7 comments

1. Really encouraged by this. What I find interesting is how the reformed put up with Kinism. For example, Abounding Grace Radio just had an episode denouncing racism and Kinism. Then 2 weeks later thay have a show on preaching where they quote RL Dabney, an avowed white supremacist and Kinist. Why are we using Dabney when there are others to pick from who were not kinist? I brought it up to the Abounding Grace guys and they told me to “grow up” and banned me for commenting. I’m thinking they would have banned Jesus too.

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   • Pilgrim,

     Note the comment policy. I’m permitting your anonymous comment but I’m granting an exception to the rule.

     I struggle with what to do with guys like Dabney. Their racial views (and hence their anthropology) were deplorable and wrong and yet not everything they said was false.

     I’ve wrestled with this re Machen.

     How far do we go in cancelling dead people who sinned even grievously? Machen did so much important work and yet he was a segregationist. I’ve argued that his case was different from Warfield who was raised in a different context. Machen’s segregationism was almost inevitable. I don’t know enough about Dabney to say but I suspect the same was true of him.

     In this country we called a truce after the war and there was a deliberate attempt to reconcile and, to a certain degree, live with one another so as to avoid another civil war. Obviously, the Reconstruction was a disaster for black people in this country but at the same time, it’s not 1964. This is a different world than even the one into which I was born. Some people seem bent on tearing this country apart because it makes them feel morally superior.

     Good people can disagree about whether to quote Dabney. I think it’s the moral equivalent of eating meat in 1 Cor 8–10. Some people couldn’t eat meat without falling. Others could. The meat had been offered to the gods but as long as the pagan host didn’t make it a religious meal, a Christian was free to eat or not eat. We should apply this rule to reading dead sinners. Some people can’t do it. Fine. Don’t do it. If seeing a Dabney quote upsets you, then don’t read it but you can’t take away the freedom others have to read and quote dead sinners.

     There are no sinless people to quote except Jesus. Paul was a murderer. Peter denied Jesus. You can see how this goes. It’s a Baptist/over-realized eschatology that demands perfection now. We live in a fallen world. We’ll have perfection when Jesus returns.

     You may reply but only if you do so using your name, per the policy.

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     • Dr. Clark is right.

       Read my post below, Pilgrim, thanking the RPCNA for its actions. I have a decades-long history of opposing racist bigotry in the Reformed world. I write this, not in any way to defend Dabney’s bigotry, but to say we need to read him because he is important.

       For better or for worse, Dabney was a major figure in the development of Southern Old School Presbyterianism. We need to quote him and read him in academic circles to understand the movement he led and what happened after his death, including how the PCA began, and why. It is simply impossible to understand Dr. Morton Smith, the initial stated clerk of the PCA and one of its leading conservatives, without understanding Dabney, Thornwell, and the rest of the Southern Old School Presbyterian tradition.

       I would, however, avoid using them from the pulpit. I have personally addressed my concerns to a ruling elder who used another one of the major Southern theologians (Benjamin Palmer, who was, if it’s possible, even worse than Dabney and Thornwell on race issues and slavery) during a reading service on a Sunday when the minister was sick due to unexpected illness. I don’t think there is any advantage to reading a sermon by these men in a public worship service when far better options are available.

       However, classes are not public worship.

       It is impossible to understand the development of Old School Presbyterianism in the North without understanding their Southern allies in what was then still a single denomination, and later, how the PC(US) developed following the Civil War.

       Let’s be honest. If it had not been for the Southern Old School people, the fight between the Northern Old Schoolers and Northern New Schoolers could easily have ended in a victory for those who wanted to downgrade the confessions. Dabney, Thornwell, and their predecessors legitimately deserve credit for being confessionalists.

       It is possible to be on the right side of one battle and the wrong side of another.

       The great thing about the Covenanters is that they were on the right side of both confessionalism and abolition of slavery, and they suffered a great deal for their very unpopular stance. Very few people from the early 1800s can say that.

       My own view? If we read St. Augustine and are glad for his views against Pelagius and in favor of sovereign grace, but disagree with him on episcopacy, and view his attacks on the Donatists as being theologically correct but opening doors to very wrong views on Roman Catholic ecclesiastical authority, we can probably see Dabney and Thornwell in a similar though less favorable light.

       I have little doubt that Dabney and Thornwell would be less nice to me and my wife than I am being to them. Some of the founders of the PCA who cited these men as their mentors had to struggle to find a way to be polite to me and my Korean wife, and I think the way they dealt with my “race mixing” was to say, “He’s a Yankee who doesn’t know any better.” Others said, to my face, that my wife is not from the lineage of Ham so she is okay, but a marriage to a woman from sub-Saharan African ancestry would not be.

       What rot and rubbish.

       I think a lot of Nigerian Anglicans who are defending the faith against liberal blueblood English heretics with ivory skin and lineage back to the Anglo-Saxons, or at least the Normans, would say that their fidelity in the face of English apostates proves that salvation is by grace and not by race. God may well be using “colonized minority people of color” to show liberals that they are violating their own presuppositions by “refusing to listen to the marginalized voices and lived experience of colonized peoples.”

       The Reformed world of 30 and 40 years ago had some REALLY serious problems with racial issues. Up until recently, I thought that was dead and buried, or advocated by only a few well-meaning but wrong elderly people who would soon be going on to glory and getting their errors fixed at the Throne of Grace.

       As with Dr. Clark, I have far more patience with Dabney and Thornwell than I have with modern bigots. Men of the 1800s grew up with this stuff and thought it was standard conservative theology. Men who advocate such things today have no excuse.

       The RPCNA did what it needed to do by taking out the trash.

       Good for them.

       Sometimes denominations actually DO remain faithful to their theology over centuries despite pressure to conform to wrongheaded views.

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2. Good for the RPCNA.

   There are few denominations in the conservative Reformed world that have a history of clean hands on the issue of race. Denominations make mistakes, and most of the older denominations have at some point in the past made major mistakes on this issue. There was a day when “separate development of peoples” was standard teaching and few disagreed.

   Few, however, does not mean none.

   To the contrary and to their credit, the RPCNA, all the way back to the early 1800s, was not only declaring slaveholding to be incompatible with church membership and actively involved in the abolition movement, but after the Civil War, worked to start Black churches.

   Working among defeated enemies to plant churches wasn’t just a one-time thing. The RPCNA has an entire presbytery in Japan, begun during an era when just about the last thing most Americans wanted to do was be nice to the Japanese. They weren’t the only ones to go at first, but they deserve credit for staying when many others lost interest in a very hard mission field, and the result is an entire presbytery. Furthermore, the work of the Chao family (father and son) to translate Reformed material into Chinese when basically everybody else had given up on China as a lost cause has created the irony that most of the theologically conservative religious material available today in China is Reformed. That is almost entirely due to one man whose denomination decided to back his translation work when most other denominations thought the work in China was lost.

   Might be a bit of a pattern there of Covenanters not being afraid of hard work in hard places?

   Given that history, why anyone who has a racism problem would want to be a member of the RPCNA is beyond me. The RPCNA took unpopular stances on racial issues not just decades ago but two centuries ago. They’re getting a lot of applause today for taking a stance that the would ALSO have taken two centuries ago, or in the middle of the last century, when stances that now get them praise were deeply unpopular in too many conservative circles.

   There are a lot of Covenanters from the 1800s who would be very happy that their successors in denominational leadership are being consistent with its centuries-old principle that salvation is by grace, not by race, and that churches must not only give lip service but also act accordingly with that principle.

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3. Praise God.

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4. Glad to see someone else disagrees with Kinism.

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   • Amen. This greatly encourages my heart. 🙂

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