Calvinists engaged the subject of slavery they had their own distinctive perspectives on which to draw. This paper will examine how slavery was seen by Arminians and Calvinists, arguing that central aspects of Calvinism were easily exploited to support slavery, while central tenets of Arminianism were compatible with abolition. In particular, Calvinist understandings of divine sovereignty and predestination were used to endorse and even bless slavery, while Arminian understandings of grace and free will undergirded freedom.
Calvin instructs that “the Providence of God, as taught in Scripture, is opposed to fortune and fortuitous causes,” and that therefore “all events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God” (Institutes, I, 16, #2). Well-known Calvinist apologists for slavery like James Henley Thornwell relied on these teachings, especially as reflected in the Westminster Confession of Faith (Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, 108; Westminster Confession, V, 1). In their eyes, slavery was part of God’s plan, and it was beyond the realm of human beings to question it. The ways of God are not subject to human understanding or critique.
Calvinist understandings of predestination—or, election and reprobation—were also compatible with slavery. Henley refers to the Synod of Dort:
Election is the unchangeable purpose of God by which, before the foundation of the world, He did from the whole human race, fallen by their own fault from original righteousness into a state of sin and misery, elect to salvation in Christ, according to the good pleasure of His own will, out of His mere free grace, a certain number of individuals, neither better than others nor more worthy of His favour, but involved with others in a common ruin (Collected Writings, 110).
Through the inscrutable wisdom of God before creation, by divine sovereignty and the doctrine of election and reprobation, it was decreed that some would be slaves and others free. Both enslaved and free bore the guilt of total depravity, and neither was better than the other, but the fact of their relation to each other was ordained by God. Election was unconditional and unchangeable.
Conversely, Arminianism rejects predestination. John Wesley was prompted to compose an essay entitled “Predestination Calmly Considered,” in which he systematically refuted the doctrine. For him, grace was available to all and potentially efficacious for all; it was not just for “the elect.” With prevenient grace being a divine gift freely given to all, all had opportunity for that grace to grow into justifying and sanctifying grace. Individuals have free will, and each day make decisions that resonate with the divine grace imparted to them or defy that grace. Slavery was not an immutable aspect of creation, but one that could be dispensed with as grace grew and social holiness spread.
Whereas Calvinists were able to retreat to the plain words of scripture for proof that slavery and Christianity were compatible, Arminians had to use the Bible more selectively. In 1774 Wesley published his “Thoughts Upon Slavery,” in which his anti-slavery stance is not grounded in scripture despite his characteristic reliance on and references to scripture in his other writings. Instead, he makes a compelling moral argument for slavery’s demise based on the brutal facts of the practice; the morality he presents is Christian, and the evil of slavery is not minimized or denied.
Wesley ended his life and career opposing slavery, and bequeathed his anti-slavery views to his American children. It has been widely discussed how, over time, American Methodists moved away from the condemnations of slavery adopted at their church’s founding in 1784. But even those Methodists who embraced slavery did not abandon their Arminian heritage. For the most part they argued that slaves were recipients of grace and needed the church for that grace to culminate in salvation. The church would attend to spiritual matters and leave slavery to the political realm.
To be fair, there were antebellum Calvinists who opposed slavery, but they had to struggle against Calvinist doctrines about scriptural authority, divine sovereignty, election and reprobation, etc. Though it may be comforting to note that slavery or other forms of oppression need not be seen as inherent in all Calvinist expressions, it is sobering to note that 19th Century Calvinist pro-slavery arguments were re-fashioned to support 20th Century apartheid in South Africa. The noted anti-apartheid theologian, Alan Boesak, stated that “it was the Bible read through Reformed eyes and arguments from the Reformed tradition that gave them justification for acts of violence and human tragedy” (Black and Reformed, 1984, 83).
Christian theology is, of course, a human endeavor, and in every age and circumstance can be subverted to venal human ends, forsaking the divine purposes it purports to serve. In the centuries-old confrontation of Arminianism and Calvinism, Arminianism has more easily supported human freedom, while Calvinism has lent itself to oppression.
The classic divide between Arminians and Calvinists pre-date the late 18th and 19th Century slavery debates, and when Arminians and Calvinists engaged the subject of slavery they had their own distinctive perspectives on which to draw. This paper will examine how slavery was seen by Arminians and Calvinists, arguing that central aspects of Calvinism were easily exploited to support slavery, while central tenets of Arminianism were compatible with abolition. In particular, Calvinist understandings of divine sovereignty and predestination were used to endorse and even bless slavery, while Arminian understandings of grace and free will undergirded freedom.