Truth Unites - Alex O'Connor vs. Dinesh D'Souza: What I Would Have Said

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

Gavin Ortlund reviews the debate between Alex O'Connor and Dinesh D'Souza on whether the Bible is true, especially focusing on the concern of slavery and genocide in the Old Testament. See my previous video on the conquest of Canaan: https://youtu.be/ssP-wQv2v5g See my previous video on slavery in the Bible: https://youtu.be/ZImmDmr8pxk See my talk on Gregory of Nyssa: https://youtu.be/jytXSTLLYEk See the dialogue with slavery with Trent Horn, Josh Bowen, and Kipp Davis: https://youtube.com/live/NpnN2_c1Cq8 Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Alex O'Connor and Dinesh D'Souza recently had a debate on whether the Bible is true. In this video, I want to give some general thoughts, especially on this issue of slavery and genocide in the Bible. This came up, it was very, kind of especially at the conclusion. I started watching it at the very end. I thought, wow, this is a fiery conversation. I thought, ah, I just long to try to help get answers out there that can help people who are struggling with these topics, these tough questions. This was an interesting debate because I found myself agreeing more with the person who holds the position that I don't hold. And that's Alex.

He starts off, basically, they both had 10 minutes to start off, though they, I think, didn't always stick to that. Alex started off on his side, he was basically giving some examples of contradictions in the Bible and so forth. That's fine. That's fair. Dinesh, on his side, started off more with kind of big picture biblical hermeneutics. That's also fine. but Dinesh never really got off of the big picture into the details. So there's a lot of vagueness and I think lack of clarity and his approach.

And then at times he seemed to be wanting to focus on kind of the overall spiritual truth of the Bible, not on its historicity. And I think Alex was kind of right to point out that for Christianity, the historicity really matters. The historicity of at least some of this is important. For Christianity, the historicity of the life of Jesus. Like if it were discovered historically speaking that a man called Jesus never existed, that would completely undermine Christianity. Are you saying that? No, I'm not saying that.

Okay, let me ask a different question. I'm saying that historically it matters. The crucifixion, the resurrection, these are matters which historically matters to Christians. And so when we're dealing with a historical account of what happened, when they're riddled with contradictions, I think that that's a problem. If you don't think that's a problem, then that's fine. But I think that the people listening and wanting to find out if the Bible is true might see that as reason to undermine the trust of the text. I think I can also sort of understand Alex's frustration and sometimes what can feel like an inconsistency of this method.

Notice what's happening in my view. What's happening is that the Bible is a historical text and a scientific text when it needs to be, and it's not one when you don't want it to be. So when I said a moment ago, here's a relatively mundane historical fact about the Gospels. You said, well, the fact that some mundane historical fact should undermine Christianity is ludicrous. But now you're telling me that a mundane historical fact is a little bit of a mundane historical fact is, enough to buttress Christianity. I don't think you can have your cake and eat it too in that so apologists like myself need to be careful about this. You know, we want to be consistent in how we use the Bible in both directions. And so I'm sort of instructed by that and reminded of

that. Now, I'm not going to go through all of the different specific contradictions Alex brought up. This is not a thorough debate review. But I'll get, I really want to get to the slavery and genocide issues, but I'll just give one general comment on methodology. In case this is helpful for people who are wrestling with these issues of contradictions in the Bible. And just something that I think is a category that needs to be more in view in these discussions. And that's the literary genre of the texts, of the texts that are in question when these alleged discrepancies or contradictions come up. So basically, what we have in ancient historiography is very different from modern historiography. And I think sometimes this is missed. Basically, to generalize in many,

of the kinds of ancient historiography that we find in biblical narrative, there's more of a looseness. There's more of a, it's more acceptable to have, for example, dyschronology, meaning putting events in different order or other small changes of detail for a theological purpose. Sometimes thematic arrangement or theological arrangement, sometimes the theological message of the author will organize or stricture how the narrative is presented a little bit. Now, this is so tricky, and I know people get nervous. This does not mean it's not true. Okay, I believe the Bible's true.

But many of these things are accepted within the literary genre that is being written. For example, even in the Gospels, I think Richard Burrage is right, that the Gospels are basically ancient biography. But you can have a little bit, you can have discronology, for example, like in the temptations of Christ in Matthew and Luke, they're put in different order. And I would say that's not an error because that's accepted within that literary genre. ancient readers would not have felt deceived by that kind of thing. So we have to measure truthfulness by the intention of the author, what they're trying to communicate. And if it's not intending to function with the kind of exactitude that modern historiography often

has, then it's not an error if it's different from that. Like a simple example would be using round numbers. If I say a million people died in that famine and someone says, well, no, it was 1.1 million, then I would say, well, that's fine. I'm not trying to be so exact. It was giving a rough figure. And that's the kind of thing I'm talking about here where, you know, look, I'm not saying this applies to every passage Alex brought up, but this is the kind of thing that we need to get into. What I would simply say is this. And by the way, this is not a new idea. This has always been recognized in the Christian tradition. John Calvin even said the evangelists were not very exact

as to the order of dates. So there's that word exact. It's not an error. It's a matter of how exact it intends to be. And if you read biblical narrative in line with its own purpose and its own literary genre, I think you'll find they're very carefully crafted and they're enormously valuable as historical resources, especially in New Testament, historiography like the Gospels. Sometimes people think of the Gospels as kind of slipshod and uncareful in how they're, for example, how they quote the Old Testament. People will all the time quote Matthew 2, quoting Hosea 11 out of Egypt, I called my son, and let's say, look, the apostles just totally abuse the Old Testament. They take these verses out of context. In Hosea,

God's son is Israel. Matthew tries to make this about Jesus. And the thing is Matthew's audience is Jewish. Matthew is Jewish. They all knew the book of Hosea very well. These are people steeped in the Old Testament. He knows that everybody knows that's about Israel in the original context. He's making a theological identification of Jesus as the true Israel, and that's a theme throughout Matthew's Gospel. That's one example of where it can look kind of uncareful, but if you try to understand what the text is intending to do, sometimes what looks like an error is actually serving a theological purpose. Now, I know that doesn't address every one of Alex's points. I'm just trying to highlight one issue here that I think is

helpful in these discussions, literary genre. I wish I could just keep saying that, because I think that's missed a lot of times in these discussions. Okay, more to say about all that. But what I want to comment more on at the end of this debate, man, I was on a walk. I remember watching this. I just got the notification. Oh, debate. I'm on a walk. I start watching it. I just see the last like 10 minutes. And this issue came up. It was a very, it was an intense discussion. Didn't boil over. No one is yelling. But it was, you know, it was intense. And they're talking about slavery and genocide. And these are two things that I just put videos out about. So I've been thinking about them. So I was very interested in this. And I was dismayed to see from the Christian perspective here from Dene. a sort of apparently it seemed as though there was a concession that the Old Testament was immoral and then there's sort of a pitting of it against the New Testament.

These people were listening to their God who was telling them to slaughter innocent women and children. That's right, the ancient Israelites were, but the ancient Israelites are not what taught you. What taught you is the, what taught you is the thousand-year tradition of the early Christian church. Which came a bit too late for the Amalekites. It came a bit too late for the Amalekites, to be sure. Were the Israeli armies not instructed by the God that you believe in? They were instructed by God. And they were instructed to do things which you would now consider to be immoral, yes?

Absolutely. So God has commanded them to do something which you now consider to be immoral, whether or not you consider it to be immoral because the later developments of Christian ethics, God himself has told us that we must abandon our intuition, that the slaughter of women and children, and by the way, when it's unnecessary in those instances to slaughter them, Well, I don't view it that way. This is how I view it. Let's put it this way. Even in the ancient world, divine revelation comes into a primitive, barbaric world, which is full of a lot of really bad guys.

And God says keep going. No. Keep it up. God does not say keep going. But what God does not say keep going. And again, this is called, you know, trying to get the point of what is happening. There's slavery in this world, in the ancient world, and it is true. The Bible doesn't come in and go, we denounce slavery. We denounce the killing of women and children. It doesn't do that. It actually immerses itself into an existing, admittedly barbaric culture.

And what's actually going on there with the Amalekites, the Canaanites, and so on, if you just read the Old Testament, it tells you it has to do with the displacement of polytheism with monotheism. That's fine. Hold on, hold on. That justifies the murder of children and women. I didn't say it does. I didn't say it does. That's what you're implying.

I'm saying that the way it happens historically is God takes aside. The single monotheistic god, who by the way in the Old Testament does not act like a monotheistic god, he acts like a tribal god, right? He acts like the god of only the Israelites. And so Israel's enemies. Listen to what you just said. The god that you believe in is acting like a tribal war god. The god of the, yes, the god that is depicted in the old. Testament is, he goes, I'm picking the Jews. I'm choosing you. So it looks like there's this concession

of God functioning in a tribal way, and then the things he commands are immoral. I think I heard that. That, you know, I'd want to try to be charitable. Maybe there was a misspeak there or something, but that seemed to come out a couple of times, actually, where there's this pitting. It's like, the mindset is like, well, yeah, that's the Old Testament. And Alex even pointed out, like, why are you calling the Old Testament God Yahweh rather than God? So there's these kinds of things that, I don't think I was the only one who was sensing this Old Testament versus New Testament sort of approach. And I think this is problematic. You know, this is sort of to flirt with the old error of Marcionism, which says the Old Testament is bad and the New Testament is good.

And this is what progressive Christians often do as well when they're saying, well, yeah, the Old Testament is bad, but Jesus corrected that. And I think Alex was basically deologically correct on this to quote Jesus himself. Do you not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets? I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the law until everything is accomplished. Therefore, anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great

in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus said that in the sermon on the mount, referring to his fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy and law. Jesus had a very high view of the Old Testament in that passage and many others. So a lesson to take, you know, we never want to comment on things just to attack, we can learn. The lesson here is, as followers of Christ, like myself and many people who watch my videos, when we pit the Old Testament and New Testament against one another, not only are we departing from the historic Christian posture modeled by Christ himself, but we're actually not making our witness more effective. You know, could be a smart skeptic who studied theology like Alex can see that and call us out on it, far better to just stand by the Old Testament and defend it

as for what it's saying. So here's how I would do that on this difficult topic of genocide. I would say, number one, God does judge evil throughout the Old Testament. He does kill people as an act of judgment. That's just unavoidable. It's all throughout the Bible. It happens in the New Testament. Jesus himself does that. He threatens that in Revelation 2, for example. So that's there. So we just have to say, yes, God has the right to take life. God is the judge. And there's a lot of evil in the world that needs to be judged. And if you lived in the ancient world, I think we could understand that.

But the second thing is, and this is what I focused on in my research, the nature of this particular judgment is not best framed as a genocide or an ethnic cleansing or something that's deliberately targeted at non-combatants. And in this video, that I'll put up the thumbnail for, I made the lengthier case for this, but I just want to reference this here. to encourage it maybe to get out there more because I think this maybe could alleviate some of the struggle here and bring some clarity, especially for Christians who struggle with this. What I've argued is that the biblical descriptions of many of these military expeditions, for example, in the book

of Joshua against the Canaanites, they involve ancient warfare rhetoric and this used hyperbole or exaggeration of various kinds. I think the case for that is overwhelming. When you interpret the language accurately, it's not talking about an ethnic cleansing or the killing of babies, or the killing of the elderly, or the killing of those who are mentally handicapped, or any kind of non-combatants. Boy, it's hard to talk about this. Such an intense topic. I'm trying to hopefully clarify here. I don't think that's what the Old Testament is talking about. I gave six arguments for this in my initial video for why the language of complete destruction need not and should not be interpreted as an ethnic cleansing or a wholesale destruction of all living

people in the region, but rather it's a complete and decisive military victory. I'll just recount them here. You can watch the video for the full thing. Number one, warfare rhetoric outside the Bible says the same thing about Israel. We say we completely destroyed Israel. Obviously, that doesn't mean everybody died. Number two, there's commandments against intermarriage side by side with the commandments for complete destruction. If everyone is destroyed, then there'd be no one to marry anyway. Number three,

there's commandments for expulsion side by side with the commandments for destruction. If everyone is destroyed, then there'd be no one to expel. Number four, the text very clearly indicates the survival of the people that are supposedly destroyed. That's in Joshua, that's also in judges, and it's even in 1st Samuel 15 with the Amalekites. Over and over, it says, completely destroy these people, and then they're still there. Number five, the same language of complete destruction, including the mayorisms of man and woman, old and young, etc., is applied to other events like the Babylonian exile, where we know that not everyone died. And number six, a number of scholars have proposed from both literary evidence and archaeological

evidence that the cities being targeted in chapters like Joshua 10 were military garrisons or forts, not civilian population centers primarily. I won't rehash the full case that I made in my video. You can check that out. The point for now is just to say, this is not a killing of non-combatants. Think of this as like the Allied soldiers going into Germany. They're not killing every German baby or something like that. That's not how it is. It's not an ethnic cleansing. It's a decisive military victory. And that doesn't solve the problem. I'm not saying that's a complete answer. We also have to get to the second argument I made in my video on this where there's a place for divine judgment against horrific evil. God can do that. But the point is we

We need to be clear about framing what the problem is. It's not genocide per se, according to most definitions of that term. And that's relevant to some of the claims that are being made in this discussion, like what Alex said about the slaughter of I. I think it's important, read these texts for yourself. There is no way that I'm misreading this text. We know that this is what's happening. In the slaughter of I, a.

That's a type of Canaanite. In Joshua, we're told that when Israel had finished killing all of the men in I, in the fields and in the wilderness, where they had chased them. and when every one of them had been put to the sword, the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it. That is to say that we're told that this is just because the promised land was inhabited, and God's God, you know, he's allowed to do this. So because the Israelites want that land, they have to go and chase out the eye.

So they chase them into the wilderness. They chase after them. They slaughter them in the wilderness. They then turn around, come back into the city and kill who's left. Who's left if the combatants have run away, the women and the children? This is intolerable, and I cannot have it simply waved away. So there was a lot of interrupting after that, so I had to kind of cut it up mid-sentence. But Alex was quoting from Joshua 1024, which I'll put up,

and he's concluding from this, that this was a slaughtering of the women and children. And I would say that assumes that I is like a modern city with a huge residential population. But claiming that there's women and children here, that's not a sound inference from the fact that they're going to the city. I may well have been a military garrison where there'd be very few civilians living. A lot of people like Richard Hess, among other scholars, have made this case that the civilian populations live outside the city and they depart when warfare is happening. I'll put up his conclusion and you can see my video for the full case. That's the kind of thing.

So in other words, you shouldn't think of this as like, think of like a modern-day city, like Chicago, and think of an army sweeping through and going into people's homes and stabbing all the civilians. That's not what is going on in the book of Joshua, Joshua chapter 10. The language is describing, even the language of male and female, it's, these are mayorisms to describe a total military victory of the opposing army. I know that can seem counterintuitive in English translation, but it's just the language of the day of that time.

So, you know, at least, you know, if someone wants to disagree, they could watch my video and see the full case, but that's the kind of issue that I think would have been a better defense here, and that I would like, I'm jealous to get out there more. to the discussion, because I think that can help us understand these ancient texts better, and then I think we just have to get to this point where we recognize the brutality of the ancient world, and that it was just for God to intervene at times. And if you've ever seen a movie that's showing some apocalyptic world where there's horrific evil that needs to be met with justice, then maybe you can understand something of what's going on in the book of Joshua.

I do think it actually is sort of the David attacking the Goliath. This is not a bully stealing from somebody. This is the dethroning of a brutal power. I do think that's what's going on in Joshua. And in my video, I talk about the infant burnings and the horrific things happening there. All right. So that's on that. Then the topic moved on to slavery. So I guess I'm just saying mainly just watch my video on that if you want the fuller case, but I'm trying to flag how I wish this would be responded to in these debates. I'd love to do the debates like this. I want to talk with Alex O'Connor. I like Alex O'Connor. I want to talk about these things because I'm jealous, you know, as I was watching this last night, I'm filming this video, the last thing I needed

was to do another video today. I'm quite busy. But I, just to be completely honest, when I was watching this debate, my heart is filled with a longing that a Christian perspective be given really, if I may be so blunt, a better representation and articulation, because I'm proud to be a Christian. I think Christianity has been so good for the world. I think on issues like slavery, it's been so good for the world, as I'll talk about now, but I just want people to see. I guess I want to make that case more and put this out there more. That's why I'm making this video. So let's talk about the slavery issue. And this is what finished off the discussion. I'll play this final segment. You can watch. This is what I was watching on my walk. You can see the, you know,

it's kind of getting into the climactic moments. Check out what happened and then I'll give my response. And tell me where you could appeal to be anti-slavery, specifically. I mean, not love your enemy, love your neighbor. Tell me specifically, like, here's how I can put it. You're in time machine you go back to antebellum slavery in the American South yeah and you you find yourself on a plantation and you say to the master of the house you know you own a bunch of slaves I don't think this is moral I don't think you should be mistreating them where do they turn and plausibly so to justify what they're doing well the answer the answer is and you can say to them well hold on have you

read this verse tell me the verse tell me where I can point this person yeah so I would recommend to you now from there Dinesh goes into how we are all created equal, and we are all equally in need of salvation. And so from those theological truths, there was a political movement that appealed to them. And I agree with a lot of what he's saying there. I think that way of reasoning has some merits to it. But Alex is saying, I need you to get more specific. He's responding by saying that's too vague. You can't just appeal to these generic truths, because his concern is, I think if I hear him correctly, is that you're reading later beliefs back into the text. People got to these beliefs from other means and then they're sort of reading them

back into the texts. Okay, fair concern and you can hear how he says this. You know, like, don't get me wrong. I am more than happy that Martin Luther King was able to make a theological case for the abolition of slavery, fine, but I would say that he was not for civil rights. He was misreading the text. Yeah, you're right. We have about five minutes, guys. Not the other way around. It's like, we have to ask who's misreading the text. And let's say, let's just suppose for a moment that you could point to me, which you still haven't done, to a single verse, even in the new, Testament, which tells me that slavery is a bad thing, which, by the way, St. Paul writes in, I can't, I can't remember which, I wish I could, I wish I could remember which letter it is,

but you'll know what I'm talking about, where he writes, slaves, be obedient to your masters, not just the good ones, but also to the cruel, or the fruard as the King James has it. It's like, if it were the case that even if you could, which I'd still love for you to do, point to a single verse in the New Testament that tells me that slavery is actually not so good, the fact that so obviously God is okay with it in the Old Testament means that even if you could do that. The best we're left with is that we have a text here which can say one thing on one day and another thing the next. So the question is, are there specific texts, like from the New Testament we can appeal to to oppose slavery as opposed to just general principles? And then are

people like Martin Luther King Jr. reading the Bible badly or are they reading it well? Let me address this to finish off the video and I'll explain why I think those who have advanced the cause of human equality like the abolitionists or people in the civil rights movement and I'm grateful for all of them so much. I think they were reading the Bible well. Not in such a way that the right way to read the Bible is always immediately obvious. The big library of books over a huge span of history, but ultimately I think they're reading it really well in both the particulars and in the big picture. So let's start with some of the particulars. If I was talking to Alex O'Connor, and he put that question to me, give me a verse. I would start with 1 Timothy 110,

which lists in slavers as those condemned by the law. And then I would point out that Paul calls being a bond servant, a yoke, a yoke in 1st Timothy 6.1, a yoke is a wooden crosspiece, fastened over the neck of an animal and attached to a plow. That doesn't sound like a good thing. Paul clearly doesn't think slavery in the Greco-Roman world is a good thing or that is good to be a slave. In 1st Corinthians 721, he says if you're a slave and you can gain your freedom by all means

do so. might say, okay, but what about those verses where Paul and Peter say slaves obey your masters? And I'll put some of these up. But I would basically say to abstract from a lot of my thought in my slavery in the Bible video, I'll put up a thumbnail of that. You can check this out for the fuller case. I'm going to draw from some of that, summarize it here, and cast it in relation to Alex's concerns here. Basically, I'd say, this is legitimate to say instruction for people who live under fallen structures doesn't necessarily entail approval of the structure. It's telling you what to do in that circumstance. It's not saying the circumstance itself is good. I don't think we can infer from,

you know, these passages I just put up where Paul says, servants, be subject to your masters, that he's saying, oh, it's a great thing that there are slaves in the world. Far from it. I mean, think of it like this. If I had a son who was in the military and I wrote him a letter, I could say to him, obey your commanding officer. That doesn't mean I approve of the war being fought. I might even be a pacifist, but I can say that because in his circumstance, that's the best thing to do. Now, you might say, well, Paul shouldn't have said that in that. He should have said slaves revolt against your masters.

But there's a good reason to think that would have been very precarious. Whenever there are in the Greco-Roman world slave revolts, the backlash was brutal. slaves would get crucified and tortured and made an example of, and it was not a good thing. So it's not actually obvious. At least it's complicated to say, how do you function in that context? And you can't just immediately overhaul this part of society that's so deeply ingrained into the economy, into how everything functions. These ethical exhortations actually don't give you the full picture. If you want to get the full biblical ideal, you have to do what I think in his better moments Dinesh was trying to get at. And that's read the whole thing as a coherent story, and that's so

you'll start with creation in the image of God, which I'll come to in a second. But you also have to look at how things are falling out in these very concrete circumstances, like the book of Philemon, where you have a runaway slave being sent back to his master, but the runaway slave has become a Christian, Onisimus. And so Paul is saying two pretty remarkable things if you read these verses and think about it, especially relative to the rest of the ancient world and the brutality of that. Number one, he says, receive him back not as a bond servant, but as your beloved brother. Now, that right there already is just, you know, scandalous in the ancient world. But then he says, receive him as you would receive me, an apostle. Now, this,

I would say, is a picture of how the gospel of Christ changes the world. It changes it from the inside out. It doesn't just, and this is what God is doing throughout the nation of Israel. He's not just sort of immediately imposing like the best possible form of democracy or something like this. He's working from the inside out. And so the book of Philemon is an example of how the gospel is undermining the assumptions that even make slavery possible because what it's saying is when you become a Christian, your fundamental identity changes. There is no, that's why Paul will say there is no slave nor free in Christ. And that kind of change cannot help but trickle down into eventual societal change. F.F. Bruce talks about Philemon. He says, what this letter does is

bring us into an atmosphere in which the institution of slavery could only wilt and die. Formal emancipation would be but a matter of expediency, the technical confirmation of the new relationship that had already come into being. I used to think this was pushing it a little too far, but if you really think about how radical it is to say, he receive him as your brother, welcome him as you welcome me, that's pretty amazing. The gospel does make a change to slavery, even if it doesn't do it at the sort of societal level immediately, and how could the early Christians have done that anyway? Now, Old Testament questions of servanthood and slavery there, I use both terms. That's a separate question, and I addressed that in my video, but let me address

the concern that might already come up, Alex might say that's still too vague. You know, you're just reading these later ideals back into the text. And my response to that would be, okay, I can, I can appreciate the concern, but I would say that the appeal that I'm making from like Philemon is legitimate because this is basically what happened. I would say this is a legitimate reading of these texts because the abolitionists and or others before, you know, the simple fact is, and I don't want to annoy my atheist viewers out there because I know some of them don't like to hear this, but I got to say this. It's just true. The simple fact is that it was Christians who led the charge against slavery. It was. Okay. I was so gripped by Gregory of Nisa's sermon in 379 AD that I took

months to study this and prepare a talk on this, which you can watch. I'll put up the thumbnail. And you can, and I'll put it in the video description. And I've talked about, you know, historians describe this, sermon is the most scathing critique of slaveholding in all of antiquity. There's nothing quite like it. Because what separates Gregory is he's not just saying that the abuse of slaves is wrong. He's saying the idea of slavery is wrong. That is very rare in the ancient world. There's only a couple places you find that and nothing as scathing as Gregory. And what brought Gregory to that conviction is the doctrine of creation in the image of God. He's basically saying you can't put a price tag on God. And if we're made in God's image,

then how could you possibly think you can own someone? And we take this kind of thinking for granted today. What we have to appreciate is how radical that was in the 4th century. Even Kyle Harper, in this fantastic book he's written, who qualifies this a bit, still acknowledges that this sermon is the only extant critique of slavery to survive from antiquity, and he calls it by far the most remarkable and categorical statement of opposition to slavery in the ancient world. Now, it's that same doctrine.

Fast forward, 1,500 years. that, or 14 or whatever, is creation in the image of God, that doctrine that is driving the abolitionist movement. This is what people like William Wilberforce and other evangelical Christians are appealing to in that context, and it's not generally disputed that it was Christians who were leading the charge. Alec Riri has this excellent book on Protestantism. He's very honest. It's a very good resource. He's honest showing Christians on both sides of the struggle, but he's right when he claims that abolitionism was a religious movement first and last. If you want a flavor of the logic and the appeal that's being made,

my favorite sentence in all this topic is Frederick Douglass's logic, where he says, there can no more be a law for the enslavement of man made in the image of God than for the enslavement of God himself. That logic was not known except through Judeo-Christian influence to my awareness. And I'm not alone in seeing that. Okay, so this is how powerful. So if Alex is wanting a specific text, I would say Genesis 1.

And Genesis 1 was absolutely unique in the ancient world. It was like light shining into darkness. I know, again, I have seen some of the atheist responses. I know they get annoyed when I emphasize this point, but I'm emphasizing it because I genuinely sincerely think it's true. And I value human equality and human dignity. I'm grateful for the influence of Christianity. I want to champion this because I think it's true.

I think Genesis 1 was dynamite that came in and exploded a lot of prejudice. I think Genesis 1 was the sunlight streaming through into the dark. So, no, everybody matters. Everybody's royal. Because all the other ancient Near East creation accounts, they had creation in the image of a deity, but it was always the king or the queen. And Genesis 1 democratized that. And that's amazing.

That was unique. Now, a fair question from the other side that Alex might say, and that I've said, I've wondered about this, is, okay, why don't you have more texts that more clearly just say, like slavery is bad, you know, abolish it immediately. Or why don't you have more Gregory of Nisas? Because they're few and far between, I admit. Reasonable concern, something I've wrestled with. I think one possible answer is that in the ancient world, especially and in the pre-modern world, generally, society without slavery was inconceivable to most people. slavery for most of human history in every place has been an integral part of how the world works.

I'm not saying it's a good thing that it's like this. Again, you see the biblical ideal in before the fall in Genesis 1, but this is just true that in subsistence economies in the ancient world, if you have debts you can't pay, this was a mechanism for survival and people would sell themselves into slavery, and it often was attended by horrific abuses. And so an immediate and universal abolition would have been very very, difficult for most people to even imagine in the final paragraph of his outstanding book. And this is not a Christian text. This is just a wonderful work of scholarship. He's describing the

mindset of Christian preachers in the fourth century like John Chrysostom. And he says, the world was inconceivable without slavery. The household and the city, the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural, slavery was implicated in every aspect of social life. So I think it's a reasonable point to make to say it kind of needed to take some time. You know, it needed to, I needed to get down into the human heart and then work themselves out. That's how all genuine societal change happens. You can't just impose it. It has to be sort of worked through in culture. And so I would just appeal to people to consider this, that we take a lot of these values for granted today, like human equality, universal human rights. But in the ancient world, Genesis 1 was a

radical idea. I would say that was the catalyst that has gotten us to where we are today, where we take these things for granted. And we take them for granted today, but they were shocking back in the ancient world, the idea of universal human dignity. People like Plato and Aristotle had no category for that. Even more radical is the ultimate message of the whole Bible, as good as Genesis 1 is, the basic thrust of the entire Bible is even more wonderful, so wonderful that I'll say it even if it annoys the other side because it's so beautiful, it's the most beautiful story you ever told that God became a slave. In the person of Jesus Christ, God gave up all his rights and entered the lowest position to save us and to die on a cross to save us. I'm never going to stop

saying that because it's what I give my life to and it's what I believe in and that's what I think makes this whole world worth, you know, it's like in the Lord of the Rings, there's some good in this world and it's worth fighting for. All of that for me comes out of my belief in Christ. So, you know, what can I do but advocate for what I think is good and true and know? noble and so forth. So my appeal to people watching this debate, struggling with this, what I would love to say, if I had been in that debate or in a context like that, I'd like to do more things like that, is that if you are, like I am, against slavery and in favor of universal human dignity, we should be grateful for the overall impact of Christianity. We should. I would say that's pretty

historically clear. If we step back and look at the big picture, slavery is universal everywhere, and what caused that to change does seem to have had this huge foundation in Genesis 1 and in the New Testament gospel message. We benefit from that today. That doesn't answer every passage, though. That doesn't resolve every difficulty. We still got to work through, what about Leviticus 25? What about Deuteronomy 23 and so forth? So I've done most of those passages.

I think all the main ones in this video, I'll put up the thumbnail again. You can see that. And then you can see a follow-up video where we, Trent Horn and I talked with Josh Bowen and Kip Davis. We had a good discussion about this specifically in the Old Testament. If you want a little deeper dive kind of vetting these topics, you can take a look at that. But that's all I'll say for now for this video. Granted, the conversation needs to go forward. I'd love to talk with Alex or others about this more. I think this issue is maybe one of the leading issues in terms of the public witness of Christianity because rightly it causes a lot of people struggle. By this,

I mean not just slavery. I mean the sort of ethical concerns. about scripture, especially the genocide and slavery concerns in the Old Testament. So what do you think? Do you think this issue is a falsification of Christianity? I don't, but I think that we as Christians definitely need to do better at addressing it. I think we need to do better. This is a tough area. All right, I'm talking fast. If I talk fast in my videos, sorry about that. Some people don't like that. I'm learning to do it faster because a lot of times on a YouTube video, it's helpful. And I'm at 30 minutes. I wanted to keep this to 20 or 25, but it always rumbles on. Anyway, thanks for watching. Let me know what you think in the comments.