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- The Legacy of Wilberforce, Part 2 January 27, 2012
- The Legacy of Wilberforce, Part 1 January 13, 2012
- Telling God's Story December 30, 2011
Regis Nicoll is a Centurion of The Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. After a 30-year career as a nuclear specialist, Regis became a freelance writer who writes on current cultural issues from a Christian perspective. His work regularly appears on BreakPoint online and SALVO magazine among other places. Regis also teaches and speaks on a variety of worldview topics, covering everything from Sharing the Gospel in a Postmodern Generation to String Theory. As a men's ministry leader in his community, Regis also conducts seminars for the spiritual development of men.
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Friday, January 27, 2012 | 17:47 PM
As discussed in Part 1, it took nearly a half-century of dedicated advocacy by William Wilberforce and his Clapham friends before emancipation became reality in the British Empire. It was a frustratingly long time, but across the Atlantic, the prize took much longer to achieve and exacted a much higher price.
In the United States, the end of slavery came after a hundred years of abolitionism culminated in a war that claimed over 600,000 lives. While Britain was able to unite the nation around a shared vision of morality and justice, the United States was torn asunder by a bloody conflict that left scars felt for generations afterward.
Which raises the question: “What made the difference?” How did Great Britain achieve the same goal in half the time and without major violence? In his essay “Jefferson and Wilberforce: Leaders Who Shaped Their Times,” Ray Blunt of the Washington Institute suggests that it was a difference in worldview -- one was based on Christian principles, and the other on Enlightenment ideals.
A conflicted advocate
Among the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson was the best poised to champion the cause of abolition. His natural eloquence and unrivaled passion for liberty landed him the authorship of the Declaration of Independence, in which he penned the enduring phrase, “all men are created equal.”
Throughout his tenure as a Virginia statesman, a U.S. Secretary of State, Vice President, and a two-term President, Jefferson was a stanch supporter of abolition. He advocated emancipation in Virginia, denounced Britain’s slave trade, banned slavery in the Northwest Territories, and signed a bill outlawing international slave trade just days after Parliament passed a corresponding act in Britain.
Yet during all of this, even until his death, Jefferson was a slave owner. Benjamin Banneker, a black mathematician at the time, challenged Jefferson to explain how his lofty ideal of “created equal” squared with the practice of “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren.” Jefferson replied, assuring Banneker of his commitment to the equality of American blacks.
But for Jefferson, equality meant something different than it did to those like Banneker who took the Declaration at face value. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote, “This unfortunate difference in colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”
Why did Jefferson see a “powerful obstacle” to emancipation? Was it because he was a plantation owner with huge debts who could see no way to free his own slaves? Did he fear, as he expressed in Notes, that “the slave, when free, might mix with . . . the blood of his master”? Or was it because one of his slaves was allegedly a mistress who, according to Virginia law, would have had to leave the state once freed?
While we may never know for sure, Jefferson’s proposal that emancipation should be contingent upon expatriation to Africa was doomed from the get-go. Not only did few slaves desire to return to their native land, the numbers involved (over half a million at the time) made it impractical.
It seemed that when the time for action was due, Jefferson’s vision was strangely at odds with the principles he enshrined in the Declaration. Continue reading here.
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Friday, January 13, 2012 | 17:45 PM
Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Isabella Baumfree are legendary figures in the U.S. abolitionist movement. They are among the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose Christian faith was a source of strength during the long struggle for freedom and civil rights. Collectively, their moral conviction and courage helped to secure the liberties ofwhich everyone today is a beneficiary.
There is scarcely a child of elementary school age who doesn’t know of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. Yet ask a college graduate if he’s heard of William Wilberforce, and you are as likely to get “You’re making that name up, right?” as a look of acknowledgement. The few who do remember him probably recall little more than that he was a prominent Brit who played a role in abolition.
While only 3 percent of Americans and 10 percent of Brits today know anything about Wilberforce, in 1858 Abraham Lincoln remarked that “every schoolboy knew his story."
So who was William Wilberforce, and how did he capture the admiration of everyone from schoolchildren to an American president? The answers are found in two excellent biographies, Amazing Grace by Eric Metaxas and William Wilberforce: A Hero for Humanity by Kevin Belmonte. Read on...
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Friday, December 30, 2011 | 10:35 AM
It seems peculiar that the gospel reading for the first Sunday of Advent centers not on Christ’s first coming, but his second. In all three liturgical years, the gospel passage is taken from the Olivet Discourse -- Jesus’ rather lengthy response to the eschatological curiosities of the disciples. But maybe that is not as peculiar as it seems.
In arresting prose, the synoptic writers report the Creator of all things privileging the disciples with secrets about end things. Interweaving predictions about the destruction of Jerusalem and His future return to earth, Jesus tells them of wars, famines, false Christs, and more. His purpose was not to shock or frighten them, but to prepare them -- and not just for the far-off events that provoked their curiosity.
Punctuating His revelations are warnings to be watchful, ready, and engaged in faithful service -- imperatives for God’s people in every age. But for the disciples those warnings had immediate relevance, which, like many times before, went unheeded.
For in a matter of hours, Jesus would be prostrate in the garden praying, while his disciples were sleeping; He would be hauled away by an angry mob, while His disciples fled in panic; He would be brought before a kangaroo court to be ridiculed, spat upon, and struck, while one of His closest intimates vehemently and repeatedly denied him; He would be scourged, marched to Golgotha, and nailed to the cross, while men who had been His constant companions cowered in an upper room, abandoning Him to His persecutors.
Incredibly, after three years at the feet of their Master, the disciples were no better prepared for the unfolding of prophetic history than they were at the beginning of their tutelage. And that should trigger a question for us: Are we prepared? Standing in history between the Incarnation and the Parousia, are we advancing his kingdom as we watch for His return?
Maybe, more to the point, are we even expecting His return? Given the 2000-year lapse, have His warnings slipped into the cluttered closets of our memory? Or, worse, has the delay eroded our confidence in His prophesy or, for that matter, in Him? Continue reading here.
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Friday, December 16, 2011 | 14:19 PM
Reader: What follows is the latest installment of The Swillpit Chronicles. Chronologically, past installments are: The Matter of Abortion, The Matter of Stem Cells, On Science and Origins, Evolution Narratives, Toward Nihilism or Spiritualism?, Carnal Knowledge, The Immunized Believer, A Useful Religion, Doomsday-ism, and The God of Science.
The Swillpit Chronicles, No. 11, “’Tis the Season”
Dear Swillpit,
It’s that time of year again! The weeks -- no, months -- of preparations for the Event reached febrile proportions just a few weeks ago. “Black Friday,” they call it. Oh, the irony!
On the same day of the week that an angry mob rushed to put a wooden cross on His back, bargain-crazed shoppers rush to put a financial one on theirs, buying gifts they can’t afford for people who don’t need them, that wear out, break down, or become obsolete by the time the season rolls around next year -- all to the melody that fills the retail aether, “White Christmas.”
Far and away, Swillpit, this is my favorite time of year. But it wasn’t always so.
For centuries we thought that His promise to “put enmity” between our Master and “the woman” was an idle threat. Then, out of nowhere, a young peasant Jewess is told that she will be “blessed.” The announcement sent shockwaves throughout our chattel-filled caverns. If true, it signaled -- oh, no, it couldn’t, could it?
Down here the gnashing and wailing ramped up until Crumgrub, I think it was, picked up on a little but important detail that escaped our notice on first hearing: The girl was unmarried. That’s right, the vessel for His grand entrance would be an unwed teenager engaged to an old duffer.
We thought surely our old Rival couldn’t be serious. If the girl wasn’t stoned for adultery, her child would be born illegitimate. Either the lad would be snuffed out of existence before He drew a breath or He would be a social outcast. This was how he planned to “crush our Master’s head?” What an addle-brained scheme!
Someone snickered, setting off a chain reaction that exploded into a rumbling howl that, I have on good account, created a minor seismic event up there with all the nuisances of shifting tables and rattling pots.
Without delay, agents were dispatched to idlers known to have a quick eye for indiscretion and ready tongue for rumor. And, whew, did those tongues set to wagging at the first whiff of impropriety! Although the nattering didn’t result in our hoped-for stoning -- largely, because of the dotard’s shocking decision to marry the girl -- the rumor survived, if just below the surface of dinner conversation.
From time-to-time a knowing nod or hand-covered murmur revived memories about the questionable circumstances of his birth. It had the delightful effect of contributing to the general skepticism that ultimately led to his rejection and execution.
I recall my satisfaction, when he was hanging on the cross as a criminal, thinking how fitting -- even poetic -- that at the other end of His life he had been lying in a manger as a bastard. But my satisfaction was short-lived...Continue reading here.
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Friday, December 2, 2011 | 20:20 PM
In Part 1 and Part 2, we found that when we plunge down the rabbit hole of reality and enter the realm of photons, electrons, and quantum wave functions, what we discover is weirder than we ever could have imagined.
Among the things that strike us peculiar are things in identity crisis -- things that act sometimes as particles and sometimes as waves. And try as hard as we may to discern what they really are, their schizophrenia thwarts our every effort.
What’s more, if we fine-tune our looking glass, we find not a solid assortment of detached and distinct particles, but a murky lattice of objects that defy precise description. To be sure, quantal objects and their behaviors upturn everything we thought we knew about the world and how it works.
In the world we know, the laws of Newton reign, allowing us, for instance, to determine the complete trajectory of a baseball once we know its initial conditions and all the forces acting on it. But that’s in the world we know. Continue reading here.
