58 Sermon Illustrations on Slavery

Sermon in 2 Peter series. Freedom vs. license. 2 Peter 2:17-22

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FREEDOM AND DEPRAVITY

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I. Who, or what, controls your life?

II. There are people who offer to control us.

A. Many people cannot handle freedom.

B. False teachers counter with convincing words. 2:18

C. They appeal to our lusts. 2:18

III. The promise of freedom. 2:19

A. Everyone wants to be free. But from what?

B. Unlimited freedom can lead to slavery.

C. Genuine freedom only comes through obedience to Jesus. John 8:36

IV. The stark alternative.

A. Can a Christian lose salvation? 2:20-22

B. "Almost" Christians are in greatest danger.

#2883

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Rev. Theodore Weld wrote the "greatest of the anti-slavery pamphlets" in 1839. The following is an eye-witness account by Ezekiel Birdseye:

A BAPTIST CLERGYMAN in Laurens District, S.C., WHIPPED HIS SLAVE TO DEATH, whom he suspected of having stolen about sixty dollars. The slave was in the prime of life and was purchased a few weeks before for $800 of a slaved trader from Virginia or Maryland. The coroner, Wm. Irby, at whose house I was then boarding, told me, that on reviewing the dead body, he found it beat to a jelly from head to foot. The master's wife discovered the money a day or two after the death of the slave. She had herself removed it from where it was placed, not knowing what it was as it was tied up in a thick envelope.

I happened to be present when the trial of this man took place, at Laurens Court House. His daughter testified that her father untied the slave, when he appeared to be failing, and gave him cold water to drink, of which he took freely. His counsel [attorney] pleaded that his death might have been caused by drinking cold water in a state of excitement. The Judge charged the jury, that it would be their duty to find the defendant guilty, if they believed the death was caused by the whipping; but if they were of opinion that drinking cold water caused the death, they would find him not guilty! The jury found him - NOT GUILTY!

Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address in March 1865 stands as the most remarkably Christian public statement by any American president.

“Neither [side] anticipated that the cause of the conflict [i.e., slavery] might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offences! For it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!’ If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?

Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Barry Goldwater's infamous line defines extremism:

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and ...

moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Operation Rescue is a modern form of extremism. Abolition is an older form. They were all-or-nothing, refused compromise, and took dramatic steps to bring the issue before the nation. Abraham Lincoln was not an extremist or an abolitionist. To abolitionists, slavery was not an unfortunate and outmoded institution - it was sin.

The language of sin is extreme language. As William Lloyd Garrison put it famously in the first issue of his newspaper, "The Liberator":

On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with

moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a

moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the

hands of a ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her

babe from the fire into which it has fallen - but urge me not to

use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest - I

will not equivocate - I will not excuse - I will not retreat a

single inch - AND I WILL BE HEARD.

Garrison was usually not this tame. He burned the Constitution on the Fourth of July. Theodore Weld was proudly known as "the most mobbed man in America." Abolitionists never gained a majority. The more they argued, the more intransigent Southerners became. When abolitionism began in 1830, many Southerners thought slavery was wrong; a few years later abolitionists would be run out or killed. Abolitionism destroyed dialogue.

America was founded on compromise, but abolitionism would not allow it. Thirty years later, after a war, slavery ceased. Some historians discount the role of abolitionism, but without it the sense of urgency to do something about slavery disappears. The hope of moderates who chose against extremism is that sense and good will can prevail. But such progress is not always certain. (Compare Nazi Germany and South Africa.)

Current times tempt people to extremism. But extremism carries costs. A good many evangelical prohibitionists lost their faith. Some were disappointed in the church's mealy-mouthed response to their cause. As institutions, churches were quite timid. And many abolitionists became so caught up in the antislavery cause they gradually they substituted the cause for Christ. They experienced a lifetime of frustration and the final victory - by war - dealt a hard blow to Finney's optimistic theology. Faith linked too closely to a cause, and without an adequate respect for the gravity of sin, is vulnerable.

"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," wrote Tertullian, but martyrdom takes discernment and courage. Bonhoeffer and Luther were extremists. Peace generally goes with purity (though not always).

You do not choose extremism because you admire its tactics; you choose extremism because you feel you have no choice. For each of us, a time and an issue may come that calls us to extremes. Haunted by the ambiguity of the situation, mindful of the costs, I pray that I will hear and heed that call.

One hundred and fifty years ago churches were disfellowshipped for siding with the "secular" social movement of abolition. Excerpts are given of prominent theologians who justified slavery back then, using the Scripture. Abraham owned slaves, Moses gave laws about them, Jesus referred to them in his parables and Paul gives instructions about them. Before 1860, ONLY tiny minorities of Bible-believing Christians EVER challenged slavery. First Baptist of Granville, Ohio, was part of the underground railroad back then, and is today helping homosexuals to be accepted.

#3598

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Sermon in 1 Peter series. Submitting to those with power. 1 Pet 2:18ff

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IF YOUR BOSS IS A JERK

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I. Being owned by someone.

II. Bearing up under bad conditions. 2:18

A. Submit to good, and evil, masters. Colossians 3:21--4:2

B. What is commendable to God.

C. Called to be extraordinary.

III. Our example has been set by Jesus. 2:21

A. Example = do what Jesus would do.

B. Peter draws five allusions to Isaiah 53.

IV. Jesus was treated unjustly - for us. 2:24

A. Ultimately, the gospel itself is not fair.

B. Jesus looks for us, and after us. 2:25

V. You don't have to be jerked around.

A. Are you in a tense situation? Feel powerless?

B. Keep the proper perspective.

C. Are you in a position of power over others?

#4128

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Most people don't spend Christmas day wading through chest-deep floodwater -- and then baptizing 500 people. But that's exactly what Bishop Macram Max Gassis did in Sudan a few weeks ago.

It was an expression of his deep and determined love for Christ, and for his people -- and it's one of the reasons Prison Fellowship is honoring Bishop Gassis with this year's William Wilberforce Award.

The award is named for the English parliamentarian who fought against the British slave trade 200 years ago. Every year, Prison Fellowship honors the person who best emulates Wilberforce's commitment to eradicating social injustice, and no one is more deserving than Bishop Gassis.

Born sixty-one years ago in Sudan, Gassis attended seminary in Italy and England. He returned to Sudan as a parish priest, and, in 1988, Gassis was consecrated a bishop.

It was then, as Sudan's civil war raged around him, that Gassis became a liaison between the country's Catholic bishops and its radical Islamic government. But Gassis got into trouble when he criticized Sudan's human rights record, which reads like an abstract on atrocity.

He spoke out against the slave raids that steal Christian children from their parents.

He spoke out against the bombing of Christian schools, churches, and hospitals.

He spoke out against the Stalinesque famines, through which the government deliberately kills hundreds of thousands.

He spoke out against attempts to force the country's entire Christian population to convert to Islam.

He spoke out when he saw Christians loaded onto trains and taken away to fearful fates in concentration camps.

He stood before the U.S. Congress, the European Parliament, and the United Nations Human Rights Commission and spoke out against the slaughter of two million Christian countrymen.

Western leaders did not always listen, but Sudan's dictators heard him loud and clear. They placed Gassis under criminal indictment. This gentle servant of Christ is now the most wanted man in Sudan. Each time he returns to his people, bringing food and medicine, Bibles and blankets, his life is in jeopardy.

Nevertheless, Gassis has taken responsibility for hundreds of orphans -- orphans who throw themselves into his arms whenever they see him.

"It is time to end the silence," the bishop says, and he's right. The torture, enslavement, and murder of Sudanese Christians must end, and there is much the U.S. can do to bring that about.

In his Christmas message, Bishop Gassis wrote, "While the world [prepares] to welcome the new millennium with joy and hope ... my people cry: 'Lord save us.' Lord Jesus, move the hearts ... of those who have the power to bring justice and peace to my people."

As Prison Fellowship salutes this courageous man tonight at the Wilberforce dinner, I pray that all of you at home will remember in your prayers the suffering church, that the shackles of those who are persecuted for our Lord's sake might be broken.

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Copyright (c) 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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Slavery -- 1857: Although he may have a heart and a brain, and he may be a human biologically, a slave is not a legal person. The Dred Scott Decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has made that clear. A black man only becomes a legal person when he is set free. Before that time, we should not concern ourselves about him. He has no legal rights. If you think that slavery is wrong, then nobody is forcing you to be a slaveowner. Don't impose your morality on somebody else! A man has the right to decide what he wants to do with his own property. Isn't slavery really something merciful? After all, every black man has a right to be protected. Isn't it better never to be set free than to be sent unprepared and ill-equipped into a cruel world? (Spoken by someone already free.)

Abortion -- 1994: Although he may have a heart and a brain, and he may be a human biologically, a fetus is not a legal person. The Roe vs. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has made that clear. A baby only becomes a legal person when he is born. Before that time, we should not concern ourselves about him. He has no legal rights. If you think abortion is wrong, then nobody is forcing you to have one. Don't impose your morality on somebody else! A woman has the right to decide what she wants to do with her own body. Isn't abortion really something merciful? After all, every baby has a right to be wanted. Isn't it better never to be born than to be sent alone and unloved into a cruel world? (Spoken by someone already born.)

Kevin Bales has researched modern slavery. In Uttar Pradesh in India he came across many examples. He writes the following:

When I met Baldev in 1997, he was plowing. His master called him "my halvaha," meaning "my bonded plowman." Two years later I met Baldev again and learned that because of a windfall from a relative, he had freed himself from debt. But he had not freed himself from bondage. He told me:

“After my wife received this money, we paid off our debt and were free to do whatever we wanted. But I was worried all the time — what if one of the children got sick? What if our crop failed? What if the government wanted some money? Since we no longer belonged to the landlord, we didn’t get food every day as before. Finally, I went to the landlord and asked him to take me back. I didn’t have to borrow any money, but he agreed to let me be his halvaha again. Now I don’t worry so much; I know what to do.”.

Lacking any preparation for freedom, Baldev reenrolled in slavery. Without financial or emotional support, his accidental emancipation didn't last. Although he may not bequeath any debt to his children, his family is visibly worse off than unbonded villagers in the same region.

A commonality among different forms of slavery is the psychological manipulation they all involve. The widely held conception of a slave is someone in chains who would escape if given half a chance or who simply does not know better. But this view is naive. In my experience, slaves often know that their enslavement is illegal. Force, violence and psychological coercion have convinced them to accept it. When slaves begin to accept their role and identify with their master, constant physical bondage becomes unnecessary. They come to perceive their situation not as a deliberate action taken to harm them in particular but as part of the normal, if regrettable, scheme of things. Some slaves in Thailand are even allowed to visit their families during holidays, for they always came back.

A similar psychology operates in a different form of slavery, one that involves domestic servants that African and Asian diplomats and business executives have brought with them to Europe and North America. As an employee of the "Committee against Modern Slavery," Cristina Talens worked for several years to free and rehabilitate domestic slaves who had been brought to Paris. She told me that liberating the body was much easier than freeing the mind:

In spite of the violence, and the living and working conditions,

people in slavery have their own mental integrity and their own

mechanisms for surviving. Some may actually like different

aspects of their life, perhaps the security or their understanding

of the order of things. When you disrupt this order, suddenly

everything is confused. Some of the women who were freed have

attempted suicide. It is easy to assume that this happened because

of the abuse they had lived through. But for some of these women,

slavery had been the major psychological building block in their

lives. When that was destroyed, the meaning of their life was like

a bit of paper crushed up and thrown away. They were told: "No,

this is not the way it is supposed to be. Start all over again."

It was as though their life had no meaning.

Human-rights worker Vivek Pandit of the Vidhayak Sansad organization in India has been liberating bonded laborers for more than 20 years. He is adamant that real liberation takes place in the mind, that physical freedom isn't enough. Conversely, mental freedom can bring about physical freedom.

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Is it time to give up on our battle to stop the legalized murder of unborn children? After all, ROE V. WADE will have been the "law of the land" for three decades this coming January. Americans are used to it. Isn't it time to move on? No.

When we get discouraged, it's time to remember the lessons of history -- specifically, the lessons of eighteenth-century England.

It was in 1787 that William Wilberforce, a member of Parliament and a Christian, decided he would take on one of the most entrenched moral evils of the day: the British slave trade.

Wilberforce knew from the start that this would be no easy task. The British empire depended heavily on the slave trade. Wilberforce knew that in order to succeed, he would have to go about the matter in the right way.

First he educated himself thoroughly, learning all about slavery and conditions on slave ships. Then he began working with a small but influential group of friends who were equally committed to abolition, known as the Clapham sect. They supervised government inquiries into the horrors of the slave trade and exposed it. Wilberforce and his allies then began educating the public about these horrors.

The first victory was a small one, but it proved that the slave industry was vulnerable. It was a vote in 1788 that restricted the number of slaves that a ship could be allowed to carry based on the ship's tonnage.

For the next nineteen years, Wilberforce introduced bills banning the slave trade. And year after year, his opponents found ways to defeat them, often playing dirty. As Kevin Belmonte writes in his great new book, HERO FOR HUMANITY, Wilberforce faced "a constant stream of false accusations and vitriol, death threats, [and] a challenge to a duel."

But after nearly two decades of hard work, it became clear that the logjam was breaking. The public would no longer tolerate commerce in human misery. This change in attitude, writes Belmonte, grew directly from "the sustained campaign to convince the public of the slave trade's immorality."

Finally in 1807 -- twenty years after Wilberforce began his battle -- the House of Commons voted by an overwhelming majority to abolish the slave trade.

What is the lesson of Wilberforce's life? Despite repeated losses, he kept working. By God's grace, his cause made incremental gains. He didn't demand all or nothing but eventually carried the day. He then continued his labors, and eventually slavery was outlawed three days before he died in 1833.

This is what we have to remember when we become discouraged over abortion: We're making progress. More college students now say they're pro-life than pro-abortion. Ultrasound machines in crisis pregnancy centers are leading more mothers to bear their babies instead of aborting them. Congress recently passed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, and we've come close to passing a ban on partial-birth abortion.

Wilberforce understood that while people may ignore the truth, they still recognize it when they see it. So he looked for ways to remind people of what they already knew in their hearts.

You and I need to do the same. Gradually, slowly, we're winning the hearts and minds of the next generation.

Give up on the abortion fight? Not a chance.

FURTHER READING & INFORMATION

Kevin Belmonte, HERO FOR HUMANITY: A BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE (NavPress, 2002).

William Wilberforce, A PRACTICAL VIEW OF CHRISTIANITY (Hendrickson, 1996).

Kevin Belmonte, "William Wilberforce," Wilberforce Forum Website. http://www.wilberforce.org/WilberforceForum/ChannelRoot/Welcome/WilliamWilberforce/William+Wilberforce.htm

BreakPoint commentary no. 021015, "Whose Choice Is 'Pro-Choice'?" http://www.breakpoint.org/Breakpoint/ChannelRoot/FeaturesGroup/BreakPointCommentaries/Whose+Choice+Is+ProChoice.htm

Janet Gilmore, "Youths more conservative than their elders on issues involving religion and abortion, new UC Berkeley survey reveals," University of California-Berkeley press release, September 24, 2002. http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2002/09/24_youth.html

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Copyright © 2002 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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Torn from his family, severely beaten and forced to live and work in subhuman conditions, Rol Deng has seen religious persecution first hand.

And he wants American Christians to know and pray about their fellow believers in Sudan who he says are being killed or sold into slavery because of their faith.

Deng and his family now live in Kansas City, Missouri. His war-torn homeland of Sudan is ruled by Muslim extremists who oppose Christianity.

"There is no work unless you are Muslim," Deng said in an interview. "The government keeps track. They want to send you to religious training to be Muslim. If you say no, then there is no job."

Civil war has raged in Sudan since 1983. More than 2 million people have died during the war, which pits Arabs in the north against Africans in the south. Tensions are rooted in attempts to impose Islamic values on all Sudanese people.

The U.S. Committee for Refugees reports that an estimated 300 Sudanese die each day of war-related causes, including disease and famine.

For Deng, life forever changed one day in 1990. The government sent militia to his village of Arkeyna. Before they left, the whole village was burned, and his father was killed.

Deng, his sister, his mother and three brothers were taken as slaves. A scar running up the side of his leg is a reminder of the beating he endured that day.

In anguish, Deng was forced to ride a camel with other village survivors after the town was razed. That day was the last time he saw his mother and his brothers.

His sister, Ayal, a toddler then, stayed with him. For the next two years, he was forced -- at gunpoint -- to care for cows in the middle of a field, the climate cold and rainy.

"I had to sleep with the cows," he said. "I had no blanket. I ate with the dog. I lived like an animal for two years."

Eventually, Deng and Ayal escaped their captors by following railroad tracks. Heading north to avoid an increased militia presence in the south, they went in search of a city.

When they came to Babanis, Sudan, they hurried into a church, looking for help. The preacher there told them not to leave. He hid them until he secured tickets to Khartoum and some money for the two.

From 1992 to 1996, Deng and Ayal lived as outcasts outside Khartoum in an area for displaced people. While there, he learned English. Also, it was during this time that Deng met and married Adut.

With only a cardboard shelter to sleep under and the food being designated for Muslims, Deng grew weary of not being able to provide for his family. He knew Christians were forbidden to go into Khartoum, but he was desperate to find work.

While traveling on the road, he was arrested by security forces. The plan was to train him for three months to be a soldier, and then he would be forced to fight.

"I couldn't do that," Deng said. "I couldn't kill my own people." He escaped and returned to his family. But that was only a temporary solution. He knew he would be found and killed.

The only thing to do was to try to escape to Egypt. Through contact with a relative who worked for the government, Deng, Ayal, his wife, Adut, and their daughter, Adeng, were able to secure money for immigration.

Then, with the help of a security officer who was a secret Christian, they were taken to a boat in the middle of the night. They traveled by boat and then by train to their destination. The officer, who risked his life to save theirs, directed them to the boat and asked them not to look back at him, or ever to mention his name.

Deng found factory work in Abbiasa, Egypt, a place that was friendly to the refugees. But it was difficult to earn enough to support his family, which now included a son, Dut, and another daughter, Amou.

With assistance from the Red Cross, the family came to the United States as refugees on July 21, 2000. The Dengs, along with fellow Sudanese Christians in the Kansas City area, worship in their native language of Dinka at a Nazarene church.

While these refugees from Sudan are grateful to finally live in a country where they can be free to worship Christ without fear, they still carry the scars of their faithful persistence.

Dr. Joseph Resendiz, an internist at Samuel U. Rodgers Community Health Center in Kansas City, sees a large number of Sudanese patients. He said they frequently have multiple complaints, mostly stemming from years of oppression in their home country.

"Many of them, both men and women, have virtually been slaves," Resendiz said. "They have told me of widespread beatings, hard labor, rape and torture that characterized their tenure as slaves.

"It is hard to believe that slavery exists in this day and age. In our country, we fight for guns and drugs and money. Over there, they fight for their faith."

Some groups, such as Christian Solidarity International, attempt to aid Sudanese Christians by buying back those sold into slavery.

But Deng said such efforts are often futile. Solders make up an amount they want for a slave. The freed slaves are taken south, often only to be recaptured. The buy-back effort, Deng says, simply puts more money in the hands of the captors.

Deng is passionate about informing Americans of the plight of Sudanese Christians. "We are dying for Christ," he said. "Jesus Christ died for us, and that is why we are dying. We need Christian brothers to find a way to unify to help Sudan. Pray for us."

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The National Archives, taking advantage of the release this month of the Steven Spielberg movie AMISTAD, opened a display Tuesday of original documents connected with the real-life slavery story depicted in the film.

The Amistad was a Spanish schooner that entered U.S. waters in 1839, after its cargo of kidnapped Africans from Sierra Leone mutinied off the coast of Cuba.

After almost two years of legal wrangling, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the slave trade was illegal and that the Africans should go free and be allowed to return to Africa.

The special display at the National Archives features the Supreme Court ruling and John Quincy Adams's written request for papers from the lower court trial of the case. Adams, a former president, argued the case for the Africans in the Supreme Court.

The Spielberg film opens in the United States on Dec. 10.

First reports say it contains vivid depictions of the brutalities slave traders inflicted on their victims.

^REUTERS@

Unpicking stitches in a seamless past

John Robson

The Ottawa Citizen

Wednesday, September 05, 2001

If the UN conference on racism hadn't been hijacked by raging anti-Semites, it might have started a thoughtful discussion of what to do about historical injustices like slavery. Such as nothing.

OK, not the UN. So come instead to the University of Texas at Austin, where I once taught U.S. history. As you might expect, when the topic of slavery came up, all but the dullest students looked around and thought "Slave ... Slave-owner ... Oooh, house slave ..." and then "I'd be a slave" or "a slave-owner." From there, it's a very short jump to the notion that the dark brown people in the class were descendants of slaves and the pink-brown ones descendants of slave-owners, which made everyone squirm in their chairs. It's not so simple. Almost every black in Texas is descended from slaves. But students of Asian ancestry weren't descended from slaves or slave-owners. Still, weren't they bystanders in a drama involving the rest of the class? No.

Only about one in four whites owned slaves in 1860. So is only one white southerner in four descended from slave-owners? Of course not: descendants of slave-owners married those of non-slave-owners. So are they all descended from slave-owners? Of course not: Some are descended entirely from whites who moved to the south after the Civil War, from the North or abroad.

Are purebred northerners mostly off the hook since there was less slavery there and it ended sooner? Some say no, because they profited directly or indirectly from the trade in slave-grown cotton. But if, as many believe, slavery was inefficient, it deprived northern merchants of opportunities for profit. Are the Yankees owed compensation, too? And if a slave-owner's grandson married an abolitionist's granddaughter, does it cancel out?

Even that's simple compared to the fact that, at Emancipation, about one in four slaves had a white father. Given one generation every 25 years, by 1890 one in 16 U.S. blacks had two white grandfathers, six in 16 one, and nine in 16 none. By 1915, one in 256 had four white great-grandparents, 12 in 256 three, 54 two, 108 one, and 81 none. By 1940, at most 6,561 in 65,536 had no white ancestors; by 1965, barely one per cent; by 1990, .01 per cent. Almost all those whites were slave-owners. The one group in America that is mostly descended from American slave-owners is blacks, not whites. (Many Caribbean black immigrants may not have white ancestors.) Must they pay each other compensation?

If so, they might sue Africans; president Abdoulayé Wadé of Senegal just said he's descended from slave-owning African kings, so "If one can claim reparations for slavery, the slaves of my ancestors, or their descendants, can also claim money from me. Slavery has been practised by all people in the world." (It has, and was worse in most places than in the U.S.)

If the claim is not against all descendants of slave-owners on behalf of all descendants of slaves, just against anyone better off now because of slavery on behalf of anyone worse off, what can this mean? Geopolitically, we can make reasonable guesses about "what if?" history. But not for individuals. Change anything in the past, and you erase one of the couplings that led to each of us existing at all.

It's obviously appalling to reflect that absent a slave-owner impregnating a slave you wouldn't exist. But if you shake anyone's family tree hard enough, some strange stuff falls out. Danish raiders didn't court British maidens with flowers and poetry, you know. We can't change the past, of course. But if we recognize that it's seamless, we see that we can't pick out the consequences of past injustice and eliminate only them.

Who in West Africa doesn't have at least one slave-owning king in his lineage, and at least one slave? What white person doesn't have Roman slave-owners and slaves in their past? And guess who's coming to dinner? A leading British geneticist says 11 million white Britons have black blood, from black traders in the 16th century. I might; many of my relatives lived by the sea when not being chased across it by religious intolerance or oppressed in the Borders. By now, I can't figure out who I should sue or be sued by. So let's not.

Whatever my ancestors did or had done to them, guilt is not carried in the bloodstream. Clear legal obligations don't lapse with time. But even if you could prove I was descended from William the Conqueror and not Edmund Ironside, and my neighbour the reverse, or from Caesar and Caractacus, time and chance have washed out any traceable pattern of rights and wrongs.

I don't spend time brooding over the Edict of Nantes. I'm grateful to be here, and I'm trying to show it by not oppressing anyone. Isn't that enough?

John Robson is Senior Writer and Deputy Editorial Pages Editor. Read recent columns by John Robson at www.ottawacitizen.com .

c Copyright 2001 The Ottawa Citizen

One hundred fifty years ago, a Constitutional crisis took place similar to one that we have been threatened with over ROE V. WADE — one in which no moral consensus could be achieved between the three branches of government. The first constitutional crisis was over the hot-button issue of that day: slavery. The Supreme Court declared an act of Congress unconstitutional, and the president, Abraham Lincoln — to his everlasting credit — refused to recognize the Court's decision.

In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled on the case of a Missouri slave named Dred Scott. Scott's master, John Sandford, had taken him into the free state of Illinois. Because of the Missouri Compromise, banishing slavery in some states, slaves in free states could demand their freedom. Scott did.

Scott's owner challenged the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise, arguing that slaves were private property protected by the Constitution and could not be taken away without due process. Congress, therefore, he argued, lacked the constitutional authority to ban slavery in Illinois or anywhere else.

The Court agreed and not only sent Scott back into slavery, but also claimed he had never been free. The Court also ruled that Congress lacked the authority to forbid or abolish slavery in federal territories — meaning the Missouri Compromise was illegal.

Lincoln saw DRED SCOTT as an outrage, in part because the Court claimed authority to decide for the other branches of government once and for all what the Constitution required. In so doing, it placed the other branches in a position of inferiority and subservience, something the founders specifically rejected.

As president, Lincoln ignored DRED SCOTT. His administration treated free blacks as citizens, issuing them passports and other documents. In open defiance of the court ruling, he signed legislation that restricted slavery in the western territories.

Lincoln saw himself following in the footsteps of another president. Thomas Jefferson also believed that the president and Congress were in no way inferior to the Court. Jefferson told a friend the Constitution “has wisely made all the departments coequal and co-sovereign within themselves.” In so doing, the founders took into account fallen human nature. Both Jefferson and Lincoln believed courts were capable of violating the Constitution and undermining constitutional government. Ultimately, of course, as we know, Lincoln proposed that the Constitution be amended to outlaw slavery — and it was, with the Thirteenth amendment.

Today, we have become so accustomed to the notion that the courts have supreme authority that we are shocked at the idea that a president or the Congress might stand up to them.

Well, fortunately, we've just witnessed the appointment of two new Supreme Court justices who respect the court's limited rights under the Constitution. And we have a president who is appointing, throughout the court system, judges who will bring the courts back to a proper understanding of their role. And so we may avert the kind of constitutional crisis Lincoln faced over our own divisive issues like abortion and so-called same-sex “marriage.”

Lincoln 's birthday is a great occasion to remember that two of our greatest presidents would never have tolerated lawless judges who had no regard for the constitutional limits of their own power.

Nor should we.

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Copyright (c) 2006 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

Christopher Hitchens’s book, GOD IS NOT GREAT, is subtitled HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING is a big word, but I guess Hitchens means it. According to him, “religion makes people do wicked things they wouldn’t ordinarily do ... the licenses for genocide, slavery, racism, are all right there in the holy text.”

By “holy text” he means the Bible, which raises a difficult question for people like Hitchens: If Christianity “licenses” slavery, then why was the abolition of slavery, both in antiquity and in modern times, driven by Christians?

As I write in my new book, THE FAITH, about to be published early next year, in the first-century Roman Empire, slavery was a fact of life — one which the writings of the New Testament reflect. But acknowledging social reality is not the same thing as “licensing” it.

When the Apostle Paul declared that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” he planted the seeds that would, one day, lead to the demise of the institution of slavery. Likewise, Paul’s inclusion of “slave traders” among those he identified as “lawbreakers” made it clear what he thought about slavery.

Historian Rodney Stark writes about the Church’s embrace around about the third century of what he calls “a universalistic conception of humanity.” This conception “[liberated] social relations between the sexes and within the family” and “greatly modulated class differences...” As Stark puts it, “more than rhetoric was involved when slave and noble greeted one another as brothers in Christ.”

Given this liberating ideal, it was only a matter of time before Christians sought to remove slavery from the Christian culture entirely. By the Middle Ages, it was agreed that “no man, no real Christian at any rate ... could thereafter legitimately be held as the property of another.”

It is true that Christians have not always lived up to these teachings: The record of the Church is not without blemish. But it is also true that when Christians kept and traded slaves, they were going against the teachings of their own religion. The theological question had long been settled.

Thus, when Spanish and Portuguese traders brought slavery to the New World, successive popes condemned the practice and even threatened to excommunicate slave traders and slave holders. The fact that they could not force European monarchs to obey them should not be held against Christianity — especially not by those who complain about Christians trying to impose their religion on others.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the fight against slavery and the slave trade was led by Christians like William Wilberforce in Britain and William Garrison in America. Like their early Church counterparts, they were motivated by Christian teaching on human dignity and equality.

Hitchens’s assertion that economic factors and not Christian abolitionists did away with slavery is, to put it mildly, absurd. Wilberforce and company succeeded DESPITE the economic interests, not because of them.

True, there are shameful episodes in Christian history. But what makes them shameful is the failure of Christians to live up to what Christianity requires — not what Hitchens imagines as its “licenses.”

How odd, then, that Hitchens and other militant atheists feel they have license to distort the facts when arguing against religion.

________

This is part one in a five-part series.

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Copyright (c) 2007 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #20887]

Roused from his sleep by the sudden jolt of waves crashing against the ship’s hull and the roar of gale-force winds, and scrambling from his hammock as his cabin started to fill with seawater, he heard a shipmate on deck scream that the ship was sinking. He raced up the ladder to the deck but met the captain who shouted for him to bring a knife. As he rushed back down to retrieve it the man who had been behind him went ahead and was instantly washed overboard.

When John Newton reached the deck he found chaos as the crew raced about the vessel making frenzied repairs, bailing water and fighting to stay on board as the relentless swells swept across the deck. Several manned the pumps feverishly, but the rising water was gaining on them. Their cargo was beeswax and wood, both lighter than water, otherwise they would have been doomed.

An hour later the sun rose and the winds started to subside slightly, allowing the crew to make limited progress. All day they desperately patched leaks with their clothes and bedding. That night Newton observed, “If this will not do, the Lord have mercy on us.” Instantly his own words struck him and he was overcome with panic. “What mercy can there be for me?” he wondered.

Indeed, Newton was in no place to hope for, much less expect God’s mercy. To that point it seemed he had done his best over the years to oppose God, and even undermine His work. When he was a child his mother was diligent in teaching him God’s Word, earnestly praying for him, sometimes in tears -- but she died before his seventh birthday. His father, a captain on a merchant ship, removed him from boarding school on his 11th birthday and took him to sea with him where he was schooled in the ways of the profane.

At 17, Newton began a pattern of rebellion against his father, which ultimately led to his forced induction into the Royal Navy on an English “man-of-war,” removing all remaining barriers to his moral demise.

While serving in the navy, then on various slave ships, over the next six years Newton seemed determined to hone his depravity. He had little or no respect for his captains, often mocking, disregarding, and even defying them. He developed a sordid pleasure in tempting and seducing shipmates to sin. Whenever he encountered a Christian, he took it as his mission to undermine and destroy that person’s faith. Years later, as he reflected back upon his life, he referred to himself as having been an “unrestrained blasphemer” — until that night his ship faced an incredible storm.

Newton was on a slave ship returning from the tropics where they had deposited their “cargo.” They were taking the northern route back to England and had anchored off the coast of Newfoundland, when he had found and read a copy of “The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas ‘a Kempis, and the thought occurred to him, “What if these things should be true?” He quickly brushed the notion aside.

But the Lord was not done with him. Through the storm that night, He got Newton’s attention and began the process of awakening him to his own depravity.

Over the next four weeks the ship was virtually at the mercy of the elements. Battered by the storm and with a gaping hole in the hull just a few feet above water line, the ship was never more than a moment from sinking. Early spring in the North Atlantic is frigid, but the men had used their extra clothing to patch holes. They were cold, exhausted from pumping frantically around the clock; most of the food supplies had been washed overboard, and they began to lose all hope for survival.

Their plight mirrored Newton’s own. Faced now with the truth of God’s Word and the reality of a Holy God, he realized his utter sinfulness and hopelessness before God. He recognized that in his condition he was doomed before God. His spiritual despair eclipsed his concern for their survival — - until he read of God’s love and recognized the hope of the Gospel. In one final act of desperation he cried out to the Lord and begged for mercy. The Lord heard his cry and saved him - — and miraculously delivered the ship and its crew to safety.

In the following weeks, months and years, the Lord dramatically transformed Newton. He studied God’s Word voraciously, aligned himself with godly men, and started holding Bible studies and worship services on board ships, even initiating Bible studies for the slaves. He became increasingly convicted over the practice of slave trading and began asking the Lord to provide another career - — and again the Lord answered his prayer. After a seizure and subsequent illness that kept him ashore, he was hired as tide surveyor in London.

While there, he grew strong in his walk with God, studying Greek and Hebrew on his own to enhance his personal study of God’s Word. During that time Newton was befriended and benefited by evangelists George Whitefield and John Wesley. Eventually he became convinced that God was calling him to be a pastor, and after first being denied ordination, in 1764, he became pastor of the Anglican Church in Olney, where he served 15 years. The services became so crowded under his preaching that the building was expanded to accommodate the crowds. In 1779, Newton left Olney to become rector of St. Mary Woolnoth in London, where he served until his death in 1807. While there, noted missionary William Carey was challenged and encouraged from his ministry. William Wilberforce was heavily influenced by John’s life, ministry, and testimony, using his reflections on slave trading to initiate the British abolition of slavery.

A portion of Newton’s last will and testament read, “I commit my soul to my gracious God and Saviour, who mercifully spared and preserved me, when I was an apostate, a blasphemer, and an infidel, and delivered me from that state ... into which my obstinate wickedness had plunged me; and Who has been pleased to admit me, though most unworthy, to preach His glorious gospel. I rely with humble confidence upon the atonement, and mediation of the Lord Jesus Christ, God and Man, which I have often proposed to others, as the only foundation whereupon a sinner can build his hope, trusting that He will guard and guide me through the uncertain remainder of my life, and that He will then admit me into His presence in His heavenly kingdom.”

On his tombstone are these words:

“John Newton, Clerk, once an infidel and libertine,

a servant of slaves in Africa, was,

by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,

preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed

to preach the faith he had long labored to destroy.”

While pastoring in Olney, Newton composed 280 hymns, including what may be the best-known and most-beloved hymn of all time:

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)

That sav’d a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see.

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,

And grace my fears reliev’d;

How precious did that grace appear,

The hour I first believ’d!

Thro’ many dangers, toils and snares,

I have already come;

‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,

And grace will lead me home.

For years on “BreakPoint,” we have talked about the plight of the oppressed — from persecuted Christians to the victims of the sexual trafficking. Raising awareness is not easy, because let’s face it, most Americans probably cannot even find places like North Korea, Sudan, or Burma on a map — much less tell you about their human rights records.

This lack of familiarity with the larger world is not new. William Wilberforce was all-too-aware of the numbing effect of “out of sight, out of mind.” He knew that before he could persuade his countrymen about the evils of the slave trade, some education was in order. It is yet another lesson Wilberforce has to teach us.

Two hundred years after Wilberforce, most people are still unaware of how brutal the slave trade was: men chained together for up to five months to save space; and diseases such as amoebic dysentery, scurvy, smallpox, and measles spreading in this human Petri dish. Little wonder that of the 13 million Africans who were compelled to make the infamous “middle passage,” 3 million died on the way.

Then, of course, there was the often-inhumane treatment of those “fortunate” enough to survive the journey.

Obviously, those profiting from the slave trade did not tell the British people the truth about slavery. “Out of sight, out of mind” was the order-of-the-day.

As Eric Metaxas writes in his book on Wilberforce, it was the slave trade’s “invisibility” that made this brutal business-as-usual possible. The average British subject did not have the “slightest hint” of the human cost associated with the sugar and molasses in their homes.

That’s why an essential part of Wilberforce’s campaign against the slave trade was to make the British public aware of the cost. He used everything from pamphlets to poetry to pottery to bring the plight of slaves to the public’s attention.

As a result, he was able to tell Parliament that “the nature and all the circumstances of this Trade are now laid open to us. We can no longer plead ignorance ... We may spurn it ... but we cannot turn aside so as to avoid seeing it.”

Once the British people stopped looking away, it became easier to do the right thing.

In this Information Age, our problem today is not the kind of “invisibility” Wilberforce combated — people who care about human dignity can easily find out what they need to know. The trick is getting them to care in the first place.

It’s making our voices and concerns heard above what many call the “clutter” of the Information Age. When thousands of things, most of them worthless, compete for people’s attention, we need to help people focus on the right things. We need to remind them that there are things more deserving of their attention than who entered rehab and who fathered whose baby.

Just as Wilberforce became the conscience of his age, we must become the conscience of the Information Age. It will not make us popular, any more than Wilberforce’s persistence endeared him to his peers.

But if we do not try to get people to look at the larger world, then today’s victims of brutality might as well be invisible.

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Copyright (c) 2007 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Looking for a larger purpose in your life, but doubt you can make a difference in this world?

There is a lie that impersonal forces shape human history. That theory, long popular among secular historians, cannot account for a man like William Wilberforce (1759–1833). What did this 5-foot-tall colossus accomplish? Nothing less than an end to the slave trade throughout the British Empire. He did it in the face of staggering odds, overwhelming opposition, contempt, ridicule and long years of defeat.

The British Parliament, of which Wilberforce was a member, finally abolished slave trading Feb. 23, 1807, after a lonely, 20-year campaign by this evangelical believer. On the day of the vote, he bowed his head and wept as other members stood in Parliament and cheered him. But it would take an additional 26 years for Parliament to muster the courage to end the practice of slavery in the Empire altogether. Wilberforce heard about that impending victory as he lay on his deathbed (he died three days later). It would take yet another generation -- and a civil war -- to end slavery in the United States. We are still coming to terms with its terrible legacy.

No one said change is easy. But it is possible, with determination –- and the power of the Gospel.

Wilberforce was a highly intelligent, witty and talented politician on the rise when God got hold of him. Elected to Parliament at age 21, he was a commoner, but had friends in high places, including the Prince of Wales and William Pitt, the future prime minister. Yet it was an older friend who helped transform his life: John Newton. The former slave trader and author of the hymn “Amazing Grace” was hated and regarded as a “religious fanatic” by sophisticated society, but Newton became a mentor to his young friend. Newton and other early English evangelicals challenged Wilberforce, who was beginning a personal relationship with God, to live out his new faith in the worldly crucible of politics.

He eventually took on the challenge of ending slavery. In the process, Wilberforce “vanquished the very mindset that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia,” writes Eric Metaxas, author of “Amazing Grace,” the book upon which the movie is based.

“He saw the idea that all men and women are created equal by God, in His image, and are therefore sacred,” Metaxas observes. “He saw the idea that one must love one’s neighbor as oneself and that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us. These ideas are at the heart of the Christian Gospel, and they had been around for at least 18 centuries by the time Wilberforce encountered them.... But no entire society had ever taken these ideas to heart as a society in the way that Britain would. That was what Wilberforce changed forever.”

Was he one of a kind?

In a tribute to Wilberforce when he retired from Parliament, his friend, the poet Robert Southey, told him England “will not look upon your like again.” Not so. A fellow English believer and historical contemporary, the Baptist cobbler William Carey, was already changing history with similar courage and determination.

Carey launched the modern evangelical missionary movement with his writings -– but even more by the power of his personal example. Beginning in 1793, he spent four decades preaching the Gospel in India, teaching the poor to read, producing grammars and dictionaries in six Indian languages and tirelessly campaigning for laws against infanticide, child abandonment and the ritual burning of Indian widows. He did much of his heroic work in defiance of the powerful British East India Company –- which essentially ruled India at the time –- not to mention the clerical establishment of his own church.

Another giant of the 19th century was even shorter than Wilberforce: Lottie Moon of Virginia, claimed by some who knew her to be 4 feet, 3 inches tall. A brilliant scholar and a rebel, she answered a greater calling (like Wilberforce) after a life-changing encounter with Christ. Moon went to China in 1873 as one of Southern Baptists’ pioneering single woman missionaries. She campaigned for an end to the cruel practice of foot-binding among Chinese women, took countless risky journeys in the countryside, endured wars and rebellions. While spending nearly 40 years telling the Chinese about Jesus, she challenged, begged, cajoled and demanded in letters home that Southern Baptists send more missionaries to the lost. The annual mission offering named in her memory has helped send and support thousands of missionaries over the last century.

Personal forces have always shaped history: the living God first and foremost, the devil -– and human beings, who choose to serve one or the other. Choosing not to serve is also an option, of course. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, as the saying goes. Thank God that William Wilberforce, William Carey and Lottie Moon chose to serve, regardless of the cost or the opponents arrayed against them.

Wilberforce challenged the believers of his day to “boldly assert the cause of Christ in an age when so many who bear the name of Christian are ashamed of Him.” We live in a similar age. Be assured that slavery still exists, in physical and spiritual forms, all over the world. Millions of literal slaves, and the hundreds of millions of spiritual slaves who live around them, wait to be freed through the liberating love of Jesus Christ.

Scripture clearly tells us God is still calling His people to bear witness to the One who can “proclaim freedom to the captives” and “set free the oppressed.”

Be a modern Wilberforce. Help free them!

Sermon in Exodus series, #13. Exodus 21:23-36

I'VE GOT RIGHTS!

================

I. We love rights.

A. And we want them now!

B. God gets into the details.

II. Everone has rights.

A. All human life has worth.

B. The special issue of slavery.

III. Every crime bears a penalty.

A. Death penalty for serious crimes.

B. Kind-for-kind punishment. (lex talionis) 21:23

C. Compensation in place of life. 21:30

IV. Understandable problems with God's law.

A. These laws reflect an ancient agrarian society.

B. Some of the laws reflect odious practices.

V. There is evidence of progressive revelation.

A. God reveals his character to us gradually, over time.

B. But the New Testament also maximizes our responsibility.

C. There is divine justice, even for us.

Sermon in 1 Timothy series - Clean Up the Church, #13. 1 Timothy 6:1-5

WAGE SLAVES

I. Being owned.

II. There are different forms of freedom.

A. The New Testament does not outlaw physical slavery.

B. Acceptance does not mean approval.

III. Example of Joseph.

A. Sold into Egyptian slavery by his brothers.

B. It would be natural to turn to bitterness or anger at God.

C. It time, God turned it around.

IV. Servitude is no fun.

A. Many have tyrants for bosses.

B. Treat your boss with respect. 6:1

C. Is it easier to have a Christian boss?

V. Not everyone accepts it. 6:3

A. Paul knew these principles would encounter resistance.

B. But this is how God changes the world.

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This sermon draws heavily on one by Rev. Ray Stedman.

“How I wish that you of all people would understand the things that make for peace.”

— Jesus (Luke 19:42)

Whether or not slavery was the direct cause for the first shots fired upon Fort Sumter in April of 1861 is a matter of scholarly debate. What is undeniable is that two and half centuries of slavery was the fuel that caused the American Civil War to ignite into a conflagration that resulted in 750,000 deaths. From its Jamestown beginnings the American colonies and later the United States practiced one of the most brutal forms of slavery the world has ever known. The preservation of an institution that systematically dehumanized millions of people for the sake of economic gain was not a thing that made for peace. Inevitably that kind of cruel exploitation would overflow its cup and unleash death and hell, bringing everything that is the opposite of peace. During the horror of the American Civil War, the “land of the free” became a burning Gehenna. Thirty percent of Southern men of fighting age were slain on battlefields that saw the birth of modern warfare. From now on, war would be totalized and mechanized. The four horseman of the Apocalypse galloped across America leaving a wake of war, disease, famine, and death.

But here is the tragic irony of this story. A spiritual revival had swept through America during the decade before the Civil War. Americans flocked to churches and evangelistic meetings. This was especially true in the more religious South where Christianity was embraced with greater fervency than in the less zealous North. Across the country revival was on, churches grew, conversions multiplied. People got saved, praised Jesus, and talked about heaven. Then they went to hell. Or at least the same kind of hell Jesus had warned Jerusalem about during his final days. Despite a great “revival,” a nation of Christians was thrust into a hell of cannonballs, Gatling guns, field hospitals, and amputation saws. Great cities were set aflame and fields were littered with thousands of rotting corpses. The fires were not quenched and the maggots did not die. What had gone wrong? Millions had “accepted Jesus” and shouted hosanna, but they did not know the things that make for peace. They prayed a sinner’s prayer, “got right with God,” and kept their slaves. They had a faith that would justify the sinner while bringing no justice to the slave. They had faith that gave them a ticket to heaven ... and a highway to hell. The religious fervor in the conservative churches of the South only served to convince them that they were blessed by heaven. They were quite certain God smiled upon their deep devotion to their southern-fried Jesus. If they had to go to war to preserve their freedom, so be it — God was on their side. They were sure of it. But there would be hell to pay.

To help you comprehend how wrong the conservative churches of the Antebellum South were, despite flaunting their faith in Jesus and clutching their well-worn Bibles, I’m going to enlist the help of someone who was there and saw it all: fellow Missourian Mark Twain. In the chapter entitled “You Can’t Pray a Lie” in Twain’s beloved novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck Finn has helped hide Miss Watson’s runaway slave, Jim. But Huck thinks he is committing a sin in helping a runaway slave. Huck had learned in Sunday School “that people that acts as I’d been acting goes to everlasting fire.” So in an act of “repentance” in order to save his soul Huck writes a note to Miss Watson and tells her where she can find her runaway slave. Now Huck is ready to pray his “sinner’s prayer” and “get saved” —

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I know’d I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off but laid the paper down and set there thinking — thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world and the only he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see the paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I know’d it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” — and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Huck Finn had been shaped by the Christianity he had found in his Missouri Sunday School — a Christianity focused on heaven in the afterlife while preserving the status quo of the here and now. Huck thought that helping Jim escape from slavery was a sin, because that’s what he had been taught. Huck knew he couldn’t ask God to forgive him until he was ready to “repent” and betray Jim. Huck doesn’t want to go to hell. Huck wants to be saved. But Huck loves his friend more. So Huck is willing to go to hell in order to save his friend from slavery. Twain is doing a masterful job of showing us how wrongheaded Christians can be about what constitutes salvation. For Huck to act according to justice he has to believe he is committing a great sin. For Huck to act Christlike he has to believe he is forsaking Christianity. For Huck to love his neighbor as himself he has to believe he is condemning his soul to hell. Think about that awhile!

Mark Twain used his skillful pen to skewer the conservative Christianity of the American South. If Mark Twain wasn’t a believing Christian (and he wasn’t) — he was a prophet to the prevailing Christianity of his day. This was a compromised Christianity in desperate need of a prophetic voice. In seeking to preserve an economy dependent upon slave labor, the southern churches had embraced a fatally distorted faith. Probably without even knowing what they were doing these Christians had quite effectively used Jesus and the Bible to validate their racist assumptions and protect their vested interests. They went to church on Sunday. They got saved. They loved Jesus. They waved their palms and shouted hosanna on Palm Sunday. But like the crowd in Jerusalem eighteen centuries earlier they didn’t know the things that make for peace. And Jesus wept over an America headed to hell. The churches were full and slavery continued ... until the Civil War. Then 750,000 people died for the sins of America.

This is more than a recitation of history; there’s a lesson to learn here. When we don’t know the things that make for peace we can barrel down the highway to hell, all the while singing about how much we love Jesus and how wonderful it is to be saved. This should disturb us. How can it be that generations of religiously observant people can say all the right things about Jesus and still be on the wrong road? How can we know the things that make for a good church service but not know the things that make for peace? Jesus says that something has hidden the peaceful way from our eyes ... and more often than not it’s a flag. (Lately we’ve been asking what the Confederate flag is trying hide.) If patriotism simply means the pride of place that inspires civic responsibility, so be it. But if patriotism means “my country right or wrong,” it’s a kind of groupthink blindness that hides the things that make for peace from our eyes. Unfurled flags of nationalism have a long history of hiding the things of Christ that make for peace. Whether they are Roman, Byzantine, Spanish, French, English, German, Russian, or American flags, when they hide the things that make for peace they are no longer the innocent banners of a benign patriotism. So what are the things that make for peace? What is it we need to perceive if we are to avoid the bloody boomerang of a self-inflicted hell? Jesus told us when he said —

“In everything do unto others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets. Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” — Matthew 7:12–14

The things that make for peace are the two great commandments: Love of God and love of neighbor ... but especially the second command. (Love of God is only validated by a co-suffering love of neighbor.) The “golden rule” of evaluating our actions through the eyes of our neighbor is the narrow and difficult road that leads to life and peace. The golden rule is the narrow gate. The narrow gate is not a sinner’s prayer, the narrow gate is the practice of the Jesus way. The narrow gate is fulfilling the law and the prophets by empathetic love of neighbor in imitation of Jesus. When we hate and vilify others for ideological reasons, when we demonize and dehumanize others for nationalistic reasons, when we use and exploit others for economic reasons, we are on the highway to hell — we have chosen the well-worn road that leads to war and destruction. The deeply disconcerting thing is that it is entirely possible to cruise down the broad road of impending doom while singing songs of praise to Jesus. It happened on the first Palm Sunday. It happened a hundred and fifty years ago in America. It continues to happen today. If we think Jesus shares and endorses our disdain and enmity for our enemies, we don’t know the things that make for peace and we are headed for an inevitable destruction ... even if it takes a generation or two to arrive at our horrible destination. If we console ourselves with the promise of heaven in the afterlife while creating hell in this present life, we have embraced the tawdry religion of the crusader and forsaken the true faith of our Savior.

The life of John Newton typifies what it means to be converted.

John Newton was born in 1725. His mother died when he was six years old, and at 11 he began life as a seaman. His early years were one continuous round of rebellion and sin. For a while he worked on the West African coast collecting slaves for sale to visiting traders. Eventually Newton became a captain of his own slave ship. The capturing, selling and transporting of black slaves to the plantations in the West Indies and America was a cruel and vicious way of life.

On March 10, 1748, he was returning to England from Africa on a particularly stormy voyage. Everyone thought the ship would be lost, and Newton began reading the classic Christian devotional by Thomas a Kempis, “Imitation of Christ.” The message of the book and the frightening experience at sea were used by the Holy Spirit to bring Newton to accept Christ as his Savior.

For the next several years he continued working as a slave ship captain. He tried to justify his work by seeking to improve conditions as much as possible. He even held worship services for the hardened crew each Sunday. Eventually, however, he felt convicted of the inhuman aspects of this work and led a strong crusade against slavery.

Newton became a minister and preached powerfully about Jesus. He also wrote one of the most-loved hymns of all time, “Amazing Grace.” At the age of 82 just before he died he proclaimed, “My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things: That I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great Savior!”

On his tombstone he had this statement engraved:

John Newton, ..., once an infidel and Libertine, a servant of slavers in

Africa, was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,

preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the Faith he had

long labored to destroy.”

When I was 6 years old my parents separated, my dad moving to Fort Worth, Texas, and my mother and I remaining in the county seat town of Decatur, Texas, where I was born. Those were halcyon days for Baptists, when church seemed at the center of family life, at least in Decatur, Texas. So every fall the Men’s “Brotherhood” would sponsor a “Father/Son Banquet” for the Royal Ambassadors (RAs) — Baptist Boy Scouts. And every fall from the time I was 6 until I was 10, when we moved to Fort Worth with my dad, I’d get a call from Johnny Ramey, a deacon at Decatur’s First Baptist Church, who, if memory serves, worked at the local Chevy dealership. “Billy,” he’d say, “I know your dad can’t make it, but I’ll take you to the Father/Son banquet. You’ll be my son for that night.” Over six decades later, the memory of that simple act remains my first cognitive lesson in Christian compassion, an entry point for spiritual formation.

These days, compassion seems elusive in American culture in general and American Christianity in particular. While Christian congregations and individuals offer compassionate witness and action every day, our theological squabbles, ecclesiastical divisions, and a tendency to write all sorts of people (right and left) out of the gospel often seem among our most distinguishing characteristics. For many observers we look downright mean, a public reputation more concerned with throwing people out than letting them in.

In a new book entitled, Mean Christianity: Finding our Way Back to Christ’s Likeness, Western Carolina University professor Billy Ogletree writes that such pietistic meanness “resonates with the experiences of countless individuals, yet it is absolutely antithetical to Christ and His teaching.” He asserts that, “A mean Christian claims Christ yet, at least some of the time, treats others in petty, offensive, or despicable ways. Selfishness may also motivate mean Christianity. Furthermore, a mean Christian may feel that their actions are justified, that their meanness is righteous.” Ogletree urges Christians to reconnect with Jesus as the primary guide toward forsaking the meanness that so easily besets us. Reading his impassioned study convinced me that we require a rebirth of compassion, and as quickly as possible.

Defining, let alone agreeing on, the nature of compassion is challenge enough. The Jewish Encyclopedia describes compassion in the Hebrew Bible as: “Sorrow and pity for one in distress, creating a desire to relieve, a feeling ascribed alike to man and God; in Biblical Hebrew, (“riḥam,” from “reḥem,” the mother, womb), “to pity” or “to show mercy” in view of the sufferer’s helplessness, hence also “to forgive” (Hab 3:2).”

In a 2017 Sojourners commentary entitled, “Can we Measure Christian Compassion in America,” Shively Smith writes: “In the Gospel of Matthew, the word for “compassion” (esplagchnisthē) occurs only five times, with Matthew 9:35-10:8 representing the first occurrence. Each time the language of compassion appears in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is the one feeling it after he has observed the state of those around him. He feels compassion for people afflicted physically and socially.” The Greek word literally means “from the bowels.” So from the womb or from the bowels; etymologically, biblical compassion begins in the depths of our being.

In Wishful Thinking, Frederick Buechner says that compassion “is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.” In its most basic sense, compassion is “the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it’s like to live inside somebody else’s skin.”

Writing in Meditations of the Heart, Howard Thurman distinguishes between pity as a “mixture of pride, arrogance, cunning,” and compassion, “the awareness that where my life begins is where our life begins; the awareness that the sensitiveness to your needs cannot be separated from the sensitiveness to my needs; the awareness that the joys of my heart are never mine alone — nor are my sorrows.” Compassion, he insists, is God “enlarging the boundaries of my heart.” This gospel-compassion is no mushy sentimentalism, but a liberating response to and for human beings, a radical kindness that sometimes outdistances our best efforts to control its boundaries.

Such gospel-compassion overtakes marginalized folks even when we try to withhold it from them. In slavery time, Southern white church-members qualified the gospel by insisting that baptism changed only the slaves’ eternal status, not their early condition. But try as they might, they could not keep the gospel’s liberating power from engaging and liberating the souls of the black folks. So in 1807, a Kentucky slave woman named Winney was disciplined by the Forks of Elkhorn Baptist Church where she was a member for saying that “she once thought it her duty to serve her mistress and master, but since the Lord had converted her she had never believed that any Christian kept Negroes or slaves.” And she got into more trouble for saying “she believed there was thousands of white people wallowing in hell for their treatment to Negroes — and she did not care if there was as many more.” Winney’s Baptist congregation “excluded” her from membership, but her witness remains, a conversion-based compassion that made chattel slavery a gospel impossibility. Whose conversion-compassion are we “excluding” right now?

That Baptist slave-woman-forebear teaches us this: A rebirth of compassion is inseparable from conversion, not as Jesus vaccination, but as a continuing religious experience with the resurrected Christ. We encounter a rebirth of our identity as followers of the Jesus Way, a compassion that compels us to revisit the meaning of the gospel at every human/humane turn.

So the Jesus of the Gospels becomes the radical hermeneutic for interpreting his and our message. Just when you think you know where he’s headed and where the kingdom of God is taking you, Jesus challenges yet another religious assumption, offers compassion to yet another theological and cultural “loser” — a “demoniac,” a Syro-Phoenician outsider female, a man the disciples thought blind because of his or his parents’ sin. In short, Jesus upends the accepted biblical/theological hermeneutic for the sake of compassion. Scary gospel; radical compassion; sinners reborn (again and again). Amen.

Christopher Hitchens’s book, GOD IS NOT GREAT, is subtitled HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING is a big word, but I guess Hitchens means it. According to him, “religion makes people do wicked things they wouldn’t ordinarily do ... the licenses for genocide, slavery, racism, are all right there in the holy text.”

By “holy text” he means the Bible, which raises a difficult question for people like Hitchens: If Christianity “licenses” slavery, then why was the abolition of slavery, both in antiquity and in modern times, driven by Christians?

As I write in my new book, THE FAITH, about to be published early next year, in the first-century Roman Empire, slavery was a fact of life — one which the writings of the New Testament reflect. But acknowledging social reality is not the same thing as “licensing” it.

When the Apostle Paul declared that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” he planted the seeds that would, one day, lead to the demise of the institution of slavery. Likewise, Paul’s inclusion of “slave traders” among those he identified as “lawbreakers” made it clear what he thought about slavery.

Historian Rodney Stark writes about the Church’s embrace around about the third century of what he calls “a universalistic conception of humanity.” This conception “[liberated] social relations between the sexes and within the family” and “greatly modulated class differences...” As Stark puts it, “more than rhetoric was involved when slave and noble greeted one another as brothers in Christ.”

Given this liberating ideal, it was only a matter of time before Christians sought to remove slavery from the Christian culture entirely. By the Middle Ages, it was agreed that “no man, no real Christian at any rate ... could thereafter legitimately be held as the property of another.”

It is true that Christians have not always lived up to these teachings: The record of the Church is not without blemish. But it is also true that when Christians kept and traded slaves, they were going against the teachings of their own religion. The theological question had long been settled.

Thus, when Spanish and Portuguese traders brought slavery to the New World, successive popes condemned the practice and even threatened to excommunicate slave traders and slave holders. The fact that they could not force European monarchs to obey them should not be held against Christianity — especially not by those who complain about Christians trying to impose their religion on others.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the fight against slavery and the slave trade was led by Christians like William Wilberforce in Britain and William Garrison in America. Like their early Church counterparts, they were motivated by Christian teaching on human dignity and equality.

Hitchens’s assertion that economic factors and not Christian abolitionists did away with slavery is, to put it mildly, absurd. Wilberforce and company succeeded DESPITE the economic interests, not because of them.

True, there are shameful episodes in Christian history. But what makes them shameful is the failure of Christians to live up to what Christianity requires — not what Hitchens imagines as its “licenses.”

How odd, then, that Hitchens and other militant atheists feel they have license to distort the facts when arguing against religion.

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This is part one in a five-part series.

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Copyright (c) 2007 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #20887]