The troubling whitewashing of Jonathan Edwards' ownership of slaves by John Piper

Coming to terms with the flaws of your heroes can be rough.  We all need heroes, mentors, those who will inspire us and open our hearts and minds as we grow toward intellectual and spiritual maturity, but those to whom we look are not flawless.  In some cases, the flaw if well known.  Martin Luther, for example, wrote and spoke in favor of kind treatment of the Jews of Europe earlier in his Post-Reformation career, only to change course around 1536, ultimately writing a disgusting tract entitled, On the Jews and Their Lies.  This change in his thinking taints the last ten years of Luther's life, increases the scrutiny of anything he wrote in that period, and of course complicates his legacy because his antisemitism was influential in the road that eventually led to the Holocaust.  When considering Martin Luther, the bravery of "Here I stand, I can do no other" is weighed with the darkness that made a home in his thinking later in life.  People are complicated, they all have flaws, heroes are no exception.  Not every hero has a glaring flaw, let us not be that jaded, but some do, and pretending otherwise is a bad idea.

Which brings us to one of Christianity's great preachers, Jonathan Edwards, a leader of the Great Awakening along with George Whitefield, who was used by God to bring about tremendous reform in the American Church.  And a slave owner. {Jonathan Edwards' disturbing support for slavery: some reflections, by David Baker }  In 2019, Pastor Jason Meyer wrestled with Edwards' legacy in light of his owning of slaves, Jonathan Edwards and His Support of Slavery: A Lament, without attempting to sugarcoat or excuse Edwards' choices:

Jonathan Edwards had more intellectual firepower than any person reading this article, and he was a systematic thinker. He could connect theological dots like no one else. If he could succumb to such obvious, woeful oppression and injustice and theological hypocrisy, then we should be spurred on to greater levels of self-examination. Where are our blind spots? Or where do we willfully turn a blind eye to things we’re simply afraid to address?

And then this month, Meyer's mentor, who picked Meyer to succeed him as the lead pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, decided to revisit Jonathan Edward's legacy by speculating that Edwards owned slaves with good intentions: How Could Jonathan Edwards Own Slaves? Wrestling with the History of a Hero:

I do not know whether Edwards purchased the 14-year-old Venus to rescue her from abuse. I do not know whether she was given care in the Edwards home far above what she could have hoped for under many other circumstances at age 14. I do not know if the boy Titus was similarly bought to rescue him from distress and was then given hope. I do not know if the Edwardses used their upper-class privileges (including the power to purchase slaves) for beneficent purposes toward at-risk black children. The scope of what we do not know is very great.

If someone says, “Piper, this is just wishful thinking,” my answer is that indeed it is wishful thinking. I do not wish for one of my heroes to be more tarnished than he already is. But perhaps it is not just wishful thinking. My wishes are not baseless, however unlikely they may seem against the backdrop of mid-eighteenth-century attitudes. All I know of the godliness that Edwards taught, and in so many ways modeled, inclines me to wish in just this way. It is the sort of dream that, if it came true, would not surprise me.

Rather than wrestling with the contradiction in Edward's life and testimony that the owning of slaves makes clear, Piper has decided (at this particular moment) to attempt to excuse/explain this flaw, leading to predictable blowback: Christian Leaders React to John Piper’s Thoughts on His ‘Hero’ Who Owned Slaves By Jessica Lea and John Piper's 'Wishful Thinking' about Jonathan Edwards and Slavery, by Chris Gehrz.

This change of tone is particularly disturbing, in part, because John Piper himself had a much more balanced and God honoring answer to the fact that Edwards owned slaves in 2013: Slavery and Jonathan Edwards.  Had he left it at that, we wouldn't be questioning his thought processes and conclusions now.  My past self doesn't always agree with my current self, but hopefully that's because I've grown in wisdom and knowledge, maybe even humility, it is hard for me to see how this could be the case regarding this particular issue and John Piper.

There is much to admire about the life and ministry of John Piper, even if one rejects his strict Complementarianism, as I do, but this late in life attempt to polish the image of Edwards is certainly troubling.  When taken together with the choice of the seminary that Piper founded to make its new president Pastor Joe Rigney, whose current crusade (along with other like minded fellows) is to declare Empathy a Sin: Have you heard the one about empathy being a sin? by Mark Wingfield at the same time that Pastor Jason Meyer resigned from Bethlehem Baptist Church, along with two other pastors.  The three pastors in question were, as noted by Christianity Today the staff's most empathetic pastors.  {This article is insightful: Bethlehem Baptist Leaders Clash Over ‘Coddling’ and ‘Cancel Culture’ A debate over “untethered empathy” underscores how departing leaders, including John Piper’s successor, approached hot-button issues like race and abuse. KATE SHELLNUTT}.  #1 Rigney vs. Empathy, #2 Meyer and other pastors resign, #3 Piper speculates that Edwards owned slaves for good reasons.  

In the end, I don't know John Piper personally, and he certainly has no idea who I am.  I've never been to Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis.  And yet, at the same time that John Piper and Joe Rigney are badmouthing empathy and disparaging the idea of feeling the pain of others {declaring it to be a SIN of all things},  John Piper also decides to look on the sunny side of Edwards' ownership of slaves.  Taken together, these two purposeful stances are an ominous sign that doesn't belong in any church of any denomination: The pain felt by the oppressed is not their problem.

For more discussion of the "Empathy is Sin" debacle:

Empathy is Not a Sin, by Warren Throckmorton

“Your Empathy Is a Sin”: A Response to Desiring God, by Rebecca Davis

Empathy is a Virtue SCOT MCKNIGHT

That time UAW members worked with Quakers to build integrated housing

 I grew up in West Michigan with two uncles who were UAW members.  For many people, thinking about the UAW conjures up stories about Jimmy Hoffa, the good old days of Detroit's Big Three, or the involvement of the UAW with Democratic politics.  In 1955, something happened in Milpitas, California, that didn't have anything to do with what you think of when I say UAW, and it had an unlikely accomplice: the Quakers.

In 1955, a developer named David Bohannon built a white-only subdivision named Sunnyhills in Milpitas, other developers built similar whites-only housing projects.  Ford had announced that it was moving its assembly plant from Richmond (north of San Francisco) to Milpitas (north of San Jose).  It would not be difficult for the white middle class UAW workers to find new housing in the area, but almost impossible for the plant's Black workers.  

At this point, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC, a Quaker group committed to racial integration) offered to helped Ford's housing committee find a developer willing to build integrated housing.  There was just one catch, everyone else was committed to stopping any such project.

The first hurdle was financing, no San Francisco Bay or San Jose area financial institution would lend them the money to build the houses, so the AFSC went to Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's vice-president, also a Quaker, who agreed to finance the project (this despite Met Life's own history of financing racially segregated projects).

Problem solved, now we can move ahead and build homes for workers with good paying jobs, right?  Nope.  The Santa Clara Board of Supervisors rezoned the chosen housing site from residential to industrial.  When they picked a new plot, the Mountain View officials made it clear that no permits would be issued.  A third attempt resulted in the local town increasing the minimum lot size to 8,000 square feet (from 6,000), ensuring that such homes would be unaffordable to middle class workers.  The builder recruited by the AFSC gave up and walked away from the project.

The new builder hired by the AFSC wanted to build two separate segregated projects, a white one in the suburbs and one for Blacks between the Ford plant and land zoned for heavy industry.  Here is where this ugly story finds a ray of hope.  The choice of moving ahead with these two projects was put to the UAW workers of the new Ford plant.  The majority of these workers were white, and had much less trouble finding housing than their co-workers.  "Although the membership was overwhelmingly white, the union adopted a policy that it would support only developers who would commit to integrated housing." (The Color of Law, p. 118, emphasis mine)

A third builder obtained a tract of land next to David Bohannon's whites-only Sunnyhills project.  The UAW was able to tell its Black members in Richmond that a new development, Agua Caliente, was being built.  "David Bohannon's company, however, remained fiercely opposed to an integrated project adjoining Sunnyhills, and after a San Francisco newspaper reveled the plan to establish 'the first subdivision in the Bay Area where Negro families will be sold homes without discrimination,' the company began to pressure the newly formed Milpitas City Council to prevent the construction of Agua Caliente by denying it access to sewer lines." (p. 119)  The City Council follow suit, raising the sewer connection fee by a factor of 10.  It was a clear plan to prevent minorities from living close to Sunnyhills.  When the builder persisted, despite this racist price increase, Bohannon's company filed a nuisance lawsuit to prevent the project from using a county owned drainage ditch between the properties.  The UAW, not known for rolling over, responded with their own offensive, boycotting the Sunnyhills project, and showing up at open houses to discourage other would-be buyers.

Eventually, Bohannon sold his company to a new developer who also purchased Agua Caliente, and construction was able to be completed.  Problem over?  Not yet.  The FHA continued to refuse to insure mortgages to borrowers living in integrated neighborhoods (a racist federal policy), making the cost of mortgages to buyers in the development higher with an increased 5.5-9% interest rate.  This could be thought of as an 'integration fee', designed to discourage integrated housing projects.  The UAW offered to guarantee the loans with its pension fund, at which point the FHA backed down provided that the development be converted to a co-op so that Blacks owned a piece of the housing development not individual homes.

In the end, the efforts of the Quaker AFSC and the UAW resulted in a completed project, but the higher cost of delays, legal fees, and financing made the homes affordable only to Ford's highest paid workers.  The Ford plant closed in 1984, and today Milpitas has many Hispanic and Asian families, but only 2% of the population is Black.

"The Milpitas story illustrates the extraordinary creativity that government officials at all levels displayed when they were motivated to prevent the movement of African Americans into white neighborhoods...part of a national system by which state and local governments supplemented federal efforts to maintain the status of African Americans as a lower caste, with housing segregation preserving the badges and incidents of slavery." (p. 122)

While this story is disturbing for how deep and abiding it reveals racism to be in America's story, it also shows a second theme: the power of good men and women to fight injustice, even if they can't always achieve a clean win.  So, when you need an interesting historic anecdote, share the time that the UAW worked with Quakers to integrate a housing project in California.

* This post is adapted from The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

The moral question of Avengers: Infinity War (Spoiler Free)

There is a central moral question at work in Avengers: Infinity War between the protagonist, the villain Thanos, and the multitude of antagonists, the Avengers, Guardians, and various other Marvel heroes.  The goal of Thanos (no spoiler here as the trailers explained it months ago) is to wipe out half of the life in the universe in order to "balance" life and usher in an age of abundance and peace.  At the root of the motivation of Thanos is the fear of overpopulation (and with it environmental degradation) leading to suffering and strife over limited resources.  In other words, in order to significantly decrease suffering and increase happiness, countless sentient lives have to be snuffed out.  Thanos believes that the ends justify the means (his goal is worth killing over), conversely the various heroes reject this moral equivalence, maintaining the sanctity of all life.

Fear of overpopulation is nothing new for humanity, in 1798 the British economist Thomas Robert Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population which predicted that population would double every 25 years but agricultural increases could only be incremental, thus resulting in widespread famine and war unless significant birth control measures were to be taken.  Malthus' warnings influenced many, among them the German imperialists who contended that Germany needed Lebensraum ("living space") to accommodate its growing population, inevitably at the expense of Germany's Slavic neighbors to the east who would need to be eliminated or turned into serfs.  The unforeseen agricultural revolution that followed after Malthus' dire predictions made the billions of human beings living in the 20th century possible, although fear of overpopulation remained, typified by the sci-fi movie in 1973, Soylent Green.  With the population of the world in 2018 at 7.6 billion and rising, that fear isn't likely to go away anytime soon, thus the question remains: How much of a problem is rising population, and what is the moral response to it?

 As stated earlier, the response of Thanos to the fear of overpopulation is genocide, a willingness to kill in war, planet by planet, half of the population, and the hope that he can obtain all six of the infinity stones for his gauntlet and then finish his task across the universe with a "snap of his fingers".  The heroes in Infinity War are faced with the question of the value of life on a much smaller scale as they must contemplate self-sacrifice in order to attempt to stop Thanos.  While Thanos was willing to kill on an epic scale to achieve his goal, the heroes must be willing to risk their own lives, a question whose consequences they face multiple times in the movie.

The self-sacrifice of an individual to save many is certainly a theme embraced by Christianity, it is after all what Jesus Christ did when he accepted the task of dying upon the cross as a sacrifice for the sins of humanity.  In order to save billions, Jesus willingly carried the cross upon which he died.  Thankfully, that sacrifice was not in vain, for with his resurrection he obtained victory over both sin and death for all those who would believe in him.

It will not be known until after Avengers 4 (set to release in 2019) what the final cost of confronting and possibly defeating Thanos will be for the Marvel heroes, but the principle established by their decision to oppose him is one in which life is considered a precious thing, and while self-sacrifice may prove necessary to stop great evil, it is not a decision to be made casually precisely because life is precious.  

Why Lance Armstrong's cheating still hurts.

If you're like me, you don't watch much cycling on TV, nobody does.  Yet a few years ago I found myself watching the Tour coverage so that I could root Lance on against the world (and especially the annoying French who always hated him for winning their race); it seemed impossible that he had that extra gear, that ability to dig deep when it mattered most.  I admired that drive because I remember it well from my days of competitive running, although I had no more talent than the next guy, I always managed to pass somebody at the end.
And now Lance is going to admit to the world what he's been denying loudly for decades, he cheated.  It seems that everybody in cycling was cheating (Baseball fans may recognize this notion), and he felt the need to join them to have a chance of winning.  I really did like Lance as an athlete, not so much as a husband, but athletes are rarely good role models (as Charles Barkley famously said).  And now this.
Even though I know that putting your faith or trust is another person opens you up to disappointment, I can't help myself.  The theology of it I understand, Paul makes it clear in Romans that there are none righteous, none that we can put on a pedestal, all have flaws.  Certainly the lives of the O.T. saints confirm the need to proceed with caution (everybody's hero David certainly have a dark side worse than most). 
And yet we, myself along with you, find ourselves believing that this person will be different; that this politician, actor, athlete, teacher, pastor, or friend will be different.  They'll never let us down and they'll always do the right thing.  When the inevitable letdown happens, we can't help but feel the disappointment.
So why do we do it?  Why do we keep on believing in people when only God can promise to never disappoint us?  Simple: we need heroes.  This world is too full of moral evil for us to cope with our own struggle against it without having heroes to look up to.  Real people living right now (on top of the comic book and fictional characters we escape from reality with) that can encourage us by their own example.
In the end, that's a good thing; we need to put our trust in people too, we can't simply say that we trust in God because our faith is lived out in this world; it is here that we must make our stand, it is here that we must sacrifice of ourselves to help others, and it is here that we need to believe that a guy can come back from cancer to be a champion, even if that belief hurts in the end...It turns out that it's worth the occasional pain of being let down to find people in life worth believing in; after all, God believes in you, his Son came to prove it.