Slaveholding = Heresy?

The founding faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS)—James P. Boyce, John A. Broadus, Basil Manly Jr., and William Williams—all owned slaves. Due to this stain on their legacy, there has recently been some debate concerning whether SBTS should remove its founders' names from their buildings and cease to honor them at all. Some critics of the SBTS founders have gone so far as to call them heretics, saying that slave-holding is a heresy.

For my part, I'm not too worried about what the SBTS buildings are named. I am more concerned about accurate theological/historical evaluations. Also: I do believe that Boyce's Abstract of Systematic Theology is an excellent work, and I would not want people to reject it, unread, due to the thought that Boyce is a heretic.

"Heretic" is a term for someone who denies a central tenet/first-order issue/core doctrine of the faith, as defined by creeds or confessions. "Hypocrite" is a term for someone whose lifestyle does not match his or her professed beliefs. This distinction is important. If you call someone a "heretic", but you cannot point to a specific core theological/Christological/soteriological doctrine as defined by a creed/confession, which the person in view explicitly denies, then you are using the term incorrectly. A person can be a hypocrite, or hypocritical in some area of life, and need repentance, without being a heretic, counted as outside the Christian faith. It is sinfully divisive to count people as heretics based on individual evaluation of a person's sin. Such heresy-hunting activity will inevitable magnify or else overlook others' sin depending on what is more or less offensive to one's own particular clique or tribe.

The hypocrisy of the antebellum slaveholders was particularly vile, and it is understandable that people today might wonder if slaveholding, being so serious, should be counted as a heresy. Note, however, that not all slaves themselves saw slaveholding (in itself) as indication that the slaveholder was necessarily a false Christian. For example: in Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped into slavery after have been born a freeman in New York, and who experienced and witnessed truly horrific examples of family separation and torture, nevertheless wrote of at least one slaveholder whom he encountered that seemed to have a genuine, active, transformative faith in Christ. Consider Northup's words concerning William Ford:

In many northern minds, perhaps, the idea of a man holding his brother man in servitude, and the traffic in human flesh, may seem altogether incompatible with their conceptions of a moral or religious life. From descriptions of such men as Burch and Freeman, and others hereinafter mentioned, they are led to despise and execrate the whole class of slaveholders, indiscriminately. But I was sometime his slave, and had an opportunity of learning well his character and disposition, and it is but simple justice to him when I say, in my opinion, there never was a more kind, noble, candid, Christian man than William Ford. The influences and associations that had always surrounded him, blinded him to the inherent wrong at the bottom of the system of Slavery. He never doubted the moral right of one man holding another in subjection. Looking through the same medium with his fathers before him, he saw things in the same light. Brought up under other circumstances and other influences, his notions would undoubtedly have been different. Nevertheless, he was a model master, walking uprightly, according to the light of his understanding, and fortunate was the slave who came to his possession. Were all men such as he, Slavery would be deprived of more than half its bitterness.

Northup wrote of his friend and fellow-slave Sam being converted to faith in Christ under Ford's influence.

Of course, Northup's is not the only view of the matter. I do think that it is also important to read the Appendix to Frederick Douglass' Narrative in which he asserts that "the overwhelming mass of professed Christians in America" are so tainted by their hypocrisy in allowing slavery that they are really a part of a grossly Pharisaical religion. He seems to doubt that someone unrepentantly enmeshed in the business of man-stealing (or its rotten fruits) could be a genuine believer.

HOWEVER: I do think that it is important to note that EVEN IF Douglass' evaluation is correct, the Pharisees themselves were not HERETICS.

The Pharisees were characterized by hypocrisy and had woes pronounced against them by Jesus; they needed repentance due to their hearts being wrong before the Lord. However, their fundamental belief system, though needing to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah, was correct, overall: to the point that even post-conversion Paul could say "I am a Pharisee" (see Acts 23:6).

MY POINT is that even the worst evaluation of the SBTS founders should not properly be considered as rendering them HERETICS. This is important because I believe that these flawed men, especially through Boyce's Abstract of Systematic Theology and SBTS' Abstract of Principles, have correctly handed down the faith once for all entrusted to the saints; the Church should treasure these writings. If these documents were produced by HERETICS, then these writings should be rejected. I believe that it would be a great loss to American Christianity if theologians like the founders of SBTS and Jonathan Edwards (another slaveholder) were discarded as heretics due to their involvement in the (admittedly diabolical) institution of American chattel slavery.

Related to this, I would also recommend the article, "Jonathan Edwards and His Support of Slavery: A Lament" by Jason Meyer.