The Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States, during the American Civil War on January 1, 1863. It proclaimed freedom to all slaves held in the Confederate-controlled states and counties. The Emancipation Proclamation is used by some proponents of the doctrine of Universal Legal Justification,¹ particularly followers of the 1888 Message Study Committee, as an illustration of the plan of salvation.² To support this connection, some proponents allege that Ellen White likewise employs the analogy. It thus seems useful to explore to what extent the Emancipation Proclamation could be used for this purpose. Here is my summary of the average version of the Emancipation Proclamation argument I encounter in conversations:

Lincoln declared all slaves to be free. The slaves were thus legally free, but ignorant of their legal standing. Hence, they continued living as slaves in hopelessness. It follows that if the slaves could just know they were legally free, they could walk away from slavery and live like free men. Someone, then, must bring the good news of their legal standing to them so they can exercise the freedom they already had at the legal level, but of which they had no personal knowledge.

The illustration is then extended along the following lines:

Just as the Emancipation Proclamation legally freed the slaves but they did not know they were free, so Christ’s death justifies all men but they do not know it. Like the slaves, people need someone to bring them the good news that they are legally already saved. Once informed, they now can experience personally the wonderful consequences of their heretofore unknown legal standing, or they can reject it and be lost.

Such an analogy has great appeal on several grounds. Emotionally, the depiction of a universal, unconditional grant of salvation has immense appeal.³ Furthermore, the analogy has wonderful symmetry which infuses an almost self-evidential quality into the argument. The illustration just sounds eminently logical. But there are several problems with the emancipation analogy which need to be addressed.

A Closer Look at the Emancipation Proclamation

The first problem is that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was not universal. It only “emancipated” slaves in rebel-controlled states and counties.⁴ The specific wording of the Emancipation Proclamation states, “all persons held as slaves in any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free ”⁵ In other words, it only proclaimed freedom to slaves in the areas over which the Union had no power. Slaves in non-rebel regions were excluded from the scope of the proclamation, thus legally remaining in slavery. Hence the Emancipation Proclamation does not properly illustrate Universal Legal Justification as it was not a universal proclamation directed at all slaves in the United States. It appears that in the Emancipation Proclamation, a select subgroup is decreed free, prior to their knowledge or consent, just as individuals are elected prior to their knowledge or existence in the Calvinist doctrine of decrees, while a second group is de facto excluded from the blessing. It seems unequivocally clear that the Emancipation Proclamation demonstrates a significant failure of analogy to the concept of universality found in the doctrine of Universal Legal Justification.⁶

Second, the slaves “freed” by Lincoln’s emancipation were not empowered to act upon the decree. As long as the Confederate government controlled a region listed in Lincoln’s proclamation, the slaves living there remained in slavery, because the Confederacy did not acknowledge the authority of Lincoln or the U.S. Government. The rebellion first had to be quelled by the Union so that the agency issuing the proclamation would be able to enforce the new measure. Merely informing the slaves that the Union no longer saw them as slaves was insufficient. They needed deliverance from the governance and power of the Confederate government. And even if those slaves could have walked away from their masters, they would not have been equipped for life in freedom; they had no resources to buy land or launch a business, and thus would not have had the economic sufficiency to support their freedom. The Emancipation Proclamation offered no resources to help slaves take advantage of the freedom it proclaimed. As a result, many who were freed through the defeat of the Confederates ended up becoming indentured servants to their former masters, in conditions that differed little, if any, from what they had endured prior to their “freedom.” Hence the Emancipation Proclamation fails as an analogy to the gospel of salvation which offers a real and meaningful deliverance from the power of sin.⁷

It fails as an illustration of salvation for another reason: Lincoln did not free slaves by fulfilling the law of the land but by changing it. This raises important questions about the relationship of salvation to God’s law.

First, as Ellen White frequently argues, if salvation could be achieved by changing the law, then Christ need not have died. “The claim that Christ by His death abolished His Father’s law is without foundation. Had it been possible for the law to be changed or set aside, then Christ need not have died to save man from the penalty of sin. The death of Christ, so far from abolishing the law, proves that it is immutable.”⁸ This recognition constitutes a huge theological problem for the proponents of Universal Legal Justification because, in trying to draw an analogy between the Emancipation Proclamation, which functioned by changing the law instead of fulfilling it, and the doctrine of salvation, which cannot tolerate saving a person by overturning the law, they unwittingly try to combine conflicting views of the relationship of the law to salvation.

Second, it was not merely the Confederate government that promoted and legalized slavery. The Union had also sanctioned slavery as a legal and legitimate practice, and continued to recognize slavery as legally legitimate for some time after the Emancipation Proclamation. Hence, having previously legislated the legitimacy of slavery, it later changed both its will and its laws regarding slavery. Using this document to illustrate the plan of salvation would suggest that God initially accepted the legitimacy of sin, but later effected a change of policy to deliver those He first willed to be enslaved in sin. Obviously this is theologically unacceptable, as it reduces God to a cosmic politician changing policies to the extent that circumstances allow.

Ellen White’s References to “Emancipation Papers”

There is yet another problem. As I travel around preaching in various congregations, proponents assert that Ellen White uses the Emancipation Proclamation as an illustration of salvation. Thus, they use the authority of Ellen White in an attempt to baptize this model. The problem is, their claim cannot be substantiated. Searching the published writings for the phrase “emancipation proclamation” using the 2007 edition of the Ellen G. White CD-ROM yields no hits. In fact, changing the search format to find any paragraph containing these two words, even if not adjacent to each other, still produces zero results. Using Boolean search tools to look for all word forms derived from these two roots in a single paragraph likewise produces no hits.⁹ Hence there appears to be no evidence in Ellen White’s published writings that she ever referred to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and thus no evidence that she viewed it as an illustration or model of salvation.

By contrast, Ellen White does refer to “emancipation papers” as an illustration of salvation. A search using the 2007 CD-ROM generates nine hits representing five different quotations. Eight of these fall into two groups: statements indicating that Christ signed the emancipation papers for the human race and statements in which Christ is said to tell the individual He has signed, or is offering them, their emancipation papers. The question naturally arises, How do emancipation papers differ from the Emancipation Proclamation?

I found a copy of emancipation papers drafted in 1823, and downloaded a photographic copy of the handwritten text plus a typed transcription. The text reads as follows:

I Thomas Clay of Davis County Kentucky do hereby make known to all whom it may concern that I have and do hereby emancipate, liberate, and set free the Negro Slaves herein named. [Illegible] old Samuel and his wife Biddy. Betty, Rachel and her children Henry, Juliett, the two [illegible] being under age. I reserve to myself or agent the management of them until the first day of June in the year 1827 when they will be of lawful age to ask for themselves as well as the others herein named as free born People of Colour, and the Clerke is required to give them a certificate of their freedom on presentment as the Law directs.

Given under my hand and seal this 28th day of February 1823.
Thomas Clay¹⁰

Several differences between this document and the Emancipation Proclamation are immediately evident. First, the most stunning is in the last line: “as the law directs.” Unlike the Emancipation Proclamation, emancipation papers free slaves through a fulfillment of the law, not through an overturning of the law. The law had a provision for freeing slaves that involved a protocol of procedures, which when followed, obligated the clerk to issue papers. Hence there is no overturning of, or amendment to, the law. Emancipation papers differ significantly from Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and, as an illustration of salvation, are theologically far more acceptable to the student of Scripture.

Second, the slaves were not legally free until they took their emancipation papers to the clerk and were issued their certificate of freedom. Thus we see a conditional element. The slave must accept the emancipation papers and go to the clerk. Had the slave kept these papers but never gone to the clerk, he or she would remain enslaved and without freedom. Mere possession of emancipation papers was by itself not sufficient to establish legal standing. A response from the slave was necessary. While the papers made full provision for the slave’s freedom, it is this latter dimension requiring a freewill response that Ellen White focuses on in her statements.

For example, she writes of Christ: “With His own blood He has signed the emancipation papers of the race.”¹¹ Three sentences later she adds: “Today He is standing at the altar of mercy, presenting before God the prayers of those who desire His help. He turns no weeping, contrite one away. Freely will He pardon all who come to Him for forgiveness and restoration.”¹² If Ellen White, by referring to Christ’s signing of emancipation papers, had meant that by that act all people were saved, why does she go on to say “freely will He pardon all who come to Him….”? Why would people still need pardon if they had already been forgiven? She indicates that the sinner must respond, by coming to Jesus, in order to receive “forgiveness and restoration.” The context of this statement does not support the idea of a universal, unilaterally imposed legal standing as the Emancipation Proclamation model tries to suggest.

Similarly, in the Youth’s Instructor, she writes: “the emancipation papers of the race have been signed by the blood of the Son of God. A way has been opened for the message of hope and mercy to be carried to the ends of the earth. Now, whosoever will may take hold of God’s strength, and make peace with him.”¹³ While the opening line sounds favorable to the Universal Legal Justification view, we see from the last sentence that, as in the first statement, salvation and peace with God are conditional upon a human response.

Perhaps critics could argue that emancipation papers functioned in a context where slavery was legal and for this reason are not analogous. It should be kept in mind, however, that Ellen White’s focus is on the legal provisions of how the slave may be delivered, and also on the conditional nature of the emancipation that required an individual, proactive response from the slave in order to become both legally and experientially free. It is these elements of the emancipation papers system that were important to her. In addition, according to Ellen White, it is Christ who offers them, suggesting the biblical image of the goel or “redeemer.” The goel had the right, using thoroughly legal means, to buy his relative out of enslavement to a third party and, having provided freedom, to equip him or her for living free. By contrast, the Emancipation Proclamation is rooted in the imagery of a government changing its mind about its own law and abolishing it in order to provide freedom.

Conclusion

Unfortunately for the proponents of Universal Legal Justification, the Emancipation Proclamation seems singularly unsuited as a model for salvation. The analogy simply does not work and, more ominously, it creates catastrophic theological misconceptions regarding the relation of salvation to the law. A further difficulty is that Ellen White points to a different method of emancipation as an illustration of salvation, but, fortunately, it is one without the problematic theological baggage of the Emancipation Proclamation model. Proponents of Universal Legal Justification who appeal to it as an illustration of the process of salvation appear to be generating their theology from the analogy and seeking biblical and/or Ellen White support for it. Thus, the proper order of theology being derived from the biblical text appears to be reversed, a theology whose support rests not on Scripture but on a false analogy. We must be wary of ascribing to attractive analogies the authority which belongs only to Scripture.