5. Disinterested Benevolence

[Rob Boss]

How did Hopkins take Edwards’s idea of “disinterested benevolence” and turn it into a argument against slavery and the slave trade?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0GSJZ8VGQ
https://shop.jesociety.org/b/bjka9

[Joseph Lee]

I believe Hopkins used the social and activist stimuli located in Edwards’s doctrine of benevolence to derive social concern and activism for his doctrine of disinterested benevolence, which was expressed in his abolitionist stance. What I mean by social and activist stimuli is the ways Edwards believed Christian benevolence should be expressed. In addition to Hopkins’s True Holiness and A Dialogue Between a Calvinist and a Semi–Calvinist, his System of Doctrines and sermons show the expressions of selfless activist love that I believe he derived from Edwards’s understanding of benevolence. In the end, I believe Edwards’s moral theology contains everything one would need to be a wholly committed abolitionist.