Phillis Wheatley Peters: Groundbreaking Poet with a Purpose

Dannah Gresh: Today on Revive Our Hearts, Dr. Karen Ellis helps us get to know the poet Phillis Wheatley. 

Dr. Karen Ellis: By all accounts, as an African, a woman, and a slave, Wheatley should have remained voiceless in the post-colonial world that surrounded her; yet, she managed to be instrumental in both the temporal revolution and the eternal one. This is radical. She takes what they have to offer her theologically, and then she uses it biblically to hold up the gospel mirror to their faces. 

Dannah: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, coauthor of You Can Trust God to Write Your Story, for Monday, May 9, 2022. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Sprinkled throughout the month of May, we are taking a look at some women whom God has used in extraordinary ways in the past. Now, as I've shared with you before, I love Christian biographies, and I'm inspired by the lives of these women, but I notice as we learn about them that it is easy to think, My life is so ordinary, or subordinary! There is no way God could use me to make a significant difference in the lives of others.

As our team was setting up this program today, I was reminded of that passage in 1 Corinthians 1 which says,

God has chosen what is foolish in the world . . . God has chosen what is weak in the world . . . God has chosen what is insignificant and despised in the world—what is viewed as nothing—to bring to nothing what is viewed as something, so that no one may boast in his presence. It is from him that you are in Christ Jesus. (vv. 27–29)

God chooses and uses simple, ordinary people who believe in an extraordinary God.

In fact, just this week I was reading in the book of Hebrews. I came to chapter 11, that amazing passage that many have called the “Hall of Faith.” It’s full of snapshots of many of the Old Testament heroes of our faith. Again, these were pretty much ordinary people. Certainly, none of them were perfect. Some of them were actually scoundrels. But in the end, these were men and women of faith. They trusted in our great God, and as a result, He used them in extraordinary ways. 

That's a reminder of the value of looking back and being inspired by people God as used to accomplish his purposes in our world. But as we look at an impressive list like that, in Hebrews 11 or some of the women we are going to look at this month here on Revive Our Hearts, I just want to remind us that there is Hebrews 12 after Hebrews 11.

When you turn the page to Hebrews 12, you focus shifts away from the stories of people, and it shifts toward the One who writes every story. Remember that opening paragraph of Hebrews 12? It says,

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses [these men and women of faith], let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. (Heb. 12:1)

As we tell these stories this month, my prayer is that their stories will remind all of us  that Jesus is the ultimate Hero. He’s the One worthy of celebrating. He’s One who is worthy of your attention and adoration and mine as we run our races of faith.

Dannah: That’s so true, Nancy. Today, we’re going to hear about a woman in history who ran her race well by keeping her eyes on Jesus. Now, I have to admit, I was not familiar with this woman until recently. 

Nancy: Now was I, Dannah. Phillis Wheatley Peters is not as well known, but Dr. Karen Ellis is here to help fill us in on this remarkable story.

Dannah: Dr. Ellis is a professor at Reformed Theological Seminary. She’s the Director of the Edmiston Center for the Study of the Bible and Ethnicity in Atlanta, Georgia. She’s passionate about theology, human rights, and global religious freedom.

Nancy: That's all true. Those are just a few of the things listed on Karen's lengthy resume. But I want to say more personally, Karen is a friend to this ministry, and a dear friend to me personally . Whenever we are able to connect, I am always greatly challenged by her spiritual depth, insight, love for Christ, her understanding of the times in which we live, and her ability to apply the Word to these circumstances. In fact, we are planning to spend a day together this summer just to talk, pray, encourage one another. I’m thrilled that she’ll be one of our keynote speakers at True Woman '22 this fall in Indianapolis! She is one of the many reasons that you don't want to miss True Woman '22.

Dannah: That’s right. Well, let’s listen. Here’s Dr. Karen Ellis, speaking to a group of students at Biola University, on the life of Phillis Wheatley Peters. She starts by setting the context for Phillis’s life, the American Colonies in the 1700s, prior to the Revolutionary War.

Karen: Now, we’re all still British at this point. Everyone remember, there is no America. America does not exist yet. We’re all still British.

I want to show you a community of character that was following the Way. It circles around this one figure named Phillis Wheatley. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her, but she is an amazing historical figure to study. We’re going to look not just at her, but also at the community around her, because remember, “No man is island.” No man, no woman stands alone.

These people had their ethics, how we should obey God; and their epistemology, what we know about God. Their ethics and their epistemology actually matched in the New World, at a time when many people who claimed Christianity, their ethics and their epistemology did not match.

The African American rights were legislated away over the course of decades, driven by an engine of cultural disdain. A lot of people don’t know this, but we weren’t always slaves. We didn’t come here necessarily as slaves. Race-based slavery was not a foregone conclusion in early America. A lot of people don’t know that the indentured servants of African descent who arrived on these shores actually came on equal footing with other European indentured servants.

But those folks that made the trip would hardly recognize their shores less than a hundred years later. They watched their rights to property, access to education, family stability, their freedom to assemble, their freedom to worship—and on and on and on—they watched all of those rights be whittled away. It took less than sixty years.

I define marginalization as being relegated to a position of insignificance, devalued importance, minor influence, or diminished power. And yet, this marginalization provided a strength to the African American church that actually sustained believers through a period of centuries of cultural hostility.

Shunning and demonization may be forms of derision for the rest of humanity, but for some reason, when it comes to God’s people throughout history, not just with this community but throughout history, it has an interesting, empowering effect over the marginalized believer. It somehow brings the gospel into vivid technicolor, and people start to experience the book of Acts even as they read it.

Marginalization is death by a thousand cultural cuts. It happens slowly. You don’t even realize you’re bleeding until you’re bleeding. Soft marginalization of Christian communities generally doesn’t become extreme persecution overnight. Much like what happened with the African slaves, the African Christian slaves, it grew very slowly, in barometric degrees, but they could feel it in the atmosphere.

What we have is a concept of biblical slavery, where God is regulating sin. He knows man will sin, so humanity is affirmed and preserved. But what we have in the American experience is chattel slavery, where humanity is denied and destroyed.

Now, in the book of Philemon, the book of Timothy, the Bible condemns chattel slavery and manstealing. It was actually a bastardization of the slavery-servant system under Rome and the Old Testament. Anybody who puts those two systems as equal is actually, by Romans 1, suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.

The Bible after the Fall shows us God’s stipulations on life. He’s regulating sin. Just because the Bible reports slavery, it doesn’t mean that He endorses it. Retweet does not equal endorsement, right? This is how it is with God. Just because He’s saying these things happen and because He’s regulating slavery in the Bible does not mean that He endorses it.

Yet slavery, even when it’s regulated so that the image of God is protected, it’s less than God’s ideal. It is not what was intended in the Garden. When God gave dominion over the creatures in Genesis 1 and 2, it was never intended to be dominion over other people.

The whole foundation of U.S. slavery was ontological racism, which is sin at its core. It was the elevation of a people to a god-like status over another. Paul isn’t endorsing slavery in Philemon and Timothy. The ultimate priority in the passage of Philemon is the glory of God. He actually implores Philemon to set Onesimus free. To use it to justify slavery and not freedom is actually a misuse of that Scripture.

We have to understand that the entire metanarrative, the great story of the Bible, endorses freedom from bondage—spiritual as well as physical—as the ideal, not slavery.

With that in mind, let me set the stage for you. It’s the eighteenth century. The only thing I can’t give you as I describe it is the smell. In 1721, a slave trader named Platon Only requested that the Royal African Company capture 500 small slaves, male and female, from six to ten years old, to be delivered annually aboard the slave ship Kent. This was the first time that legislation allowed for the capture and sale of African children in the New World. It would introduce scores of children into these conditions.

They will be stuffed like afterthoughts into the smallest areas of the hold on slave ships. Have you ever seen the cutaway of a slave ship with the bodies lined up? It was a three to six month journey, depending on how the winds went. You’re lying either on your back, if it’s loose-packed, if they didn’t catch that many on the continent. If they caught enough, you would lie on your side, head to toe, head to toe, head to toe.

They’re a land people who had never been on water before, so stomachs are coming up into mouths. They’re urinating and defecating where they lie. Because of the rocking motion of the boat, this is washing this pestilence over people’s bodies.

From this pestilence, a voice rises. A woman named Phillis Wheatley, born in 1754, is seven years old when she makes this trip. It’s called the middle passage. She will later write about her experience as a Christian, as an American, and as an abolitionist. I want to introduce you to Phillis and the community around her as an example of an expression of the other cultural, other political reality of the kingdom of God.

She helped others around her reconcile the inconsistencies of people who were saying that Christianity favored the people who looked like them. The model of Christ, in providence, gave her incredible comfort. Her pen and gifting gave her incredible courage and strength to promote a revolution that was both temporal and eternal.

Let me give you a sampling of Phillis Wheatley’s work. She wrote about her middle passage experience on the ship coming to America to the Earl of Dartmouth. You’ve heard of Dartmouth University, Dartmouth College? This is him, before the school exists. She writes to him. At this point he’s His Majesty’s Secretary of State for all of North America. She writes him these words. 

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatched from Africa’s fancied happy seat.
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labor in my parents’ breast!
Steeled was that soul, and by no misery moved,
That from a father seized his babe beloved.
Such, such my case, and can I then but pray
That others may never feel tyrannic sway?

Now, Wheatley’s brilliance showed at a very early age. After she was kidnapped from Senegambia and made the trip from West Africa to America at the age of seven, she was purchased at auction by the Wheatley household. She was given the name of the slaving vessel that brought her over. The name of the ship was the Phillis. 

She came and was taught the English alphabet by the Wheatleys’ daughter. She was trained to be a domestic. In Senegal and Gambia you could find certain types of slaves. Very much the dehumanization process was to say kind of like how we do with dogs today, “This is a good dog for police work,” if you get this German shepherd. Well, they had the entire region mapped out for different kinds of slaves coming from different regions. 

She came from Senegal and Gambia, which was appropriate for various kinds of work. But the Christian Wheatleys soon realized that she needed to be in a life of service with a pen in her hand and not a broom. We don’t know exactly how she got her education, but there’s solid evidence that she was educated well. 

She may well have received her religious and theological education from the clergy of New England. That she is educated well is to the credit of her owners, even if they offered her educational and spiritual freedom, if not physical.

You see, legislation against educating slaves hadn’t gotten to Boston yet, but it was discouraged. It was seen as impossible due to ontological racism, because they said, “Well, this other group of people, they’re not quite human, so they’re not as intelligent. Why educate them if they’re not intelligent?”

Here’s Phillis. Sixteen months after her purchase, at age nine, she’s reading English with fluency and ease from the most difficult portions of the Bible, having only spoken Wolof, her indigenous language, prior to that. She’s delicate in constitution, but her mind is strong. In addition to reading sacred texts in English, she mastered Greek and Latin by the age of ten. (Remember, this is a person who’s not supposed to be smart enough to do this!)

She’s reading Ovid and translating Virgil into English. By fourteen, she’s catechized by the Church and published her first book. This is a brilliant woman in chains.

She converted to Christianity at the age of sixteen. She becomes a member of the Old South Congregational Church in Boston under Reverend George Soule. Then the tradition and teaching were in the tradition of the evangelical and reformed churches. So, though she wasn’t reformed ecclesiology, she was definitely reformed doctrinally.

In 1773, her first literary work is published in the form of a small book, to mixed acclaim, and sent to the new colonies and England.

If you’ve ever heard of the book The Valley of Vision, you also need to own Phillis Wheatley’s first and only book of poems, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Her owners helped her finance its publication.

Now, remember, Africans are considered inferior in intelligence at this point, so they see a woman who has written extensive poetry, she’s translating, and the men of the day say, “This is impossible!” As proof of her authorship, the volume included a preface where seventeen Bostonian men actually claimed that yes, she had indeed written her poems.

What was that like? They made her translate from English to Latin, translate back from Latin to English; translate English to Greek, back from Greek to English; and then write in poetry on the spot for them. Once she had proven herself; they endorsed her book.

Poems on Various Subjects is a landmark achievement in American history. When she published it, she became the first African American and the first U.S. slave to publish a book of poems, as well as the third American woman to do so. 

But these aren’t all of her works. She had two forms of texts. She had her provincial works, which would be her blogs today. They dealt with local and global issues of the day: Will America get free? Will America be born as a nation? Should we be British? Should we be something else? What will happen in the new colonies?

Then she had her classical works, based on the works of other people, like Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Virgil’s Eclogues and Bucolics and The Aeneid, and Homer’s Iliad and Terence’s Comedies. 

Her publisher, Archibald Bell, referred to her as an “artful jade.” An excellent businesswoman, she actually held back some of her poems so she could create a two-volume set. She dropped the first album, and everybody on Twitter was like, “Ooh! Phillis Wheatley just dropped an album!”

She was like, “Wait a minute, you all, I’ve got some more!” So she dropped a second album.

While she was enslaved, she received half of her proceeds from her published works, and the Wheatleys received the other half.

She wrote letters to her dearest friend, also a literate slave. This shows that she knew that this might be her access to freedom. It encouraged people in London to pressure the Wheatley family to set her free.

Who were her greatest critics? Those who thought that she, of inferior intelligence, could not write, should not write, and had not written. Sad to say, her greatest critics were Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, and many of the other Enlightenment thinkers. Ben Franklin was not a fan.

Wheatley’s work is in the style of Elizabethan and Jacobean English literature, which, if you’re like me, I love literature! At times she echoes the iambic metrical art and the patterns of Shakespeare and Ford and Aphra Behn and Dhwanian. Some of her pieces are in the Romantic style, and other times she’s writing like the Greeks in the epic stylings of Homer.

But not only is she an artist, she’s also an abolitionist. She appeals to the emotions of her readers. She uses her craft to demonstrate the humanity of the African and European people of descent that they shared. She puts that together with an argument of moral superiority of enslaved Africans to hypocritical Christians. She transforms what culture would consider in her a defect—her beautiful dark skin, her otherness. She takes that, and she flips it on its head and she turns it into a virtue.

She often claims the authority of her readers as an “Ethiope” rather than a black or African, in order to assume biblical authority over her readers. After all, Moses married an Ethiopian (Numbers 12:1). Psalm 68:31 predicts that Ethiopia “shall soon stretch out her hands to God.” So it’s a very common technique of friends and other Kingdom-oriented Christians of the day. These are biblical counter-arguments to cultural self-hatred. 

Some of the themes in her work—natural revelation versus special revelation, a transcendent Creator God who’s sovereign over His creation and who’s also benevolent and omnipotent in spite of her circumstances, biblical authority. She’s clearly theistic, and she rejects atheism and deism.

Wheatley’s work reflects the themes of redemption, the image of God, original sin, total depravity, suffering for righteousness. She would have known through the abolitionist social circles of Boston that Christians in America preached that the Bible justified slavery. But with access to her English Bibles and the original languages, she would have seen that this was inconsistent with the story, “I will be your God, you will be my people, and I will gather you from all the nations.”

She would have seen that slavery was inconsistent with Old Testament Israel in both the ancient languages and in English, and she would have thought, while she was sitting in the rafters of the slave section of the old Congregational Church in South Boston . . . She would have heard Reverend Soule talking about freedom from tyranny in England, and she would have thought of freedom from tyranny for herself.

What can we learn from this community of character? I’m going to tell you about some of her friends. They were composed of Africans, indigenous Americans, and ethical Europeans, so they were a multi-ethnic community, following the story of the people of God. What they can teach us today is how to exercise influence when you don’t have authority.

Wouldn’t you take that class? If I could teach one class before I die, I’d like it be: how to exercise influence without authority.

Our first character in her world is Ignatius Sancho, an African. He was a composer, an actor, and a writer. He was a neighbor and friend of Phillis Wheatley. He was born in 1729 on a slave ship. Let that sink in. He was born in 1729 on a slave ship. That means his mother was pregnant when she was captured, and delivered in that pestilence we mentioned earlier.

He spent the first two years of his life enslaved in Grenada. His mother died when he was very young; his father killed himself rather than become enslaved. When he was two, his owner brought him to England. He worked as a servant in Greenwich, then worked for the Duke of Montague. Sancho was an autodidact—he taught himself to read. He spoke about the slave trade. He went on to compose music, write poetry and plays, and in 1773 he accessed his freedom. Together with his wife they set up a grocer’s shop in Westminster.

Now, Sancho was really well known in the town. It became a meeting place for some of the most famous writers, artists, actors, and politicians of the day. As a financially independent African householder, he eventually became the first black person of African origin to vote in Parliamentary elections in Britain.

After his death in 1780, his letters were published in a book, and he wrote a great deal about Phillis Wheatley. He was actually one of the first critics of African descent to praise Wheatley. He was the first person of any ethnicity known to question the motives of the Wheatley family by owning her and helping her get her book published.

This is what he said in 1773: 

Phillis’s poems do credit to nature and put art merely as art to the blush. It reflects nothing either to the glory or generosity of her master if she is still his slave, except the glories in the low vanity of having his wanton power in a mind animated by heaven, a genius superior to himself. The list of splendid, titled, learned names in confirmation of her being the real authoress—alas! It all shows how very poor the acquisition of wealth and knowledge are without generosity, feeling, and humanity. These good, great folks all know and perhaps admired, nay, praised genius in bondage; and then, like the priests and Levites in sacred writ, passed by, not one good Samaritan among them.

The second character in her world: Olaudah Equiano, born in 1745. A former enslaved African seaman and merchant, he wrote an autobiography depicting the horrors of slavery, and he lobbied Parliament for its abolition. In his biography he records that he was born in what is now Nigeria. He was kidnapped, sold into slavery as a child, endured the middle passage on a slave ship bound for the New World. After a short period of time in Barbados, he was shipped to Virginia and put to work weeding grass and gathering stone.

He was purchased by a naval captain for about forty pounds in 1757. They renamed him Gustavus Vasta, and he was about twelve when he first arrived in England. Eventually, he was sold and sold and sold, and then he was able to buy his own freedom back for the same forty pounds.

He came to London, and in 1775 he traveled to the Caribbean, became involved in setting up a new plantation colony on the coast of Central America, and tried to do everything in his power to mitigate the circumstances of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

What’s his connection to Wheatley? He returned to London and worked as a servant for a while before he found employment with the Sierra Leone resettlement project, which was set up to provide a safe place for freed slaves to live and work. Freedom was a tenuous thing at that time. You could be sold right back into slavery, or if you were free you could be sold into slavery, kidnapped.

So they set up the Sierra Leone resettlement project. He worked with the Sons of Africa, a group that campaigned for abolition through public speaking, letter-writing, and lobbying Parliament. They set up the Sierra Leone resettlement project and had a mission established there so that when people became free they could resettle on the continent and be safe from being sold back into slavery.

He was friends with Ottobah Cugoano, an African anti-slavery campaigner who was kidnapped in 1770 and taken to the West Indies. He spent nearly a year enslaved in Grenada. Cugoano was brought to England in 1772 and soon became a leader of London’s African community and their campaign to end slavery.

Now, Cugoano published a book, and the thing about books in this age, in the eighteenth century is, the titles are incredibly long—they’re a paragraph long. But this one was called Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Human Species. Long title; very descriptive. He cowrote the book with Equiano, and he talked extensively about the slave trade in Grenada and in the islands and on the coast.

He argued powerfully that slavery was morally wrong, and he used the Bible as his platform. He said, "How could the British be civilized people in the world, that they should carry on the traffic of the most barbarous cruelty and injustice, and think slavery, robbery, and murder is no crime.”

Cugoano’s books, Wheatley’s, Equiano’s greatly influenced public opinion. The relationship to Wheatley is in 1774 when the three of them get together with Samson Occom, a native indigenous Anglican pastor; and Philip Quaque, the first ordained Anglican priest of African descent. They start this work overseas in Sierra Leone, and they start funding mission work to Gauna. This early African American mission activity gets truncated by the Revolutionary War, but it may well be the first recorded mission activity from America’s shores.

What is of note is that Wheatley supports the abolitionist justice movement with her pen, but the Christian movement with her earned funds. Now, George Lyle went to Jamaica in 1782; Hudson Taylor went shortly after he did. Wheatley, Occom, Quaque, Cugoano, and Equiano began their mission in 1774, years before the other ones.

Well, we get to 1775; relations are so poor between England and the colonies that all mission activity gets suspended. They send everybody home, and Wheatley at this point develops for the first time an African in America Christian identity, and she sides with the revolutionaries.

Another significant figure, and the last in our community, is a man named Granville Sharp, an ethical European, a civil servant, an attorney, and a political reformer who was also proficient in Greek and Hebrew and theology. (Oh, what would our legal system look like today if our attorneys were also theologians!)

He was one of the twelve men who in 1787 formed the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and he was the first chairman of that society. It’s through him that Phillis Wheatley begins to work on getting free.

Sharp’s theology went like this in his legal briefs: “The glorious system of the gospel destroys all narrow national partiality and makes us citizens of the world, obliging us to profess universal benevolence, but more especially, we are bound as Christians to commiserate and assist to the utmost of our power persons in distress and in captivity.”

This ethical European became the leading defense of African people in London, and he saved many Africans from being sent back to slavery in the West Indies, often at his own expense.

So Granville Sharp gets together with Phillis Wheatley, and now she’s an enslaved celebrity in London and the New World. She goes on a tour from the colonies to England. A very clever woman, possibly with self-emancipation in mind, she makes plans to travel, and the Wheatley family sends her with Granville Sharp.

Now, what Granville Sharp did was he created an act, the Mansfield-Somerset Act, that meant that if slaves could get to England, they could be free, but they would have to leave all of their lives in America behind. At this point, Phillis decides she’s going to negotiate her own freedom. She does it so that she can return and go back, and return and go back, with all the freedom of an American citizen.

At this point she begins to write more boldly about chattel slavery. She compares this deep hunger and sadness over her own loss of personal freedom with her journey through the middle passage into slavery—which was a risky identification. Aimed at the heart of America’s foremost leaders, she began writing to George Washington. Imagine that. A woman of color in the New World, a former slave, a person who should have no voice whatsoever, writing to then military man George Washington. Guess what? He wrote her back, and they began a correspondence.

There was among Africans of America an ethics of accessing freedom. Some Christians chose to purchase their freedom. They took advantage of the Mansfield option. Still others chose to take advantage of the opportunity to escape slavery by flight. I cannot blame them.

Wheatley chose to purchase hers, and her emancipation granted her the most freedom of movement. She had her manumission put in writing, so that she always had it on her person, and rather than seeking her freedom as a concession from the Wheatley family, she empowered herself and coerced them to exchange one promise of freedom for the other. She took out an insurance policy on her own work, so now she owned everything, and it would never again be considered Wheatley property.

She left a slave on 26 July 1773 and returned a free woman later that year. She referred to 1773 as her annus mirabilis, her miracle year. Freedom, fame, the hope of fortune yet to come. Unfortunately, she’s now in an even more vulnerable position, a freed woman of African descent in a world with very few economic opportunities open to her.

So John and Susannah Wheatley allowed her to continue to live with them after her manumission, but now she’s supporting herself. The father, John Wheatley, dies, and she mourns him as a father. Whoa! Something has happened in the Wheatley family. Susannah dies then in 1773, and Wheatley stays in a favored place with the rest of the Wheatley family.

This, again, underscores the difference between chattel slavery and biblical slavery. Now she is with the children of the Wheatleys, her age-mates. Reverend John and Mary Wheatley Lathrop were among the refugees who moved from Boston to Providence during the British occupation of Boston, and Wheatley goes with them. Why? Because she says they share the same Kingdom values. What happened? What were those values? What were her life-defining, life-controlling concerns and issues that she says they now share?

The daughter’s husband, Reverend Lathrop, writes, “I long for the time when war and slavery shall come to an end; when, not only every sect of Christianity, but when Jews and Gentiles, when all nations of men on the face, however differing in color, and in other circumstances, embrace as brethren children of one common Father and members of one great family; I long for the time when all flesh shall know the Lord.”

I think that the Wheatley family’s spiritual growth took the shape of the book of Philemon. I think they went from the religion of Cain to the worship of Abel, and they entered into the story of the people of God.

Now, Phillis is free. She’s growing more and more bold, and as she’s “blogging” and as she’s “tweeting” and as she’s making her “Facebook posts” and putting up her “pictures,” of course, the trolls show up. An anonymous troll, a satirist, alleges that “women who pursue intellectual interests, particularly in public, are either unnatural or sexually deviant and lascivious.” He criticizes Wheatley’s work over and over and over again. He criticizes the work of the other women that she’s writing with, and he maligns her character publicly. He writes that by essentially calling her a stud among the other female poets of the day.

And Wheatley claps back in the most beautiful way possible. She says, “I challenge this white-faced, white-livered enemy of modern poetesses. It will be a black affair for him if he ever comes under my lee, for I will have no mercy on a man who stands up against me on that score. I am a match for the stiffest pedant in the republic of letters. He holds up his crest, no doubt, with confidence, as he has hitherto met with no rub for his impudence in turning up the frail part of us female poets; but I would have him draw back in time, and not plunge too deep into a subject whose bottom his short line of understanding can never fathom.” Boom.

1776 to 1784 are the silent years. We don’t have any writings from her at this period, and we think this is the consequence of marriage on her freedom.

But as we look back over history and as we look at these people who took a journey from the religion of Cain that exalted self over others to the worship of Abel and the entering into the spirit of the storied people, we have to ask ourselves a few questions.

Question one: Who was the slave and who was the free person? Question two: Who was the preacher and who was the congregant?

Wheatley stands, both in life and in death, as a revolutionary among revolutionaries, a true witness of true Israel amidst a nation who didn’t seem to understand either the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings or His greatest command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” The general culture of slavery handled and held the holy writ, the words of God, on a daily basis, but they seemed to understand only its form while denying the transformational power inside of it.

By all accounts, as an African, a woman, and a slave, Wheatley should have remained voiceless in the post-colonial world that surrounded her; yet, she managed to be instrumental in both the temporal revolution and the eternal one. This is radical. She takes what they have to offer her theologically, and then she uses it biblically to hold up the gospel mirror to their faces. 

This is exercising influence when you don’t have authority. This is how the underground runs, and there are stories like this all over American history. The forgotten, the voiceless, the overlooked; but they’re there for the taking. So I’ve mined these diamonds for you, to give and to encourage you to find the people in history, to learn from the people in history, to learn from the people in the global underground who are following the story of God’s people as closely as they can. Nobody’s going to do it perfectly. Perfect doesn’t come until we get to glory. But there are some who got closer to it than others. Find them. Tell each other about them. Share their stories, and then get in the stream yourself.

Dannah: I love that: get into the stream yourself. We’ve been listening to Dr. Karen Ellis clue us in to the amazing life of Phillis Wheatley Peters, the poet who looked beyond the labels society placed on her and found her purpose, ultimately, in the God who created her.

Nancy: I think one takeaway for all of us is to recognize the beauty of what God can do in and through an individual such as Phillis, someone who lived her life for His glory, and stewarded well the gifts and abilities God had given her, and someone often swimming against the cultural current.

Dannah: Like a salmon?

Nancy: How did you know I was going to say that?

Dannah: Well, let’s just say I know you, Nancy.

Nancy: Yes. In fact, I have a picture of a salmon swimming upstream that a friend drew for me that is hanging on my study wall. Because I'm always saying to women, "We need to be willing to swim upstream against the culture." We need to swim against what the world considers good and right, to swim in the direction of God's Word, which will take us against the current, but it is so worth it, as we've seen in the life of Phillis Wheatley. And like Karen Ellis, who is another woman who is swimming upstream in ways that are bringing great glory to Christ.

I'm so thankful that you got to hear from Karen today. She will be joining us for True Woman '22, this coming September.

Dannah: Karen Ellis also wrote the chapter on Phillis Wheatley in the new resource from Revive Our Hearts. This is a book with the title (Un)remarkable: Ten Ordinary Women Who Impacted Their World for Christ. Each chapter features a look at a woman who God used in some extraordinary ways. And this month, we’re making it available to you as a thank you for your donation of any size in support of Revive Our Hearts. Nancy, this is a really important month in terms of donations.

Nancy: It absolutely is. That's because May 31 is the fiscal close of our year of ministry, and it’s also the last month before summer starts up. Now, donations to organizations like Revive Our Hearts sometimes slack off during the summer months. So here in the month of May, we’re hoping to hear from listeners like you, who are saying, “I want to help you finish your ministry year well and launch into your next year of ministry in a good place, financially speaking.” 

Of course, we don’t want you to take anything away from what you give to your local church on a regular basis. And we understand that you might not be in a place to make a donation right now. That’s perfectly okay. But if God has blessed you with extra to share, I’d like to ask you to consider making a donation to Revive Our Hearts.

Dannah: And when you do, don’t forget to ask about the book on the ten women who impacted their world for Christ. Again, it’s our way of thanking you for your support. 

Nancy: Our website is ReviveOurHearts.com. You can make a donation there. Or you can call us at 1-800-569-5959. 

Dannah: Tomorrow, Nancy, you’re going to take us to Psalm 107 to remind us of “God’s Faithfulness in Times of Trouble.”

Nancy: I love this passage! In fact, here’s something you as a Revive Our Hearts listener can do. Sometime between now and tomorrow, why don’t you pull out your Bible and read through Psalm 107. It’s one of the longer psalms—forty-three verses—but it’s so worth it. Before you hear tomorrow's teaching, I know you'll get so much more out of it if you take a little time and meditate on how Psalm 107 shows us the faithfulness of God. 

Dannah: Oh, you’re giving us homework?

Nancy: Yes, because these are times of trouble, aren't they? But, as we read in that psalm, we have hope because of the faithfulness of God. Join us again tomorrow, for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. Calling you to swim upstream like a salmon, toward greater freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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