Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 85:1 (Spring 2023)
Article: Francis Grimké And The Spirituality Of The Church: A Case Study
Author: Sean Michael Lucas

WTJ 85:1 (Spring 2023) p. 169

Francis Grimké And The Spirituality Of The Church: A Case Study

Sean Michael Lucas

Sean Michael Lucas is the Chancellor’s Professor of Church History at Reformed Theological Seminary. He also serves as senior pastor at Independent Presbyterian Church (PCA), Memphis, TN.

For the past several decades, historians have viewed the spirituality of the church doctrine as a means for white Presbyterian leaders to protect their social position and influence in American culture. For example, E. Brooks Holifield held that southern Presbyterian theologians invoked the spirituality of the church idea as “a protective gesture”—in the antebellum period to avoid commentary on slavery and in the postbellum era to reify the segregated social order. Likewise, Mark Noll noted that commitments to the spirituality of the church kept theologians as brilliant and nimble as Charles Hodge, Robert Breckenridge, and Robert Lewis Dabney from dealing biblically with issues of slavery, segregation, and civil war. In studying twentieth-century Mississippi Presbyterians, Peter Slade observed that “the spirituality of the church is in fact the time-tested political strategy of powerful men to perpetuate an unjust status quo free from moral censure.… [It] is a sophisticated theological resistance to systemic change: it is not an innocent doctrine misused.” And for Carolyn Dupont, the spirituality of the church teaching was the main support for “conservative Presbyterians who condemned the Christian supporters of black equality.” It was a theological commitment that “formed an essential foundation for their racial ideology.”1

This historical evaluation of the spirituality of the church doctrine creates challenges for confessional Presbyterians, because the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) requires a commitment to the church’s mission as “spiritual.” Not only does the church only have authority to declare God’s Word in a ministerial fashion, but it ought to avoid involving itself in “civil affairs.” WCF 31.4

WTJ 85:1 (Spring 2023) p. 170

declares that “synods and councils are to handle, or conclude nothing, but that which is ecclesiastical: and are not to intermeddle with civil affairs, which concern the commonwealth, unless by way of humble petition in cases extraordinary; or, by way of conscience, if they be thereunto required by the civil magistrate.” Southern Presbyterian theologians believed that confessional paragraph prevented them from seeking the abolition of slavery prior to the Civil War and the social and political equality of African Americans afterward. I have argued elsewhere that this was a misunderstanding of the confessional pa...