Before the late eighteenth century, in the United States, as in Europe, it was generally recognized that slavery was a bad thing—for the slave. Like disease, loss in warfare, or early death, it was thought of mostly as a variety of poor fortune. There were worse and better masters, worse and better places to be enslaved, but only a very few considered that the institution, in all cases, was not just bad, but wrong, evil. Although a change in mindset certainly came too slowly for the victims of slavery, it was an extraordinarily rapid process. By the time of the American Civil War, what a few isolated radicals first proclaimed in the eighteenth century—that slavery was a sin—had become for vast numbers of northern Protestants an obvious statement of moral fact. Once an accepted social institution, slavery had become a moral horror.

American antislavery advocates were also impressed by the rapidity of this process, which they took as evidence of the providential progress of mankind in their time. How else to explain how an institution taken for granted from biblical times until less than a hundred years ago was now seen to be wrong? Yet this explanation raised troubling questions for antebellum antislavery Protestants. The orthodox Christian idea of revelation held that, through the inspired writers of scripture, God had completed His revelation to humankind and had established a single and unified moral standard for human life for all time. And yet, judging by the increasing numbers of believers who opposed slavery, it appeared that God might be demanding something more of His modern-day faithful than He had of the ancient Israelites or the early Christians.

The Bible, after all, never pronounces slavery a sin. Far from it. God's covenant with Abraham includes his slaves “bought with money.”Footnote ¹ The tenth of the Ten Commandments specifically mentions slavery without any suggestion that slavery might be contrary to God's will: “You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”Footnote ² The law of Moses encourages the enslavement of the heathen and provides no regulation of heathen slavery, but several passages mitigate the lot of Hebrew slaves. According to the law, Hebrews cannot kidnap one another, Hebrew masters cannot murder or dismember their Hebrew slaves without consequence, and Hebrew slaves cannot be permanently enslaved.Footnote ³ And yet, despite these few restrictions, nowhere does the Old Testament suggest that slavery might be inconsistent with the instruction to love one's neighbor as oneself.

Antislavery readers fare no better with the New Testament. The Gospels describe multiple instances in which Jesus uses slavery as a metaphor for the perfect service that his followers should show to both God and neighbor. And yet, while Jesus recognizes the importance of the institution of slavery, he never condemns it. Rather, the Gospel of Matthew portrays Jesus praising the faith of a Roman slave-master. His apostles have more definite views of slavery. Paul sends a fugitive slave back to his owner, Philemon, and instructs slaves to obey their masters as they would Christ, and Peter instructs slaves to endure beatings in imitation of Christ. While the New Testament elevates the spiritual status of the slave, it never suggests that slavery is unjust or in violation of God's will.Footnote ⁴

Antislavery Protestants managed to make strong biblical arguments against the evils of modern-day, southern slavery, including arguments against its racism. However, in the context of the slavery debates, such arguments proved to be inadequate. The highly constrained discourse of the slavery debates forced antislavery Protestants to make a biblical case not just for the sinfulness of the antebellum southern variety of slavery, but for the sinfulness of slavery in itself. The biblical record, which indicated that slavery had once been acceptable to God, made the moderates’ task extremely difficult. In order to make their case, they had to explain how slavery had become a sin. Orthodoxy could account for social progress—humanity growing closer to God's revealed will—but could not account for moral progress, or the becoming-wrong of actions and institutions that had not been wrong before and had not been denounced in the Bible. The effort to account for the moral progress represented by antislavery reform forced antislavery Protestants to develop new, liberal understandings of Christian revelation.Footnote ⁵

After the Civil War northern Protestants would face a chain of crises, all of which contributed to the rise of Protestant liberalism. Historians of American religious liberalism have rightly emphasized the role of Darwinism, positivism, the higher biblical criticism emanating from Germany, and increasing religious pluralism.Footnote ⁶ The slavery crisis was certainly not the only or even the most important cause of Protestant liberalism's late nineteenth-century bout of success. However, the debate over slavery did play an important role. The antebellum slavery debates forced antislavery moderates to utilize the idea of moral progress and demonstrated the difficulties of reconciling this idea with orthodox Christian belief. Furthermore, the development of antislavery Protestantism and its eventual triumph testified to the reality of moral progress. In the decades surrounding the Civil War, a series of Protestant theologians developed new conceptions of revelation that accounted for this progress of morality. A progressive understanding of Christian revelation became central to the work of late nineteenth-century liberal Protestant theologians, for whom moral progress served as a model for the evolutionary progress of nature and society.

Attending to the neglected connection between antislavery Protestantism and the postbellum rise of Protestant liberalism helps us to understand the intellectual and moral necessity of liberal Protestantism's theological innovations. From the vantage point of the slavery controversy, Protestant liberalism looks less like an act of surrender to secular ideas than a refusal to choose between two sets of equally valid priorities. The liberals of this study might best be defined by their determination to hold on to both their moral, intellectual commitments, whether to antislavery reform or to science, and their religious commitments to the Bible. While biblical literalists chose to jettison the former, and unorthodox radicals and unbelieving scientists the latter, moderately antislavery Protestants and postbellum liberal Protestants made the theological adjustments necessary to accommodate both.

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The problem of moral progress was not everyone's problem. Many antebellum Americans expressed a belief in the moral progress of society, but neither abolitionists nor slavery defenders made the far more theologically challenging claim that the moral law itself progressed over time.Footnote ⁷ Abolitionists of various stripes insisted, against the biblical record, that slavery had always been a sin. Although they continued to employ biblical rhetoric and to believe in the sovereignty of a biblical God over human affairs, many radical abolitionists rejected the primary moral authority of the Bible. In 1845 William Lloyd Garrison argued that instead of using the words of scripture to form their conscience, moral men and women should use their conscience to judge the contents of the Bible. “To say that everything in the Bible is to be believed, simply because it is to be found in that volume,” wrote Garrison, is “absurd and pernicious.”Footnote ⁸ Transcendentalist pastor Theodore Parker wrote that “if the Bible defends slavery, it is not so much the better for slavery, but so much the worse for the Bible.” Gerrit Smith cautioned the congregation at his abolitionist Church of Peterboro that although “the idolatry of a book and of its authority-imposed interpretations can so pervert the vision that even slavery shall appear right, nevertheless in the light of reason there can be no such illusion.”Footnote ⁹ While the Bible might err, the conscience testified to the fundamental and universal sinfulness of slavery.

The Christian abolitionists who maintained a commitment to Scripture, including Theodore Weld and George Cheever, denied that the Old Testament Hebrews had ever owned slaves. In order to make their case, Christian abolitionists had to resort to extremely strained biblical argumentation. For example, Weld and Cheever both argued, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, that the fact that the Old Testament speaks of wives being “bought” meant that the Hebrew term translated as “to buy” could not refer to purchasing a human being. Without any proof besides the absence of an Old Testament record of the Hebrew purchase of a slave from a third party, Weld maintained that “bought servants” were actually paid in advance for their services. Weld, Cheever, and their fellow Christian abolitionists could have made a solid case that Hebrew slavery did not provide a warrant for southern slavery, but, because they believed that slavery was universally, eternally sinful, they were unwilling to accept the possibility that God ever permitted slavery. The hermeneutical lengths to which Christian abolitionists were willing to go to avoid the conclusion that the Hebrews practiced slavery under God's watch demonstrated the depth of their commitment to the universality and unchangeability of moral law as reflected in the Bible.Footnote ¹⁰

As Eugene Genovese and John Patrick Daly have demonstrated, southern slave-owners were just as dedicated to progress as were northern devotees of free labor.Footnote ¹¹ However, unlike their antislavery counterparts, proslavery Protestants denied that humanity could progress past the moral code of the Bible. The explanation of William F. Hutson of South Carolina was typical: “In religion and morals, we doubt all improvements, not known to certain fishermen who lived eighteen hundred years ago.”Footnote ¹² The evangelical defenders of slavery denied that the conscience possessed any authority apart from the Bible. Southern Presbyterian James Henley Thornwell reminded antislavery Protestants that their Church was not “at liberty to speculate.” Further, “She has a creed, but no opinions. When she speaks, it must be in the name of the Lord, and her only argument is Thus it is written.”Footnote ¹³

Moral progress posed theological problems only for those who were committed both to antislavery and to the authority of the biblical text. The moderately antislavery religious leaders, including William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, Moses Stuart, Horace Bushnell, Jonathan Blanchard, E. P. Barrows, and Albert Barnes, shared the abolitionists’ belief that slavery contradicted Christian principles and the American dedication to freedom and equality, and should not be perpetuated. However, both their conservative tendencies and their biblical commitments prevented them from accepting the abolitionist belief that every instance of slaveholding was an act of sin. There is a great deal of truth to William Lloyd Garrison's characterization of the moderately antislavery Protestants: “They are polite men—they are cautious men—they are accommodating men; and they cherish a sacred horror of fanaticism, and do not like irritation, and love to sail beneath a cloudless sky upon an unruffled stream.”Footnote ¹⁴ The moderates held prominent roles as pastors of prestigious congregations or as college professors or presidents. Their social position encouraged their distrust of radical reform. The moderates refused to label all slave-owners sinners in part because they knew that by doing so they would antagonize southerners with whom they shared deep institutional and personal ties and risk weakening the authority of their churches and their faith.

And yet, if the moderates were morally narrow and shortsighted, they were also morally honest. The slavery debate was a real debate, not just a cloaked defense of interests against ideals. The fact that many non-abolitionists did think that there was something wrong with southern slavery did not mean that they were too cowardly to conclude that it had to be gotten rid of immediately. There were reasons other than cowardice or self-interest to resist abolitionist immediatism. Labeling every instance of slaveholding a sin contradicted the biblical record, according to which God had permitted, or at the very least tolerated, specific instances of slaveholding. Unwilling to call every slave-owner a sinner, and yet convinced of the wrongfulness of southern slavery, the moderates argued that the system of slavery was always sinful, while the actions of particular slave-owners might not be. By defining slavery as a “social sin”—that is, a sin cohering in a system of laws rather than in individual actions—moderately antislavery Protestants squared their antislavery commitments with the biblical record and justified their desire to remain in fellowship with Christian slave-owners. For antislavery moderates, slavery was not only a moral and a political problem, but also a religious one. Their religious commitments shaped their response to slavery.Footnote ¹⁵

The moderates made various attempts to demonstrate what should have been obvious, that the Bible did not sanction antebellum southern slavery. In 1836 E. P. Barrows (then the pastor of the First Free Presbyterian Church in New York and later the professor of Hebrew literature at Andover Theological Seminary) wrote that the slave system necessitated “the most enormous evils of every kind,” including physical abuse, the destruction of slave families, the prevention of slave literacy and thus Bible reading by slaves, and the sexual abuse of female slaves.Footnote ¹⁶ During his four-day-long debate with Nathan Rice, an event that demonstrated the intensity and level of interest in the slavery debates, Jonathan Blanchard argued that if southern slavery was not sinful, then neither was kidnapping, the separation of parent and child, or the master's inhuman whipping of the slave.Footnote ¹⁷ Antislavery divines also argued that the biblical sanction of ancient Hebrew slavery did not apply to slavery as practiced in the American South. Francis Wayland, Brown University president and moral philosopher, argued that if slavery is justified by the Law of Moses, it is only justified to the extent that it conforms to that Law, which, among other things, prohibited kidnapping, freed Israelite slaves every six years, and freed slaves maimed by their masters.Footnote ¹⁸

The moderates also made biblical arguments against the racism of southern slavery. In 1850 biblical scholar Moses Stuart inquired, “Will it be said, by any, that the African is not a proper man, but an inferior species of animal between a monkey and a man, and therefore, we may enslave him, as we do the lower animals?” To anyone who might claim a racist basis for slavery, Stuart quoted Acts 17:26: “[God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”Footnote ¹⁹ Barrows argued that race was “a distinction unknown to the Mosaic institutions.”Footnote ²⁰ Several moderates referred to race in order to ridicule the proslavery defense of slavery as a social institution. Wayland pointed out that the proslavery argument “authorizes them to enslave us, just as much as it authorizes us to enslave them.”Footnote ²¹ Blanchard told his audience that “if we establish the doctrine that it is not sinful to hold slaves, then we shall commit no sin, if, at some future period, one portion of us shall drive the daughters of the other portion into the kitchen, and their sons into the field.”Footnote ²²

Proslavery commentators responded to the moderates’ attacks on the southern slave system with the affected patience of a schoolmaster whose students had missed the point.Footnote ²³ The question, insisted the proslavery divines, was not the sinfulness of the southern system of slavery, but the sinfulness of slavery in the abstract. During his debate with Blanchard, Nathan Rice claimed not to know what was meant by “the system of slavery.” The only subject of the debate, he contended, was “whether slave-holding is in itself sinful, and the relationship between the master and slave a sinful relation.”Footnote ²⁴ In 1845 Baptist pastor Richard Fuller engaged Wayland in a back-and-forth debate that became the central text of the slavery debates. Fuller reminded Wayland that the question at hand was “whether it is necessarily, and amidst all circumstances, a crime to hold men in a condition where they labor for another without their consent or contract?”Footnote ²⁵ In “The Christian Doctrine of Slavery” Thornwell explained that, if slaveholding is to be deemed a sin, “the argument cannot turn upon incidental circumstances of the system, upon the defective arrangement of the details, the inadequate securities which the law awards against the infringement of acknowledged rights; it must turn upon the nature of the relation itself.” For slavery to be a sin in itself, he maintained, it must be proven that the relationship itself, not its violations, makes things of men.Footnote ²⁶ The proslavery men argued that the moderates’ complaints about southern slavery proved the need for reform, not abolition. None of the proslavery participants in the debate, including Thornwell, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Robert Lewis Dabney, W. S. Grayson, and Thornton Stringfellow, aimed to establish that southern slavery was a perfectly Christian institution, or that Christians should practice slavery. The defenders of slavery were more than willing to admit the need to reform the slave laws, as long as their opponents admitted that there could be a Christian form of slavery.Footnote ²⁷ The defenders of slavery kept their focus on a biblically warranted and politically essential goal: the establishment of the principle that a Christian could own slaves without sinning. Proslavery Protestants insisted that because slavery could be practiced without sin, there could be no religious warrant for abolition.Footnote ²⁸

Demonstrating the evils of southern slavery was not sufficient. In order to answer the proslavery objection, the moderates had to make a biblical argument for the sinfulness of slavery in itself. Antislavery Protestants had to find a way to explain how, despite the Bible's apparent sanctioning of the institution, slavery had become a sin. The moderates needed a theory of moral progress.

This need was not obvious from the start. The primary strategy employed by several of the moderates was to privilege certain New Testament texts over those biblical passages that referred directly to slavery and to interpret the entire text in the light of these privileged passages. Albert Barnes, a New School Presbyterian pastor and subject of a famous heresy trial, in which he was accused of believing that humans had the power to choose God, argued that “the spirit of the New Testament is against slavery, and the principles of the New Testament, if fairly applied, would abolish it.”Footnote ²⁹ William Ellery Channing, the nation's leading Unitarian divine, argued that specific texts should be interpreted “according to the general tenor and spirit of Christianity.” Like most antislavery commentators, Channing argued on the basis of the golden rule, which he called “the perpetual teaching of Christianity with regard to social duty.” Slavery, he claimed, clearly violates the golden rule, because no one could pretend that in enslaving others he is doing unto his neighbor what he would have his neighbor do to him.Footnote ³⁰ In his widely used college textbook, The Elements of Moral Science, Wayland used the same strategy when he wrote, “The precept of the Christian religion is, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself . . . Everyone must admit, that, were this precept universally obeyed, slavery could not exist, for a moment, in fact, though it might exist for a while, in form.”Footnote ³¹

These appeals to the spirit and principles of Christianity raised difficult questions. If Christianity was so clearly against slavery, why did Jesus never speak against it, and why did His greatest missionary, Paul, send a fugitive slave back to his master and direct slaves to obey their masters? In order to reconcile the essential message of Christianity with Jesus’ silence and Paul's words, Channing and Wayland repeated an argument that William Paley had made in 1785: if the gospels had denounced slavery, “the most clamatous of all contests, a bellum servile, might probably have ensued, to the reproach, if not the extinction of the Christian name.”Footnote ³² In 1835 Wayland and Channing both argued that in the case of slavery, God chose not to reveal His will directly, but indirectly, through principles. God made this decision, Wayland speculated, because

The eradication of complex social evils required the slow working of principles through time and, therefore, slavery could not have been proscribed outright. Channing wrote that if the early church had denounced slavery, it would “have shaken the social fabric to its foundation, and would have armed against itself the whole power of the state.” Therefore Paul “satisfied himself with spreading principles which, however slowly, could not but work its destruction.”Footnote ³⁴

The hermeneutical strategies available to antislavery believers were so limited that theological opposites found themselves in agreement over the issue of slavery. Moses Stuart usually prided himself on disagreeing with the likes of Channing. Stuart was the eminent biblical scholar of Andover Theological Seminary, which had been founded in 1808 for the express purpose of safeguarding orthodoxy from Harvard Unitarianism. In order to further that effort, Stuart insisted that the role of criticism was not, as Channing believed, to use the conscience and the reason to decide which parts of the Bible were God's Word, but to uncover the truest meaning of the text so as to best understand the Bible, the entirety of which he equated with God's Word.Footnote ³⁵ Unlike Channing, Stuart never interpreted the Bible in the light of the spirit of the New Testament. At times, he appeared to support the interests of slave-owners. Stuart earned the acrimony of abolitionists with his 1850 publication of Conscience and the Constitution, in which he maintained that Christians should obey the Fugitive Slave Law because they had no grounds for knowing better than Paul or the writers of the Constitution. But when it came to the question of slavery's sinfulness, Stuart found himself agreeing with Channing. Like Channing and Wayland, Stuart argued that Christ and his apostles chose to abolish slavery through principles instead of explicit precepts. Christ avoided meddling in civil matters, and, besides, He “doubtless felt, that slavery might be made a very tolerable condition, nay, even a blessing to such as were shiftless and helpless, in case of kind and gentle mastership.” Therefore Christ decided that slavery should be tolerated for a while, but “took care to utter truths and establish principles, which in their gradual influence and operation would banish slavery from the face of the earth.” The fact that theological enemies found themselves using the same hermeneutical strategies testifies to the difficulty of the antislavery moderates’ task.Footnote ³⁶

Proslavery pundits and conservative biblical scholars were quick to see the weakness of the argument from Christian principles. Northern Old School Presbyterian Charles Hodge asked why teaching abolitionism would not cause strife and bloodshed today, as Wayland and Channing argued that it would have in the early days of the Church. “Is human nature so much altered, that a course, which would have produced universal bloodshed, and led to the very destruction of the Christian religion, in one age, is wise and Christian in another?”Footnote ³⁷ The Protestant Episcopal Society for the Advancement of Christianity asserted that, without a new revelation from heaven, no Christian has the authority to pronounce slavery wrong.Footnote ³⁸ The most developed criticism came from Wayland's opponent, Richard Fuller. “Here,” wrote Fuller, “we have the Author of the gospel, and the inspired propagators of the gospel . . . all conniving at a practice which was a violation of the entire moral principle of the gospel!” Fuller bristled at Wayland, Channing, and Stuart's suggestion that Jesus and the apostles would base their moral teachings on small-minded expediency. As Fuller depicted it, the antislavery argument was an attack on Jesus’ character and that of his apostles, in particular that of Paul. He depicted Wayland's argument in the following manner:

To believe that Paul disapproved of slavery, Fuller concluded, was to convict him of dishonesty.Footnote ³⁹

Responding to the proslavery critique was not an easy task; the options available to antislavery believers were highly constrained. Either Paul, author of the first Christian scriptures, was indeed a prevaricating coward, or humans had somehow progressed morally since biblical times so that modern Christians knew better than Paul. In the absence of a theory of moral progress, to call slavery a sin was to impugn Christ, the apostles, and the trustworthiness of Christian revelation. In order to explain how slavery had become wrong, antislavery Protestants had to develop an idea of revelation that allowed for the progress of morality.Footnote ⁴⁰ The task fell to a series of mid-century theologians. E. P. Barrows, Horace Bushnell, and Samuel Harris endeavored to explain how God's revelation could be perfect and universal if moral law changed over time. Their efforts bridged the divide between the antebellum religious world and the postbellum flowering of Protestant liberalism.

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On the late date of July 1862, the editors of Andover's journal, Bibliotheca Sacra, finally decided that it was time to address the slavery issue. Aside from a few erudite articles on the nature of Hebrew and Roman slavery, they had thus far managed to avoid the controversy. They assigned the task to Barrows, then the professor of Hebrew literature. Barrows was a good choice, not just because of his knowledge of scripture and his acquaintance with biblical criticism, but because his primary scholarly interest was the nature of revelation.

Before the beginning of his academic career, when he was a pastor of the First Free Presbyterian Church in New York City, Barrows had written a pamphlet on the slavery issue. In this 1836 statement Barrows had made an argument similar to that of Wayland and Channing. He wrote that the system of slavery violated Biblical principles; that Mosaic Law was preparatory, and does not apply to a Christian society; and that Christ and the apostles did not denounce slavery, because it would not have helped to establish Christian truth. Christ and the apostles had acted expediently.Footnote ⁴¹

Barrows's first writings on revelation dealt with the threat of “rationalism,” the denial of miracles and of the truth and uniqueness of Christian revelation, not with the problem of slavery. On the occasion, in 1853, of his inauguration as the seminary professor of sacred literature at Andover Theological Seminary, Barrows argued that although each communication from God to men is perfect, and contains no errors, there is in the earliest revelations “a holding back of the full light reserved for future ages, because the world is not prepared to receive it.”Footnote ⁴² In 1862 he turned this logic to the slavery debates. He began by quoting Frederick A. Ross, who, in a speech before the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, had colorfully proclaimed,

Antislavery advocates do not argue, Barrows responded, that God permits sin, but that God suffers certain abuses until humans are capable of doing better. God's governance, he explained, is and always has been a “redemptive and remedial system.” Revelation is perfect, but humans are not capable of understanding it totally. Revelation becomes clearer to humanity over time, as God prepares humanity to receive the full light of revelation. The kingdom of heaven, he explained, is like leaven, working from within. “By its quickening, illuminating, purifying, and elevating power, it reveals to the Christian understanding and feeling old abuses in their true deformity. Then is the time to attack them with the principles of Christianity and in its spirit, and thus to remove them.” Barrows's notion of a revelation that unfolds gradually as humanity progresses made room for moral progress.Footnote ⁴⁴

Horace Bushnell developed a similar answer to the problem posed by moral progress. Bushnell brought his vague but innovative theological mind to the slavery issue in a series of pamphlets. Bushnell looked backward toward Old Calvinism as much as he looked forward to liberalism. On the one hand, he presaged late nineteenth-century liberalism by rejecting dogma and insisting that theological language was too imprecise to capture theological truth. On the other, he longed for the theocratic world of old New England, where pastors were public intellectuals and Christianity was an everyday, shared reality that did not require precise theological articulation.Footnote ⁴⁵ His position on slavery reflected his brand of conservatism; although Bushnell detested the brutality of southern slavery, he spent more time denouncing abolitionism than he did arguing for emancipation. Yet Bushnell adamantly defended the possibility and the necessity of moral progress against those who would limit the moral possibilities for society to the letter of Scripture. In his commentary on slavery, Bushnell developed an organic view of revelation that, true to form, was at once a step toward Protestant liberalism and a renunciation of Protestant social reform.

In 1843 Bushnell spoke to a group of Yale College alumni on the subject of “the moral tendencies and results of human history.” In answer to his rhetorical question, “Is there any law . . . in human history, by which the authority of conscience is progressively invigorated?”, Bushnell answered yes, that although the law of virtue was immutable, it allowed for variety and progress. Some revelations existed for all time, and society's task was to apply them more perfectly, but others, what Bushnell called “permissive statutes,” depended on the moral capacities of society. God designed revelation so that it would speak to men according to their moral abilities, eliciting their obedience while strengthening and invigorating their consciences. As society progressed under God's tutelage, permissive statutes belonging to barbarous ages passed away.Footnote ⁴⁶

Such progress, Bushnell continued, explained the development of antislavery. A new age of the world had so changed the relation of slavery that it was no longer the same, and could no longer be justified. The question, Bushnell explained, is not “whether we can torture Scripture so as to make it condemn all that we desire to exclude,” nor “whether we are bound, for all time, and eternity to boot, to justify what the Scripture suffers.” The real question, according to Bushnell, was

While certain revelations were immutable, others were adjusted to the capacities of society, and therefore changed as society progressed.Footnote ⁴⁷

However, Bushnell did not believe that, because social progress had revealed the wrong of slavery, men should fight for its abolition. Just after Lincoln's election, when violence, so anathema to Bushnell's temperament, threatened, he assured a New York audience that current population trends would bring an automatic end to slavery. In this address, entitled “The Census and Slavery,” Bushnell expanded upon his belief in God's direction of human moral progress. Both antislavery and proslavery advocates, Bushnell said, limit the power of God, the one side in its torturing of the Scriptures in fear that society has outpaced God's revelation, and the other in its limiting of revelation to the morality of a barbaric society. Both imply that “God has been able to do nothing for the world,” and ignore that the God of Scripture expects moral growth, and, through revelation, is always “putting in new germs of possibility, to raise the conceptions of men and make them capable, in society, of better things.” But God does not rely on human reform efforts to make the new “germs of possibility” bear fruit. Bushnell asked,

Bushnell's belief that social change and moral progress altered the applications of revelation presaged the liberal Protestant belief in the development of revelation through the progress of human society. However, his organic understanding of revelation promoted quietistic conservatism rather than the social progressivism that later forms of liberal Protestantism so often inspired. Bushnell's career, like Barrows's, spanned the time when orthodoxy was in decline and Protestant liberalism was not yet established. They both advocated an organic vision of revelation that looked forward to liberal notions of the kingdom of God, but also backward to a less theologically precise time when faith was more assured.

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In the period from 1861 to 1880 the pressures on orthodoxy increased. War and emancipation preempted the slavery debates and, for antislavery northerners, attested to the reality and the speed of moral progress. Postbellum liberals had a complex relationship with the antislavery believers in moral progress. While the postbellum generation's experience of slavery's demise strengthened their belief in moral progress, their belief that the evil of slavery necessitated its violent overthrow distanced them from the antislavery moderates, who now appeared to have lagged behind the progress of morality. After the war, Congregationalist pastor and liberal theologian Theodore Munger wrote of his disgust with his own antebellum moderation. The “generation now maturing,” wrote Munger,

With the clarity of hindsight, Munger now revered Garrison: “the wonderful fact about Mr. Garrison is not that he had the courage of his opinions, but his clear vision of the thing to be done.”Footnote ⁴⁹ If the moderates, such respectable and intelligent men, had not fully understood the wrongfulness of slavery, then morality had progressed quickly indeed, so quickly that only the lunatic fringe had sensed the change. After the war, northern Protestants like Munger knew, much to their discomfort, that Christians, despite righteousness, erudition, and faith, could not and did not see the moral truth until God, working through history, revealed it to them. In order to keep up, Christians would have to be highly attuned to the progress of morality.

They would also have to attend to even more threatening forms of progress, namely scientific and technological progress, and, with the beginning of the Darwinian controversy, the progress of life itself. During the last third of the nineteenth century the relationship between progress and revelation changed. While antebellum antislavery Protestants had struggled to explain the meaning of moral progress for a Protestant culture dedicated to the inviolability of revelation, postbellum religious liberals faced the greater challenge of defending the possibility of believing in anything timeless and unchangeable in a culture enthralled with progress. The antislavery idea of progressive revelation became indispensable to the postwar generation of liberal Protestants.

Samuel Harris, the professor of systematic theology at Yale Divinity School from 1871 to 1895, was arguably the first American religious thinker to treat the problem of moral progress in a systematic manner.Footnote ⁵⁰ According to Harris, the greatest threats to Christianity were “naturalism”—the study of nature apart from any belief in or consideration of the supernatural—and the belief that the moral and scientific progress of human society had eclipsed revelation. Harris felt the need to redeem Christianity from its association with error—with scientific error, and with the enormous moral error of slavery. In order to defend the validity of Christian revelation, Harris focused on the relation between God and human history.Footnote ⁵¹

Harris associated scientific progress with the moral progress represented by the antislavery movement. To his mind, they were parallel; both brought with them the suggestion that Christian revelation was invalid because it contained error and human ignorance. Why, for instance, did Jesus not give humanity the benefits of modern science and technology? If he was indeed God, and all-knowing, why did he hold back this information which could have prevented so much suffering? If he had done so, Harris wrote, he would have given the world the message that technology and modern comforts were essential to redemption, “that the Son of God came into the world to give to man ‘all the modern conveniences.’” But also, if he had revealed the “modern discoveries,” argued Harris, “they would not have been appreciated or received. For the wonders wrought by his science and inventions he would have been likely to be pronounced a magician, while his discoveries and inventions would have been forgotten.” Harris then applied the same logic to slavery, using a familiar argument: “If he had at once set himself to abolish slavery . . . he would have been put to death as a disturber of the peace, and his doctrines forgotten as the dreams of a fanatic.” Here was the expediency argument used by Channing, Wayland, and Stuart (although in an odd form—was Jesus not put to death as a disturber of the peace anyway?). But Harris, unlike the earlier participants in the slavery debate, developed a theology to support the expediency argument. Revelation, he argued, could never be far in advance of human capabilities, because revelation works through human history.Footnote ⁵²

Harris believed that emancipation was evidence of God's movement through human history. American slavery had “vanished like a cloud in the presence of the very generation who were declaring its removal impracticable.” This fact disclosed, he argued, how God's providence brings “secular interests, customs, institutions, and agencies to aid in the advancement of his kingdom.”Footnote ⁵³ God always achieves his will through such means; God's redeeming grace, Harris explained, “can manifest itself only in human history.” And, since revelation must be historical in nature, “it must advance by human agency, and its advance must be subject to the processes and changes of human history.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Because God's grace is revealed through humanity, the institutions, customs, and laws that embody Christian life will differ and change through time. Social change, then, even enormous social changes like war and industrialization, should not worry Christians. Such changes can alter only the form of Christianity, not its essence.

To those who objected that moral and scientific progress show revelation to be imperfect and inadequate, Harris responded that they are right, but that this is the way revelation works. As long as humanity is imperfect, it must perceive the truths of revelation only partially and incompletely. It is inevitable, then, that Christianity at times associates itself with what turns out to be imperfection and error. As the kingdom of God advances, along with the moral and intellectual capabilities of humankind, new meanings and applications of revelation are disclosed. It is a mistake, Harris wrote, to say that the apostles provided, in their inspired writings, a rule for Christian life throughout all time. “No inspired thinker of the apostolical churches could have delineated the peculiarities of civilization which Christianity has already produced.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Revelation had never been static; it had always kept just ahead of the times, pulling God's people forward at the fastest pace they could withstand. Because “revelation goes on without ceasing, in all nature, in the experience of individuals, and in the history of man,” it must be “receive[d] . . . ever anew.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Because revelation is always seen only partially, and Christianity does not provide a blueprint for human life, Christians know God's will only through the actual experience of Christian life:

Harris had developed a theological explanation of the slavery crisis. Sometime in the 1830s God brought it to the attention of some northerners that southern slavery had to be eradicated, and we should not be surprised, Harris implied, that the less advanced culture of the South prevented southerners from perceiving this movement of Providence.

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Explaining how Christianity could have been in error and yet still have a special claim to eternal truth required a new, evolutionary idea of revelation. Beginning in the late 1870s, a new generation of liberal Protestant theologians developed an evolutionary and progressive understanding of revelation. Moral progress was central to the “New Theology” of liberals including Newman Smyth, Lyman Abbott, and Theodore Munger. This new generation of liberal divines endeavored to construct a form of Christian orthodoxy that could make its peace with evolution and historical criticism while expressing the religious and moral experience of modern Christians.Footnote ⁵⁸

Writing in 1879, Congregationalist pastor Newman Smyth pondered the theological lessons of antislavery. “The fact that arguments in defense of slavery used to be drawn from the Bible,” wrote Smyth, “shows the need of popular instruction with regard to the development of revelation, and the guiding spirit of the Bible.” Smyth used the example of slavery to illustrate the true nature of revelation. The “idea of the individual and his rights,” he explained, “could be firmly secured only by a patient work of God in human history.” Ridding humanity of the sin of slavery required a gradual process of education accommodated to the capacities of humans in each successive age.Footnote ⁵⁹

Like other late nineteenth-century liberal Protestant theologians, Smyth relied on a progressive understanding of revelation to make sense of various challenges to orthodoxy. First, the progressive nature of biblical revelation accounted for the many faults and historical limitations of the Old Testament. The faults of scripture were “the necessary incidents of a course of moral education, . . . the unavoidable limitations of a partial and progressive revelation.” Even more importantly, especially for Smyth, for whom evolution was “the one word, which more than all the others has been a revolutionary call to modern thought,” moral progress provided a language for accommodating evolution to Christian belief.Footnote ⁶⁰ Both moral and biological development were part of God's progressive creation of the world:

The belief that revelation was an ongoing, progressive, educational process accorded as well with evolution as it had with moral progress.

Congregationalist pastor, editor, and Social Gospel proponent Lyman Abbott discovered the same congruity. In 1892 he wrote that the “Christian religion is itself an evolution; that is, that this life of God in humanity is one of continuous progressive change, according to certain divine laws, and by means of forces, or a force, resident in humanity.” Abbott explained that the belief that the Bible is a divine revelation is consistent with the belief that the Christian religion is an evolution, because “revelation is not a final statement of truth, crystallized into dogma, but a gradual and progressive unveiling of the mind that it may see truth clearly and receive it vitally.” According to Abbott, the “Christian evolutionist” understands that the Bible is not “an infallible standard of truth or life . . . but the history of the growth of man's consciousness of God.” Abbott's teleological version of evolution was more than a scientific theory; it was God's method for interacting with fallible humanity.Footnote ⁶²

The “New Theologians” understood both nature and revelation as processes of gradual progressive development. Munger preached that evolution revealed the true basis of the unity of creation; that is, the fact that God creates all things by a single process of development. “We find the same method,” wrote Munger, “in matter, in brute life, in humanity, social institutions, in government, in religions, in the progress of Christianity.” Believing that this process of development “tends steadily toward the moral,” Munger believed that evolution served as proof that, over time, the Church's “highest hopes” for human society would be fulfilled. To those doubters who complained that evolution distanced God by hiding Him behind impersonal laws and processes, Munger responded that, by revealing to us the very methods of God, evolution “goes far towards breaking down the walls of mystery that shut him out from human vision.” For the founders of the “New Theology,” the once-troubling idea of moral progress became a model for all forms of development, and a means of understanding the method of God's creation.Footnote ⁶³

The liberals’ belief in progress served to unify the sacred and the secular, revelation and nature. Everything—nature, science, society, morality and revelation—remained in harmony as long as everything was in constant forward motion. At high speed everything was blurry enough to look the same. Belief in progress allowed late nineteenth-century liberal theologians to minimize and even to evade possible incongruities between secular and religious forms of thought. Historians have often portrayed the liberal adjustment to orthodoxy as a needless and weak-minded concession to secular ways of thinking. And yet the history of the development of one major liberal conception, the belief in moral progress, suggests a different story. In nineteenth-century America the problem of moral progress originated in the fundamental incongruity between the letter of Scripture and the moral imperative to proclaim slavery a sin. While liberal theologians might have come to rely too heavily on belief in moral progress, the incipient liberalism of antislavery Protestants was neither dishonest nor unnecessary. Rather, the development of the idea of moral progress suggests that the effort to sustain important and entirely valid moral and intellectual commitments might occasionally require major theological adjustments. It is fitting that coming to terms with slavery required theological innovation. After all, slavery was the nation's most fundamental moral problem, and its abolition remains our best testament to human moral progress.