The following is an edited extract and supplement from ‘Evangelicals, slavery and colonialism’, a paper given at the Westminster Conference 2022.
The Christian engagement with slavery in the past has come under fire in recent years, whether it be the Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, or Christians in the Southern States of America. What are we to think and say as Christians? ‘Man-stealing’ (cf. Exodus 21:16; 1 Timothy 1:10) was denounced as a sin by the Puritans in the Westminster Larger Catechism.
Samuel Rutherford expressed what was perhaps the strongest statement from a Puritan in his Lex Rex (1644). While he seemed to accept that slavery will exist in certain circumstances, he was clear that ‘Slavery should not have been in the world, if man had never sinned, no more than there could have been buying and selling of men, which is a miserable consequent of sin and a sort of death… A man being created according to God’s image, he is res sacra, a sacred thing, and can no more, by nature’s law, be sold and bought, than a religious and sacred thing dedicated to God.’
Richard Baxter in England and Cotton Mather in Massachusetts gave perhaps the fullest expressions to the position characteristically taken by Puritan pastors. Baxter was writing in the 1670s with a focus primarily on plantation slave owners. He reasoned, ‘Remember that God is their absolute owner, and that you have none but a derived and limited property in them; that they and you are equally under the government and laws of God; remember that God is their tender Father.’
