(Receive our blog posts in your email by clicking here. If the author links in this post are broken, please visit our Free PDF Library and click on the author’s page directly.)
Jacob Green once famously declared in a 1778 sermon delivered in the midst of America’s War of Independence: “Can it be believed that a people contending for liberty should, at the same time, be promoting and supporting slavery?” Not all American Presbyterians have shared his sentiment at all times, and few issues historically have divided the Presbyterian Church like the issue of slavery; but generally speaking, a review of the early deliverances of the Presbyterian Church in this country — including the Reformed Presbyterian of North America (RPCNA) in 1800 which barred membership to slaveholders — reveals a stand against slavery and in favor of freedom for all.
An overture by a committee of the Synod of New York and Philadelphia made this memorable statement in 1787:
The Creator of the world having made of one flesh all the children of men, it becomes them as members of the same family, to consult and promote each other's happiness. It is more especially the duty of those who maintain the rights of humanity, and who acknowledge and teach the obligations of Christianity, to use such means as are in their power to extend the blessings of equal freedom to every part of the human race.
The final approved version of the 1787 Synodical statement was worded differently - encouraging religious education and supporting the eventual abolition of slavery. This final 1787 statement was republished by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) in 1793. The following year, and for over two decades afterwards, an explanatory clause on the sin of man-stealing in connection with Question 142 (on the Eighth Commandment) in the Westminster Larger Catechism was published along with the Constitution of the PCUSA. For more details on this chapter in early American Presbyterian church history, see the relevant appendix in George Bourne’s Picture of Slavery in the United States of America, and Charles Hodge’s The Constitutional History of the Presbyterian Church, as well as this earlier Log College Press blog post about Bourne and RPCNA pastor Alexander McLeod regarding man-stealing. Also, the deliverances of Synod and the General Assembly on this subject may be consulted at our Minutes page.
Meanwhile, the profound and Biblical simplicity of the original 1787 statement on freedom for all remains worthy of remembrance. Even 155 years after ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the struggle for freedom for all in America and around the world continues in some respects, and as God “hath made of one blood all nations of men” (Acts 17:26), we need not ask, as the lawyer did in Luke 10, “Who is my neighbor?” - not only is all mankind our neighbor, but especially the oppressed and those in need, such as the one to whom the Good Samaritan rendered aid. May the words of a committee in 1787 ring in the ears of Christians today, which call us to “use such means as are in [our] power to extend the blessings of equal freedom to every part of the human race.”
