” Similarily, John Girardeau dealt critically with Dabney’s view of black men and women in the South.”
ARP study report on Kinism
Girardeau, like Dabney, Thornwell, and Palmer was one of the great Reformed ministers of the ante-bellum south. I would recommend everyone read Girardeau’s book “Calvinism and Evangelical Arminianism” in order to aid in seeing the emptiness of Arminianism.
It is true that Girardeau disagreed with Dabney but what Girardeau proposed as an alternative to Dabney’s proposal for blacks worshiping in the South is something that every Kinist would salute every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
It is true the Girardeau, like Stonewall Jackson, worked in ministering to black slaves and encouraging them in the Christian faith. However, both Girardeau and Gen. Jackson did their work in the context of a social order that accepted slavery as the norm. Neither Girardeau nor Jackson challenged the system of slavery, though both sought to alleviate its sometimes harsher realities.
We need to keep in mind that Rev. John Girardeau served as a chaplain in the confederate Army in a South Carolina unit that participated in numerous battles against the Jacobin and abolitionist Yankees and the ARP covenanter types that supported the Yankee slaughter and rape of the South. To invoke Girardeau and suggest that Girardeau was some kind of proto-ARP type egalitarian is just ridiculous as we shall see.
Now, as we said, it is true that Girardeau sought to modify Dabney’s more extreme approach but let’s consider the Kinist like proposals that Girardeau put forth,
When the issue of black worship came up in the Southern Presbyterian church Girardeau, against Dabney, proposed three different options for Black Presbyterians. Girardeau proposed,
(1) separate Black churches and presbyteries with ordained officers
(2) Black churches set up as “missionary congregations” without ordained officers
(3) Black churches established as branches of White churches, with ordained officers who did not have authority in councils with White members.
Now, I don’t know of one Kinist who would object to any of these proposals by Girardeau. Indeed, anybody proposing today what Girardeau proposed would be labeled a dirty rotten Kinist by the ARP egalitarians. And yet, the ARP document the opening quote is lifted from tries to suggest that Girardeau shares the ARP egalitarian disposition. This is false as seen in those proposals above.
This is more 9th commandment violation, this time against Girardeau, all to the end of trying to smear contemporary Kinists by trying to march Girardeau out as someone who would object to Kinists today, when in point of fact Kinists today would agree with all of Girardeau’s above proposals.
This sense of obligation to the black community was not unique to Girardeau. We have already mentioned Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson but we need also mention James Henley Thornwell. Thornwell once said of blacks,
“The Negro is one blood with ourselves — that he has sinned as we have, and that he has an equal interest with us in the great Redemption. Science, falsely so called, may attempt to exclude him from the brotherhood of humanity…. but the instinctive impulses of our nature combined with the plainest declaration of the Word of God, lead us to recognize in his form and lineaments — his moral, religious, and intellectual nature — the same humanity in which we glory as the image of God. We are not ashamed to call him our brother.”
Dr. James Henley Thornwell
Sermon — Rights and Duties of Masters
Yet, ARP types are forever condemning men like Thornwell. The fact of the matter is that the ARP types no more understand today’s Kinists as witnessed by how they constantly and repeatedly misinterpret what Kinists advance, then they understand men like Girardeau and Thornwell of the past.
