I went to seminary not feeling a twinge about being from a Southern Presbyterian heritage. After all, racisim was pretty much a sin of the entire nation, including Lincoln, so why should it especially bother me that this was found among Southern Presbyterians? That was my mindset.

Having said that, while I was a PCA member and candidate, there was nothing distinctively Southern Presbyterian in my theological reading. My literary exposure to the Reformed Faith came through Westminster Philadelphia. I had read Kline (Images of the Spirit ought to be much more appreciated that it is), Vos (I think), Murray, Van der Waal, Calvin, Van Til, Jim Jordan, Ronald Wallace, Berkhof, Bavinck, John Frame, Vern Poythress, etc. I had, as far as I can recall, never read a syllable of Dabney, Thornwell, Girardeau (still true) or anyone else who was distinctly Southern Presbyterian in identity.

But when I read The Metaphysical Confederacy I had the pinball game of my mindset shouldered into serious tilt. It had never dawned on me that Thornwell was known among secular historians of the period, men who had no real interest in Presbyterianism one way or the other, as one of the major apologists for the South and for Slavery in particular (I’m remembering him being listed as one of the “top three” but I am not sure I’m remembering correctly). He actually listed as one of the reasons why the South must secede (his expression of an opinion on this matter, was of course, somehow within the strictures of “the spirituality of the Church”) was because the Federal Government would not allow the creation of new slave states in the West. This meant that the “Southern Man” could only migrate West as a “Northern Man,” but not as a “Southern Man.” As the author points out, Thornwell made slaveholding the essence of being Southern.

I’m sure Thornwell had better moments. Theologically I think he opposed the evolutionary type of dehumanizing racism that was developing among unbelievers in the South which became modern eugenics. But the book convinced me that we not talking about simply children of their time and culture; we are talking also about leaders in their culture.

When this came up on the floor of GA I voted for it, though I thought it could have been much improved if Thornwell and Dabney had been mentioned by name. To claim we cannot “repent” of our past makes sense in some ways but is entirely bogus where it counts. We bask and boast in these “great fathers in the faith” all the time. We actually extoll them. No doubt they had some virtues (I think this by Dabney, for example, is well worth getting excited about). But we can’t simply claim the good without renouncing the bad and we do have a duty to make that clear. Getting the benefits of being identified with a heritage means having to deal with the heritage’s liabilities as well. I don’t think that is a problematic guideline, and it certainly gives us reason to make public repentance a priority along with our public identifying ourselves as a continuation of the Southern Presbyterian Church.

Perhaps in the future this will all become moot as the denomination becomes truly national and international and the archaic regionalisms simply wither and dies. But until that time, this is what we face.

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