Edwards, Whitefield, and the Compromise

Today's Reading

Read 1 Corinthians 1:26-31 ("not many of you were wise according to worldly standards... so that no human being might boast in the presence of God").

Read James 3:1-2 ("Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness").

Read Romans 12:3-8 and 1 Corinthians 12:14-26 — Paul's two great passages on the body of Christ as a body of many members, no one of whom can do without the others.

Reflection

This is a hard day. It would be easier to write a triumphant biography of Jonathan Edwards or George Whitefield, two of the most extraordinary preachers in American history, and leave it there. We are not going to. Honesty is owed to them, to history, and to the people they harmed.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most important theologians ever to write in English. Religious Affections, The Freedom of the Will, The End for Which God Created the World, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God — these are texts that are still being read three centuries later, and for good reason. Edwards saw further into the architecture of the human heart than almost any of his contemporaries. The first Great Awakening, in significant part, was God's work through his preaching.

Edwards also owned slaves. The historical record is clear and not in dispute. He purchased an enslaved Black woman named Venus in 1731, when he was a young pastor; later records show other enslaved persons in his household. He left at least one enslaved boy, Titus, to his widow in his will. Edwards wrote, in the 1740s, a letter defending the practice of slavery against an unidentified critic — a letter in which he made the standard New England defenses of his time, while also conceding that the trade in slaves was an evil that should be ended. He never freed his slaves. He died with them as his property.

George Whitefield (1714-1770) is the other towering figure of the eighteenth-century Awakening — the preacher whose voice, by the calculations of awestruck contemporaries like Benjamin Franklin, could be heard by tens of thousands in the open air. Whitefield's evangelistic work crossed the Atlantic again and again. His sermons brought countless people to Christ. He also operated an orphanage in the Georgia colony, the Bethesda orphan house, and concluded that he could not maintain it economically without slave labor. When the Georgia colony was considering whether to legalize slavery in the 1740s — Georgia having been founded as a free colony — Whitefield publicly lobbied for legalization, on the grounds that the orphanage and the colony's prosperity required it. The colony legalized slavery in 1751. Whitefield himself purchased enslaved persons to work the Bethesda properties.

Both men. Both giants. Both wrong, in ways that destroyed lives and that we today have to name.

What do we do with this?

The first temptation is hagiography — to soften the record, explain it away, point to other men of their century who did worse, note that "the times were different." Some of that is true. Most of it is evasion. The times were not so different that Quakers in the same generation could not see slavery for what it was, that John Wesley — Whitefield's contemporary — could not call it "the execrable sum of all villainies," that Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved Black poet of the Awakening era, could not write Christian poetry that quietly dismantled the assumptions of her enslavers. The times were different in degree, not in moral capacity. There were better men in the room. Edwards and Whitefield were not them.

The second temptation is the opposite — to throw out everything they wrote because of how they lived. This too is wrong, for a reason worth pondering. The same Bible we read warns us, repeatedly, against this kind of all-or-nothing reading. David committed adultery and murder; we still sing his Psalms. Solomon's later years were a moral collapse; we still read his proverbs. Peter denied Christ, and even after Pentecost was confronted by Paul for racial cowardice (Galatians 2); we still trust his epistles. Scripture itself does not erase the work of fallible servants because they were fallible. It also does not pretend they were not.

So what is the third option, the one between hagiography and dismissal? Read them critically and gratefully — and read them in plurality. This is the deeper lesson of Edwards and Whitefield's failure. They were not stupid men. They were among the most thoughtful Christians of their century. The reason they did not see what was in front of them is that the people in their immediate circle — their fellow pastors, their patrons, their congregations — did not see it either. They were reading the Bible in an echo chamber whose walls were the very institution that was paying their salaries.

The corrective Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 12 is the body. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you." The body sees with many eyes precisely because no single eye can see in every direction. A church that is theologically led only by people who look like Edwards — Anglo, educated, propertied, men, of a particular class — is going to develop blind spots in exactly the places where its leaders' interests would be threatened by sight. This is not a slander on Edwards. It is the doctrine of total depravity applied honestly to even the regenerate. The heart is deceitful above all things, and the heart of the most learned, most converted, most gifted theologian is no exception.

The eighteenth-century white American church needed Black Christian voices, Native Christian voices, women's voices — voices from outside the financial system of slavery — to read its Bible with it. It mostly did not have them, or did not listen when it did. We know now how that turned out.

This is why one of the most important spiritual disciplines for any reader of Scripture, especially a reader who occupies any kind of cultural majority, is to seek out commentators and teachers from outside your own ethnicity and class. Not as a quota. As an exegetical necessity. The Spirit gives gifts variously to many members. There are passages of Scripture that the Black church in America has read more deeply than the white seminary, because of where it has stood. There are dimensions of suffering and exile and exodus that recent immigrant congregations grasp at a level the comfortable native-born never will. There are aspects of the household codes that women have understood with a precision that men, on average, do not. The body sees with many eyes. The lone eye, however brilliant, will get some things blindingly wrong.

Edwards and Whitefield are not warnings against being clever. They are warnings against being clever alone. And that warning applies to every reader of the Bible who thinks his own circle has the whole picture.

Going Deeper

This week, identify a Christian teacher or pastor from outside your own ethnic and cultural background — alive or dead — and read or listen to one full sermon, lecture, or chapter. Not to find something wrong with them. Not to congratulate yourself for your range. Read to see what they see in the text that you do not.

If you find yourself surprised by a verse you thought you knew, that is the body doing what the body does. That is the eye learning from the hand. That is the corrective the eighteenth-century giants did not have, or did not take. We have it. The question is whether we will use it.