The William Wilberforce movie is coming out, and I hear it’s pretty good. Here’s hoping the movie is at least good enough to get William Wilberforce back in the public eye.

Wilberforce is justly famous as a man of action, and his legislative victories in the cause of justice are the thing we should never forget about him. If he had just done the things he did in the british Parlaiment, that would be enough. But he was also a good enough communicator that he managed to capture his life-message in words as well as deed. His excellent book has this (not) catchy title: A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. Published in 1797, it is a classic statement of evangelical Christianity. Wilberforce’s Practical View is especially eloquent about how real Christian faith moves the heart and motivates social action.

But his opening gambit in the book is to lambast the lukewarm Christians of his day for not knowing their doctrine, and in particular for neglecting to cultivate proper theologies of Christ and the Holy Spirit. If the nominal Christians of Britain are ignoring gross institutional wickedness like race-based chattel slavery, it is because their hearts are cold; and their hearts are cold because their heads are empty. What Dr. Wilberforce prescribes is a big dose of “the peculiar doctrines of Christianity:” not morality or piety in general, but the core doctrines which we only know from special divine revelation in Scripture.
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