2. Question of Consistency

[Rob Boss]

You argue that Hopkins was more consistent with Edwards’s ethics than Edwards himself. What does that consistency look like in practice?

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[Joseph Lee]

Simply put, Hopkins became a committed abolitionist. After his time pastoring in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he was deeply impacted by observing enslaved people being unloaded at various slave-trading docks in Newport, Rhode Island, beginning in 1770. The inhumanity of the slave trade marked him, and he began to include antislavery teaching in his sermons and advocated publicly for the eradication of the slave trade and the institution. For Hopkins, his doctrine of disinterested benevolence and the growing equalitarian sentiment of the 1770s converged, pushing him to believe everyone is equal and worthy of service and love. He taught the evil and cruelty of the slave trade and institutionalized slavery and the need for the eradication of both.