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Caruthers hears God’s claim upon American slaves expressed in the words, “My people.” He divides the claim under two subheadings: “On the Creation and Preservation” (pp. 5–60) and “Redemption” (pp. 61–136). A similar division is found in Caruthers’s undated sermon on First Samuel 15:29, where he describes God’s character and the “corresponding affections towards him as our Creator, Preserver, and Redeemer.”34 Using this same division, American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders develops lines of argument under each of these headings. In this chapter the content subsumed under the headings of the Exodus claim is examined in two parts, the first part covers creation and preservation and the second, the covenant of redemption.35

Creation and Preservation

The claim—“My people”—of the Exodus text is based on creation. The unity of the human race guarantees that if the Hebrews are God’s people then so are the Africans. God’s claim upon Israel or any nation is based first on his relationship to them as their creator. We can understand God’s absolute right to creation, Caruthers argues, by way of our own feelings about the imperfect but legitimate claims of people to their possessions, inventors to their inventions, or farmers to their crops. God “has made everything out of nothing and has given to all men their existence” thus he has “a perfect right to employ or dispose everything as he pleases.”36 If the creator has made humanity “of one blood” then “for one to compel others . . . to serve him all their life without compensation, and to entail that compulsory service upon his unborn posterity, is unjust, inhumane and criminal before high heaven.”37The claim of Pharaoh or American slaveholders is “no right that can be made good in the court of heaven, nor at the bar of reason or before their own consciences . . . but God’s claim is valid and cannot be disputed.”38

Moreover, in the creation of humanity God has already given “everything which makes existence comfortable or desirable.”39 The explicit declarations of Gen 1:28–30 and their alteration after the flood in Gen 9:2–3 are in view. “The fruits of the earth, the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air and fish of the sea, with the earth itself as the source from which the means of subsistence for man and beast are to be obtained include all that has been granted to the children of men by the Creator,” he writes, warning, “and all they can claim as their property.”40 “You may have the earth and its products,” he warns again, “but on your fellow man you must not lay your hand unless it becomes necessary in self defense or for the prevention of a crime.”41 From creation Caruthers deduces a “ fundamental principle, that we can have no right to hold any thing as property without an express grant from the Creator,” which he makes, “ the basis of all my arguments.”42 Everything that humanity should or ought to possess was expressly given by their creator but “all the rest, the world of intelligent beings, he has reserved for himself.”43 No allowance was made at creation for human beings to possess their own species. Humanity is not made to rule over humans, only the lesser creatures. As such life and labor is marked by a measure of freedom, self-sufficiency, and self-determination which ought not be encroached upon by others. From the creation of humanity, Caruthers sees “great principles . . . distinctly given which are easily comprehended and are applicable at all times and in all circumstances.”44 In its historical context the text is God’s counter claim to the illegitimate demands of Pharaoh upon the Hebrews but ethically it applies to all situations of similar circumstances in the created order. It is on this foundation that Caruthers asserts the universal claim of the Exodus text.

Caruthers casts American slaveholders in the mold of Pharaoh. Just as his claim to the Hebrews usurps God as their creator, “so is the claim of all slaveholders to the services of their slaves,” Caruthers writes, “ entirely false and consequently sinful.” Because the slaveholders’ have no such authorization from God, their claim, like Pharaoh’s, is “utterly unfounded.”45 Humanity is in the image of God, created to enjoy God’s favor, and his possession alone. Because there is no allowance for slavery at creation, American enslavement of Africans is a criminal action against God, “robbing them of their birthright and invading the prerogative of God.”46

Nor does the slavery generally found in antiquity justify American slavery. Speaking of slavery’s advocates, he finds it “strange that men of talents, extensive learning, and hopeful piety, would, in this nineteenth century and in this land of boasted freedom, science and general intelligence” attempt to justify slavery because it is found in antiquity.47 Since “every conceivable abomination” and “every possible form of injustice and oppression” and “every atrocity” and “every wrong” and “every species of vice” could be justified by its alleged antiquity with this line of reasoning, then the advocates of slavery are only demonstrating by this assertion “a conscious want of more substantial arguments or a careless indifference in regard to truth.”48 If the slavery issue “ can not be settled by a fairer process of reasoning” than this, then “it had better be given up.”49 Caruthers then devotes twenty pages of his manuscript to an examination of the histories of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome in order to prove that American slavery has no parallel in the ancient world. Not even in Egypt, he insists, did Israel’s situation reach such a height of inhumanity because there was “no intimation of an edict that their bondage should be upon them forever.” Pharaoh, he writes, probably “thought of nothing more than holding them under authority while he lived.”50 Finding no parallel to the perpetual racial slavery of Antebellum America, he argues that the “alleged antiquity of slavery furnishes no justification of the practice.” And even if “slavery always has existed in the world and . . . always will exist,” he writes, still “it would be no proof that slavery is right and that we or any other people can perpetuate it without woeful criminality.”51

Joined to creation is the category of “preservation,” which describes the stability of creation under God’s continuing care. For Caruthers and his contemporaries, “Preservation” is the first part of a two-fold concept of “providence” formulated in chapter 11 of the Westminster Confession of Faith and elsewhere as God’s “preserving and governing all his creatures and all their actions.” Charles Hodge explained preservation as “the omnipotent energy of God by which all created things . . . are upheld in existence, with all the properties and powers with which He has endowed them.”52 William Sherlock reasons similarly, citing Acts 17:28 and Heb 1:3 to support the division of providence into “preservation and government,” the former emphasizing “that God upholds all things in being from falling back into their first notion, and preserves their natural virtues, powers, and faculties, and enables them to act, and to attain the ends of their several natures.”53

Slavery violates God’s ongoing relationship with creation because it interprets perceived differences between ethnic groups for the purpose of exploitation, undermining the unity and equality of humanity established at creation. Any physical, mental, or external inequalities that might exist between people or races “subserve his own wise and beneficent purposes” but the “inequalities which man has made . . . immensely increased the degradation and wretchedness of our race.”54 The use of “inequalities in physical strength, in mental capacities and external advantages” to justify slavery, in Caruthers’s view, is only “subserviency to personal and local interests.”55 To the contrary, inequalities in the “variety of phenomena and uniformity of design” in the natural world constitute an instructive analogy for similar variations in humanity. He writes:

The hills are as important in their place as the lofty mountains, the rivulets as the majestic rivers and the lake as the mighty oceans, but must not be removed nor arrested in their course. The smallest asteroids have an important purpose to answer in the solar system as well as the mightiest orbs but must be left free to revolve in their appropriate spheres.56

Caruthers’s intends all this as an analogous illustration: It is the Africans who have been “removed” from their home, “arrested in their course” and so the universe has been plunged into chaos. The supremacy of human freedom cannot be empirically proven but is instinctively perceived and supported by heuristic arguments drawn from the creator’s ongoing relationship with the world. Just as God “has made every planet and asteroid in solar system the right size,” he writes, “so he has made the earth and every thing on it—every continent, sea, and river, every man and everything else of the right proportions; but has given man no authority to meddle with his arrangements.”57 Just as the “mightiest orbs” move along their course undisturbed, so all humanity “must be left free.”58 Caruthers deduces from both the creation and preservation of humanity that the “inequalities which the Creator has made to subserve his own wise and beneficent purposes” must never be used as the basis of the wrongful inequalities in the realm of “civil and religious rights.”59

Caruthers believes that “if left to the unrestricted operation of those laws which the Creator has established the inequalities would not be of long duration in any one line of descent but soon change . . . ” due to a process of “unceasing alternations of depression and elevation . . . indispensable to the progress of society.”60 Specifically, “an unvarying law” of human society is that “those who have acquired or inherited wealth and favor and high position gradually lose their intellectual enterprise and are left behind in the race of improvement and of social advantage.”61 Such a law accounts for the experience of the African people. “ In the early ages of Christianity,” he writes, “the gospel had quite an extensive and thorough influence along the Nile and over all the northern part of Africa,” a region populated by “flourishing churches”, and the “most learned pious and useful ministers” but now they are treated “with contempt and rigor.”62

According to Caruthers not only were the early ages of Christianity times of flourishing for the Africans, but the larger history of the African race reveals the working of this “unvarying law” mentioned above and contradicts the presuppositions of racism. The creation and preservation of the African race is not without change or “vicissitude” that is found in “all the works and operations of the divine Being.”63 Caruthers’s thinking on this point is best understood in the larger context of the battle against nineteenth-century racism waged by nineteenth-century Afrocentrism. Determining the degree to which he was in agreement with or influenced by the tenets of nineteenth-century Afrocentricism—a universal history of humanity in which blacks are the founders and leaders of all cultures—is beyond the scope of this book. Regarding the debate over the world-wide significance of the ancient African culture, he might have concurred with Wilson Jeremiah Moses’ conclusion that “certain aspects of the so-called Afrocentricism have been sensibly argued” but are “unrelated to the fanciful exaggeration that African Americans are, in some exceptional or exclusive way, heirs to the civilization of the ancient Nile.”64 There is not enough information to know what Caruthers actually thought on the matter. Nevertheless, his emphasis on the change or “vicissitude” that is found in “all the works and operations of the divine Being”65 and the elaborate ethnography found in his manuscript are both elements typically associated with Afrocentrism.

Caruthers’s use of “vicissitude” or change is a version of the Afrocentric emphasis on the “mutability of human affairs.” The phrase initially appears in an article published in the African Repository and Colonial Journal in 1825 and later becomes the title of a three part series in Freedom Journal in 1827. The first issue of the monthly journal, published by the American Colonization Society in March, 1825 includes “Observations on the Early History of the African Race.” The author, identified only as “T.R.,” describes the once great Ethiopian civilization as the people “who brought the arts and sciences of civilization to the world” and who were once the pinnacle of world culture but who are now diminished because of the “mutability of human affairs.”66 In the appeal to “mutability,” antislavery literature employs history in the racial debate.67 The state of the African, according to this line of reasoning, is due not to presumed innate inferiority, but to changing historical circumstances.

Bruce Dain has noted the dependence of this article and much of this kind of literature on Travels through Syria and Egypt, the reflections of Constantine Volney published in 1784. Samuel Stanhope Smith, successor to John Witherspoon as head of Princeton College, demonstrates Volney’s influence in early America recalling in one of his lectures “a remark made by Mr. Volney when contemplating the head of Sphinx in Egypt.” Smith recounts Volney’s belief that the Sphinx “exhibits a type of the countenance of the ancient inhabitants of the country who resemble more the natives of tropical Africa than the present population.”68

The travels of Volney, a recognized skeptic and critic of religion, convinced him that it was “to the race of negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of our extreme contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, and even the very use of speech.”69 T.R.’s “Observations on the Early History of the African Race,” bundles Volney’s research together with studies on the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone, the history of Herodotus, and the Bible. All are combined to prove the divine role of the once great Ethiopia in the universal salvation of Africa, and all in fulfillment of the champion verse for T.R. and the American Colonization Society, and even Caruthers, Psalm 68:31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt and Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands.”70

Caruthers utilizes such history against the formidable pretense of African inferiority in his era. By the 1850s the craniology studies of Samuel George Morton had become foundational for scientific racism. Utilizing skull size and capacity it was argued that the African was incapable of having the intelligence of a Caucasian thus rendering African inferiority an unalterable and indisputable fact. Morton’s research methods were seriously flawed but his conclusions were embraced by many and used by some proslavery advocates to justify belief in the Africans’ inferiority.71 Against this background Caruthers’s counters: “For long generations they appear to have been the superior race and . . . long buried monuments of their greatness have been brought to light on the Nile, the Tigress, and the Euphrates.”72 He presents an account of an ancient Africa far more capable and accomplished than their nineteenth-century circumstances indicated. The achievements of their past were proof of the Africans’ capacity for greatness. The race of Ham is the “intrepid, earnest, and successful” forerunners in human improvement and development, “building cities and establishing governments” or engaged in commerce, ship building, and fine arts, while the other races displayed only “idleness and indifference about the future.”73

Drawing historical and ethnographical facts from the Bible in order to demonstrate the greatness of ancient African culture was also a preoccupation of Caruthers’s era, and his manuscript reveals strong similarities to this aspect of Afrocentrism.74 He utilizes place names of the Old Testament to construct an account of these descendants, piling up famous personages of the black race, heaping up their accomplishments, while dismissing the rest of humanity as simple, pastoral, and unmotivated. He assumed, along with T.R. and the rest of the antebellum world, that the Africans were, in fact, the descendants of Ham.

T.R. presents the ancient Ethiopians as “invincible in war and yet preeminent in all the arts of peace, distinguished above other men for learning, enterprise, and valour—at once tyrants and instructors of mankind!”75 Likewise, Caruthers tells his reader of “ a galaxy of men who were celebrated for their enterprise and generalship” or of “six African generals” who “were more than a match for the ablest of the Roman commanders” or of another African “who was certainly one of the ablest generals of this age to which he belonged” as well as many “ other names of note in history to which we cannot now refer.”76 The ancient Africans “became famous in arms and carried on a world wide and most profitable commerce, while all the rest of mankind were engaged in hunting, or tending their flocks, or whiling away the hours in idle amusements.”77 Once the Africans “were the superior race; but, owing to a variety of secondary causes . . . they gradually deteriorated and became dispersed.”78

Not only are the enslaved Africans the descendants of a once-great race but the Americans who now oppress the Africans are themselves the descendants of the “Anglos and Britons and the Germans” who were “exceedingly ignorant, superstitious” and believed inferior by their Roman conquerors.79 The enslavers of the Africans descend from those who “believed in signs and portents, in fairies, witches, ghosts, and hobgoblins” and “were frightened out of their wits by an eclipse of the sun, the appearance of a comet, or a play of meteors in the heavens.”80 Only through the “humanizing influences of Christianity” over the past fifteen hundred years have they been elevated to their current position.81 “That the Africans or any other race,” he writes, “are of an inferior grade, as to natural capacities and powers is mere slang, the flimsy pretext of slaveholders, to conceal their pride and avarice.”82

Caruthers’s tendentious account powerfully contradicts the claim of southern slaveholders to their slave property. Such a claim “rests not on any origin or express grant from the Creator but entirely on . . . the pretended inferiority of the race.”83 His ethnography sweeps away the basis for American slavery founded in racial superiority. Carl Degler has called it “an ethnological defense of black equality that is unusual anywhere in antislavery thought in the United States, North or South.”84

Summary

American slaveholders are like Pharaoh, asserting a claim to people who belong only to God. American slavery denies God’s order and the sufficiency of his creation. It wrongfully exploits differences and inequalities intended to serve his own purposes in the history of humanity. American slavery is attempting to subvert the course of his creation, presuming the innate inferiority of the African. Borrowing elements of Afrocentrism and general history, Caruthers argues that the capabilities and intelligence of races, including his own, are not static but dynamic. Assumptions of slaves’ inferiority and their own superiority by slaveholders are thus shown to be self-serving. The exploitation of the African’s current circumstances is an injustice not only against them but against God, himself: “He who will rob another who has not strength to resist him . . . is unjust, not only to him,” Caruthers emphasizes, “but to God.”85

Redemption through the Covenant

God’s “claim on the Africans and all other races” is not only based on the creation and preservation of humanity but also on their redemption in Christ who “gave himself a ransom for all to be justified in due time.”86 In pages 61–64 Caruthers explains Ps 2:7–8: “I will tell of the decree of the Lord: He said to me, You are my son today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession.” The nations, according to Caruthers, have been given to Christ, they are his “inheritance.” He explains that because “all nations were included in the cov’t [covenant] of redemption.”87 “It was promised to Abraham,” Caruthers tells his reader citing Gen 22:18, that “in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed.”88 Thus, Africa and all other “heathen nations . . . stand pretty much,” the southerner writes, “in the same relation to Him in which the descendants of Abraham, so far as they were included in the promise, stood to Him before their deliverance from Egypt.”89 American slavery is therefore a violation of the “covenant of redemption.” Caruthers’s distinctive covenantal understanding and its relationship to the Exodus text consists of just four pages but its fuller explanation is warranted because it is the only antislavery argument from a covenantal perspective.90 Before looking more closely at Caruthers’s “covenant of redemption,” some general background on the covenant concept and its development in the Westminster Confession of Faith is needed.

The term, “covenant,” a fundamental concept in the world of the Old Testament, signifies an agreement between two equal parties by which they obligate themselves to certain responsibilities, such as a marriage or political agreements. See, for example, the description of marriage in Mal 2:14 and Prov 2:18; the agreement between David and Jonathan in 1 Sam 23:18 or the description of treaties between nations in Hos 12:1 and Ezek 17:13. It is also more broadly and frequently used to describe God’s relationship to the Hebrew patriarchs and the nation of Israel (Gen 6:18; 9:9–17; 15:18; 17:2–21).

In Covenant Theology or Federal (from the Latin term foedus, meaning “compact” or “covenant”) Theology the concept of covenant structures God’s relation to the world and the Bible’s redemptive plan. The multiple types of covenants or covenantal forms and their varying conditions prompt Diarmaid MacCullough’s portrayal of it as “a fertile concept that is full of hope and reassurance” resulting in an “idea that can take off in a various directions.”91 The accuracy of his description is verified by the ubiquity of the covenantal form as a central doctrine for theologians within the ranks of Presbyterianism as well as their disagreement over its exact meaning and role. Robert Godfrey’s understanding of the covenant of works, “as a key foundation for understanding the work of Christ and justification by faith alone”92 or Geerhardus Vos’ declaration of covenant theology as “a truly universal phenomenon, emerging everywhere where theology is done on the basis of the Reformed principle,” as well as Gerard Van Groningen’s summary of the Bible as the “written record of the revelation of two covenantal relationships” are representative of the prominence given to Covenant Theology in Reformed and Presbyterian thinking.93

The domination of Scottish and British confessions by the covenant concept is accounted for not only because of its biblical roots but also because of its prevalence in legal and political thought as democratic ideas emerged in the early seventeenth century. Arguably, the prevalence of the covenant principle in the Reformation is proof of its adaptability to a unified state and church society.94 The emergence and development of Covenant Theology during the social crisis in sixteenth-century Zurich was actually precipitated by the rejection of the state church by some of Ulrich Zwingli’s more radical followers.

After Zwingli’s reforms in the early 1520s those who later would be known as anabaptists, disputed the biblical legitimacy of a state church as well as the practice of baptizing infants into its membership. Zwingli’s response was to defend the baptism of infants as the Christian equivalent of the Old Testament’s practice of circumcision and as the sign of the new covenant now been made in Christ. The linking of baptism with a covenant was particularly successful among the Swiss cantons for whom the ‘Bund’ or ‘covenant’, was already a familiar and useful political structure. Zwingli used the theme of covenant only in relation to infant baptism, but his successor in Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger, organized his entire discussion of Christianity around it.95

As a Presbyterian minister Caruthers subscribed to the Westminster Confession of Faith, a Reformed and Puritan confessional document produced in Seventeenth-century England by the Westminster Assembly. With the exception of the seven Independents, the assembly of 121 theologians were Presbyterians. The assembly was convened by the Parliament at Westminster Abbey in 1643 to revise the doctrinal standards of the English church, the Thirty-Nine Articles. A newspaper’s reference during the opening week of the assembly to “the drooping spirits of the people of God who lie under the pressure of Popish wars and combustions” typifies the common sentiment during this extended period of political and religious strife between Charles I and Parliament.96 When revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles proved unworkable, the assembly instead produced several new documents of theological doctrine including a confession of faith for the Reformed churches of Great Britain, Scotland, and Ireland.

Completed by the assembly with proof texts in 1647, the Westminster Confession of Faith never fulfilled its intended role, but still retains an historic place in the doctrines of the Church of Scotland. It was subsequently adopted by American colonial Presbyterians in 1729 with the exception of its chapter on the civil magistrate. It continues to embody the doctrinal standards of Presbyterians in America and throughout the world, but in varying degrees. Berkhof’s complaint that “Presbyterian scholars . . . take due account” of covenant doctrine “in their theological works” but “in the Churches which they represent it has all but lost its vitality” is arguably true of the entire confession’s present day influence within all but the most conservative Presbyterian congregations.97 Nevertheless, the Westminster Confession remains the most important embodiment of Covenant Theology because of its arrangement of all redemptive history into a covenantal framework of works and grace.

Vos’ description of the Westminster Confession as “the first Reformed confession in which the doctrine of the covenant . . . has been able to permeate at almost every point” suggests the overarching importance of the confession’s seventh chapter, Of God’s Covenant with Man for the Presbyterians of the assembly.98 As found in the seventh chapter, six sections in the confession explain their understanding of the “voluntary condescension on God’s part which he has been pleased to express by way of covenant.” Vos notes the appearance of John Ball’s Treatise on the Covenant of Grace in 1645 during the sitting of the Westminster Assembly as well as Archbishop James Ussher’s formulation of the covenant published in the Irish Articles in 1615, as probably constituting the direct influences of the confession’s seventh chapter.99

The Westminster Confession of Faith’s seventh chapter presents the “covenant of works,” as “ the first covenant made with man . . . wherein life was promised to Adam, and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and personal obedience.” It was broken by humanity represented by Adam and Eve making them “incapable of life by that covenant” but “the Lord was pleased to make a second . . . the covenant of grace wherein he freely offers to sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in him.” The covenant of grace was “differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the gospel,” in the former time of the patriarchs and Mosaic era “by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances delivered to the people of the Jews” and in the latter time under the gospel by “the preaching of the Word, and the administration of the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.”

Not appearing in the Westminster Confession of Faith, but a further development of the concept, the “covenant of redemption” designates for Caruthers and Presbyterian theologians from the eighteenth century onward “the agreement between the Father, giving the Son as Head and Redeemer of the elect, and the Son, voluntarily taking the place of those whom the Father had given Him.”100 Even those who did not adopt this particular formulation nevertheless spoke of “that eternal agreement between the Persons of the Godhead, on which the whole dispensation of mercy to mankind is founded.”101 Psalm 2, cited by Caruthers, is seen as a particularly persuasive proof of such an agreement between God and Christ. It is a psalm ostensibly written for the immediate Davidic monarchy of its era, but which is also attested as Messianic prophecy by the New Testament implying a compact between the Father and the Son with conditions and promises, after the pattern of a covenant.102 While in the Old Testament the covenant and its conditions between God and Israel are explicit,103 other implicit covenantal forms like Psalm 2 can also be found in which a covenant is implied such as in the conditions and responsibilities given to Adam.104

Charles Hodge, a nineteenth-century contemporary of Caruthers and the leading theologian of Princeton believed the covenant of redemption is “entirely beyond our comprehension” but “we must receive the teachings of Scripture in relation to it without presuming to penetrate the mystery which naturally belong to it.” He realized it is not “expressly asserted” in the Bible but many texts are “equivalent to such direct assertions.”105 As a Reformed and Presbyterian minister Caruthers would have been in agreement with Hodge’s following criteria for a covenant:

When one person assigns a stipulated work to another person with the promise of a reward upon the condition of the performance of that work, there is a covenant. Nothing can be plainer than that all this is true in relation to the Father and the Son. The Father gave the Son a work to do; He sent Him into the world to perform it, and promised Him a great reward when the work was accomplished. Such is the constant repetition of the Scriptures. We have, therefore contracting parties, the promise, and the condition. These are the essential elements of a covenant.106

The lack of biblical grounds for the covenant of redemption and its implied agreement between the Father and Son was eventually questioned more directly by Karl Barth: “This is mythology for which there is no place in a right understanding of the Trinity.”107

As shown above, Covenant Theology or Federal Theology was a central heading under which a large amount of biblical material was organized and interpreted by Caruthers and his nineteenth-century Presbyterian contemporaries. The consensus of the Westminster Assembly regarding covenantal theology, however, was not successfully transmitted to all of its theological descendants. James Torrance’s objections to Covenant Theology have been described as “deep-seated and passionate.”108 Citing various sources of federalism, Torrance demonstrates that its adherents confuse a covenant with a contract and thus move the focus away from what Christ has done for us to what we do for ourselves. He also traces elements of anxiety and Pelagianism in Reformed congregations to the Westminster Confession of Faith’s doctrines of limited atonement, and complains of its failure to comprehend the meaning of Christ’s headship over all humanity by its imposition of a “radical dichotomy between the sphere of Nature and the sphere of Grace, of natural law and the Gospel, so that the Mediatorial Work of Christ is limited to the covenant of grace and the Church, the sphere marked out by the covenant of grace.”109

Rejection of Covenant Theology from within the ranks of Presbyterianism such as Torrance’s is rare but not only recent. In Caruthers’s own era Scottish pastor and theologian, John McLeod Campbell, one of Torrance’s influences and subject of his research, rejected Covenant Theology.110 Campbell was deposed from his ministry in the Church of Scotland in 1831 on the charge of heresy and eventually published his views in his major work, The Nature of the Atonement in 1856, to explain his views and restore an emphasis upon the fatherhood of God and his universal and unconditional love.111

In its role for Presbyterians as an “architectonic principle” of federal theology, the covenant has prompted an interminable debate, charitably described by its proponents as “historical development.”112 The continuing variation and disagreement within the reformed ranks over Covenant Theology substantiates MacCullough’s observation that the Old Testament speaks a great deal about the covenant between God and Israel as an agreement to keep his law, but that it also develops the idea in various ways, and it talks about covenants in different contexts, and with different implications.113

Although Reformed Presbyterians and others committed to federalism have not developed a consensus among themselves with regard to the covenant’s soteriological role, the legitimacy of the covenant form is mostly agreed upon within broader biblical studies. The amount of scholarly energy expended on the study of the covenant is impressive with varying results. Studies have tended to seesaw between the early twentieth-century judgments that the covenant did not become a working idea in Israel’s literature until the later Deuteronomic traditions and the later twentieth-century views of George Mendenhall, Walther Eichrodt, as well as others who view the covenant as “an early and constitutive notion in Israel.”114 Recent work generally tips in favor of the latter. The covenant’s place of importance seems certain in the earliest period of Israel’s worship of Yaweh. As such, for Mendenhall, the covenant concept embodies and represents Israel’s underlying conviction that its social, religious, and even global aspirations, are important lawful expressions of the nation’s relationship to Yaweh.115

The lawful dimension of the covenant can be seen as especially prominent in Caruthers’s emphasis upon God’s rightful claim upon the Africans. Caruthers sees Exodus as an expression of the covenant that authorizes not only God’s relationship with Israel but with all the nations of the earth. In her study of the covenant concept in Qumran literature Bilhah Nitzan utilizes aspects of Eichrodt’s work that views the covenant as both an early and “revolutionary factor in the relationship between human beings and their deity.” In her opinion, Eichrodt correctly understood that Israel’s “covenant detached religious faith from the feelings of anxiety and insecurity that characterized pagan religions” and established the more secure “covenantal relationship,” capable of regulating human life “according to fixed laws of retribution given by a single divine authority thereby providing hope for peace and security to those who kept the laws of the covenant.”116

Similar legal and binding overtones of divine authority are sounded in Caruthers’s use of the covenant promise against slavery. When he writes that “it was promised to Abraham,” and reminds his reader citing Gen 22:18, that “in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed,” Caruthers is drawing upon the legality of God’s claim not only upon Israel but all nations.117 Thus Africa and all other “heathen nations . . . stand pretty much,” he writes, “in the same relation to Him in which the descendants of Abraham, so far as they were included in the promise, stood to Him before their deliverance from Egypt.”118 Caruthers sees the Exodus text as an expression of the covenant that authorizes not only God’s relationship with Israel but with all the nations of the earth. God’s covenantal claim upon the enslaved African in the nineteenth century is thus no less legitimate than his claim upon the enslaved Hebrews in the Exodus account.

In Caruthers’s thinking enslaved Africans are “My people” because the claim of the Exodus text applies to all nations.119 The covenant is singular without temporal boundaries, lawful over all of redemptive history, and Africa is among the nations included in the Abrahamic promise as reiterated in Psalm 2. For Caruthers “the whole world was under condemnation and led captive by the devil at his will” but since “all nations were included in the covenant of redemption” in which Christ ransomed his people, then “no man and no act of men have a right to claim the services of any portion of his purchased inheritance.”120 This includes Africans and Anglo Saxons because “both were given him in the covenant of redemption and he has redeemed both by the same price.”121

Summary

For “the Christian reader,” Caruthers writes, “it is unnecessary to multiply quotations” from the Bible in proof of his point, but not before he has cited Psalm 72 and its prediction of “universal homage.” Caruthers sees the Hebrews’ redemption from slavery as the pattern for the redemption yet to come in the person of the Messiah, to whom “every knee shall bow . . . and every tongue confess,” and from whom “the church, in its ministry and membership, received a commission . . . to go and carry the light of the gospel to them that are sitting in darkness” and to “proclaim an immediate and eternal deliverance to all who were in bondage to sin and Satan.”122 Thus the claim—“My people”—is now doubled in its justification.

First, as shown above, it is justified because it is based on God’s role in the creation and preservation of Israel and all other nations. The unity and equality of humanity from the dawn of creation was grounded in their common creator. God’s claim upon the Hebrew slaves of Exodus extended to the African slaves of the South. The enslavement of Africans, or any nation, is a violation of the Exodus text and in defiance of the creator’s claim. God was the creator and preserver of all humanity and, therefore, the only rightful superintendent of the black race.

Secondly, it is based on the covenant of redemption. In the covenant, deliverance in Christ’s name is proclaimed to the Africans because their nation is also his inheritance. As a Presbyterian minister Caruthers was committed to the expression of Covenant Theology developed throughout the Reformation and its expression in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Although that expression has provoked critical dissent and substantial differences among adherents that will not be resolved any time soon, there is general agreement upon the biblical covenant as structurally circumambient, encompassing the relationship between humanity and God in an atmosphere of lawfulness, regulation, and security. For Caruthers, American slavery pollutes and clouds this atmosphere with its illegitimate claims. If the Africans belong to God through creation, and to their Messiah through redemption, they belong to no one else.

Instead of acknowledging God’s claims and “bringing them to the knowledge of salvation through the mercy of our God,” American slaveholders have enslaved and kept the Africans “in ignorance, degradation and wretchedness, from generation to generation, without any crime alleged and without any authority whatsoever from the Lord whom they profess to serve.”123 American slaveholders are therefore acting criminally towards God. They are violators of creation, preservation, and the covenant of redemption, claiming ownership of people who belong only to Christ through creation and through a pact with roots in the ancient bond God made with Abraham, reiterated throughout the Mosaic and Davidic eras, celebrated in the psalms of Israel, fulfilled in the appearance of the Messiah, and carried to the ends of the earth.

34. Caruthers, “First Samuel 15:29.”

35. The section on the covenant of redemption is the analysis of pp. 61–64 in the manuscript. Because Caruthers’s understanding of the covenant’s bearing on the question of slavery is unique in the nineteenth century, the entire second part of the present chapter is given to its explanation. Excised for separate consideration because they are more typical of antislavery literature, pp. 65–136 are examined in chapter 7 below.

36. Caruthers, American Slavery, 5.

37. Ibid., 6.

38. Ibid., 4.

39. Ibid., 5.

40. Ibid., 202.

41. Ibid., 207.

42. Caruthers, Preface to American Slavery.

43. Caruthers, American Slavery, 202.

44. Ibid., 207.

45. Ibid., 4.

46. Ibid., 6.

47. Ibid., 30.

48. Ibid., 29, 30.

49. Ibid., 30.

50. Ibid., 36.

51. Ibid., 29.

52. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:581.

53. Sherlock, A Discourse concerning the Divine Providence, 22.

54. Caruthers, American Slavery, 8.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid., 9–10.

57. Ibid., 250.

58. Ibid., 10.

59. Ibid., 8.

60. Ibid., 9, 11.

61. Ibid., 12.

62. Ibid., 21, 24.

63. Ibid., 9.

64. Moses, Afrotopia, 6.

65. Caruthers, American Slavery, 9.

66. Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind, 105.

67. Rael, “A Common Nature, A United Destiny,” 193; Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind, 112–48.

68. Smith, The Lectures Corrected, 1:43; Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion, 119.

69. Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind, 77.

70. Ibid., 106.

71. Ibid., 197–99.

72. Caruthers, American Slavery, 17.

73. Ibid., 22.

74. Shavit, History in Black, 47.

75. Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind, 105–6.

76. Caruthers, American Slavery, 20.

77. Ibid., 19.

78. Ibid., 249.

79. Ibid., 25.

80. Ibid., 26.

81. Ibid.

82. Ibid., 249, 403.

83. Ibid., 249.

84. Degler, The Other South, 30.

85. Caruthers, American Slavery, 28.

86. Ibid., 61.

87. Ibid., 61, 62.

88. Ibid., 62.

89. Ibid., 63.

90. The analysis of the remaining portion of this section of the manuscript, pp. 65–136, is found in chapter 4 below.

91. MacCullough, The Reformation, 174.

92. Cited in Koo Jeon, Covenant Theology, xii.

93. Vos, Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, 238; Groningen, Messianic Revelation in the Old Testament, 61.

94. Redding, The Prayer and Priesthood of Christ, 149.

95. MacCullough, The Reformation, 145; McGrath, Christian Theology, 48, 429, 442; Kempla, “The Concept of Covenant in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century,” 94–107.

96. Mitchell and Struthers, Minutes of the Sessions of the Westminster Assembly, xi.

97. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 217.

98. Vos, Redemptive History, 239.

99. Ibid., 241.

100. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 271.

101. Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:489.

102. E.g., Acts 13:13; Heb 1:5, 5:5; Isa 53:10.

103. E.g., Exod 19:5; 24:7; 34:27–28.

104. E.g., Gen 2:15–17.

105. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:360.

106. Ibid.

107. Barth, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, 62.

108. MacCleod, “Covenant Theology,” 217.

109. Cited in Redding, Prayer and Priesthood of Christ in the Reformed Tradition, 152; cf. Redding, Prayer and Priesthood of Christ, 150–57, for Torrance’s objections to covenant theology Donald MacCleod’s critique of Torrance, and Redding’s evaluation.

110. Torrance, “The Contribution of McLeod Campbell to Scottish Theology,” 295–311.

111. Torrance, “New Introduction” 2.

112. MacCleod, “Covenant Theology,” 217; Jeon, Covenant Theology, 3.

113. MacCullough, The Reformation, 172.

114. Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 418.

115. Mendenhall, “Covenant,” 714–23.

116. Nitzan, “The Concept of Covenant in Qumran Literature” 86–87.

117. Caruthers, American Slavery, 62.

118. Ibid., 63.

119. Ibid.

120. Ibid., 61, 62.

121. Ibid., 312.

122. Ibid., 63.

123. Ibid., 64.