Several first wave feminist leaders linked the struggle for women’s rights with the struggle to end slavery. Similarly, many pro-slavery advocates linked these causes with the alternative intention of securing a patriarchal order over both white women and enslaved people. For the sake of simplicity, many scholars have studied the submission of wives and slaves in isolation, even though some feminists and pro-slavery advocates explicitly connected them. Scholars run the risk of misunderstanding complex connections when they focus on only one concept that is logically connected to a person’s overarching worldview. Instead, this article ventures into the complexity of two similar perspectives on two related topics. Southern Presbyterian minister Robert Dabney recognized an indissoluble correlation between the submission of slaves to masters and the submission of wives to husbands. Northern Presbyterian theologian Charles Hodge noted significant distinctions between the two. This study does not attempt to vindicate Dabney or Hodge’s views but to understand the consistencies and inconsistencies of their ideas in their historical context. While both men were products of their time, the fact that they shared so many beliefs and still disagreed on notable issues reveals the role cultural context often plays in biblical interpretation. This article argues that while Dabney strongly supported slavery and staunchly opposed any form of egalitarianism, Hodge articulated nuanced and easily misunderstood views on both slavery and women’s roles. This is not, however, a study of their views on women and chattel slavery writ large; it is a comparative analysis of how they thought about submission in the institutions of marriage and slavery. Hodge and Dabney shared many philosophical and theological convictions, but their distinct political and cultural commitments informed their biblical interpretations.

As a theologian, professor, and Confederate chaplain, Robert Dabney developed stringent arguments for both slavery and patriarchy, wedding them in his defense of hierarchy and the social order. Dabney’s pro-slavery apologetic was not merely a defense of slavery. His pro-slavery arguments were informed by his patriarchal, anti-democratic, aristocratic republicanism.1 Of course, Dabney was not the only nineteenth-century theologian to grapple with the relationship between husbands and wives, and masters and slaves. The Princeton theology professor Charles Hodge represents a moderate approach to both the question of slavery and marital relations, even though his ideas still bore the stains of his historical moment.

Dabney and Hodge were both Old School Presbyterians and thus theologically likeminded in most regards; nonetheless, they resided in different sections of the country and the 1861 regional rift in the Old School body separated them for the rest of their lives. Robert Dabney’s commitment to southern hierarchies gave his thought a great deal of consistency. His political theology was grounded in patriarchal hierarchy, which is why he strongly opposed abolitionism, feminism, and public education, all of which he believed had the same problem: a democratic shift towards individual autonomy and away from white patriarchal authority. Charles Hodge exhibited more nuance, drawing conclusions on the topics of slavery and women’s rights that both accorded with and defied his cultural context. His nuance did not prevent him from slipping into the cultural assumptions of his day, but even when he parroted such assumptions as if they were novel, his views were rational, measured, and tempered in a way that Dabney’s were not.

There are many reasons why these men and their views deserve attention.2 They were both professors who trained many ministers in the North and South. Dabney taught at Union Seminary in Virginia, which was under the control of southern synods and attracted southern students almost exclusively.3 Hodge taught at Princeton Seminary, which attracted many students from both the North and the South.4 Hodge and Dabney were men who thought deeply about a variety of issues, and they defended their beliefs in books, periodicals, presbytery meetings, general assemblies, and classrooms. They both exemplify a common late-Antebellum approach to Scripture, which Mark Noll outlines in his classic America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002). As Noll argues, Protestantism was Americanized throughout the nineteenth century as American Protestants aligned it with republicanism and commonsense realism.5 Many American Christians in this milieu equated their interpretations of Scripture with a commonsense reading of the text. This “republican-evangelical-commonsense synthesis” discouraged theologians from examining their cultural assumptions and their personal biases. Both Hodge and Dabney fell prey to these Americanized, hermeneutical impulses.

Hodge and Dabney equated their culturally informed readings of Scripture with its plain meaning, though Hodge’s exegesis occasionally defied his cultural sensibilities. Dabney’s interpretations rarely pushed against the patriarchal and racist hierarchies of southern society. Hodge, however, occasionally took unpopular positions amongst other northern Old School Presbyterians, like his belief in the validity of Roman Catholic baptisms. Similarly, even though Hodge personally supported Abraham Lincoln and the Union in the Civil War, he opposed his denomination’s endorsement of the Union. Hodge argued that the Church must not bind the conscience of her members on civil matters. Despite being a product of his time, Hodge was a better expositor of Scripture because he was willing to carry his theological convictions to culturally and denominationally unpopular conclusions.6 He had his finger on the societal and ecclesial pulse enough to know when a topic would threaten unity. When a topic portended division in his seminary, his denomination, or his nation, he broached it with the social awareness of a seasoned politician.7

Both men influenced Americans well beyond the bounds of Presbyterianism, especially Dabney, who took up the task of defending slavery and the Confederacy. Several of his writings about slavery and women were intended for average educated Americans like his books Life and Campaigns of Lieut. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson (Stonewall Jackson) (1866), A Defense of Virginia (and Through Her of the South) (1867), and The Sensualistic Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century (1875). Charles Irons observed that even with a small proportion of Presbyterians in the South, Presbyterian divines such as Robert Dabney and South Carolina’s James Henley Thornwell played an inordinate role in defending the South’s peculiar institution.8 Alternatively, almost all of Hodge’s books were religious in nature. While some works could be considered more than just theological, Hodge almost always addressed topics that he considered primarily theological. Aside from his work What is Darwinism? all of Hodge’s books directly addressed theological issues. Hodge did however address many other religious adjacent topics in The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, most of whose readers were ministers or religious intellectuals.

Although Hodge and Dabney were Presbyterian, their approaches to slavery and gender roles were not unique to Presbyterianism. Their common commitment to a shared religious tradition and epistemology, however, reveals that such commonalities cannot be the source of their disagreements. Their ideas were at times profound and at other times egregiously errant, but their insights and errors are both instructive.

1. “Pious Females”

Even though women constituted a majority in nearly every Presbyterian congregation, they were not mentioned in any of the official documents of the Presbyterian Church in the USA (PCUSA) for over two decades after the denomination’s establishment in 1789.9 Women were first mentioned during the 1811 General Assembly, which recognized the role that “pious females” had played in voluntary mission, benevolent, and reform organizations.10 The term “pious females” often occurred in subsequent documents, revealing some of the ways revivalism offered Presbyterian women prominent roles. They primarily organized to address social and political concerns with a “woman’s tenderness.”11 These organizations responded to urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and the growing need for more churches in the western United States, but they were often encouraged to do so in ways that were considered suitable for their sex.12

The early nineteenth century saw the rise and permeation of a “separate spheres” ideology of gender roles.13 Throughout most of western history, the predominant view was that men and women were essentially the same sex, with the assumption that the latter was a biologically deformed and deficient version of the former. The Enlightenment, however, gave rise to the idea that women were wholly other in both their sexual nature and their fitness for certain types of labor.14 This new understanding of the differences between the sexes, gave rise to new cultural practices and expectations for how men and women should function alongside each other in the family, the Church, and society. This new concept no longer saw women as inferior in every way, but as better equipped in certain regards, especially in the domestic sphere. Paradoxically, this “separate spheres” ideology led many to believe women were more pious, virtuous, and able to instill piety and virtue in their children. In the context of American history, Linda Kerber called this “republican motherhood”; its broad acceptance within a young nation allowed women the opportunity to pursue education, while still relegating them to the home to instill their intelligence and values in their children, particularly the boys who would one day vote or run for office. Furthermore, the “separate spheres” ideology afforded many women the opportunity to form organizations that, they argued, needed particularly female solutions.15

Antebellum Presbyterians, like Americans more broadly, employed language that signaled this shift. For example, in 1811 Albany minister Matthew La Rue Perrine argued that women “ought to ascertain and discharge those duties which are suited to their natures and conditions, and which are the glory of their sex.”16 These encouragements and admonitions remained consistent within the PCUSA in the years leading up to the denomination’s split in 1837–1838. By 1832, the General Assembly was a bit more explicit in their warnings, but the same spirit remained: “Meetings of pious women by themselves, for conversation and prayer, whenever they can conveniently be held, we entirely approve. But let not the inspired prohibitions of [Paul] be violated. To teach and exhort, or to lead in prayer, in public and promiscuous assemblies, is clearly forbidden to women in the Holy Oracles.”17 After the schism of 1837–1838, members of both the Old and New School had to walk a fine line on controversial issues, most notably slavery.

When the Presbyterian Church split in 1837–1838, both sides were patriarchal. New School Presbyterians supported revivals much more than their Old School brethren, and revivalists pushed the bounds of decorum in many ways, such as women praying in public.18 New Schoolers were not trying to destabilize a “separate spheres” ideology, but they generally demarcated the boundaries of such spheres more liberally than Old Schoolers. Nearly every minister in both the Old School and the New School accepted a “separate spheres” view, but geographical differences often intermingled with the “separate spheres” concept to produce markedly different concoctions. Since Robert Dabney and Charles Hodge represent different regional and cultural assumptions, Dabney and Hodge each constructed their beliefs in accordance with a “separate spheres” ideology, but the differences between their views highlight their cultural distinctives.

2. Slavery and Schism

Despite the common myth that Old School Presbyterianism was predominantly southern, southerners made up only a third of the Old School.19 Similarly, even though most southern Presbyterians stayed in the Old School after the schism of 1837–1838, ten thousand southern Presbyterians sided with the New School.20 Even though Old School Presbyterians were more accepting of pro-slavery advocates and New School Presbyterians were more accepting of abolitionists, both hoped to avoid further fragmentation.

Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, most PCUSA ministers supported efforts to free enslaved people gradually and colonize them elsewhere, usually Liberia. Some of the most influential men in the Old School were strong supporters of colonization. At the time of the 1837–1838 split, many Presbyterians still remembered when Samuel Hopkins, Jonathan Edwards’s star pupil, initially suggested colonization back in 1776.21 The PCUSA General Assembly was the first ecclesiastical body to endorse the colonization movement in 1818.22 By the end of the 1830s, most colonization advocates were forced to face the many logistical problems that lay behind their efforts. The failure of colonization as a viable option gave rise to a stronger and more radical abolitionism.

Political and theological strife resulted in polarization generally along sectional lines. The Methodist and the Baptist denominations split in 1844 and 1845, respectively, over the subject of slavery. Whereas in 1818 the Presbyterian General Assembly had condemned slavery calling it “a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature; as utterly inconsistent with the law of God … [and] the spirit and principles of the gospel of Christ,” in the 1840s both the Old and New School struggled to be bold yet not so bold as to rend asunder their denominations.23 In 1845, the Old School General Assembly concluded that the Church could “not legislate where Christ had not legislated, not make terms of membership which he has not made…. [The] Assembly [could] not, therefore, denounce the holding of slaves as necessarily a heinous and scandalous sin.”24 Thus, Old School Presbyterians chose to prioritize ecclesiastical unity. Almost two decades later, in 1861, southern Old Schoolers left the PCUSA in opposition to the Gardiner Spring resolution which required them to support the Union in the Civil War. They quickly reorganized and rebranded themselves the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America (PCCSA).25

The PCCSA, particularly under the influence of Robert Dabney, cultivated a distinctively southern Presbyterianism. Throughout his life, Dabney’s own personal identification with the South and the Reformed tradition influenced his political theology. Before the war, Dabney strongly defended southern slavery as a part of the patriarchal order of “Bible Republicanism.”26 Indeed, Dabney’s defense of slavery reveals one of the strange ironies of Presbyterianism and pro-slavery argumentation: even though Presbyterianism was far more common in the North, most of slavery’s ablest defenders were southern Old School Presbyterians. Because a few southern Presbyterians articulated the most robust defenses of slavery, their views are often taken as representative of the more predominant pro-slavery positions of Baptists and Methodists.27

3. Robert Dabney

Robert Dabney was born in Louisa County, Virginia, in 1820. He strongly identified with Virginia, the South, and Scottish Presbyterianism, despite the fact that he was the descendent of French Huguenots.28 Dabney studied at Hampton Sidney College before attending the University of Virginia for his Master of Arts and subsequently studying at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. After attending seminary, Dabney pastored two Presbyterian churches, one in Louisa County for only a year and another in Augusta County, Virginia for six years. Dabney believed in the virtues of farming, and he was involved in agriculture both as a child and throughout his adult life. His connections to agriculture made him personally familiar with and reliant on slavery. While pastoring in Augusta County, Dabney married Margaret Lavinia Morrison. In 1853, Dabney was offered a faculty position at Virginia’s Union Theological Seminary, where he taught Ecclesiastical History and Polity and then Systematic and Polemic Theology for most of his adult life.29

Robert Dabney was a native Virginian who stood in what has been dubbed the “southern tradition.” This tradition accepted and defended the idea that civilization necessitates a religiously established society with what Sean Lucas called, “sanctified social distinctions,” such as class, sex, and race.30 Furthermore, this tradition entailed a belief in Jeffersonian agrarianism, limited republicanism, an opposition to an individualism that rejected civic responsibility, and a defense of chivalry and gentility.31 Dabney’s greatest legacy has been his ideological fusion between Old School Presbyterianism and the “southern tradition,” which shaped the worldviews of his contemporaries and southern Presbyterianism in his wake.32

Like many nineteenth-century Americans, Dabney adhered to Scottish commonsense realism.33 Ironically, Dabney’s commonsense philosophy did not stop him from seeing a deeper concern behind nearly every argument; however, his commonsense philosophy was wed to assumptions he often overlooked or simply left unexamined. Dabney employed commonsense philosophy in his attempts to combat what he called “sensualistic philosophy.” By “sensualistic philosophy,” Dabney was primarily targeting positivism, an epistemology that argues knowledge cannot be attained through religion, intuition, or commonsense, but instead through sensory experience and testable propositions. Positivism led to an almost limitless confidence in science, propelling the rise of naturalism and the decline of supernaturalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Dabney described positivism when he wrote, “[It] is that theory, which resolves all the powers of the human spirit into the functions of the five senses, and modifications thereof.”34 He blamed positivism for what he considered nineteenth-century society’s deepest flaws, such as egalitarianism, abolitionism, feminism, the centralization of government, northern Capitalism, and public education.35 Dabney was convinced that he maintained a biblical worldview in his fight with the “sensualistic philosophy,” but Dabney’s worldview was deeply enmeshed within his own context.

Dabney was raised in a slaveholding, patriarchal family. In 1903, his first biographer Thomas Carey Johnson explained that Dabney enjoyed the educational, cultural, and leisurely pursuits that slaveholding afforded him as a boy. According to Dabney, hierarchy was both natural and integral to society. Against modernism’s prioritization of the individual, Dabney upheld the Christian household. In his view, there was little difference between the words slave, subject, and subordinate. A master was to be “the chief magistrate of the little integral commonwealth” while the wife, children, and slaves were considered “his State… under the master’s tutelage.”36

Dabney’s thought can be challenging to parse out because he connected nearly every concept to another, which cultivated an all or nothing mentality. He usually portrayed the options as his view or “sheer infidelity” by logical consequence.37 Often, Dabney failed to connect all the dots in his slippery slope arguments, which revealed his reliance on commonsense realism all the more. This is evident in Dabney’s 1871 article against women’s rights, when he concluded, “We must then make up our minds in accepting Women’s Rights to surrender our Bibles, and have an atheistic Government.”38 For Dabney, abolitionism and women’s suffrage were detrimental to a biblical worldview, when they were actually just a threat to his “southern tradition.” In the same article, Dabney made a telling connection, writing, “No words are needed to show hence that should either the voice of God or of sound experience require woman to be placed for the good of the whole society in a subordinate sphere, there can be no natural injustice in doing so. But these old truths, with their sound and beneficent applications, have been scornfully, repudiated by Abolitionism and Radicalism.”39 This one comment encapsulates all of these complex elements in Dabney’s thought. His commonsense philosophy undergirds his sentiment that little explanation is necessary for why women are relegated to a separate sphere. His language makes it clear that he embraced a “separate spheres” ideology and that he did not see this framing as a cultural development, calling them “old truths.”40 Then, perhaps most tellingly, Dabney said that it was these truths that “Abolitionism and Radicalism” opposed. Previously in the article, Dabney had already praised the “southern tradition,” but here he connected a slave’s unwillingness to submit and a wife’s unwillingness to submit. He blamed individualism, but specifically the capitalistic, individualism of the North. Dabney connected the Confederate defense of slavery in the Civil War with an ongoing battle against positivism, individualism, and feminism after the war.

For Dabney, all household relations must be measured by their submission to the master, which is why he was even comfortable calling wives and children types of slaves. Indeed, in his 1878 Systematic Theology, Dabney marveled at the extent of parental authority, writing, “[I]t authorizes the parent to govern the child for a fourth of his life as a slave… seeming almost to infringe the inalienable responsibilities and liberties of the immortal soul!”41 He always tried to cushion the blow by reiterating that a husband, master, and father ought to be benevolent. He praised an idealized benevolent form of slavery over against the poor working conditions of factory workers in the North, and he similarly argued that once women entered politics and the workforce, the result would be “ the re-enslavement of women, not under the Scriptural bonds of marriage, but under the yoke of literal corporeal force.”42 Once again, his defense of slavery and patriarchy were anchored in his “southern tradition” and in direct opposition to northern industrial capitalism.

Dabney’s understanding of gender roles is explicated in detail in his 1879 article “The Public Preaching of Women.” He argued that woman was originally created as “a helpmeet for the man,” but “God, from the beginning of man’s existence as a sinner, put the wife under the kindly authority of the husband, making him the head and her the subordinate in domestic society.”43 Dabney then directly cited Eve’s curse in the Garden of Eden: “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” ” (Gen 3:16 KJV).44 Whereas modern complementarians and egalitarians would understand this curse as a tragic consequence of sin, Dabney interpreted it more so as a template to follow. Dabney went on to argue, against nearly all modern interpretations, that this “sentence on the first woman has been extended, by imputation, to all her daughters.”45 Then, without transition, Dabney jumped from the relation of wives to husbands to the relation of women to men in the Church, contending, “These are the grounds on which the apostle says the Lord enacted that in the church assemblies the woman shall be pupil and not public teacher, ruled and not ruler.”46 He wrapped up these interpretations by applying it to his context. He dichotomized “the radical theories of individual human rights and equality now in vogue” and the immovable structures of hierarchy. He attempted to silence any objections by concluding, “But this is inspired!… ‘He that replieth against God, let him answer it.’”47 This argument was much more informed by Dabney’s cultural context than he led on.

While Dabney upheld this hierarchical model as the very “theory of the Bible,” he was articulating prevalent cultural assumptions.48 Beneath Dabney’s patriarchy was a clear belief in a “separate spheres” ideology. “The female child,” he observed, “is born with a different set of rights in part, from the male child of the same parents; because born to different native capacities and natural relations and duties.”49 He often spoke of the woman’s sphere as the home, and he argued this was a biblical assignment and in no way cultural.50 He admitted that both men and women have a “natural superiority” in their respective spheres, but, in his writings, women’s superiorities all pertain to motherhood and childrearing. Dabney anticipated the complication that unmarried women might pose to his supposedly biblical model, since his model left women without a practical femininity outside of marriage. “God contemplates marriage as the proper condition of woman,” he writes, “while he does not make celibacy a crime; and that the sphere he assigns to the unmarried woman is also private and domestic.”51 In short, he doubled down and considered this one sentence a sufficient treatment.

Dabney’s unexamined cultural assumptions led him to conclusions foreign to the biblical text itself. This is perhaps most telling in the sharp difference between Dabney’s defense of slavery and his defense of racism. Whereas Dabney articulated one of the most robust defenses of southern slavery, his racism and opposition to integration lacked nearly any pretense to biblical warrant. Eugene Genovese poignantly commented, “Nothing is more disheartening than to see such firmly orthodox Christians as Dabney, who stood all his life on sola scriptura and turned to the Bible for guidance on every subject, plunge into arguments from sheer prejudice that hardly pretended to be scripturally grounded.”52 What made Dabney’s pro-slavery argument successful was his consistent effort to portray the options as either slavery or infidelity.53 Here again emerges Dabney’s strategy of dichotomizing between his view and infidelity. Dabney knew, however, that this framing would only succeed if southerners were willing to make southern slavery into what he considered a biblically justified version. Genovese called this approach pro-slavery ameliorationism, because the goal was not simply to preserve slavery, but to reform it.54

If implemented, Dabney’s pro-slavery ameliorationism would have offered many enslaved blacks a tradeoff, not unlike the benefits and less severe drawbacks that “republican motherhood” presented for white women. “Republican motherhood” afforded women the opportunity to receive higher levels of education and greater opportunities to pursue distinctively female tasks inside and outside of the home. Had Dabney’s approach been legally enacted, enslaved populations would have had to make a similar assessment with even less flexibility: in an improved yet still enslaved situation, should the enslaved accept these improvements and continue submitting to their white masters? Thankfully, American chattel slavery ended in 1865 and no such calculation was forced upon enslaved peoples.

Dabney’s view of the household centered around and elevated the master, exalting him as a stern but genteel father figure. In Dabney’s so-called “biblical slavery,” paternalism inspired language that connected fathers with masters and slaves with children. Dabney’s view maintained a correlation between enslaved people and children, crippling the Apostle Paul’s admonition to Philemon that he accept back Onesimus, “not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved” (Phlm 16 KJV). Dabney wrote off the “not now” in this verse almost entirely, writing, “the obvious sense of these words is, that Philemon should now receive Onesimus back, not as a slave only, but as both a slave and Christian brother.”55 For Dabney, brotherhood in no way eschewed perpetual enslavement nor the perpetual status of child for the enslaved.

4. Charles Hodge

The Princeton theologian Charles Hodge is a helpful comparison to Dabney for many reasons. Hodge was both conservative and moderate. While defiantly orthodox in his confessional Presbyterianism, he was strikingly nuanced in the ways he applied Scripture to political and social dilemmas. One of the chief reasons Hodge was so nuanced was because he prioritized unity. Since slavery threatened to divide his seminary, his denomination, and his country, his writings on the topic may seem overly nuanced to those who do not share his ultimate concern for unity.56 Especially when it came to slavery, Hodge wrote with a politician’s awareness of how his words would be read by different audiences. Hodge, like Dabney, believed and espoused commonsense realism, he took the “separate spheres” view as a given, and he was a theological titan within the Old School. One of the strongest similarities between Hodge and Dabney was the role the Westminster Confession of Faith played in their thought. They both imbibed commonsense and a “separate spheres” ideology, but they were also both deeply committed to the Westminster Standards.57

Charles Hodge was born in 1797 in Philadelphia to Presbyterian parents of northern Irish decent.58 Like his father and his older brother, Hodge attended Princeton College, graduating in 1815.59 The following year, Hodge began his studies at Princeton Seminary. As Hodge’s graduation neared, the seminary’s president and Hodge’s personal mentor, Archibald Alexander, offered Hodge a professorship. He originally taught biblical Hebrew, but throughout his tenure at Princeton he spent most of his time teaching biblical literature.60 Aside from a two-year stint when Hodge studied in Europe, he taught at Princeton Seminary until his death in 1878.

Hodge was a systematic theologian, but he specialized in the Pauline epistles. Between 1835 and 1857, Hodge authored commentaries on Romans, both Corinthian epistles, and Ephesians. His belief in commonsense realism, the “separate spheres,” and biblical infallibility gave rise to patriarchal interpretations common in his day, but they also gave rise to surprising conclusions. For example, Hodge supported female education and even female writings and publications, but only in fields that in no way threatened male headship.61 Louise L. Stevenson pointed out that biblical literalism actually drove Princeton Seminary to allow more female writings and publications.62 According to Hodge, the Bible only barred women from public speaking “especially in the church,” but it made no such prohibitions against women writing.63 Hodge went even further in his commentary on 1 Corinthians to acknowledge Paul’s acceptance of female prophetesses, commenting, “It is therefore only the public exercise of the gift that is prohibited.”64 Hodge used many of the same tools as Dabney when expositing Scripture. They each came to the conclusion that women were superior to men in ways that are in keeping with “the refinement and delicacy of their sex.”65 Nonetheless, Hodge’s “commonsense” reading of the text expanded the female sphere in ways Dabney’s “southern tradition” could not countenance.

Hodge’s exposition of the household code in his 1857 commentary on Ephesians is particularly insightful. It reveals in brief his thoughts on authority, women, marriage, slavery, and how they related. The household code in Ephesians begins in chapter five, verse twenty-one … or does it? In the twenty-first century, commentators still debate whether Ephesians 5:21 should be considered the end of a preceding section or the beginning of the following. The verse simply reads, “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God” (Eph 5:21 KJV). Modern evangelicals generally argue that if this verse is considered part of the household code, it is at minimum saying that wives and husbands are to submit to each other, and perhaps that parents and children, and masters and slaves should do the same. Some conservative evangelicals have argued that the verse should be grouped with the preceding section and that it is unrelated to the subsequent household code.66 Long before these current debates, Hodge argued that verse twenty-one should be considered the beginning of the household code. Perhaps even more surprising, Hodge interpreted the verse to mean that all Christians, regardless of social relation, should be predisposed to submission and obedience. “From the general obligation to obedience,” Hodge wrote, “follows the special obligation of wives, children, and servants.”67 Even though Hodge contended for “womanly women, and manly ministers,” he argued that all Christians are relegated to a state of constant dependency and mutual submission, two dispositions widely associated with femininity in the nineteenth century.68 Hodge argued, however, that the general duty of mutual submission does not preclude other specific types of submission.69

Hodge’s “separate spheres” ideology comes into focus in his exposition of verse 23, which reads, “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body” (Eph 5:23 KJV). Hodge forthrightly stated that men and women are naturally superior to each other in complementary ways. He claimed that men are “larger, stronger, bolder,” and they have “more of those mental and moral qualities which are required in a leader.”70 Furthermore, even though he provided biblical arguments for male headship, his commonsense realism is particularly apparent in light of the limited evidence he provided after employing such broad language; he commented, “This is just as plain from history as that iron is heavier than water.”71 Hodge contended that this male superiority was in no way challenged by “the mutual dependence of the sexes” but rather bolstered by it because of the “inferiority of men to women in other qualities than those which entitle to authority.”72 Hodge did not address these superior female qualities in his Ephesians commentary, though he did address them on other occasions. In his exposition of Ephesians 5, Hodge seems most concerned with proving that the creation order (man first and woman second as a helper for man) still carries weight for how husbands and wives ought to interact. Whereas an older one-sex model portrayed women as less capable than men in every way, this two-sex paradigm still maintained male authority, but it recognized and even encouraged female superiority in areas that were considered distinctly feminine.

Hodge struggled to apply this approach in 1849 when his daughter was about to have her first child. Hodge’s daughter, Mary, was living in Danville, Kentucky with her husband. Mary explained to her mother Sarah that she was unable to find hired help since Kentucky was a slave state, so she would have to give birth without aid. Sarah immediately made plans to travel to Kentucky to help her daughter, but Charles was concerned about Sarah’s safety. The great cholera epidemic was afflicting many throughout Mississippi and no one knew where it might spread next. Charles was terrified that he might lose his wife, and even Mary implored her mother not to come, especially if it was against the wishes of her father.73 Nonetheless, Sarah resolved to help her daughter and, despite his frustrations, Charles did not stop her. Not only did Sarah leave, but she took her sons along with her. It is almost certain that if Sarah had not been there, Mary and the child would have died. After giving birth, Mary developed puerperal fever and an abscess on her breast. Sarah cared for Mary during her illness, having to relocate her and the child to Lexington and eventually Princeton in order to avoid the influx of cholera cases.74 After the matter, Charles Hodge reflected upon the event and wondered whether Sarah’s responsibility to love her daughter or her responsibility to submit to her husband should have taken precedence. While Sarah was gone, Charles wrote her, praising his wife for following “the ‘instinctive judgment,’ the gift of your sex, rather than the advice that the wisdom of men dictated.”75 Even in these dire times, Hodge’s “separate spheres” ideology shown through, and he praised his wife’s superior maternal judgment.

This story highlights the extent to which context shapes, affirms, and forces us to question our beliefs. Charles Hodge cared about the health, unity, and endurance of institutions. He cared about the survival of his seminary, his denomination, his nation. For much of Hodge’s antebellum tenure at Princeton Seminary, approximately 20–25% of the student body was southern.76 Even beyond southern presence at the seminary, slavery legally persisted and was gradually abolished in New Jersey throughout almost the entirety of Hodge’s life.77 Also, he and his denomination remained committed to a stance of inaction on the question of slavery. Like other Old Schoolers, Hodge feared facing the possibility of a split akin to those that transpired in the Baptist and Methodist Churches in the mid-1840s. Aside from his personal temperament, Hodge was also a Whig and, later in life, a Republican. He admired the political maneuvers of men like Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln who successfully kept unity in times of crisis. Hodge’s treatment of slavery must be understood as an attempt to, on the one hand, tackle the issue as he understood it, while, on the other hand, approach it in a way that only offended those who supported division. As Allen Guelzo concisely observed, “Division was Hodge’s great dread.”78

Hodge’s exposition of the household code in Ephesians not only sheds light on his view of marriage but also his view of slavery. His exposition of Ephesians 6:5–9 conveys both his insights and assumptions. Hodge paved a moderate path, condemning both radical abolitionists who considered slaveholding inherently sinful as well as pro-slavery advocates who wanted to perpetuate the institution or who considered it desirable.79 Still, Hodge was more aggressive in his denunciations of abolitionism, which he considered a threat to unity. Unlike Dabney, Hodge believed any effort to reform slavery should simply be a positive step towards emancipation, but not an end in itself. As a point of commonality between Hodge and Dabney, both argued that to classify enslaved people as property would be unbiblical and dehumanizing.80 Notably, Hodge and Dabney both acknowledged that a subordinate must ultimately submit to God, which meant that a Christian should defy any command to break God’s law and any directive that prevented him from keeping it. Dabney understood this to mean that slave laws needed to be improved to prevent masters from forcing enslaved people into sin.81 The black Presbyterian minister Henry Highland Garnett used strikingly similar logic to argue that enslaved Christians had a duty to defy any and all masters who prevented them from keeping the Sabbath and reading the Bible, which constituted the vast majority between the Nat Turner rebellion (1831) and the onset of the Civil War (1861).82 Charles Hodge’s ultimate aim was slavery’s demise, but his approach granted credence to certain pro-slavery arguments; this is partially why many abolitionists inaccurately considered Hodge pro-slavery.83

Hodge also demarcated his view from pro-slavery divines such as Dabney and Thornwell when he argued that Christians must not cherish slavery. For Hodge, slavery was a tragic reality that Christians should peacefully, legally, and gradually bring to an end. Whereas Dabney pushed for a “biblical slavery,” Hodge argued that all forms of slavery are founded upon “the inferiority of one class of society to another” and any effort to perpetuate slavery necessitated the perpetuation of that inferiority, “preventing the improvement of the subject class.”84 Of course, Dabney did not want African Americans to improve beyond his designated bounds, as his post-war life evidenced.

Whereas for Hodge the goal was to recognize the enslaved as brothers and sisters and thus raise them above their station, for Dabney the goal was to care for the enslaved as children and keep them “under the master’s tutelage.”85 Alternatively, Charles Hodge followed his logic to a surprising conclusion as early as 1836 when he wrote:

It may be objected that if the slaves are allowed so to improve as to become freemen, the next step in their progress is that they should become citizens. We admit that it is so… This objection would not be considered of any force, if the slaves in this country were not of a different race from their masters. Still they are men; their colour does not place them beyond the operation of the principles of the gospel, or from under the protection of God.86

Hodge’s argument seems uncharacteristically naïve yet also remarkably insightful. Some abolitionists criticized Hodge’s view as impractical, as if shackles were “gradually to relax, until they f[e]ll off entirely.”87 Indeed, Hodge’s view was hands off. He believed that gospel logic would work through slave societies and gradually bring the institution to an end, given that individual Christians do their part in following the household codes. Despite this naïve assumption, Hodge openly acknowledged that many southerners were defiantly opposed to improving the lives of enslaved individuals because of their race. He supported the end result of black citizenship, something Dabney could never bring himself to do.

Furthermore, in his commentary on Ephesians, Hodge observed that as long as slavery endured, the temptation to view enslaved people as less than equal in worth and dignity would also endure, fester, and spread.88 This proved to be a particularly insightful observation, as historians have observed the many ways enslavement cultivated modern concepts of race and perpetuated racism. While Hodge briefly touched on the unique danger of American slavery because of its racial basis it in 1836, he rarely gave it the attention that it deserved. As the nineteenth-century Church historian Philip Schaff perceptively commented, “Of all forms of slavery the American is the most difficult to dispose of, because it is not only a question of domestic institution and political economy, but of race. The negro question lies far deeper than the slavery question.”89

Using language that might appear strange in light of modern usage, Hodge argued that masters have a responsibility to treat their slaves with “justice and equity.”90 He distinguished equality of roles or stations with equal rights as human beings. Hodge argued for a gradual emancipationism that began with Christian masters treating slaves with worth and dignity. For Hodge, this did not necessitate immediate abolition, but he argued it could not mean slavery’s perpetuity.

One can and should criticize Hodge’s view as naively optimistic, but his view was much more pragmatic and socially aware than is often realized. As Allen Guelzo pointed out, once it became clear that the Confederacy would fight to preserve slavery until the bitter end, Hodge dropped his prior nuances and approved a PCUSA statement in 1864 that labeled slavery “an evil and guilt… that concrete system… designed and adapted to keep a certain class of our fellow-men in a state of degradation.”91 Dabney bristled at this PCUSA opinion nearly a decade after it was published, opining:

Any man or any church who says [slavery] is sin takes some other rule of faith, and is so far infidel. The Old School Church was not willing to say anything like this before the war. But the war separated her from the South, and also fired her heart with hatred against the South, and she was led during the war and subsequently to declare slaveholding to be sinful in itself. She deliberately assumed the infidel ground.92

Hodge was finally willing to stand upon this so-called “infidel ground” when all hope for unity within his Church was lost.

5. Comparative Analysis

Robert Dabney and Charles Hodge were very similar. Each revered the other so much that in 1860 Hodge implored Dabney to join the Princeton faculty, and even though Dabney refused, he treasured the invitation until the end of his life.93 Even this, however, seemed to be a last minute attempt on Hodge’s part to preserve unity on the verge of the Civil War.94 Each man embraced commonsense realism and imbibed a “separate spheres” ideology. They both firmly adhered to the Westminster Confession of Faith, and they were both theological giants within Old School Presbyterianism.

They also had notable differences. Charles Hodge was a committed Whig; Dabney was a strident Democrat. Hodge’s political heroes were Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln; Dabney’s political heroes were John Randolph and John C. Calhoun, not to mention his excessive admiration for Confederate generals, particularly Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.95 Hodge was northern and a Union man; Dabney was southern and a lifelong, unrepentant Confederate.96 Hodge fought to preserve unity between northern and southern Old Schoolers and he tried to bring them back together after the war. He strongly opposed the efforts that ultimately succeeded in bringing the northern Old School and the northern New School back together. In his opinion, such a union was more political than theological.97 Alternatively, Dabney fought against reunion with the northern Church until his dying breath. Over the decades, his students at Union found his anti-northern sentiments intransigent and archaic. On one occasion, a student challenged Dabney’s disdain for northerners and their efforts to provide equal rights for blacks; rather than responding, Dabney decided to preach the following Sunday on the passage, “Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee?”98 As Sean Lucas observed, Dabney died just as he had assured Charles Hodge the South would live, “unconquered, unconquerable, and forever alienated.”99

Both Hodge and Dabney imbibed aspects of their regions and their cultures. While individuals like Dabney and Hodge used Baconian induction and commonsense realism to interpret Scripture, some outside of the cultural and theological currents of the day noticed the underlying problems that Dabney and Hodge often overlooked. In 1849, the German Reformed theologian John Williamson Nevin, for example, opined, “If the Bible be at once so clear and full as a formulary of Christian doctrine and practice, how does it come to pass that where men are left most free to use it in this way … they are flung asunder so perpetually … instead of being brought together?”100 Nevin argued that commonsense realism turned the Bible into no more than a list of rules, something Hodge lent credence to when he described the Bible as a “store-house of facts.”101 The reality that Hodge and Dabney embraced so many of the same philosophical and theological approaches yet came to notably different conclusions reveals commonsense realism’s shortcomings. Furthermore, it is telling that Hodge and Dabney’s most notable differences reflect their cultural and regional contexts.

Charles Hodge and Robert Dabney engaged the questions of slavery and women’s rights in characteristically conservative nineteenth-century ways. Even though Hodge exhibited more nuance and a greater willingness to follow his convictions to unpopular conclusions, he still failed to acknowledge certain possibilities because of his cultural context, and he tempered some of his greatest insights in order to avoid division. Hodge and Dabney prove to be helpful case studies to show just how much baggage even the most astute theologians bring to the text. In 1861, the German Reformed theologian Philip Schaff shrewdly observed that God “instituted marriage and the family relation before the fall, but not slavery.”102 With this observation, Schaff noted that marriage and children are positive goods, but slavery is a tragic result of the Fall.

Dabney so infused hierarchy into his understanding of the world that he could not recognize what Schaff did. For Dabney, wives, children, and slaves were all enslaved in some sense. While Hodge agreed that slavery was a legally recognized institution that could not simply be defied or overthrown, he knew that Scripture required masters to recognize enslaved people as equal brothers and sisters.103 Hodge also recognized that slavery cultivated and sustained hatred between two classes of people. Even though Hodge acknowledged that slavery’s racial basis meant ending the institution and granting freed people citizenship would be difficult, he still downplayed just how immense such a struggle would prove.

Dabney fought for “Bible Republicanism” because he was deeply convinced that hierarchy, patriarchy, and black inferiority were simply part of God’s created order; for Dabney, this was merely commonsense. Because his political theology was built upon a commitment to patriarchal hierarchy, he perceived every threat to the South’s hierarchal social structures as both theological and political heresy. For Dabney, abolitionism threatened a slave’s submission to her master, feminism threatened a wife’s submission to her husband, and public education threatened a child’s submission to his parents. This is why Dabney so vehemently and tirelessly advanced narratives of the Lost Cause and opposed modernism and “Yankeeism” until his dying breath.104

Hodge’s opinions and how he expressed them often reflected a prioritization of commitments. He aimed foremost to preserve his seminary, his Church, and his nation, as disagreements about slavery posed a grave threat to unity and catholicity. Furthermore, he aimed to defend the Bible and the social order against abolitionists who, he believed, threatened the integrity of both. Of third rank priority, Hodge aimed to end slavery. Women were simply not on Hodge’s list of priorities. After all, as Louise Stevenson wisely observed, “Hodge was a man educated by men who taught men and wrote for men.”105 When Hodge defended women’s rights, it was simply because he was trying to adhere to Scripture, which is why he defended female authors, for example.106 Whether Hodge’s biblical interpretation was correct or not, he believed Scripture forbade women from publicly prophesying and teaching, but he saw no such prohibitions against women’s writings.107 Such a concession was both significant yet also seriously limited. It cut against the cultural grain while also reenforcing other traditional boundaries.

Hodge and Dabney reflect the theological struggles of many orthodox Protestants in nineteenth-century America. When Hodge and Dabney used their Bibles to understand the surrounding world, they often unintentionally used the surrounding world to understand their Bibles. May their examples humble those who continue to interpret Scripture within the confines of culture. May their examples challenge us to analyze our assumptions as well as the biblical text.

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1 R. Dean Davenport, “Patriarchy and Politics: A Comparative Evaluation of the Religious, Political and Social Thought of Sir Robert Filmer and Robert Lewis Dabney” (MA diss., Baylor University, 2006), 319.
2 Despite prior studies of Hodge and Dabney, few substantively compared these men. In his biography of Dabney, Sean Lucas picks up on many of the same themes that this paper addresses. For example, Lucas does an excellent job analyzing Dabney’s hatred of egalitarianism and the despisal of authority that Dabney connected to the French Revolution. Lucas connects these dots to show that Dabney’s pro-slavery sentiments and his patriarchy were both rooted in a commitment to authority. Lucas talks about Hodge throughout his biography of Dabney, but primarily because he traces some of their interactions and explains some of their similarities and differences as professors. In other words, Hodge’s views about slavery and patriarchy are not discussed and their views are not put into conversation with each other. More scholarship has focused on Hodge, much of which is succinctly conveyed in the 2002 collection of essays, John H. Stewart and James H. Moorhead, eds., Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). A couple of essays herein address Hodge’s views on slavery and gender roles, although there is no consideration of how or if they were connected. Louise Stevenson’s essay, “Charles Hodge, Womanly Women, and Manly Ministers” (pp. 159–80), is one of very few works, if not the only work, that considers Hodge’s life and thought through a gendered lens.
3 Sean M. Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney: A Southern Presbyterian Life (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2005), 79.
4 Allen C. Guelzo, “Charles Hodge’s Anti-Slavery Moment,” in Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work, ed. John H. Stewart and James H. Moorhead (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 303.
5 Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 13.
6 Noll, America’s God, 419.
7 Guelzo, “Charles Hodge’s Anti-Slavery Moment,” 303.
8 Charles Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in the Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 15–16.
9 Lois Boyd and R. Douglas Brackenridge, Presbyterian Women in America: Two Centuries of a Quest for Status (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), 3.
10 Boyd and Brackenridge, Presbyterian Women in America, 3.
11 . M. Wherry, ed., Woman in Missions: Papers and Addresses Presented at the Woman’s Congress Missions, October 2–4, 1893, in the Hall of Columbus, Chicago (New York: American Tract Society, 1893), 90; cited in Boyd and Brackenridge, Presbyterian Women in America, 4.
12 Boyd and Brackenridge, Presbyterian Women in America, 5.
13 While the one-sex model and the “separate spheres” concept are different understandings of how the sexes relate to each other, each gave rise to cultural practices and expectations that accord with these understandings of the nature of sex difference. By gender or gender roles, I am referring to these cultural practices and expectations that are anchored in biological sex.
14 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), viii, 3.
15 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 335.
16 Matthew La Rue Perrine, Women Have a Work to Do in the House of God: A Discourse Delivered at the First Annual Meeting of the Female Missionary Society for the Poor of the City of New-York and Its Vicinity (New York: Thomson, 1817), 8.
17 Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. From A.D. 1821 to A.D. 1835, Inclusive (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication), 378–79, https://tinyurl.com/4ek32khs.
18 Boyd and Brackenridge, Presbyterian Women in America, 93.
19Peter Wallace, “‘The Bond of Union’: The Old School Presbyterian Church and the American Nation, 1837–1861,” 3 vols. (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2004), 1:28.
20 Wallace, “The Bond of Union,” 1:102.
21 George Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience: A Case Study of Thought and Theology in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 92.
22 Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience, 92.
23 Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America from Its Organization A.D. 1789 to A.D. 1820 Inclusive (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1847), 692, https://archive.org/details/minutesofgeneral01phil/mode/2up.
24 Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, From A.D. 1838 to A.D. 1847 Inclusive (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publications, 1887), 378–88, https://tinyurl.com/y63cjf9r.
25 Nathan P. Feldmeth, S. Donald Fortson III, Garth M. Rosell, Kenneth J. Stewart, Reformed and Evangelical across Four Centuries: The Presbyterian Story in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 175; Wallace, “The Bond of Union,” 2:647–48.
26 Robert Dabney, Systematic Theology, 2nd ed. (Richmond, VA: Union Theological Seminary, 1878), 1023–24, https://tinyurl.com/y87rxn7h.
27 Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity, 15–16.
28 Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 23; Wallace, “The Bond of Union,” 1:20.
29 Davenport, “Patriarchy and Politics,” 315–17.
30 Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 25.
31 Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 25; Eugene Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 14.
32 Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 25.
33 In brief, commonsense philosophy is an epistemological approach that claims humans can take the existence and processes of the world essentially at face value.
34 Robert Dabney, The Sensualistic Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1876), 1.
35 Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 166.
36 Robert Dabney, A Defence of Virginia and Through Her, of the South, in Recent and Pending Contests Against the Sectional Party (New York: Hale & Sons, 1867), 229, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47422/47422-h/47422-h.htm.
37 Robert Dabney, “Women’s Rights Women,” The Southern Magazine (March 1871): 329.
38 Dabney, “Women’s Rights Women,” 330.
39 Dabney, “Women’s Rights Women,” 327.
40 Dabney, “Women’s Rights Women,” 327.
41 Dabney, Systematic Theology, 918.
42 Matt Jantzen, “Confederate Theology: Robert Lewis Dabney and the Theological Afterlife of Slavery,” Modern Theology 39.4 (2023): 751–74, 762; Dabney, “Women’s Rights Women,” 332.
43 Robert Dabney, “The Public Preaching of Women,” The Southern Presbyterian Review 30.4 (1879): 700.
44 Dabney, “The Public Preaching of Women,” 700.
45 “Dabney, “The Public Preaching of Women,” 700. This is a striking argument for numerous reasons. Modern debates between complementarians and egalitarians revolve around when roles were given to Adam and Eve and for what purposes. Complementarians tend to argue that Adam’s authoritative role and Eve’s submissive role predate the Fall, whereas egalitarians tend to argue that these roles were lamentable consequences of the Fall itself. Complementarians often argue that there will be tension and strife within marital relations, but that does not do away with the roles of husbands and wives entirely. Dabney, ever the stringent patriarchalist, attempted to have it both ways. He argued that woman was made for man, and thus each had a distinct role before the Fall, but he also argued that the Fall made the woman’s role even more subservient. The former aligns with modern complementarianism and the latter aligns with modern egalitarianism. Dabney would strongly disagree with the egalitarian argument that Jesus reversed the curse and restored women to a pre-Fall status of equality. He argued that Eve’s sin was imputed to her subsequent daughters. Modern complementarians and egalitarians agree that the curse described in Genesis 3:16 is a terrible post-Fall reality, but they disagree about what exactly it is describing. Dabney, however, contended that the curse should be enforced by sequent generations of men. The same logic would oppose epidurals, for example, as ways of getting around the curse. It is dangerously close to seeing the Fall’s curses as positive goods.
46
47 Dabney, “The Public Preaching of Women,” 700.
48 Dabney, A Defence of Virginia, 229.
49 Dabney, Systematic Theology, 1023.
50 Dabney, “The Public Preaching of Women,” 700.
51 Dabney, “The Public Preaching of Women,” 700.
52 Eugene Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1998), 95.
53 Molly Oshatz, Slavery and Sin: The Fight Against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 46.
54 Oshatz, Slavery and Sin, 46, 69; Genovese, A Consuming Fire, 95. For Dabney’s pro-slavery strategy to work, African Americans could not be legally disciplined more harshly than whites who had committed the same crimes; their marriages had to be honored and spouses could not be separated; black women could not be sexually violated; and enslaved people had to be instructed in the Christian faith and taught how to read the Bible.
55 Dabney, A Defence of Virginia, 184.
56 Guelzo, “Charles Hodge’s Anti-Slavery Moment,” 306.
57 Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 19, 86, and 150.
58 W. Andrew Hoffecker, Charles Hodge: The Pride of Princeton (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2011), 28–29.
59 Paul Gutjahr, Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 31.
60 Gutjahr, Charles Hodge, 72–74.
61 Stevenson, “Charles Hodge, Womanly Women, and Manly Ministers,” 163.
62 Stevenson, “Charles Hodge, Womanly Women, and Manly Ministers,” 168.
63 Charles Hodge, An Exposition of the First Epistle to the Corinthians (New York: Carter & Brothers, 1860), 304–5, https://archive.org/details/epistlecorinthians00hodgrich/page/n333/mode/2up.
64 Hodge, An Exposition of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, 305.
65 Hodge, An Exposition of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, 305.
66 Egalitarians and complementarians fall on both sides of this debate, so the sectional categorization of Ephesians 5:21 is not a defeater for either view. For more on the scholarly debate surrounding the placement of Ephesians 5:21, see Frank Thielman, Ephesians, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 365–376. Thielman articulates a nuanced view akin to that of Charles Hodge. He argues that grammatically the verse serves as both the concluding line of the previous section and the initiatory line of the household code. Tielman writes, “The phrase ‘submitting to one another in the fear of Christ,’ then, functions at the same time as a transition from the previous section on corporate worship to the new section on submission as a heading over the new section indicating its primary concern—submission to one another in the household.” (365) Thielman also describes the scholarly debate when he observes, “Some commentators (e.g., Best 1998: 515– 16) attach this verse to the previous section, and the grammatical structure of the passage certainly supports this view. Ὑποτασσόμενοι (hypotassomenoi, submitting) is one of a string of five participles in 5:19– 21 that qualify πληροῦσθε (plērousthe, be filled), and so at one level it makes sense to see ‘submitting to one another’ as a description of yet another result of being filled in the sphere of the Spirit: those who are filled in the Spirit not only speak, sing, make melody, and give thanks in corporate worship; they also submit to one another in the fear of Christ. The theme of submission, however, dominates the household code that follows, reappearing not only where the term ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō, submit) itself is implied (5:22) or used (5:24), but also where the concepts of fear (5:33; 6:5), honor (6:2), and obedience (6:1, 5) show up. The grammatical attachment of the participle to the previous section eases the transition to the new section, but the substance of the verse, with its focus on submission, means that it is best taken with what follows and should be understood as an introduction to it (cf. Dawes 1998: 18– 21).” Thielman, Ephesians, 365, 372.
67 Charles Hodge, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians (New York: Carter & Brothers, 1860), 5:21, https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/charleshodge/hodge_ephesians.html.
68 Hodge, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, 5:21; Stevenson, “Charles Hodge, Womanly Women, and Manly Ministers,” 159.
69 Hodge, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, 5:22.
70 Hodge, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, 5:23.
71 Hodge, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, 5:23.
72 Hodge, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, 5:23.
73 Stevenson, “Charles Hodge, Womanly Women, and Manly Ministers,” 172.
74 Stevenson, “Charles Hodge, Womanly Women, and Manly Ministers,” 173.
75 Stevenson, “Charles Hodge, Womanly Women, and Manly Ministers,” 173.
76 Guelzo, “Charles Hodge’s Anti-Slavery Moment,” 303.
77 Guelzo, “Charles Hodge’s Anti-Slavery Moment,” 302.
78 Guelzo, “Charles Hodge’s Anti-Slavery Moment,” 306.
79 Hodge, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, 6:5.
80 This was a key pillar in the strongest pro-slavery arguments, and both Robert Dabney and James Henley Thornwell noted this distinction. They claimed that masters only had a right to the labor of the enslaved, not their personhood.
81 Oshatz, Slavery and Sin, 69.
82 Henry Highland Garnett, “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America,” in Negro Orators and Their Orations, ed. Carter G. Woodson (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969), 153; cited in Oshatz, Slavery and Sin, 71.
83 Genovese, A Consuming Fire, 88.
84 Hodge, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, 6:5.
85 Dabney, A Defence of Virginia, 229.
86 Charles Hodge, “Slavery,” The Biblical Repertory 8.2 (1836): 304–5.
87 Guelzo, “Charles Hodge’s Anti-Slavery Moment,” 315.
88 Hodge, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, 6:5.
89 Philip Schaff, “Slavery and the Bible,” Mercersburg Review 13 (1861): 316–17; cited in Noll, America’s God, 418–19.
90 Hodge, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, 6:9.
91 Guelzo, “Charles Hodge’s Anti-Slavery Moment,” 323.
92 Robert Dabney, “The Presbyterian Reunion, North,” The Southern Presbyterian Review 22.3 (1871): 398.
93 Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 97–98.
94 Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 97.
95 Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 24, 29.
96 Guelzo, “Charles Hodge’s Anti-Slavery Moment,” 304, 307, 323.
97 Hoffecker, Charles Hodge: The Pride of Princeton, 326–28.
98 Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 132.
99 Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 130–31.
100 John W. Nevin, “The Sect System,” Mercersburg Review 2–3 (1849–1850); cited in Noll, America’s God, 403.
101 Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner & Company, 1872), 1:10.
102 Philip Schaff, Slavery and the Bible: A Tract for the Times (Chambersburg, PA: Kieffer & Co, 1861), 3 https://archive.org/details/slaverybibletrac00scha.
103 Hodge, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, 6:5.
104 Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 191–92.
105 Stevenson, “Charles Hodge, Womanly Women, and Manly Ministers,” 160.
106 Stevenson, “Charles Hodge, Womanly Women, and Manly Ministers,” 168.
107 Stevenson, “Charles Hodge, Womanly Women, and Manly Ministers,” 167–68.

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