May 1, 1748, George Whitefield preached to "a large company of Negroes" as well as "a number of white people who came to hear what I had to say to them," nearly 1500 people in all:
"I said, their hearts were as black as their faces"
😳
Whitefield had prayed for "divine" "wisdom" in order to preach just the right message to Black people. He wanted to "touch the negroes, yet not to give them the least umbrage to slight or behave imperiously to their masters"
iow, he needed them to be "good christian slaves"
Black people had expected Whitefield to "speak against their masters."
GW: "Blessed be God, that I was directed not to say any thing to masters at all, though my text led me to it"
He went *against* the grain of the text to *avoid* preaching on the sins/duties of white people
And then he dresses it all up in spiritual sounding scriptural language:
"Everything is beautiful in its season. Lord, teach me always that due season, wherever I am called, to give either black or white, a portion of thy word!"
you can find this in:
Memoirs of the Life of the Reverend George Whitefield (1772*), pages 165–166
Needless to say (but I'll say it), this mingling of white supremacy and evangelism was a corruption the doctrine of sin ("black as their faces"), and hence salvation (saved from blackness to ... ???).
Let’s break down this March 15, 1747 letter by George Whitefield:
“the constitution [of Georgia] is bad”—it prohibits slavery and rum, both of which Whitefield commented on elsewhere
“impossible for the inhabitants to subsist themselves without the use of slaves”—*impossible*!
“But GOD has put it into the hearts of my Carolina friends…” — he credits *GOD* for the means to enslave Black people on his new plantation.
“for the support of Bethesda” — the profits off the backs of these enslaved laborers would support his orphanage
“Blessed be God, the purchase is made” — the pious language that you find everywhere in Whitefield’s letters becomes hard to stomach when you realize that he includes the ability to enslave others among these “divine” “blessings”
When I first published "John MacArthur on Robert Lewis Dabney" in 2018, I just looked at his sermons, not his books. I've since updated the post which is nearly twice as long.
The oldest is from 1977, calling Dabney a "Reformed stalwart":
MacArthur cites Dabney, _The Five Points of Calvinism_ in his New Testament Commentary on 1 Timothy
MacArthur's edited book on Preaching recommends Dabney:
"Although R. L. Dabney wrote over a century ago, we join him today in urging that the expository method . . . be restored to that equal place which it held in the primitive and Reformed Churches"
Just this week a friend sent me an article by Albert Mohler, "Why I am a Baptist"
Overall the article is fine (I am myself a Baptist, after all), but this one paragraph is trash, intended to frame an utterly shameful act as something praiseworthy:
The SBC formed as a split out of existing missions organizations (the Baptist Convention for Missionary Purposes, founded 1814, and the American Baptist Home Missionary Society, founded 1832)
They “did not leave their first meeting without establishing mission boards” bc they had just all left the existing boards bc they wouldn’t appoint slave-holders as missionaries.
In order to facilitate that, they had to form their own. That's literally all they were doing
Wow. PCA pastor @ZacharyGarris on Robert Lewis Dabney and racism:
"Though the Bible affirms that all humans are made in God’s image and that Jesus redeems people from every nation, there is nothing in Scripture that teaches that all men are created equal."
Garris had published an article praising Dabney's views of hierarchy "Remembering R. L. Dabney"
"We will find few defenses of hierarchy better than those contained in the writings of Robert Lewis Dabney."
Someone wrote in pointing out "Dabney's Blind Spot"
"The article mentions hierarchal views of biblically sanctioned authority. It does not mention the extension of this to his racist views... This blatant blind spot was worth mentioning in the article."