Thread by @tisaiahcho

You can go back further than Johnathan Edwards to the 17th century in the Netherlands during the time of the Synod of Dordt, when the Reformed condemned the teachings of Arminius with the Canons of Dordt.

jstor.org/stable/3163567

At the same time that delegates were hashing out responses to the Remonstrants that eventually become common parlance as the "5 points of Calvinism" long afterwards, it is more than likely that the majority opinion of these delegates was in favor of slavery and the slave trade.

In fact, a few decades following Dordt, those who were often hard-line Calvinists against Arminians (Gomerians, as they were sometimes called) wrote defenses of slavery or distributed them approvingly. Johann van den Honert oversaw the work of Jacobus Capitein, who was one of the

first Africans (and former slave) to be ordained in the Dutch ReformedChurch who argued that Christians could be slaveholders. These arguments were seen as well within the norm and consistent with everything that had proceeded from Dordt to the early 18th century.

When the

Netherlands began New Netherland/New Amsterdam (now New York), the Dutch Reformed ministers deferred to the commonly held views from their motherland classis regarding slavery and Christian slaveholding.

There were definitely influential voices in the Dutch Reformed Church

who strongly stated that slaveholding and confessing the Christian faith were impossible to do simultaneously, even as early as the 16th century, but these were minority views that did not hold sway in church courts and decisions. In other words, people knew better for a long

time that their involvement (both individually and corporately) was sinful.

This is another example to show that history is a lot more ugly than "the Reformed Christians pwned the Arminians at the Synod of Dordt." decades and centuries later, those who hailed from

Reformation confessions would use these teachings in order to continue to enslave people, develop the system of apartheid, segregate, etc. In fact, one interesting fact that comes from the article I cited at the beginning of this thread is that the traditional Dutch Reformed

practice of requiring a rigorous doctrinal/theological/confessional examination in order to become a communicant member of the church for an adult created a cycle by which African slaves (and their children by infant baptism) could never (or very rarely) become members in the

Dutch Reformed Church. This circumvented the possibility of arguments being made that those who were baptized could not be enslaved (which was indeed held by those who had a consistent covenant theology in the Dutch Reformed Church).

So now is the "what now?" question. Do I think this means that we need to throw out the Dutch Reformed, the Canons of Dordt, and Reformed theology? Not necessarily, but maybe for some it does. What it does require is a deeper honesty and transparency about how we tell our own

theological and ecclesiastical history, and how we respond when things like Johnathan Edwards' slaveholding comes up. This is the way it's always been, and we have to be clear that there were more than likely competing interests even within the Synod of Dordt that were

not *solely* theological.

A great start is lament and humility, realizing that a part of what it has meant to be "Reformed" has been caught up in deep and heinous injustices that have shaped the world and disenfranchised and marginalized people in the name of Christ.