Submitted May 8, 2017
Steve Wells responded to my column (His View, May 3) in the newspaper by citing some quotations from me, as though those quotations were inconsistent with what I said in my article. He wants to represent me as a returned prodigal who is dishonest enough to pretend that he had never run off in the first place. But I stand by what I wrote in my piece on May 3, and I stand by the inflammatory quotations that Mr. Wells cited. Not only so, but I could probably find some additional provocative quotes to stand by, if requested.
Connecting all these various quotations is a curious practice that our ancestors used to call “presenting an argument.” Since Mr. Wells made no allusion to the existence of such an argument in his attempt to represent me as disingenuous, let me put the argument in a nutshell here.
In every country but ours, slavery was ended in the West without a war. We managed to kill 600,000 people in our war. In contrast, the biblical approach to overthrowing pagan forms of slavery is by means of peaceful subversion — teaching believing slaves and masters alike how to behave in such a way as to make the continuation of the institution of slavery untenable. The New Testament is crammed with instructions on this. Had we been willing to do this — subverting the system without reviling the people who are engaged in subverting the system — we would not have done it the way that secularists apparently love to applaud, that is to say, via unnecessary carnage.
Whether one agrees with my argument or not, my argument does exist, and what actually is disingenuous is the practice of pretending that it doesn’t.
Moscow