Had the holding of slaves been a moral evil, it cannot be supposed, that the inspired Apostles, who feared not the faces of men, and were ready to lay down their lives in the cause of their God, would have tolerated it, for a moment, in the Christian Church. If they had done so on a principle of accommodation, in cases where the masters remained heathen, to avoid offences and civil commotion; yet, surely, where both master and servant were Christian, as in the case before us, they would have enforced the law of Christ, and required, that the master should liberate his slave in the first instance. But, instead of this, they let the relationship remain untouched, as being lawful and right, and insist on the relative duties. In proving this subject justifiable by Scriptural authority, its morality is also proved; for the Divine Law never sanctions immoral actions.
Richard Furman, pastor of First Baptist Church, Charleston, S.C., wrote those words in 1822, at the end of a year that sent shock waves through South Carolina and the rest of the South with the discovery of Denmark Vesey’s plans for a slave revolt.
Vesey, a freed slave of Caribbean origins, allegedly worked to arm a group of slaves organized through Charleston’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, ancestor of today’s Mother Emanuel AME Church. The plot was discovered and some 131 Black people arrested, 67 found guilty, 35 hanged, and the rest exiled from the United States.
Bill Leonard
In a treatise titled, “EXPOSITION of the Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population in the United States in a Communication to the Governor of South-Carolina,” Furman implored the governor to call a Day of Devotion and Gratitude, thanking God the plot was foiled and the masters saved.
Furman insisted slave rebellions were inspired, in part, by dueling biblical hermeneutics — methods of reading and interpreting Scripture — within American positions “very unfriendly to the principle and practice of holding slaves,” opinions advanced “directly to disturb the domestic peace” of South Carolina.
Their anti-slavery views produced “insubordination and rebellion among the slaves,” particularly their insistence that opposition to slavery was born of “the Holy Scriptures,” and “the genius of Christianity.”
By contrast, Furman, and the white Baptists he represented, did not think anti-slavery to be “just or well founded: for the right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example.”
Debates regarding that slavery hermeneutic consumed Baptists North and South, reaching a critical point in 1844 when Georgia Baptists nominated James Reeve, a known enslaver, for missionary service through the Baptist Home Mission Board. The board rejected the appointment because “it is not expedient to introduce the subjects of slavery or anti-slavery into our deliberation.”
Following that decision, Baptist leaders convened a gathering at First Baptist Church, Augusta, Ga., where the Southern Baptist Convention was formed on May 8, 1845. America’s largest Protestant denomination began out of a hermeneutical debate over conflicting biblical interpretations of chattel slavery.
Some 181 years later, the SBC may be at another “breaking point,” this time over the role of women in the church’s ministerial life, says Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In a recent podcast, he and Clint Pressley, president of the SBC, discussed that issue as Pressley noted that “overwhelmingly our churches and pastors are complementarian. I think we need to consistently say that and not be ashamed of it.”
The problem, Mohler insisted, is “there are some churches that are saying, ‘We can use the title “pastor” to mean something else,’” thereby allowing female staff members to receive a pastoral designation in their specific church ministries, such as “children’s pastor.”
“This biblical interpretation is not new to the SBC.”
This type of “representational language,” he said, is due to concerns that “women don’t have a seat at the table as if the New Testament church was in question on this matter.” Mohler countered: “The Apostle Paul and the apostolic witness is really clear about how that leadership is to come together. And that’s not an insult to women. It’s a basic biblical fact going back to the patriarchs of the Old Testament. It’s how God has chosen the leadership of his people.”
This biblical interpretation is not new to the SBC. In 1984, the convention approved a resolution “On Ordination and the Role of Women in Ministry” that included these assertions:
The Scriptures attest to God’s delegated order of authority (God the head of Christ, Christ the head of man, man the head of woman, man and woman dependent one upon the other to the glory of God) distinguishing the roles of men and women in public prayer and prophecy (1 Corinthians 11:2-5); and
The Scriptures teach that women are not in public worship to assume a role of authority over men lest confusion reign in the local church (1 Corinthians 14:33-36); and
While Paul commends women and men alike in other roles of ministry and service (Titus 2:1-10), he excludes women from pastoral leadership (1 Timothy 2:12) to preserve a submission God requires because the man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall (1 Timothy 2:13ff).
By the way, that 1 Timothy text says women’s churchly silence is required because Eve was “in the transgression.”
Southern Baptists already forbid the pastoral ordination of females, including that doctrine in their confession of faith in 2000. Now they want it added to their bylaws and are certainly free to do so. But for history’s sake, they might ask if their biblical hermeneutic regarding women might in any way parallel their 19th-century slavery-based hermeneutic, remembering that the SBC was formed over Black folks’ “place at the table.”
The 1984 reference to the Edenic fall, and the 21st-century comment about women’s “place at the table” took me back to a Christian Century article I wrote in 1985 titled “Forgiving Eve.” There I noted:
The children of Israel thought all other nations were accursed until Jonah learned that even Nineveh could repent and God would forgive. The first century Jews were convinced that Samaritans were cursed, but Jesus found a Good Samaritan. … “The Negroes are cursed,” said our Southern forebears as they conjured up marks on Cain and curses on Ham to prove that human slavery was the will of God.
“Women are cursed,” (because of Eve) said 4,793 messengers to the 1984 Southern Baptist Convention and because of that curse they may be saved but not ordained in the Christian ministry. But if Eve’s sin is communicated to her sex in perpetuity, then the grace of God could be impotent for the rest of us.
Thus God is not redeeming feminine creation, making it new in Christ, but still getting even for the first transgression. And if God is forever getting even, then grace is little more than a mechanistic transaction which fulfills a salvific requirement, placating divine retribution but leaving us trapped forever by the sins of our ancestors, If the curse of Eve remains, then there are no really new creations. Old things will never pass away.
The good news, therefore, is this: “As in Adam, all die, even so in Christ are all made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22). With those words, all curses die.
In her 1836 autobiography, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, A Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of her Call to Preach the Gospel, the AME Black preacher Jarena Lee declared:
O how careful ought we to be, lest through our bylaws of church government and discipline, we bring into disrepute even the word of life. For as unseemly as it may appear now-a-days for a woman to preach, it should be remembered that nothing is impossible with God. And why should it be thought impossible, heterodox or improper for a woman to preach? Seeing the Saviour died for the woman as well as the man.
What a hermeneutic!
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce.
Related article:
Mohler and Pressley on women having a seat at pastoral table