Sensitive to this fact, the proslavery advocates among the southern clergy leveraged it. Who would dare go against the authority of the Bible openly? For this reason, a young Robert L. Dabney explained in an 1851 letter that the path to defeat the abolitionists was to take the debate squarely to them in terms of the Bible alone. This would expose them, he argued, by exposing that for all their appeals to religion, they actually despised the Bible at the heart of it.
TGC and John piper and others supoort Dabney in part beause of his biblicism but it mtters what Dabney thought he was supporting
