Crisis Prep 101

Popular accounts paint Wilberforce as a man driven by the immorality of slavery, but that's an incomplete picture. Though the abolition of slavery and the slave trade may have been Wilberforce's crowning achievement, he was a man who championed many causes that today we would collect under the banner of "social justice."

One biographer noted that at one point he was involved in 69 different initiatives, including child labor conditions, prison reform, the prevention of cruelty to animals, and even the tyrannies of the caste system in India.

Yet, these were not general do-good efforts. According to John Piper's account of his life, Wilberforce's work was so effective because it was rooted in a gospel-centered perspective. By studying the doctrine of justification, Wilberforce had a tool, if you will, to withstand criticism and even self-doubt in the numerous years he dedicated to the cause of abolition.

It is a stunning thing that a politician and a man with no formal theological education should not only know the workings of God in justification and sanctification, but consider them so utterly essential for Christian living and public virtue. Many public people say that changing society requires changing people, but few show the depth of understanding Wilberforce did concerning how that comes about. For him, the right grasp of the central doctrine of justification and its relation to sanctification — an emerging Christlikeness in private and public — were essential to his own endurance and for the reformation of the morals of England.

This was why he wrote A Practical View of Christianity. The "bulk" of Christians in his day were "nominal," he observed, and what was the root difference between the nominal and the real? It was this:

The nominal pursued morality (holiness, sanctification) without first relying utterly on the free gift of justification and reconciliation by faith alone based on Christ's blood and righteousness. 

Eternal Perspectives Ministries, page 14