Bethesda and Its Shadow

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. JAMES 1:27

For thirty years one earthly work held George Whitefield’s heart more than any other: an orphan house in Georgia. He called it Bethesda, after the pool in Jerusalem where the sick waited for healing — the house of mercy. He begged for it in the fields of England and Scotland and the streets of Philadelphia and Boston. He poured his own money into it. On his deathbed at Newburyport he prayed for it. And it was for Bethesda that he did the thing that most darkens his memory: he campaigned for slavery in Georgia and became an owner of enslaved human beings. This chapter must hold both together, because they cannot honestly be separated.

The house of mercy

When Whitefield first came to Georgia in 1738, the colony was young and struggling, and he found many children left orphaned by the hardships of settlement, scattered in a forlorn condition. He resolved to build them a home. The first brick was laid in March 1740, some miles outside Savannah. For the rest of his life Whitefield raised money for it wherever he preached, and Bethesda became a byword for his generosity. Benjamin Franklin, who thought the house should have been built in Philadelphia and went to hear Whitefield determined to give nothing, recorded in his Autobiography that by the end of the sermon he had emptied his pockets into the collection.

Whitefield’s teaching on charity was consistent with the work. In The Great Duty of Charity Recommended he pleads with the rich to consider the poor, rebukes those who spend at horse races and masquerades what could relieve the hungry, and says bluntly, “if we have not charity, we are not Christians.” He insists that he is not asking for himself, and he was scrupulous about the accounts: Bethesda’s books were examined, and he was shown never to have taken a penny of its funds for his own use.

He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD; and that which he hath given will he pay him again. PROVERBS 19:17

In January 1770, months before his death, he preached at Bethesda before the governor and assembly of Georgia, a sermon now in his Selected Sermons. He traced the providence of God in the house’s history, gave thanks for those who had helped, and declared his wish that “Bethesda shall be always on a broad bottom,” open to all denominations, as all denominations had given to it. He hoped to see it grow into a college.

The shadow

Georgia had been founded with a ban on slavery. Its trustees had forbidden it for reasons both moral and practical, wanting a colony of free, industrious smallholders. Whitefield came to believe that the colony, and his orphan house with it, could not prosper without enslaved labour. In letters to the trustees he argued that the ban should be lifted, and he pressed the point for years.

He did not wait for the law to change. In 1747 he used money given to him to buy a plantation in South Carolina, where slavery was legal, and enslaved people to work it, so that its income might support Bethesda. When Georgia’s ban was repealed at the start of the 1750s — a change he had campaigned for and welcomed — enslaved people were brought to work at Bethesda itself. Whitefield owned enslaved men, women and children for the rest of his life. When he died, his will left the orphan house, with the people enslaved there, to the Countess of Huntingdon.

And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death. EXODUS 21:16

It cannot be said that he did not know better. In 1740 he had published an open letter rebuking the planters of the southern colonies for their cruelty to those they held, and warning them of God’s judgement. In his letters he admitted that the manner in which Africans had been brought from their homeland was wrong and the trade not to be approved. But he reasoned that since slavery would continue in any case, he might use it for a charitable end, and treat those he owned more kindly than others did, and teach them the gospel. It was the reasoning of a man who wanted the good he could do more than he feared the evil he was doing.

Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbour’s service without wages, and giveth him not for his work. JEREMIAH 22:13

What must be said

There is no way to soften this, and no Christian should try. Whitefield preached that Christ had died for enslaved Africans as well as for others, and that in Christ there is neither bond nor free. He told them they might be the children of God. He then bought and held them as property to fund an orphanage. The same man who saw that a collier had a soul, and that a slave had a soul, looked at the system that bound them and chose to profit by it.

Some defend him by saying he was a man of his time. That is true, and it explains much, but it does not excuse him. Others in his time saw more clearly. Quakers such as John Woolman were already bearing witness against slavery, and within a generation evangelicals shaped by the revival Whitefield helped to lead, John Wesley and John Newton among them, would condemn it outright. The light was available. Whitefield did not walk in it.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? MICAH 6:8

What we may learn

The first lesson is humility. If a man so used by God, so earnest in prayer, so free with his money, so eager for the salvation of the poor, could be so blind, then none of us may assume we are not. The sins most dangerous to us are often the ones our society approves and our own good causes seem to require.

The second is that good ends do not sanctify evil means. Bethesda was a work of mercy. It was built in part on injustice. The orphans were fed, and other children were enslaved to feed them. God does not need our sin to accomplish His purposes.

The third is that the gospel Whitefield preached was greater than his practice. The truth that Christ died for all, that every soul is precious, that in Him there is neither bond nor free, carried within it the end of slavery, and later generations of believers drew that conclusion even when he would not.

Not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved. PHILEMON 1:16

Reading him honestly

Readers of Whitefield should not look away from this chapter of his life, and they should not let it cancel everything else. Both things are true: he was a faithful preacher of Christ, and he did a great wrong. The proper response is neither to excuse him nor to dismiss him, but to learn, to repent of our own blind spots, and to love justice and mercy together.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask God to show you any injustice that you, your community or your church accepts because it is normal or convenient.

2. Examine a good cause you care about. Is any part of it built on means that wrong others?

3. Read Galatians 3:28 and Philemon 1:16 slowly, and ask what they require of you in how you treat people who serve you or work for you.

4. Learn something this month about the history of slavery and the church in your own country, and pray about what you learn.

5. Give generously and privately to a work of mercy for children, as Whitefield taught, and make sure it is a work done justly.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You are the Father of the fatherless and the defender of the oppressed. You see what we will not see.

I confess that Your servants have done great wrong in Your name, and that my heart is no less capable of blindness than theirs.

Open my eyes to injustice I have excused. Keep me from doing evil that good may come.

Teach Your church to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with You, and let no one we serve be wronged by our hands. Amen.