William Wilberforce, A Christian Hero

William Wilberforce by Kerby Anderson

Eric Metaxas is the most eclectic Christian I know. Anyone whose resume says he has written for Chuck Colson, Veggie Tales, and the New York Times is by definition a unique individual. He is perhaps best known these days as the biographer of William Wilberforce. I spent a week with him and his family this summer at a Christian camp and recently interviewed him on my radio program. We talked about some of material in his book, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery.
Eric's biography of Wilberforce is powerful for many reasons. One of them is his ability to put you into the cultural context of the time. He reminds us how much slavery was a part of society. He says: "Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for five thousand years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable."
Because of this the idea of ending slavery was not even spoken by abolitionists. They focused merely on trying to abolish the slave trade (the buying and selling of human beings) but did not speak about emancipation.
In the midst of this cultural milieu, Wilberforce came to see the evil of slavery. Because of his Christian faith he was able to see what so few in his world could see. And after a long, protracted battle he changed the way the world viewed slavery.
That is the power of a Christian worldview. It enables us to see the world the way God sees it, not the way the world has been accustomed to seeing it. Wilberforce no longer saw the world divided in slave and free. He saw that all men and women are created in the image of God and thus are equal and valuable.
There are many lessons to be learned from William Wilberforce, but the moral clarity of a Christian worldview is certainly one of the most powerful lessons. Like Wilberforce, we need to apply our worldview glasses today to the many ills in society.