Truth Unites - Is the Bible Pro-Slavery?

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

In this video Gavin Ortlund responds to the objection that the Bible is pro-slavery. Gavin's video on Gregory of Nyssa: https://youtu.be/jytXSTLLYEk?si=FBMBPU3yql6mytuh Tom Holland's Dominion: https://www.amazon.com/Dominion-Christian-Revolution-Remade-World/dp/1541675592/ Glen Scrivener's The Air We Breathe: https://www.amazon.com/Air-We-Breathe-Kindness-Christian/dp/1784987492/ Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

Is the Bible pro-slavery? This is one of the most challenging and pressing objections that we face, those of us who are followers of Jesus, that we face as a criticism of scripture and of Christianity. You certainly hear it in like new atheist circles, but you also, as we'll talk about, hear it in all kinds of other circles, kind of interesting. So how should Christians respond to this? One thing right out of the gate we need to be, I think, directed away from is a minimizing of this problem. I think we make things worse for people if we act like, oh, this doesn't even need to be taken seriously, we minimize the concern, something like that. Sometimes I've discovered Christians are not even aware of some of the passages that at least seem to give face value support for slavery,

not just Old Testament regulations, but New Testament epistles written by the very apostles of Jesus Christ. Here's three examples that will put up on the screen. We also have some difficult Old Testament passages to deal with, So whatever else we say, you know, it's better actually sometimes in the context of apologetics to simply say nothing but to listen and then go study first and then come back, you know, because we can make things worse by minimizing or something like that. Now, in the other direction, some Christians agree that the Bible is pro-slavery. You hear this in progressive Christian contexts sometimes where people will say, yes, the Bible is pro-slavery,

and then this will be used as part of a hermeneutic that often will result in a lower view of biblical authority. You can Google the words, redemptive trajectory hermeneutic and do some reading in that way of thinking about things. In the other direction, in some conservative contexts, you'll find Christians who just say, yeah, the Bible's pro-slavery. It's there. You got a problem with that. The problem was with you. Deal with it. And I think that response is not helpful either, especially when it's said without any compassion or nuance. So what I would like to do in this video is do my best to defend scripture against this charge by pointing out three problems or at least complexities with this charge that the Bible is pro-slavery. Number one has to do with the definition

of slavery. Number two is the principle of accommodation. And number three is the book of philemon. One caveat, I'm not an expert on this. I know enough to know how complicated it is, how much literature there is out there. So this video is not designed to be exhausted. or conclusive, but hopefully it'll be just a helpful contribution for those who may be thinking about this. If nothing else, it'll just cause us to think more about it and realize the complexity of it, if nothing else. The first point I want to make is about the definition of slavery. This is not an answer to the question, but it just helps us more accurately frame what we're talking about. When we read verses, like Ephesians 6.5, Colossians 322, 1 Peter 2,18, we in the United States and many other

places in the West hear this word in light of our own historical context. And so we typically think of race-based chattel slavery, in which the slave is the legal property of the master and permanent property, usually, and lacks any basic legal rights. That kind of slavery is manifestly one of the most despicable institutions ever to disgrace human civilization. It is not what is in view in these text in the New Testament or in the Old Testament. Now, let me say up front. In trying to make careful distinctions here, this could be taken to minimize the problem that's not the intent. I want to be clear up front, in a perfect world, there is no slavery or servanthood of any kind, except perhaps you might say the servanthood of love or something like this. But you know what I'm talking about, the kinds

of things that we're going to talk about in these scriptures. In a perfect world, and we'll talk about the effects of the gospel on human relationships. So any form of slavery reflects the fact that we are in a fallen world. It is not God's ideal for human beings. Having said that, we need to make basic distinctions between different kinds of, because actually that word slavery can encompass so many different things. The Greek word doulas can be translated slave, but often it will be translated servant or bond servant, something like this.

And in the first century Greco-Roman world, it often referred to people who had a surprising level of legal and social status. Now, again, this is complicated, but I think a good case can be made that the vast majority of slaves in the Greco-Roman world were not slaves from birth or necessarily for their whole life or because of their race. For example, there's a passage in the Roman jurist Gaius in his writings coming from the second century AD,

where he talks about how many slaves were prisoners of war. and basically they were made into slaves because they would have been slaughtered if not. Now, again, we're not saying this is all great, but we're saying, okay, let's just understand what we're talking about here first. Similarly, in the Old Testament, slavery was not organized by race. It was organized by circumstance and economics. Israelite regulations freed slaves in the seventh year, the year of Jubilee. You can see Exodus 212 for that.

There was a command of the death penalty for man stealing in Exodus 21st, and many of the passages dealing with slavery are seeking to curb against abuses of the institution. Now, that doesn't mean that slavery in the ancient world wasn't ever harsh, and there are still difficult passages we have to deal with, but we're just trying to right out of the gate create conceptual space for the important distinctions we have to go through here, because we at least need to be aware of the difference between, for example, chattel slavery and Abraham's relationship with his top servant. As another example, it may be on the other end of the spectrum. Okay, so that's just getting our bearings. Now, someone's going to ask, okay, but why does

any form of slavery have approval in Scripture? Second point, the principle of accommodation. Christians believe that God accommodates his revelation to particular historical contexts and even to fall in social structures in those contexts. Basically, to put it colloquially, God tells people how they are to behave even when they're living in imperfect contexts. Now, that makes sense if you just think about it. Unless you require that God refrain from giving people instruction on what to do in a very particularized situation until all social evil has been removed. So an ethical exhortation in a document like an epistle, or even the laws of the Old Testament,

don't actually tell you everything you need to know about God's will and character with respect to this issue. For that, you have to look at the whole of Scripture. Now, I know this can seem evasive, but the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. Those passages are going to give you more of a picture of day-to-day life in a certain context. Let me give analogies to try to help this land, because I know some people can want to dismiss this. Suppose I said to my friend, go vote in the next election. Does that mean that my overall ideal philosophy of how society should be run is that it is democracy? Not necessarily. I'm telling them what they should do if they live in a democracy. What if I tell a soldier? A father sends a letter to his son who's in the military and the letters has commands to obey your commanding officers? Does that mean that the dad is not a pacifist? Does that tell you the full range of his ideal expectations and desires for the world? Of course not. He's telling his son what to do while he's in the military. Similarly, practices like slavery, political,

and divorce were everywhere in antiquity. So biblical instruction that allows for them in certain contexts isn't necessarily saying this is the biblical ideal. Again, let me try to create sympathy for this. Consider Matthew 19. The Pharisees come to Jesus and say, basically the first century Jewish world appears to have been a culture where there was a lot of easy divorce. People abused Deuteronomy 24-1, 1 through 4, and use this passage to get a divorce for any

old reason. can see various debates about that that Josephus records, but a lot of people had a very lax view of divorce. So Jesus is responding to that, and in verse 8, he indicates that the reason for that law from God in Deuteronomy 24 was the hardness of heart. And then he appeals to creation to say, it wasn't always like that. That's accommodation. Jesus is not denying that Deuteronomy 24, which allowed for a certificate of divorce, was divine instruction. But he's saying that was accommodated divine instruction. It is not a timeless ideal. And so in other words, there's a category in scripture for a commandment that is, A, genuinely from God, and B, not God's timeless ideal.

So how do we know then what are accommodated laws? Well, basically, you look at the whole of Scripture. You look at everything else the Scripture has to say. The more you think about this, the more this does make sense, because basically Christianity is a religion that's revealed across a period of centuries, really, really a millennia. So you have to look at the overall picture of how it is progressing. In particular, there are two massive mountain peaks within biblical revelation that we have to look at. Creation, because that tells us about the world before sin, and the good news of Jesus, because Jesus is the pinnacle revelation of God, because Jesus is God himself as a man. So creation is essential because it tells you what was God's original intent.

And the gospel, the good news about the work of Jesus, is essential because it's the pinnacle expression of God's redemptive work. And the doctrine of creation teaches us what is a radical idea in human history, namely that every human being is a reflection of God, made in God's image. You know, the other ancient Near Eastern creation accounts, I wrote an article on this once. It's fascinating. Most of them only apply the the idea of creation in the image of a deity or as the offspring of a deity is common in the ancient near east, but usually it's only applied to the royal figures. The king will be said to be in the image of this deity, or the queen will be said to be

the offspring of that goddess or something like this. Genesis 1 democratizes this idea of creation and the image of God to all human beings. Then in the New Testament, we understand that the work of Jesus overcomes all racial, social and religious divisions. Jesus' death on the cross binds all of those who are reconciled to God to each other. When we are reconciled to God, we are reconciled to each other, and we exist as brothers and sisters in the gospel. To see how the gospel changes human relationships, consider the book of Philemon.

It's surprising that Philemon isn't more talked about in these discussions, because it's written to a slave owner named Philemon. and it's about his runaway slave named Onesimus. In fact, the whole occasion for this letter is that Paul is writing because Onesimus has runaway, he's a runaway slave, and then he's become a Christian. Now, if the Bible was pro-slavery, what might you expect Paul to say here?

If the logic of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is actually in favor of an institution like slavery, what would you expect? What Paul says is, receive him back no longer as a slave, but as a dear brother. and he appeals to Philemon to receive him as you would receive me. In other words, Paul dissolves the master-slave relationship and erects in its place a brother-brother relationship,

in which the former slave is treated with all the dignity of the apostle himself. In other words, even before the actual institution of slavery is abolished, the work of the gospel changes relationships in such a way that undermines it. I think that's more what you have to look at, at least in addition to looking at passages like in Ephesians. Because, again, it's not very realistic to expect Paul to say, you know, bond servants, revolt against your masters and create social reform. The fact that Paul wouldn't say that in that context doesn't mean Paul thinks slavery should just be completely untouched by Christianity. And the book of Philemon rounds out the picture a little bit. I find it interesting that Christians have been so active in opposing slavery throughout history.

Now, of course, we think of William Wilberforce in this connection, but I want to go all the way back to Gregory of Nisa. In the 4th century in 379 AD, Gregory preached this thundering sermon against slavery just, oh, it's beautiful. It's a work of art. He's just going on and on saying, how dare you think you can own another human being? He's got all his theological reasons for this, creation in the image of God, human equality, you know, all this. And he talks about the thought that you could own another human being as a pride that rises up to God himself. One historian called that sermon the most scathing critique of slaveholding in all of antiquity. The reason is lots of people criticize slavery when it was conducted poorly.

But Gregory didn't merely condemn the abuses of the institution. He condemned the institution as such. I have a link to a video that I will put in the video description where I talk about Gregory Moore, more in that sermon, but here's the point I would make to end with. If you want to throw stones at the Bible for allowing for slavery in various ways, even while it does so in a very accommodated way that often pushes against it, consider this question, where did our opposition to slavery come from in the first place? Slavery, in one form or another, was basically ubiquitous throughout the ancient world. We inherit all of these instincts that incline us to think that slavery is wrong, because we believe in things, most of us in the modern West, like human equality. The idea of human

equality was not taken for granted in the ancient world. Most human beings haven't just assumed that. Think of someone like Aristotle who just assumes, of course, we're not equal, right? Where does this idea of human equality come from? And I would make the case that many of the criticisms of the Bible and of Christianity on this score are actually unconsciously borrowing from Christian values in order to make the criticism. Where do we do we? we get this idea that slavery is wrong? I would make the case Christianity has been a great influence to that end. I think that could be overstated sometimes, but I'm pretty convinced it's true. If you'd like to explore that more, there's a great book by Tom Holland called Dominion

that is this lengthy treatment of it. It's really amazing. You could also read another great book by Glenn Scrivener called The Air We Breathe. I did an interview with him about that on my channel. You could look for that. I'll put that in the video description as well. Basically, it's talking about how we are far more influenced by Christianity than we even realize. And many of the basic values we take for granted, like equality, haven't been taken for granted by most human beings. Now, I know that my reflections here will not satisfy everyone. Again, this is a touchy subject and a very difficult one, and rightly so. I'm going to keep thinking about it, and I got a lot of books I still want to read that are kind of on my two-read list. That's always spiraling up, right?

so there are more that needs to be said, but hopefully it's at least helpful to draw attention to the different meanings of the words slave and servant so that we can more accurately hone in on what we're actually talking about in scripture in these passages. Hopefully we have some kind of category for the principle of accommodation. Christians might differ from one another on exactly how to understand that. I don't think anybody can deny that that's a legitimate category of thought as revelation is progressing over the millennia. Above all, I I find it helpful to come back to the example of Jesus Christ himself, who became a servant for us. The main teaching of Christianity, the core of Christianity, is that God himself became a servant.

In the person of Jesus, God came down, he was born as a tiny baby, he lived a sinless life, he died an atoning death upon the cross, and he rose again from the dead, doing all of that for the salvation of his enemies, those he did not have to save. And if you come to believe that, and I think there's really good reasons to believe that, then we know we have reasons to trust the heart of God. God is good. And that can be then the starting point from which we then work through these difficult and complicated topics like slavery in the Bible. So hope this video will be helpful for some out there. This is just a first volley.

I'll probably, as I keep studying this, probably keep returning back to it. But hopefully this could be helpful for someone in the meantime. Thanks for watching, everybody. God bless.