Brian Edwards reflects on how sound evangelicals can be disastrously blind on vital issues
I was rummaging through the pastor’s library.
It was at the church I was visiting – one of the few privileges of being an itinerant preacher – that I came across a volume of essays on the life and thought of B. B. Warfield. Warfield was a mighty champion defending the authority and inerrancy of Scripture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and whose seminal work, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, has proved so influential and persuasive.
White supremacy
In the light of the current ‘white supremacy’ resurgence in the United States, the chapter in the book from the pastor’s study that drew my particular attention discussed Warfield’s attitude to slavery following the American Civil War.
Sadly, after the defeat of the largely slave-owning Confederates in the South, the Northern states reneged on their insistence on correcting the abuses of slavery – which had been a major cause of the War – and allowed the South to continue much as they had done previously. This led to what became known as the ‘Jim Crow laws’, which instituted racial segregation. Blacks and whites were firmly separated in transport, education, social integration, public facilities and even in churches.
Tragic segregation
Warfield himself came from a slave owning family – although they were anti-slavery slave owners – and this gave him an acute understanding of the issues. What disappointed him above all was the fact that many prominent evangelicals in the South, who vigorously defended the absolute authority of Scripture to guard and guide every area of life, tried to defend this segregation from the Bible. Chief among these was Robert L Dabney.
Dabney was an evangelical Presbyterian and had been a Staff Chaplain in the Confederate Army; he wrote the first and perhaps most significant biography of the Confederate general, Stonewall Jackson.
However, Dabney was more than this, he was an influential philosopher, theologian and an eminent preacher. He could also add farmer, architect, surveyor and inventor to his CV. But it was his clear and unwavering commitment to evangelical theology, expressed in his Systematic Theology of 1871 that was especially valuable. Dabney was wholeheartedly committed to the infallibility and authority of the Bible for all faith and practice; he insisted that our actions and our conscience should be sustained by Scripture above all else.
It was all the more tragic therefore, that Dabney and many of his evangelical colleagues sought to defend the continuation of slavery, and especially segregation, from the Bible by turning the text to suit the expectations of the South.
The chapter that I was reading concerned Warfield’s exposure of the complete inconsistency of Dabney and so many southern Presbyterians relying wholly upon Scripture for their faith and practice only until it cut across the social practicalities and long-held traditions of the day.
Social norms trump Bible
In the strongest language, Warfield accused them of maintaining a caste system which was a discredit to the modern American society. He accused them of disgracing themselves by professing their orthodoxy and yet abandoning their commitment to Scripture on this one issue. They had allowed pragmatic thinking and the social norm to overrule the clear teaching of the Bible. The slaves might now be free, but segregation in any form was an insult and a disgrace. For Warfield, if full integration was socially unacceptable then it was the task of evangelical leaders to realign society with the standards of the Bible. Dabney and his colleagues had allowed the social norms to trump the Bible.
Of course, Warfield was correct. The results of the Jim Crow laws on segregation, although abolished in 1965, are still with America today among the ‘white supremacists’. A lesson to be learned is that it is all too easy for those of us who maintain an unwavering commitment to Scripture as our only infallible guide and guard of conscience and behaviour to dodge that commitment when the views of contemporary society appear to conflict with the Bible.
Creation and evolution
Then I realised this is exactly what happened to B. B. Warfield himself! With the advent of evolutionary theories, he who rightly castigated the evangelical theologians for abandoning the supremacy of Scripture on the slavery and full integration issue, spent time in his writing and lectures accommodating the possibility of evolution with the biblical text.
It is quite untrue to maintain, as many have, that Warfield was a committed ‘evolutionist’; he never finally accepted the theory, and he scorned Darwinian evolution, but he always allowed the possibility that one day some form of evolution may be proven true. In the light of this, Warfield concluded that a form of evolution would not necessarily be incompatible with Scripture, providing it is understood within the framework of biblical creation; he suggested that God might have used the interaction of other forces in the process of creation. That has left Warfield wide open to the miss-charge that he believed in evolution. But it does illustrate how even the mighty Warfield in his day could allow a modern scientific theory to force him to attempt the impossible alliance between that and the absolute clarity and authority of Scripture.
Is there something to teach us today in this lesson from history?
