Sermon Tone Analysis

! Peculiar Doctrines, Public Morals, and the Political Welfare

Reflections on the Life and Labor of William Wilberforce

2002 Bethlehem Conference for Pastors

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By John Piper February 5, 2002

 

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If you want to understand and appreciate The Life and Labor of William Wilberforce, one of the wisest things you can do is to read his own book, A Practical View of Christianity first, and then read biographies.

The book was published in 1797 when Wilberforce was 37 years old and had been a member of the British Parliament already for 16 years.

The book proved incredibly popular for the time.

It went through five printings in six months and was translated into five foreign languages.

The book makes crystal clear what drives Wilberforce as a person and a politician.

And if you don't see it first in his book, chances are you may not find it clearly in the biographies.

What made Wilberforce tick was a profound Biblical allegiance to what he called the "peculiar doctrines" of Christianity.

These, he said, give rise, in turn, to true affections – what we might call "passion" or "emotions" – for spiritual things, which, in turn, break the power of pride and greed and fear, and then lead to transformed morals which, in turn, lead to the political welfare of the nation.

He said, "If . . .

a principle of true Religion [i.e., true Christianity] should . . .

gain ground, there is no estimating the effects on public morals, and the consequent influence on our political welfare."

But he was no ordinary pragmatist or political utilitarian, even though he was one of the most practical men of his day.

He was a doer.

One of his biographers said, "He lacked time for half the good works in his mind."

James Stephen, who knew him well, remarked, "Factories did not spring up more rapidly in Leeds and Manchester than schemes of benevolence beneath his roof."

"No man," Wilberforce wrote, "has a right to be idle."

"Where is it," he asked, "that in such a world as this, [that] health, and leisure, and affluence may not find some ignorance to instruct, some wrong to redress, some want to supply, some misery to alleviate?"

In other words, he lived to do good – or as Jesus said, to let his light shine before men that they might see his good deeds and give glory to his Father in heaven (Matthew 5:16).

But he was practical with a difference.

He believed with all his heart that new affections for God were the key to new morals (or manners, as they were sometimes called) and lasting political reformation.

And these new affections and this reformation did not come from mere ethical systems.

They came from what he called the "peculiar doctrines" of Christianity.

For Wilberforce, practical deeds were born in "peculiar doctrines."

By that term he simply meant the central distinguishing doctrines of human depravity, divine judgment, the substitutionary work of Christ on the cross, justification by faith alone, regeneration by the Holy Spirit, and the practical necessity of fruit in a life devoted to good deeds.

He wrote his book, A Practical View of Christianity, to show that the "Bulk" of Christians in England were merely nominal because they had abandoned these doctrines in favor of a system of ethics and had thus lost the power of ethical life and the political welfare.

He wrote:

The fatal habit of considering Christian morals as distinct from Christian doctrines insensibly gained strength.

Thus the peculiar doctrines of Christianity went more and more out of sight, and as might naturally have been expected, the moral system itself also began to wither and decay, being robbed of that which should have supplied it with life and nutriment."

He pled with nominally Christian England not to turn "their eyes from the grand peculiarities of Christianity, [but] to keep these ever in view, as the pregnant principles whence all the rest must derive their origin, and receive their best support."

Knowing Wilberforce was a politician all his adult life, never losing an election from the time he was 21 years old, we might be tempted to think that his motives were purely pragmatic – as if he should say, "if Christianity works to produce the political welfare, then use it."

But that is not the spirit of his mind or his life.

In fact, he believed that such pragmatism would ruin the very thing it sought, the reformation of culture.

Take the example of how people define sin.

When considering the nature of sin, Wilberforce said, the vast Bulk of Christians in England estimated the guilt of an action "not by the proportion in which, according to scripture, [actions] are offensive to God, but by that in which they are injurious to society."

Now, on the face of it that sounds noble, loving, and practical.

Sin hurts people, so don't sin.

Wouldn't that definition of sin be good for society?

But Wilberforce says, "Their slight notions of the guilt and evil of sin [reveal] an utter [lack] of all suitable reverence for the Divine Majesty.

This principle [reverence for the Divine Majesty] is justly termed in Scripture, 'The beginning of wisdom' [Psalm 111:10]."

And without this wisdom, there will be no deep and lasting good done for man, spiritually or politically.

Therefore, the supremacy of God's glory in all things is what he calls "the grand governing maxim" in all of life.

The good of society may never be put ahead of this.

It dishonors God and defeats the good of society.

For the good of society, the good of society must not be the primary good.

A practical example of how his mind worked would be the practice of dueling.

Wilberforce hated the practice of dueling – the practice that demanded a man of honor to accept a challenge to a duel when another felt insulted.

Wilberforce's close friend and Prime Minister, William Pitt, actually fought a duel with George Tierney in 1798, and Wilberforce was shocked that the Prime Minister would risk his life and the nation in this way.

Many opposed it on its human unreasonableness.

But Wilberforce wrote:

It seems hardly to have been noticed in what chiefly consists its essential guilt; that it is a deliberate preference of the favor of man, before the favor and approbation of God, in articulo mortis ["at the point of death"], in an instance, wherein our own life, and that of a fellow creature are at stake, and wherein we run the risk of rushing into the presence of our Maker in the very act of offending him."

In other words, offending God is the essential consideration, not killing a man or imperiling a nation.

That is what makes Wilberforce tick.

He was not a political pragmatist.

He was a radically God-centered Christian who was a politician.

We will come back to how the Christian faith worked in his life and politics, but first let's get a brief glimpse of his life.

!!!! His Early Life

Wilberforce was born August 24, 1759, in Hull, England.

His father died just before Wilberforce turned 9 years old.

He was sent to live with his uncle and aunt, William and Hannah, where he came under evangelical influences.

His mother was more high church and was concerned her son was "turning Methodist."

She took him out of the boarding school where they had sent him and sent him to another.

He had admired Whitefield, Wesley, and John Newton as a child.

But at this new school he said later, "I did nothing at all there."

And that became his lifestyle through St. John's College at Cambridge.

He was rich and able to live off his parents' wealth and get by with little work.

He lost any interest in Biblical religion and loved circulating among the social elite.

He became friends with his contemporary William Pitt who in just a few years, at the age of 24, became the Prime Minister of England in 1783.

Almost on a lark Wilberforce ran for the seat in the House of Commons from his home town of Hull in 1780 at the age of 21.

He spent £8,000 on the election.

The money and his incredible gift for speaking triumphed over both his opponents.

After that Wilberforce never lost an election till the day of his death just before his 74th birthday.

In 1784 he ran for the seat of the much larger and more influential Yorkshire and was elected.

Thus began a fifty-year investment in the politics of England.

He began it as a late-night, party-loving, upper-class unbeliever.

He was single and would stay that way happily until he was 37 years old.

Then he met Barbara on April 15, 1797.

He fell immediately in love.

In the next eight days he proposed to her and on May 30th they were married, about two weeks after they met – and stayed married until William died 36 years later.

In the first eight years of their marriage they had four sons and two daughters.

We will come back to William as a family man, because it sheds light on his character and how he endured the political battles of the day.

I've just skipped over the most important thing, his conversion to a deep Christian, evangelical faith.

It is a great story of the providence of God pursuing a person through seemingly casual choices.

On the long holidays when Parliament was not in session Wilberforce would sometimes travel with friends or family.

In the winter of 1784, when he was 25, on an impulse, he invited Isaac Milner, a friend he had known in grammar school, and who was now a tutor in Queens College, Cambridge, to go with him and his mother and sister to the French Riviera.

To his amazement Milner turned out to be a convinced Christian without any of the stereotypes that Wilberforce had built up against evangelicals.

They talked for hours about the Christian faith.

In another seemingly accidental turn, Wilberforce saw lying in the house where they were staying a copy of Philip Doddridge's The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745).

He asked Milner about it, and he said that it was "one of the best books ever written" and suggested they take it along and read it on the way home.

Wilberforce later ascribes a huge influence in his conversion to this book.

When he arrived home in February 1785 he "had reached intellectual assent to the Biblical view of man, God and Christ."

But would not have claimed what he later described as true Christianity.

It was all intellectual.

He pushed it to the back of his mind and went on with political and social life.

That summer Wilberforce traveled again with Milner and discussed the Greek New Testament for hours.

Slowly his "intellectual assent became profound conviction" One of the first manifestations of what he called "the great change" – the conversion – was the contempt he felt for his wealth and the luxury he lived in, especially on these trips between Parliamentary sessions.

Seeds were sown almost immediately at the beginning of his Christian life, it seems, of the later passion to help the poor and to turn all his inherited wealth and his naturally high station into a means of blessing the oppressed.