Biblical Interpretation,Race,and Union Presbyterian Seminary

The Growth of Misinterpretation

During the sixteenth century, the Spanish and Portuguese built their empires by enslaving indigenous peoples and Africans. In contrast, Tudor England relied more on indentured servitude to fill the need for unskilled labor. Indentured servants sold their labor as apprentices for a specific time period and, in return, masters agreed to provide suitable room and board. For many English persons, the notion of chattel slavery was abhorrent; stories of Englishmen (such as Captain John Smith) who had been enslaved by the Turks and Moors had been seared into the national consciousness. Nevertheless, beginning in 1623 the English began building their sugar plantations in the Caribbean with slaves purchased from the Spanish because they believed they needed slave labor to compete with the Spanish. The assumption seems to have been that chattel slavery would be confined to the sugar plantations.

When the first Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619 there was no reason to think that they would be anything but indentured servants. Yet, the plantation-type of agriculture found in the South lent itself to adopting the system of chattel slavery found in the West Indies. In contrast, farms north of Maryland were smaller and usually worked by families, indentured servants, or paid seasonal workers, with Blacks never more than three percent of the Northern population in the colonial period. ² Economics, however, does not tell the whole story.

By the middle of the seventeenth century the moral scaffolding of North and South was informed by differing interpretations of Scripture. In July 1640, a Virginia court sentenced John Punch, an African who was serving as an indentured servant, to a lifetime of slavery for trying to escape from his master. For the first time a legal distinction was made between Africans and Europeans, and John Punch is seen as the first slave in North America. In contrast, a Massachusetts court in 1646 freed two Black slaves and convicted the White sailors who had captured them of the “haynos and crying sinn of man stealing” (Exod 21:16) so that “the Law of God established in Israel” would be kept in Massachusetts. ³ The pattern was set and in 1662, when with the term “slave,” the Virginia legislature enacted a law declaring children born to enslaved mothers to be the property of the mother’s owner. ⁴

The moral framework governing the reasons behind the acceptance of chattel slavery developed in the 1650s. The Reverend Jeremy Taylor (ultimately Anglican Bishop of Ireland) published pamphlets during the decade supporting chattel slavery based on the “Curse of Noah” (Gen 9:22, 24–25). ⁵ In this story, Noah curses Ham, and through him the Canaanites, to serve Japheth and Shem forever because Ham demeaned Noah. Without any evidence or precedent, Taylor interpreted Noah’s curse to mean that Blacks, as sons of Ham, were condemned to be slaves forever. Blacks, therefore, were divinely appointed to be a subservient class and less capable than Whites.

Taylor’s pamphlets were widely distributed throughout the colonies because he was an influential part of the established church. Those arguing against Taylor did not have the same voice; they were localized to New England and largely confined to dissenting churches, usually Presbyterian and Quaker. It was not until 1715 that Taylor’s arguments were systematically attacked and heard throughout the colonies. Elihu Coleman, a Quaker from Massachusetts, condemned the misinterpretation of the “curse on the children of Canaan.” This curse, Coleman argued, could not apply to Africans. Had not Christ himself removed the wall of partition that separated all people? Moreover, the resurrection negated the curse on Ham, so Paul could declare that all human beings are one in Jesus Christ (Gal 3:26–29).

Taylor’s assertion that the curse of Noah justified chattel slavery had no precedent in church history either; Augustine (City of God, 19.15), Aquinas (Q 94, A5), and Calvin (Commentary on Genesis 9:25) all condemned slavery (both debt and chattel) as against God’s intention and a perversion of God’s image in all people. Yet, it is not too much to say that Taylor’s misinterpretation of Genesis 9:25 became a convenient excuse for slavery and is a key to understanding the biblical justification for slavery and segregation.

Pro-slavery writers succeeding Taylor have followed his model. First, they argued that Africans are descendants of Ham and are thus condemned to slavery. Second, due to the curse, Africans were seen as a subordinate order of humanity outside the human equality proclaimed by Paul (Gal 3:26–29). Third, they deliberately confused the types of servitude. In their view, slaves in the classical world (such as Socrates or Onesimus) were chattel slaves. Finally, it was God who ordained the ordering of society; some were naturally slaves and others slave owners.

In the fifteenth and early sixteenth century it was argued that heathens could be enslaved as chattel on the basis of Lev 25:44–46 (interpreted to give Israel the right to enslave other nations). As colonial Blacks became baptized, however, Taylor (and others) argued that those of African descent were still cultural heathens. Blacks, according to this design, could never be treated as full Christians because the curse of Ham made them less human than Whites. Elihu Coleman would have none of it: God makes no distinction between nations, and the command to release all slaves in the year of Jubilee (Lev 25:40) cannot be ignored. ⁶

The Great Awakening in the 1730s, with its emphasis on personal perfectibility, gave colonial anti-slavery arguments a national hearing. Along with George Fox and Cotton Mather, John Woolman (a Quaker) pricked America’s conscience. In “Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes” (1754), he combines the systematic use of biblical citations with eyewitness accounts to denounce slavery as a sin. First, he maintains that baptized slaves are brothers and sisters to other believers no matter their race (Matt 12:48). ⁶ Second, to hold other human beings in servitude is to keep them in poverty, which would be against the injunction to assist the “least of these” (Matt 25:40). ⁷ Third, strangers are to be welcomed, not enslaved (Lev 19:33–34). ⁸

Perhaps the most interesting part of Woolman’s argument is his final point; no nation is destined to be enslaved. He does not directly address the curse of Ham (perhaps because he had heard it so often); rather, he notes that Joshua made slaves of the Gibeonites (Joshua 9). He then dismisses the notion that Joshua’s actions can be applied to present times. Woolman rejects Lev 25:44–46 in the same way. The fact that Israel was permitted to take slaves in a national war does not excuse individual Englishmen for taking people from their homes. Hearkening back to the Massachusetts court of 1646, he declares that modern slavery, chattel slavery, is no more than “man-stealing,” specifically prohibited by Exod 21:16 and 1 Tim 1:10. Furthermore, he notes that Jeremiah condemned the mistreatment of slaves (Jeremiah 7 and 22), so those enslaving other human beings will also fall under the prophet’s denunciation. ⁹

Woolman had travelled in the South and heard all the excuses. He railed against subordinating God’s ordinances to economic expediency. He called for immediate emancipation: “He who reverently observes that Goodness manifested by our Gracious Creator toward the various Species of Beings in this World, will see, that in our Frame and Constitution is clearly shown, that innocent Men, capable to manage for themselves, were not intended to be slaves.” ¹⁰ He accuses slave-owners of not keeping their sacred obligation to guide their slaves to baptism. He finishes his essay with painful eyewitness descriptions of the slave trade. The challenge is clear: how could “professors of Christianity of every description” accept an institution so clearly against the will of God? If Jesus died for all, he even died for those we now enslave. Yet, only the Quakers acted, prohibiting slave-owners from the Yearly Meeting in 1758. ¹¹

By the 1760s the anti-slavery movement had become thoroughly secularized. Appeals to natural law were seen as more “scientific,” and for many the Bible had no relevance to the modern world. Accepting the premise that all human beings have the same intrinsic value, the natural law argument had an internal logic: if it was self-evident that owning another human being was evil, so slavery had to die out gradually once people realized how irrational it was. The ratification of the Constitution reinforced the natural law argument that slavery would steadily disappear of its own accord. In some circles, confidence was high that there would be no slavery after January 1, 1808, when Article I, section 9, forbade the foreign slave trade.

It was a vain hope. The 1808 deadline imposed by the Constitution did not end slavery—it just increased the domestic slave trade. Chattel slavery had become an accepted part of American culture. Even the church was guilty: by 1860, fifty percent of all Presbyterians and thirty percent of all Presbyterian ministers in the South owned slaves. ¹² But parts of the Southern church could still speak out. George Bourne, a member of Lexington Presbytery, published The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable in 1816. In this fascinating work he attacks the pro-slavery arguments of the previous hundred years.

While declaring that his work is “published with no unchristian sensibilities” Bourne did not accept that God’s word sanctions American chattel slavery. In his writings, he contradicted the arguments first propagated by Jeremy Taylor with the plain sense of Scripture. First, he noted that Africans cannot be the descendants of Ham. The slave trade, therefore, was nothing more than “man-stealing” prohibited by Exod 21:16. ¹³ Second, Africans were human beings and have souls; to teach otherwise “directly subverts divine authority” and contradicts the Golden Rule (Matt 7:12). ¹⁴ Moreover, slavery goes against the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke10:25–37). ¹⁵ Third, Onesimus was not a chattel slave, but a debtor who could work his way to freedom. In contrast, “Negroes . . . are converted into property” which causes them to be treated as less than human. In holding slaves, Christians “transform the Book into a minister of unrighteousness.” ¹⁶

OPEN IN VIEWER

George A. Baxter. Photo courtesy of Union Presbyterian Seminary.

Bourne went beyond all previous writers by accusing the church of being an accomplice to evil: How could a people who know the Word of God “own” someone born in the image of God? Slaveholding, he declared, is nothing more than a substitution of Mammon for God. ¹⁷ Bourne then challenged the church in a new way. The real test of a church’s fidelity, he concludes, is its willingness to exclude slaveholders from fellowship. ¹⁸

Although the Presbyterian Church condemned slavery in 1818 “as utterly inconsistent with the law of God . . . and called for “immediate and universal emancipation,” ¹⁹ this pronouncement made no difference to the Lexington Presbytery. George Baxter (who would later become the theology professor at Union Seminary) argued in a presbytery meeting that slavery was in accordance with Scripture. He wanted George Bourne censured, and Bourne ultimately took a church in Ossining, New York. His treatment, however, garnered national attention, and William Lloyd Garrison, who founded The Liberator in 1831, identified George Bourne as his inspiration. ²⁰

For most White believers, chattel slavery had become accepted in the South as part of God’s ordained order. Indeed, some Southern churches owned slaves and rented them out to pay their minister. For example, Cumberland Church (near Union Seminary in Hampden-Sydney, Virginia) owned slaves as early as 1775 and by the 1820s had more than sixty. The proceeds from these slave-rentals paid not only for the pastor at the Cumberland Church, but also for the ministers at the Farmville and Hampden-Sydney churches. ²¹

John D. Paxton, pastor of the Hampden-Sydney church, raised the only recorded objection. He complained that using slave-rents to pay a pastor was immoral. He supported the American Colonization Society (founded in 1816 to send freed slaves to Liberia) and openly criticized the lack of religious instruction for slaves. ²² He and his wife freed their slaves on January 1, 1826, sent them to Liberia, and urged the congregation to do the same. ²³ Although he insisted that his actions were thoroughly consistent with the church’s pronouncements, he was accused of abolitionism. ²⁴ It appears that John Holt Rice tried to intervene and bring peace between Paxton and the congregation, but to no avail. ²⁵ Paxton resigned his pulpit later in 1826 and moved to New Jersey. In 1833, he published Letters on Slavery; Addressed to the Cumberland Congregation, Virginia in reply to those he felt had defamed him and his family. His premise was simple: the misreading of Genesis 9 had perverted the church’s understanding of slavery. ²⁶

OPEN IN VIEWER

Moses Hoge. Photo courtesy of Union Presbyterian Seminary.

Union Presbyterian Seminary

Moses Hoge and John Holt Rice, the first leaders of Union Presbyterian Seminary (then known as Union Theological Seminary), embodied the dilemma of the Southern Christian. Both inherited slaves through their wives and later freed them; both spoke out against the abuse of slaves, ministered to slaves (even serving communion to them in their own homes), and were members of the American Colonization Society. While these actions may seem feeble to us, Hoge and Rice were severely criticized for their actions.

While Moses Hoge has not left any anti-slavery writings, John Holt Rice published many articles in his magazines denouncing slavery. In 1819 he declared: “It is to be generally admitted that slavery is the greatest . . . evil which has ever entered the United States.” ²⁷ And in 1823 he lamented: “Would to God that I could enumerate among the achievements of religion, the universal and complete abolition of a practice so detestable and so horrid.” ²⁸ Curiously, although he was a biblical scholar, Rice never cited Bible passages to condemn slavery, and he never referred to George Bourne. Rather, in keeping with the philosophy of the Revolutionary generation he relied primarily on appeals to natural law.

At the same time, however much he detested slavery, Rice always insisted that the issue of abolition was not a matter for the church. He shared the belief with most Whites that Blacks were a subservient race, so the Christian ethical attitude toward enslaved people had to be one of benevolence rather than freedom. Slavery was “necessary” because Blacks were inferior. He argued that “reason does not require us to emancipate a people, whose emancipation would bring ruin on themselves and upon the whole society with which they were connected.” ²⁹ For Rice, the pulpit could do no more than prompt the consciences of slave owners to guide their slaves to faith. ³⁰ It is here that we see the beginning of what became known after the Civil War as the “Spirituality of the Church.”

OPEN IN VIEWER

John Holt Rice. Photo courtesy of Union Presbyterian Seminary.

George Baxter succeeded John Holt Rice as Union Presbyterian Seminary’s leader in 1832, and he made sure that the seminary would never give any quarter to abolition. He was a well-known proponent of slavery; he led the fight against George Bourne in the 1820s. As the Second Great Awakening spread across America in the 1830s, he detected abolitionist sentiments in the revivalist emphasis on self-improvement, reform, and individual judgment. He began to gather around him traditionally minded Presbyterians (known as the “Old School”) who condemned the uneducated, revivalist ministers and the theological laxity of other denominations.

By the mid-1830s Baxter realized that pro-slavery forces were in a sectional minority; the success of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 led to growing anti-slavery sentiment and Northern presbyteries were openly in favor of abolition. So instead of suffering defeat in the General Assembly, he split the church. In 1836 he marshalled his supporters and drove four New York synods out of the denomination. ³¹ Although he accused these synods and their supporters (known as the “New School”) of an “ever restless spirit of radicalism, manifest both in the church and in the state,” ³² abolition permeated the atmosphere. Baxter charged that the New School had attempted “to change our creed, and to pour a flood of abolition into the bosom of the Presbyterian church.” ³³ He declared that slavery was an institution founded in the providence of God and the church cannot judge the morality of slavery (except to counsel the slave-owner to instruct his slaves on religious matters). ³⁴

Baxter turned Union Theological Seminary into a bastion of the antebellum South. When the school year began in 1837, all Northern students were gone, and the three anti-slavery faculty members were gone shortly thereafter. Although Union was staunchly pro-slavery, and antebellum faculty minutes refer to “servants of the seminary,” ³⁵ it is unlikely that the seminary itself owned slaves. Union did not possess a charter, so it could not hold property. More important, there was no reason for the seminary itself to own slaves. Students could bring their family slaves to school to work off tuition, the professors owned slaves, and the businesses serving the seminary owned slaves.

After George Baxter died in 1841, Union and most Southerners considered the subject of slavery settled. Benjamin Mosby Smith (Professor of Oriental Languages and Librarian, 1854–1889), however, represents the developing unease over the “peculiar institution.” When Smith entered Hampden-Sydney in 1821 and continued on through the seminary he brought his family’s dining-room servant Wilson to work off his board. ³⁶ As a loyal Southerner he advocated secession as early as 1853, and he continued to own slaves until the Emancipation Proclamation was enforced. He refused calls to pastorates in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Louisville because he could not take his slaves with him.

In 1858, however, he began to question his beliefs after reading Frederick Law Olmstead’s description of slaves on a South Carolina plantation. And after being involved in the selling of his father-in-law’s slaves, he understood how slavery tore families apart. He apparently began an in-depth study of Scripture and confided in his diary: “What miserable folly for men to cling to [slavery] as something heaven-descended.” ³⁷ A year later, Anne Rice, the wife of John Holt Rice, lamented that people were now declaring slavery a positive good, describing it as the best institution which could be devised, and completely relieving their consciences on the immorality of slavery. ³⁸

While Smith privately struggled over slavery, Robert Lewis Dabney, his colleague and professor of Church History, had no qualms about owning another human being. Interestingly enough, when Dabney was twenty, he wrote a vigorous criticism of slavery, describing it as economically impracticable, politically indefensible, and inconsistent with the ideal of the kingdom of God. He felt that slavery was a national tragedy, but he wanted abolitionists to leave the South alone so as to allow emancipation to take hold gradually. ³⁹ Yet, by 1850 Dabney was arguing that the Bible justified slavery. ⁴⁰ In 1860, Princeton Seminary offered Dabney a professorship in theology, and he was also called as pastor of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. He turned both positions down because he owned slaves, and the refusal of some states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act meant the legal status of slaves in the North was increasingly uncertain. ⁴¹

OPEN IN VIEWER

Robert Lewis Dabney. Photo courtesy of Union Presbyterian Seminary.

The South was largely united on the biblical justification for slavery and the church’s place to keep silent about it. Slavery was defined as purely a “political” issue. James Henley Thornwell, professor at Columbia Seminary in South Carolina, turned the idea of the spirituality of the church into dogma. He argued in 1847: “We stand upon the platform of the Bible. God’s word recognizes the relation of master and servant . . . whether Slavery shall be perpetuated or not . . . these are questions not for the Church but the State . . . Christian men may discuss them as citizens and patriots, but not as members of the Church of Jesus Christ.” ⁴² This argument was powerful for Dabney; he would employ it after the war when he tried to make sense of the conflict and define the church’s place in society.

The Civil War rendered the theological arguments on slavery moot. Appallingly, those who supported slavery now used the same arguments from the 1650s to justify segregation. And Union remained a citadel of misinterpretation. Robert Louis Dabney published A Defence of Virginia [and Through Her, of The South] in Recent and Pending Contests Against the Sectional Party in 1867. Tragically, his book was probably one of the more influential works in American history. Throughout the next century Southerners, and others, would use his arguments and terms to define “Tradition” and employ his reasoning to defend the “Southern way of life” as segregation and resistance to change.

Dabney’s arguments rely on the time-worn formulas stretching back to the seventeenth century. He parrots Taylor: since Noah cursed Ham and Abraham owned slaves, the Old Testament justifies American chattel slavery. ⁴³ Moreover, Dabney argues that neither Jesus nor Paul ever rebuked slave owners. Indeed, Paul, in advocating for Onesimus to return to Philemon, actually rebukes the abolitionists. ⁴⁴ He claims that the English forced slavery on the colonies, so Southerners are blameless. In the same way, he declares that Northerners controlled the slave trade, so it was they who really held Blacks in bondage.

For Dabney, the South was blameless in the war, only protecting herself against tyranny. Yet, in the end, God permitted the South to be defeated “for our sins towards him.” ⁴⁵ In God’s providence Blacks were brought to America, and the South became a civilizing influence. Since Blacks were naturally inferior to Whites, it still remained for White Southerners to maintain the divinely ordered hierarchy to enlighten the recently freed slaves. ⁴⁶ A Defence of Virginia exposed the fundamental assumptions that made slavery possible: White supremacy and Black inferiority.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Benjamin Mosby Smith. Photo courtesy of Union Presbyterian Seminary.

While many in the United States accepted and enshrined Dabney’s argument, Benjamin Mosby Smith challenged Dabney and the pro-slavery tradition not by writing another book, but by working to establish public schools in Virginia. In 1869, he called for the state to assume full responsibility for the education of all children of all races ⁴⁷ and to support these schools through taxes. In 1870, he began serving as the Superintendent of Schools for Prince Edward County, a position he held until 1881. ⁴⁸

Of course, Dabney disagreed with Smith and belittled his efforts. Their animosity was obvious; students reported that they argued in public and ignored one another when passing on campus. Unfortunately, Dabney’s argument prevailed; with the end of Reconstruction in 1877 segregation gradually insinuated itself into Southern life and it was ultimately written into the Virginia constitution in 1903. For a time, it seemed as though Union would be encased in the amber of Dabney’s unyielding White supremacy and manipulative biblical interpretation. To be sure, much of the wider American culture was receptive to Dabney’s racial justifications. For some, it was convenient to accept the way he combined biblical citations with natural law to corroborate his assertion that God ordained an innate superiority to European culture. His appeals to the developing theories of Social Darwinism gave racial segregation a scientific cache. While a very few Union students, the most notable being Walter Lingle, would not accept the prevailing culture of segregation and its justification, the seminary continued to teach biblical interpretation diluted with Dabney’s version of custom, economics, and science. It was understanding the Bible in its plain sense that challenged the status quo.

Biblical Theology

Beginning in the 1940s, Union Presbyterian Seminary became a center of what would become known as the Biblical Theology movement. James Mays argued that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries biblical scholarship had been caught between the confessional and “scientific” approaches. These methods of studying the Bible focused on validating denominational theology or theories of the text, instead of forcing people to confront the meaning of what the text demanded. The quest for the historical Jesus, for example, reflected modern presuppositions rather than the content of Scripture. According to Mays, “The synoptic gospels have dissolved into sources, the sources into pericopae, the pericopae into original languages,” but this kind of scholarship cannot explain what the text means. ⁴⁹

OPEN IN VIEWER

James Luther Mays. Photo courtesy of Union Presbyterian Seminary.

This effort towards redefining biblical theology, with an emphasis on understanding the message, was a call to see the Bible as laying claim to all parts of life. Ethics and issues of interpretation could no longer be separated; Jesus stands before us demanding a response. ⁵⁰ For over a century, the church saw the Bible as a confessional document; it was now a call to action. As Donald Shriver has noted, at stake was the challenge of distinguishing what the Bible says from what many generations of church theologians have said it says. This effort to redefine “biblical theology” was diverse, but one assertion was the insistence that the Bible be taken on its own terms. Disputes over “inerrant inspiration” do not lead to a Christian life. Accepting Scripture as it is and wrestling with its demands are calls to action. ⁵¹

OPEN IN VIEWER

Ernest Trice Thompson. Photo courtesy of Union Presbyterian Seminary.

James Smylie has argued that the influence of this movement demolished the old Bible-based arguments to support segregation. If the 1861 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America could affirm that “God in history . . . assigned to every man by a wise and holy decree, the precise place he is to occupy in the great moral school of humanity,” figures within this movement asked where in Scripture that decree was found. Some biblical scholars and theologians were ready to confront the easy assumptions about race relations. ⁵²

In the March 21, 1949 issue of The Presbyterian Outlook, E. T. Thompson wrote a provocative article intitled “Jesus Among People of Other Races,” a Bible study showing that racism was unbiblical. He reviewed the time-worn passages from Genesis through 1 John that were often used to justify White supremacy. ⁵³ Unexpectedly, there was no public reaction.

Six years later, many Americans were ready to hear. The March 14, 1955 issue of The Presbyterian Outlook carried articles concerning segregation and integration as the church wrestled with the burgeoning Civil Rights movement and the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. The Outlook reprinted a speech given by the Reverend G. T. Gillespie, President Emeritus of Bellhaven College, Jackson, Mississippi before the Synod of Mississippi on November 4, 1954. Looking back to Jeremey Taylor in the 1650s and following Dabney’s line of argument, he maintained that segregation was not based on “race prejudice,” but was “one of nature’s universal laws.” Segregation, according to Gillespie, promoted progress, does not necessarily involve discrimination, and was based on biblical grounds. Thus, segregation could not be characterized as un-Christian. ⁵⁴

E. T. Thompson, Donald Miller (both Union professors), and John H. Marion (Secretary of Christian Relations for the Southern church) answered Gillespie. Thompson wrote two articles: “The Curse Was Not on Ham” ⁵⁵ and “Paul Said, ‘God Made of One.’” ⁵⁶ These articles reflected real progress in biblical interpretation. Thompson was not only answering Gillespie, he was contradicting the traditional arguments put forward by Dabney in Defence of Virginia a century earlier. Gillespie’s address made little more than general points which were congenial to Southern culture. Thompson, though, speaks past him at several points. Putting an outline of Defence of Virginia beside “The Curse Was Not on Ham,” it is clear that Thompson was not aiming solely at Gillespie, but Dabney and the larger culture of segregation (Dabney had made great use of Ham’s curse). Ninety years after Dabney, Thompson argued that by reading Genesis it is clear that God does not condemn Blacks, as descendants of Ham, to a position of perpetual servitude. Indeed, the passage says nothing of the sort: “(1) the curse is pronounced by Noah, not by God—and there is a difference; (2) the curse is pronounced on Canaan, and not on Ham; and (3) the descendants of Canaan are the Canaanites (see Gen. 10:15–19).” ⁵⁷

OPEN IN VIEWER

Benjamin Rice Lacy. Photo courtesy of Union Presbyterian Seminary.

In the same way, Donald Miller answered Gillespie point by points, sweeping away all the arguments for segregation based on Scripture. Pointing to the reality of judgment, he noted that “there should be no distinctions between us except those between sinners and saved.” For Miller, the Golden Rule has to be applied as Jesus intended, to all people in light of the fact that God loves us all while we are still sinners. ⁵⁸ This was using Scripture alone to address a contemporary issue, exposing false interpretation, and advocating a new way of living. And this manner of interpretation reached beyond the seminary walls. In the supreme irony, a movement called Massive Resistance was born in Prince Edward County, where Benjamin Mosby Smith had been the Superintendent of Schools. In 1958, the Commonwealth of Virginia closed down all public schools rather than integrate. The retired president of Union Seminary, Benjamin Rice Lacy, was a leader in the efforts to defeat Massive Resistance. And students from Union were prominent in the Civil Rights movement—unthinkable just 100 years before.

Conclusion

Chattel slavery in the United States was never foreordained. The enslavement of one human being by another did not occur in a vacuum. American slavery was the result of deliberate choices made by people with a distorted moral vision. This vision was not based on the plain sense of Scripture, but reading Scripture through the lens of expediency, tradition, economics, and a warped view of science. Yet a reading of Scripture based on justice, equality, and a gracious God who intervenes on behalf of the oppressed emerged. It took three and a half centuries, but new interpretive voices, by emphasizing the plain sense of Scripture, led Union Presbyterian Seminary to repudiate the immorality that was slavery and segregation and call our nation to a new way of living. We need to hear those words still.