Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Hopkins

Hopkins isn’t nibbling at the edges of pro-slavery theology; he’s trying to burn the whole scaffold down. The opening move is almost surgical: he grants, for the sake of argument, the premise his opponents love most - that Scripture might conceivably “vindicate” some form of slavery. That concession is bait, not surrender. It lets him pivot to the real indictment: whatever ancient servitude the Bible describes, it cannot be stretched to sanctify the racialized, hereditary, profit-driven bondage of Black people in the Atlantic world. He’s separating categories so cleanly that proof-texting becomes not just wrong but obscene.

The subtext is a direct rebuke to the clerical class that functioned as slavery’s public-relations arm. Hopkins is saying: if you need the Bible to launder this system, you won’t find the detergent. Notice the phrasing “as we do.” He isn’t debating abstractions; he’s pointing at a specific American practice - chattel slavery, enforced by law and violence, rationalized as paternal care - and insisting it’s a theological nonstarter.

Context matters: Hopkins is writing as a New England Congregationalist in the revolutionary era, when “liberty” was becoming America’s sacred word while slavery remained its economic engine. The line “condemned by the whole of divine revelation” is maximalist on purpose. It refuses the common compromise of the period (slavery as regrettable but tolerated) and frames the institution as not merely sinful in parts, but fundamentally incompatible with the moral arc of Christianity. It’s abolitionism as doctrinal clarity: not “be nicer to slaves,” but “stop calling this God.”