Truth Unites - Slavery in the Bible: Answering Atheist Critiques

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

In this video Gavin Ortlund responds to critiques from atheists about slavery in the Bible. My article on the Imago Dei: https://truthunites.org/mypublications/#essays Peter Williams' lecture on slavery in the Bible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUOsBQYuZ9g Jay Sklar's Leviticus commentary: https://www.amazon.com/Leviticus-Zondervan-Exegetical-Commentary-Testament/dp/0310942187/ Alec Ryrie's Protestants: https://www.amazon.com/Protestants-Faith-That-Modern-World/dp/0670026166 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/

Is the Bible pro-slavery? I think this is a huge question these days for two reasons. One is that it's one of the most common, and I would say one of the most powerful and growing arguments against Christianity, especially from secular critics, but also how Christians respond reveals some deeper fault lines of difference between how Christians interpret the Bible, how we address controversial social issues today. So this is a really important issue. I'm going to just, the first of those two things is what this video is about. I can respond to atheist critics of the Bible, put a lot of work into this, chiseled it down to a video that will still be very long, but hopefully it will serve you well and be organized. I want to start by showing several

clips of atheist or agnostic YouTubers, basically expressing this argument and the encouragement here, the goal here really is just to help Christians be a little bit sensitized to how urgent this issue is. And I want to encourage. encourage Christians not to get too immediately defensive. I think what we want to try to do is draw out the valid concerns and insights that may come in with what we're going to hear. And then what I'm going to argue is that Christianity ultimately has a more satisfying answer to those concerns. And we'll get into that. Let me start with a clip from Sam Harris. It is just an inconvenient fact that slavery is endorsed in the Bible. It's explicitly endorsed in the Old Testament. And it's certainly not

repudiated in the new, right? And Jesus told slaves to serve their masters and serve their Christian masters especially well. So there's no place in the Bible where you can get a truly compelling case against slavery because the creator of the universe clearly expected slavery to be a human institution. Well, except for abolitionists finding enough inspiration in the Bible to use it as their main text. But they did that despite what's in the Bible. Now, Harris was wrong when he said that Jesus told slaves to obey their masters, but there are injunctions from the apostles of Jesus, like the passages I'm going to put up, though we need to define these words bond servant and servant and kind of get into these passages,

which we will do here. These are from the ESV translation. But you heard Sam Harris, he put this in a common way. He said the verb endorse came in. The Bible endorses slavery. So he was saying abolitionists like William Wilberforce were acting despite what was in the Bible. Now that interview is a little bit older, but that same appeal, okay, this is so common right now. We hear this a lot. And just to give you a sense of the intensity of it and just to acclimatize us to this a little bit, let me show a few short clips of how it's often framed, and then we'll get more into some of the content and concerns as we go here. Here's a recent video from a channel called Mind Shift. This is a topic that drives me absolutely wild. I find that there is no excuse, and there is clear evidence of what

the Bible actually says about slavery. I'm not talking about indentured. Servitude, I'm talking about slavery. I'm not talking about it's just part of the world and God was working around it. I'm talking about not just condoning it, but endorsing it and benefiting from it. So here we have again that verb endorse and the claim of benefiting from it and the claim is being made very strongly that this is not indentured servitude. This is not just that this is in the world somehow and God is working around it. I'll be interacting a little bit more with some of his comments. Again, I just want us to feel the weight of this a little bit. Here's Stephen Wood referred from rationality rules, he's responding to Paul Copan, who's a Christian theologian,

and Stephen is basically comparing Christian apologists to defense lawyers who defend criminals. And not only should you feel good about selling your daughter, but you should know that God Almighty signs off on this. God said that it was good. I swear. Paul Copan should have gone for a career as a lawyer instead of an apologist. Can you imagine? I know, I know it looks like my client was being cruel when he sold his children as slaves, but you have to understand that this was actually an act of kindness so that the children would be fed by their masters. Way. Never mind, an apologist essentially is a defense lawyer for God. Now, remember that passage about selling your daughter later when we get into the category of

case laws a little bit down the road here, but for now I just want us to see the force of this attack, and he even goes so, he goes a lot farther than these other clips. He even goes so far to make this larger judgment on Western culture. Apologetics does not seek truth, only to defend their client, their faith. Its mission is not ethical consistency, but self-preservation through moral contortionism. And Copen's mental gymnastics on slavery demonstrates the modus operandi of apologetics in full transparency. But it's not just he who is enslaved by this nonsense. We are, too, as a culture. By being drenched in biblical stories from birth,

we fail to see the likes of Paul for what he is. If Paul was defending, you know who, and hand-waving away, you know what, we'd refuse this man respect, not to mention accolades. But when he defends our culture's atrocities, the genocide of the Medianites, for instance, all the awards are thrown at his feet, and even those that disagree with him, treat him with respect. This is the greatest joke religion has played on humanity, and we are the punchline. If there is a good God, It didn't sign off on this monstrosity. So the claim here is the Bible is like Nazism. And if we can't see that, we're just, we've gotten so used to it, you know, we've grown up with it, we have a blind spot, something like this.

A little less bombastically, here's Alex O'Connor at the conclusion of one of his older videos. So in summary, my video today serves two purposes. First, I obviously hope to have shown you that slavery is in fact condoned in the Bible, and it's not some nice kind of slavery if there can even be such such. thing. But second, I think this serves as a demonstration of just how important it is to contextualize biblical injunctions. When someone shows you a verse that seems to be anti-slavery or something like that, should take a minute to read the sentences surrounding it. Sometimes it's as simple as that. And likewise, don't go throwing around Bible verses that you think make it out to be an evil

book if you're not sure of what context those verses are speaking in. Be careful reading that Bible. It's a dangerous book. Okay, so this advice at the end there is really great to read the Bible contextually and props to Alex for recognizing that both sides can fail to do this. Let's talk about Christians first, you know, because contrary to what Stephen was saying, the only kind of apologetics I'm ever, I don't even like the category of apologetics all the time. The only kind of apologetics I'm really interested in is one that is ruthlessly honest and willing to even be vulnerable and kind, you know, in the midst of the polemics. but because we need to serve each other at getting to the truth. And all these issues are way more complicated than people on both sides sometimes make it sound like. So let's acknowledge some of the Christian problems here and others who defend the Bible.

Sometimes Christians glamorize this issue. And in the Bible, we don't take all these passages with full force. I've made mistakes on this topic. Years ago, I wrote an article where I didn't distinguish sufficiently between Hebrew servants and foreign servants in Israel. That was a mistake. I didn't mean to do that. It was just an honest mistake. I didn't really get into that like I needed to. But a lot of these tough Bible passages, we can be tempted to kind of push them off to the side too quick. You know, these are tough. Now, you know, let's not try to downplay anything. There was one in particular, I was thinking, oh, should I go into that now?

And I'm going to because I don't want to skirt around anything. This is a tough topic. And when it comes to church history, another thing we can do is we can be quick to champion the William Wilber forces and really fail to acknowledge and grieve how much sin there is in church history. And many times Christians have been sluggish to act as Christ would want us to act. And, you know, these kinds of concerns don't just come up on YouTube. I've been reading this book by Kyle Harper. This is an amazing work of scholarship. This is the kind of book, you read the first 10 pages, and it's like, wow, this gives you a sense of how good a book can be.

and just all the work that goes into it. And he's basically giving a portrait of slavery in the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD. And he's basically arguing that you shouldn't just see that as then evolving into medieval serfdom. But basically, he addresses Christianity a lot, and he says Christianity accommodated itself to slavery. He says the Christian ideology of slavery, which emerged in the 4th century, represented neither a critique of nor a challenge too. Roman ideology of slavery, but rather a baptized version of it. Now, I'm going to push back against that claim later toward the end of this video just a little bit, though he's, you know, I'm not trying to challenge him and his expertise. He knows a lot more about what he's writing

about than me, but I do want to give some comments about that pushing back a bit. But I'm just raising this now as an example of the kind of thing that Christians need to wrestle with trying to be honest. However, if Christians can glamorize the Bible, there is a danger in the other direction. So please hear me on this. It's also possible to read the Bible cynically, making biblical slavery as sinister as possible, always reading things in the worst light and so forth. In any act of cultural communication from one place to another, cross-cultural communication, I should have said, it's really easy for misunderstandings to occur. And for modern readers, it's really easy to kind of bring a Western framework to the Bible and fail to appreciate

just how brutal and foreign the world is that we're interacting with and kind of what are the baseline expectations from which these biblical commandments are departing. And so what I want to try to do here is just maybe invite you to consider this with a fresh mind. I always try to think of people who are in the middle, so I'm not reacting to the extremes as much, but people who are of good faith kind of wrestling with this. I know a lot of people are. Believe me, I do pray for the people who watch my YouTube videos that when you're struggling

that God would, if it sounds hopefully not weird, I pray that God would kind of communicate the peace and assurance the Holy Spirit can give through the content that's being presented here. That's what I hope for this video. So what I want to do is basically argue that not only is this issue of slavery in the Bible, not a falsification of Christianity, but Christianity has been and is, a powerful force against slavery in the world. If like me, you are against slavery, Christianity offers us powerful resources for that end, like the incredible doctrine of creation in the image of God.

It's just thrilling every time we think about it. And I think part of the reason we today think of slavery as wrong is because of Christian influence on even our intuitions. Now, I think some people will already be angry about that on the other side. And you're already thinking, what about all the verses in the Bible? What about all the issues in church history? Fair enough. Let's walk through it step by step.

I have six points I want to make. Number one, slavery was taken for granted nearly everywhere in the ancient world. Number two, Genesis 1 made a huge contribution to human equality through its doctrine of the image of God. I'm going to call that the Imago Dei. Number three, the Old Testament law was not. never designed as a timeless ideal. Number four, the Old Testament law made significant improvements upon slavery in the ancient Near East. Number five, slavery is inconsistent with the New Testament's portrayal of the gospel. And number six, the abolition of slavery in the modern world

has a huge debt to Christian influence. Let's go fast. I told you I'm tired. I'll try to talk clearly. Let's go. The first one will be, first one is more of a preliminary point. Number one, slavery was basically taken for granted everywhere in the ancient world. It's a universal part of pre-modern humanity. Gleason Archer says slavery was practiced by every ancient people of which we have any historical record. He says it was an integral part of ancient culture as commerce, taxation, or temple service. But what I want to emphasize is it's not just that slavery existed everywhere, it's that it was assumed everywhere. So it's just taken for granted.

People like Plato and Aristotle, for example, they just think it's obvious. People are not equal. Some people are born to be slaves. And that's the general way of thinking. A few exceptions, but for the most part, slavery was seen throughout ancient human history and really pre-modern human history as like poverty. Regrettable, but inevitable. Okay. Now, today it's pretty much the opposite in much of the Western world. Slavery still exists, and it's growing in certain parts of the world. But most of us in the developed world, agree that slavery is wrong, and we see that as kind of obvious. So we're living on the far end of this massive turn in the basic intuitions with which we approach an issue like this. And that's

just really helpful to set some context, because it's not as though human beings start off as a blank slate, and then here comes the Bible, and it's introducing slavery or something like that. Remember that verb endorse? This is going to get really complicated really quick, because slavery's already there. The Bible is coming along, and it's starting a problem. that gets us to today. When I hear atheists railing against slavery in the Bible, sometimes it comes across as though they're sort of assuming that there was some secular alternative that should have been chosen instead. And I think it's a fair question to ask, where do we even get the idea that slavery is wrong? That's an intuition. If you say, for example,

well, it's just obvious. You know, I just sometimes people respond. They say, it's just obvious. Of course we can see that slavery is a bad thing. But I think, that's naive about the problem here. That wasn't obvious to the vast majority of human culture throughout history. Most, we only see that as obvious today because of a very specific process of evolution in human civilization. And that process differentiates us from most of pre-modern humanity and certainly from the animal kingdom. I mean, this is the challenge for the atheist, is in our long evolutionary history, where did this idea of like universal human rights? That was never a thing. Where did that suddenly come in? Where do you get that from? I'm going to come back to

that at the end. I'm not necessarily trying to resolve that point right. I'm trying to kind of flag that because what I want to start arguing now is that Christianity has played a catalytic role in the process of us coming to see slavery is obviously wrong, especially through its doctrine of the image of God and also through its understanding of the gospel. What it says is the good news of Jesus Christ. And so the the concern just to make visible here is if you don't believe in that, you do that have to give some other alternative for what do you ground this belief in human equality in? And I'll come back to that at the end. I just kind of want to flag that at the beginning here. In other words, another way to say this is, you know, it's a fair question to ask, how could the Bible tolerate

slavery? That's what I'm going to try to address now. But it's also fair to ask, how did it ever come to be that there's a society that doesn't tolerate it. That's a bit of the story I want to tell in this video. Point number two, Genesis 1 made a huge contribution to human equality through its doctrine of the image of God, and it's legitimate to prioritize Genesis 1 and 2, because when you're trying to understand the Bible, you want to see what is God's ideal at the very outset. Even if you don't think these chapters are historical, this is what the text is putting forward as the original plan. before evil comes into the world in Genesis 3. And in Genesis 1 and 2, there's no thought or possibility of slavery.

I think sometimes people fail to appreciate how much of a step forward. Genesis 1 through 2 was relative to other ancient Near Eastern understandings of human beings. I'll say succinctly here. It's very common in other ancient Near Eastern creation texts for the royal figure of a particular culture to be seen as in the image of a deity or the image of the deity or the offspring of a deity. I wrote an article about this 10 years ago that I'll link to, and that's kind of what I'm saying. I'm saying basically there's interplay between the idea of image and offspring. But that's a separate point. Right now, I just want to document this a little bit that

the idea of Genesis 1 was very radical. Basically, Genesis 1 was saying, everybody is made in the image of God. And that was a step forward. Just to give a few examples, I think seeing some of the context in the ancient Near East helps us because it helps us not just read the Bible against modern Western democratic values, but to see it in its own time, how radical it was. So, for example, I'll put up four examples from Egyptian texts and inscriptions where you can see various pharaohs spoken of as the image of a deity. If you want to go into more of those, you can read my article. and in each case, this is talking about a royal figure. By the way, another book that goes through this that's really good that I derived a lot from in my own work on this is this great book by J. Richard Middleton called The Liberating Image.

Amazing book. You can see pages 93 to 145 of that book. He goes through all these Egyptian examples. I think he goes through like 18 different examples, and he mentions there are some others where the Pharaoh figure is portrayed as the image of the deity. And I could only find one text where it's applied a little more broadly than that. In the Babylonian creation myth, Anuma Elish, you find this idea of creation in the image of a deity, but again, it's only applied to other deities.

So here's an example from very early on in the first tablet there. The human beings are not the image bearers of God here. They're created to do the menial labor. They're like underneath the gods doing the grunt work. You know, that's human beings in this text. And so people love to talk about parallels between Genesis and these other ancient Near Eastern texts, But there's differences, and one of the differences is Genesis 1 gives this more exalted view of human beings. I'll put up just a few other examples from an ancient Assyrian epic called the Ticoti-Nanurta epic, where you can find, I'll just quote from my article here.

I won't read through this, but you can find two Assyrian kings talked about as the image of a particular deity, and again, it's just the king. And in the article, I go through a few other Mesopotamian documents. to, but the point is, the Bible takes this idea, which was kind of a common thought in the ancient Near East, and democratizes it. It's not just the royalty that's in the image of God. Everybody bears God's image. In other words, metaphorically speaking, everybody is royal. That's a radical idea. We often take that for granted today. Historically, that was not self-evident. And throughout Christian history and Jewish history, you can see that idea, that radical new, idea, coming into clash with alternative ideas. For example, Selsus, the critic of Christianity

in the second century, one of his criticisms is, you guys elevate human beings to highly. He said the radical error in Jewish and Christian thinking is that it is anthropocentric. They say God made all things for man, but this is not at all evident. And his own view is evident in these words. He says, in no way is man better in God's sight. than ants and bees. That's a very common, ancient way of thinking about human beings. We're like bugs. We're like insects, you know, not particularly valuable or exalted. The idea of creation and the image of God was this lightning step forward. And I'm not the one who's, you know, I'm sure you're aware, this is an argument. This was the doctrine that it was like a hammer

in the hand of the abolitionists in the 18th century. I'll come back to that at the end of this. And I'm sure you're familiar with people like Tom Holland and his amazing book, Dominion. I'm not trying to say he would agree with everything I'm going through right here. But he does talk about this, this modern value of equality. And he says the ultimate seedbed of this idea was the book of Genesis. More on that later. So, but just one step at a time here. Let's talk about the Old Testament a little bit more now.

What I want to do now is going forward from Genesis 1, from creation. I want to show that Old Testament laws about slavery, we have to read them in their historical context. They were one step forward. They were never intended to be the final results or the timeless ideal. Okay. And just so this third point here is where I want to review some principles of biblical interpretation. This is so important before we dive into the specifics. This will be brief, though.

But basically, you hear people make this mistake all the time of thinking that to have a high view of scripture, means you apply verses to just indiscriminately, right? So people will pull out a random verse in Leviticus about shellfish or something like this and they'll say, ah, you don't follow this verse as though that were a problem. But this is assuming that the Old Testament law was sort of given for everybody at all time and it wasn't. The Old Testament law was given for Israel at a particular time in history. And it had a kind of built-in obsolescence. Jeremiah 31 talked about a new covenant coming. There's an awareness. This isn't the end of the story. So not only is it just given to this nation, but it's not given forever and ever just to be applied timelessly.

And if you get into the specific Old Testament laws, and you try to get into the historical context, you see how we need to be careful in interpreting these. For example, a lot of Old Testament laws are casuistic or case laws. So this basically means they're addressing a specific situation that arises. In a lot of cases, something will happen. The judges or other leaders will deliberate and arrive upon a verdict. And then this will establish precedent for future cases like that. And eventually this becomes enshrined in law. And so what's happening here is a certain behavior is being regulated. It's not necessarily being instituted or approved of. Now, I'm not saying this applies for all the challenging texts. We'll work through those in a second. But I'm trying to alert

us to this as a category because sometimes this comes up. I'll put up just an obvious example from Exodus 22 where you can see, you know, a lot of these case laws you'll find because they start with the word if or when. And obviously the thing in question is not being approved of by the law here. It's not saying like there's case laws about stealing and it's not saying stealing is good. You know, a modern day example would be like laws about gambling in our nation. And if someone was studying our culture from a thousand years in the future, they shouldn't conclude that we all think gambling is a good thing. There's such a thing as permissive law or laws that are regulating something that's already in existence. And so a lot of these, you know, people will miss this and they'll quote

from Deuteronomy 21 and say, ah, God is approving of polygamy here. Or they'll quote from Exodus 21 and they'll say, God is approving of selling your daughter as a slave here. Now, there's other things we can also say about both those passages, but just that already is a problem because it's not recognizing this is given to address a specific situation that has arisen. Furthermore, there are also these elements of what I'm going to use, I thought carefully about what words to use here. I'm going to use the words incrementalism and accommodation in the Old Testament law. So incrementalism means basically you make improvements step by step gradually rather than all at once. Don't be too despising of incrementalism because that's the way a lot of things actually get

improved. Accommodation means God communicates with language and categories that people can understand at that time. Now, Christians may differ a little bit on exactly how to cash this out. Again, I'm not trying to say these categories apply in every case, but we have to have these categories in our mind. So, for example, here's an example. God, throughout the Bible, God, will give instruction for how people are to live under a fallen structure like slavery. New Testament epistles would be an example of this. I'll get to those more later too. And that instruction does not necessarily entail approval of the structure. In other words, it's telling you what to do in that circumstance. It's not necessarily approving of the circumstance itself. A metaphor would be,

if I have a son who's serving abroad in the military during a war, I could write him a letter and I could say, obey your commanding officer. That doesn't mean I'm in favor of the war or in favor of him being there. Maybe he was drafted and I'm really upset about it, but I'm telling him what to do in that particular circumstance. And I want to give, I know this makes some Christians nervous talking about this. So let me give an example from the teaching of Christ where he's confronted about divorce and the Pharisees are coming to him testing him from Deuteronomy 24 where, and there was a lot of actually lacks divorce, kind of no-fault divorce, we might call it today. In the Jewish world, at the time of Christ, there were debates, you know, the rabbis debate about what are the, and there's

different schools of thought. But Christ responds to this by pointing out that that law was never intended for all people at all time. He says, Moses gave that because of the hardness of heart. It had a specific context. And he then says, go back to the creation. From the beginning, it was not so. interpreting that law in the broader context of creation and the ultimate heart of God. And that's not Christ being, this is not being relativistic with the scripture or something like that. It's making a simple point. The scripture comes in a historical context. And not all of the laws at one time are timeless ideals for every other time. So we have to be aware of that. So hopefully that's clear. Okay. Now let's dive in. Fourth section of the video. The Old Testament made significant

improvements upon slavery in the ancient Near East. And I'm actually going to call it generally servanthood. I'm not saying we can never use the word slave. This gets really complicated. How do you even translate the, you know, in English we have slave, servant, bond servant in different translations. This really helpful lecture by Peter Williams goes into this and he basically, he gets in, I'll link to it as well. He gets into the lexical issues of, and how much the translations have changed over the years toward the beginning of his lecture. it's really helpful. But the important thing to note is just how much variation there is in how slavery has functioned or servanthood has functioned throughout different cultures.

And so the vocabulary becomes really important here. When we hear the word slavery, we often think of what we've seen in our context, for me as someone in the United States, we think of the transatlantic slave trade from the 15th to the 19th centuries. We think of slavery in the American South prior to the Civil War. And that's what comes into our mind, That's what we know of. And this is one of the most despicable forms of slavery to ever exist in its scale, and its brutality, and in its nature, it was race-based chattel slavery. So chattel slavery means the slave is the legal property of the master.

And it was explicitly race-based. The way people defended it was by arguing that one race is superior to another. So this is a particularly egregious form of slavery, though I'm going to say all slavery is bad. All slavery reflects the fact. that we're in a fallen world, but this is like one of the worst forms ever. That's not the same, despite what people will claim, and I'll address the pushback in a second. That's not the same as what we have in the Bible. In the Old Testament, the general basis for slavery was economic.

You have a subsistence economy. There's not a lot of safety nets. If you can't pay off your debts, this is one way you can survive. Here's, this is how Jay Sclar puts it. He says, in the ancient Near East in general, and in the Bible in particular, debt was commonly, the reason for entering into servitude. By the way, if you want a good commentary on Leviticus, he has an older one that's smaller,

and then he has this more recent one. I'll link to this in the video description too. I just try to recommend helpful resources. He's my favorite commentator on the book of Leviticus, and he has some helpful treatment of this topic, too. So to try to give one example of some of the differences here, we shouldn't think of ancient Hebrew servants as doing the grunt labor rather than the master.

On the contrary, both would be working. That's the kind of world you're in, in the ancient world. Chris Wright says Old Testament servants were residential domestic workers complimenting, but not a substitute for the laborer of free members of the household. In other words, slave laborer was not a means by which free Israelites were released from physical labor, as was the case in classical Greece, for example. Slaves also were treated with rights and with dignity, more so I'll show in a second than other places in the ancient Near East. So, for example, here's how it's put in the Anchor Bible Dictionary's essay on slavery. We have in the Bible, the

first appeals in world literature to treat slaves as human beings for their own sake and not just in the interest of their masters. Now, I'll give a few examples of this in just a moment from the Old Testament law. One of my favorite verses about this topic actually is in the book of Job. He's listing possible sins he could have committed. You know, if I had committed adultery, if I had mistreated my neighbor, and then he says, if I had rejected the cause of my man's servant or my maid servant when they brought a complaint against me, what then shall I do when God rises up? You know, there's an awareness. You can't just treat your servant any old way you want. They're not, they're not chattled property. It's not like that. Some people, of course, say that it is. Let me document that.

So in MindShift put out another video responding to Trent Horn. Trent Horn was pointing out that the Atlantic slave trade was evil. And here's how Mind Shift responded. Now, I think in the that in many cases throughout human history, slavery was unjust, like the transatlantic slave trade, for example. So he just said it. The transatlantic slave was unjust. That is exactly to a T what the Israelites were doing. They're not taking from within their own country. They're going to a different country or tribe or people group or ethnic group, etc. They're going outside of their own area to take people and make them slaves as property. It's the exact same thing. How can anyone excuse that? It's like they just do the same thing. Every single apologist does the same thing.

They hear the verse in Lividoicus that is definitely not about indentured servitude. And then they say, let's talk about indentured servitude. It's cheap. So there he's talking about Leviticus 25. We'll get to that passage in a minute. Alex O'Connor says the same thing. He says, basically, biblical slavery deserves the same condemnation as American slavery. The regulations of slavery in the Bible are exactly what you'd expect from a book that refers to these slaves as property.

They're awful, indefensible, superstitious idiocy that deserve the same historical condemnation as the legality surrounding the slave trade in the USA. And this is still only in reference to Hebrew slaves. Elsewhere in the Bible, we see what's condoned when enslaving people from foreign nations. Now, one of the things you see already coming up here is this distinction between Hebrew servants and foreign servants. We'll talk about that in just a second with Libiticus 25. I'm going to deal with Numbers 31. In a subsequent video I'm going to make on the conquest of the Canaanites, that's where Alex was about to go. But here I just want to push back against this claim that the transatlantic slave trade is the same as slavery in the Old Testament to a T. No, it wasn't. I think any honest historian would admit that, first of all, just in its

scale and brutality, it was sort of unrivaled, but more basically, it's a different kind of slavery altogether. Just taking the prohibition of Exodus 2116 alone, this would have made the transatlantic slave trade impossible, because in the Old Testament, you get the death penalty for human theft. It doesn't say whoever steals a Hebrew. It says, whoever. steals a man. That's, you get the death penalty. But let me give some more specific examples where you can see the Hebrew Bible, even compared to other law codes in the ancient Near East, is taking some steps forward. In other ancient Near Eastern cultures, you can find lots of laws where if you harm someone else's servant, you're transgressing a certain law, and you have to make amends to

their master and so forth. But in the law of Moses, there are laws about how you can't harm your own servant. And if you do, you forfeit the right to that servant. That was relatively rare. You know, you'll find in like the code of Hamarabi, a Babylonian legal text composed it during like the 18th century BC, basically permission for masters to, to like punish their servants in these cruel ways, cutting off an ear, this kind of thing. That's the kind of thing. Exodus 21 is reacting against saying, no, you can't do that. And this was relatively rare in the ancient Near East. Here's how the Jewish scholar Naham Sarnah puts it. This law, the protection of slaves from maltreatment by their masters, is nowhere else found in the entire existing corpus of ancient Near Eastern legislation. Here's how another scholar puts it.

No other ancient Near Eastern law has been found that holds a master to account for the treatment of his own slaves as distinct from injury done to the slave of another master. And the otherwise universal law regarding runaway slaves was that they must be sent back with severe penalties for those who failed to comply. So that latter part of the quote there, Chris Wright is talking about Deuteronomy 23. And the law that was given to Israel that basically foreign runaway slaves are not to be sent back. Most of the other places, the law is the opposite. You're in trouble if you don't send the back, if you harbor the slave. Deuteronomy 23 says, no, don't send the back. And then the last sentence I like there, you shall not wrong him.

And this does appear to be talking about foreign slaves. Paul Copan gives three reasons for that. There's no use of the terms brother or neighbor. Israelites weren't allowed to enslave other Israelites, according to Leviticus 25. And a foreign slave could choose which town he wants to live in, as referenced here in verse 16. But the Israelites lived in lands allotted to their clans. So this looks like, basically, you know, if some other, person from some other nation runs away, they're a slave, they run away, they get to Israel,

now they have a safe haven. Can you imagine if God's people had consistently implemented this law, they would be the only safe haven in the world at that time for slaves. These are the kind of passages that get kind of glossed over sometimes. Now, in his response to Trent, at 1250 of his response, Mind Shift was saying that, you know, masters could treat servants however they wanted, they could beat them, they could rape them, all these kinds of things. Yes. Were there, Israelites in the Israelite community that ran out of money and were going to starve. And so they said, hey, because I have no other option and you guys are into this thing, let me come work for you for seven years. And that would almost be okay if it was a work contract. But the things that were

allowed to happen to these individuals, you could beat your indentured servants as long as they got up the next day. You could totally mess them up as long as you didn't dismember their body. You could rape them, you could force them to do anything you wanted to. Very, very few rules, and you got to do that for seven years. But this is clearly wrong. Just from what we've seen in Exodus 21 alone, we see, no, slaves did have rights. Think of Job's awareness. If I mistreat, even when they bring a complaint to me, you know, how will I deal with God if I mistreat them? It's not so sinister. People try to make this worse than it is. Here's another example. In cases where a slave is killed or assaulted by their master, there are severe penalties.

So earlier in Exodus 21, you find, I'll just read it. It says, when a man strikes his slave, male or female with a rod, and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged for the slave is his money. Now, here's where a lot of problems come up. The Hebrew word for avenged here is talking about the death penalty. And again, that's rare in that historical context. Mark Meinal says, if found guilty, a master was to be punished, which might result in death, that was unheard of at a time when the closest legal equivalents only dealt with assault on other people's slaves.

But here's the problem. People look at verse 21 and say, oh, how terrible. You mean you can beat them as much as you want and as long as they survive, then there's no punishment. Right? This is how Alex O'Connor takes it. But they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property. Okay, so it's perfectly permissible to mercilessly be. your slaves with a rod as much as you want, and this should only be punishable if the slave dies as a quote direct result. If they get up after a few days, everything's fine. In what world should we consider this acceptable moral guidance? Even if we grant that the slavery being talked

about here is more like a kind of employer-employee situation, this would be an unacceptable way to treat any employee. Imagine if your boss could beat you as much as he wanted as long as you didn't die. It's ridiculous. But no, it's not perfectly permissible. to beat your slave as much as you want as long as they don't die. This is one of those areas where it's easy to misread these foreign texts. What verse 21 is saying is there's not to be the death penalty, but that doesn't mean there's no penalty for other physical maltreatment of a slave or a servant. Okay. That specific, more extreme penalty is not given in that case because it's a less severe crime. But to see that there are penalties, all you do is just read a little bit further.

and you get to the verses we already looked at. We're even knocking out the tooth of a slave means they go free. Okay? So it's false to derive from Exodus 21. Oh, because you don't get the death penalty, there's no penalty at all. But it's really easy to misread these passages

or to make them a little more sinister. Let's go to Leviticus 25. This is one of the passages that MindShift is talking about. It's talking about the distinction here between Israelite servants and foreign servants. and the language here, and in other passages as well, for acquiring is not talking about human theft. That's already been forbidden in Exodus 21. It doesn't even have to mean acquiring through money.

The verb here doesn't have to mean a financial purchase. You can find this same Hebrew verb being used for when a pregnant woman has a child and then she says, I have acquired a child. or Ruth 410 talks about the marriage of Ruth and Boaz like that. He is acquiring a wife. It's definitely not talking about a forced capture, man stealing, that kind of stuff. So the way that Mind Shift took that is, again, more sinister than necessary. And rationality rules video was quite unfair on this point to Paul Copan. Paul Copan is pointing out basically a lot of the language here about property or about acquiring is not necessarily.

necessarily talking about chattel slavery. And he was making the point that, look, you can use this language in other ways. And he was giving examples today, how we use language like trading sports players and transferring employees. And he gave various examples like this, making a very specific point about the language here. And the point is just that that language is underdetermined to tell you the more specific question of whether the servant had any rights. Think of sports players. They are traded. They are sold.

They have agents to take care of these transactions, these owners of these franchises. And he had given LeBron James as one example. So then Stephen, from Rationality Rules and his guests, are just going on and on, as though Paul Copan were arguing LeBron James is in the same position as an ancient Hebrew servant, which, of course, was not his point. He was making a more specific focused point about the language and what you can't get out of the language. Now, if you want to know for sure that Leviticus, 25 is not talking about race-based chattel slavery, just keep reading. Right after those verses,

you see the exact opposite scenario can come about. If the sojourner becomes wealthy, the Israelite can sell himself into servanthood to that person. I'll just read it for us. Leviticus 25, 47, 48, if a stranger or sojourner with you becomes rich and your brother beside him becomes poor and sells himself to the stranger or sojourner with you or to a member of the stranger's clan, then after he is sold, he may be redeemed. Actually, many of the commentators used this verse to show that foreign slaves could become free. They could work their way to independence, because that's disputed. But the point is, slavery in the Old Testament is not chattel slavery.

It's not rooted in racism. People say that, too. Okay, it's true that there is preference given for fellow Israelites, but the differences between an Israelite and a non-Israelite are not just about race. It's about their whole citizenship and nationality. And there were differences in how Israelite servants and foreign servants are treated, but the differences are not absolute. The main difference seems to be with the Jubilee Year principle.

So every seven years, Deuteronomy 15 says, you send your servants away, you don't send them away empty-handed. That seems to be applying to Hebrew servants specifically, not foreign servants. But that doesn't mean that foreign servants or foreign slaves could never be freed. That certainly happened sometimes. One of the things that would happen a lot is some servants would be adopted by their master in their final years, adopted, and then set free upon the master's death. So that can happen. But for foreign slaves, it's not regulated every seventh year like this, as it was for Israelite servants.

However, all the other laws protecting the servant are not just applicable to the Israelite servants. They're applicable to all servants, including foreign servants or foreign slaves. All the servants and slaves had protections. had rights. As Scalar puts it, servants from the nations enjoyed the same legal protections given to all servants, such as freedom, if severely beaten, and the right to rest on the Sabbath. The foreign slaves would also partake of the Passover, another Israelite feasts. None of these laws made a distinction between some kinds of slaves versus others. All right. Now, one other challenging passages, people talk about sexual slavery, and they'll bring up

Deuteronomy 21. And what we have to understand here is the cultural context and what would typically be done. Here again, I want us to see how the Hebrew Bible is progressing. It's putting things in the right direction. The rituals during this 30-day period are not designed to humiliate her. These are purification rituals. They're not meant to be, it's about ritual purity. They're not meant to be demeaning or something like that. And it's giving a period of time to protect her. Okay. Look, that, the purpose of that law was because the common practice at that time would have been for women to be raped in that circumstance. And they're in basically, they might be as just as good as dead at that point in that, at that time in history, if their husband has just been

killed. And so the law is pushing against that and saying, no, you have to marry this person and you have to wait this amount of time. It's trying to push against the general practice at that time. What is sometimes missed when we come from a modern Western framework and read these laws is the sense of progress being made here relative to ancient history in general. Here's how one scholar puts it. The norms given in the book of the covenant reveal when compared with related law books in the ancient Near East radical alterations in legal practice. In the evaluation of offenses against property, in the treatment of slaves, in the fixing of punishment for indirect offenses, and in the rejection of punishment by mutilation,

the value of human life is recognized as incomparably greater than all material values. Take the principle of the Jubilee here. One commentator calls that probably the most radical, social, and economic idea in all the Bible. Another says it enshrined in law, the cessation of land abuse, the cancellation of debts, the restitution of land to its original owners, the repair of the family, and the termination of slavery. The design of this law is as a safety net for the vulnerable. It's trying to stop generational cycles of poverty.

In Deuteronomy 15, you can see that's the explicit purpose. They're trying to regulate an already existing institution with the overarching goal of reducing poverty. I can summarize like this. If you read through books like Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and you have an open mind, two things will become clear. Number one, this is the ancient world. Okay, this is not a timeless ideal. Number two, this is not tyrannical and malevolent. You can see this as coming out of Genesis 1 and the doctrine of the image of God.

It's trying to curb against the abuses that existed in the world at that time. And that's the great theme if you step back and see the big picture of the Old Testament law over and over and over. If there's anything that is hammered away at in the law of Moses, it's that you were slaves in Egypt. So treat the sojourner among you with compassion. Look out for them. I'll put up a few examples of this on the screen.

So when you see the big picture like that, it might help you kind of see the biblical story in its overarching development. All right, let's keep moving in that development. Get to the New Testament. This will be more brief. We're actually through most of the video now just to finish off last two points.

Let's talk about the New Testament. When you get to the New Testament, you're dealing with a different kind of slavery. This is not the kind of economically regulated servanthood of the ancient Near East. We're talking about something. And so first let's describe what we're talking about. Then we'll describe what is the New Testament's response to it. Slavery in the Roman Empire was huge.

A huge percentage of the Roman population were slaves. Kyle Harper says slavery has been virtually ubiquitous in human civilization, but the Romans created one of the few genuine slave societies in the Western experience. And in the Roman Empire, slavery could be very brutal. The power of a slave over his master was generally considered absolute. For example, a master could kill the slave without legal consequence, for example. So you could call this chattel slavery. But it's not the exact same thing as the American system because, and just to be historically

accurate, we can just point out a couple differences. Number one, it's not generally race-based. It's not that there wasn't racism in the ancient world, but that really wasn't the basis for slavery in the way that it was in the United States and a few other places more recently. And that's actually one of the things that's most despicable about slavery in the United States is the rank hypocrisy because the whole ideal from the first line of the Declaration of Independence is equality and yet we fell short of that in such an egregious way. Ancient Rome didn't have any professed ideology of equality so that you don't have that

hypocrisy element of it. But another difference is that slavery in the Roman Empire was, you know, was pretty brutal at times, but there's more diversity, I get the sense, you know. And there was greater range and flexibility to it. No profession was outlawed to slaves except military service. You can find slaves making money, accumulating money, buying their freedom, becoming artisans, becoming civil or imperial servants. There's generally, basically more mobility that's possible. You can find slaves who make it to the upper echelons of society after being freed Felix, the Roman procurator in Acts 23 and 24 was a former slave. You can find people like this. Think of it, you know, think of it as more of a fluctuating social ladder than just this fixed binary. In the American

South, you have two classes, slave and free. There's not a lot of movement. The Roman Empire, there's more of a spectrum. You have higher and lower slaves. You can find slaves who have their own slaves. And among free people as well, you have a kind of a gradation. Here's how one person puts it, the Roman patronage system meant that everyone, whether slave or free, had obligations to someone higher up in the social pecking order all the way up to the emperor. Now, we're not saying Roman slavery is a good thing, okay? But we're just trying to be accurate about what we're talking about here. I'll put up this quote from Murray Harris. He says in the first century, slaves were not distinguishable from free persons by race, by speech, or by clothing. They were sometimes more

highly educated than their owners and held responsible professional positions. Some persons sold themselves into slavery for economic or social advantage. And he goes on talking about some of the other things where, you know, we can have an overly negative view of it. However, I have to say, having read Harper's book pretty with great interest, I do want to say, you know, slavery was bad. It could be fantastically cruel in the Roman Empire. It did entail social dishonor.

There was a lot of sexual exploitation of slaves, for example. It's a terrible thing. Okay. So, but we're just trying to kind of parse some of the differences here. Now the question is this, what's the New Testament attitude towards slavery? Contrary to Sam Harris saying the Bible endorses slavery, there's actually nothing like that. The New Testament never says, oh, this Greco-Roman institution is a good thing. On the contrary, when Paul is listing sins, he includes enslaving as a condemned sin in 1st Timothy 110.

Paul calls being a bond servant a yoke. and first later in that same letter. A yoke, by the way, is a wooden cross piece that's fastened over the neck of an animal and attached to a plow. Paul never says people should become slaves or must remain slaves. In 1 Corinthians 721, he says, if you're a bond servant and you become a Christian and you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity. What you do find is instruction given to people who are currently slaves or bond servants, as the ESV translates, to obey their master.

Now, that is, again, remember what we do. said from Matthew 19 about contextualized laws. Remember Jesus saying, you know, there's a difference between the instruction of what to do under the fallen structure and approval of the structure itself. There's a difference between saying, here's how you are to act in this circumstance, and that circumstance itself is a great thing. And we see throughout the New Testament as a whole that the gospel, the good news of Jesus ultimately undermines the assumptions and prejudice and ways of thinking that make slavery even possible. The book of Philemon is a great window into this.

Paul is sending Onisimus, a runaway bond servant, back to his owner, Philemon, but Onesimus has become a Christian. And so note how Paul sends him back. He says, first, receive him no longer as a bond servant, but more than a bond servant as a beloved brother. And then he says, this is the one that's so amazing, receive him as you would receive me. Just think of how much has changed because this is what Paul believes about the gospel. I mean, think about that.

The runaway slave has all the dignity of an apostle. And this is part of, here's how F.F. Bruce puts it. What this letter does is to 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 has already come into being. I think that's true. I used to wrestle with Philemon trying to understand this a little bit. If you think about what Paul is saying, it is radically countercultural. And you might say, well, that was just Philemon. Maybe this idea that there's this, you know, there's this completely new relationship between Onesimus and Philemon, now that Philemon has become,

or Onesimus has become a Christian. But actually, Paul is just giving the principle. He's already taught in Colossians 3 and Galatians 3 that in Jesus, in Jesus, Christ, there is no slave nor free. When we become a Christian, our identity, our core identity changes. The most fundamental thing now is that we're united to Christ. And that means that when we're in Christ, there is neither slave nor free. Therefore, while I still might have that role, it's not the thing that is most true of me. And therefore, the relationship between a slave and a master is eclipsed in light of this greater thing that they now have in common. and in a hierarchical society like the Roman Empire, this is very scandalous, and that's what you see playing out in Philemon.

What I'm trying to show is the gospel doesn't just like immediately make slavery illegal or something like that, but it makes it unthinkable because it's eroding the assumptions that make it possible. Here's an illustration that Rebecca McLaughlin gives in her book Confronting Christianity from the Merchant of Venice, where the character Antonio has signed a contract entitling a lender to have a pound of his flesh if he defaults on a loan. And sure enough, he does. And so his enemy is looking to take revenge on him. And there's a female character acting as the lawyer. And she rules, yes, a pound of flesh is owed. But she says the contract says nothing about blood.

If you take one drop of Antonio's blood, then your own goods will be forfeited to the state. And so it's kind of a way of protecting Antonio because you're saying, of course, you can't get a pound of flesh without drawing any blood. And her point is, the New Testament argues against slavery, the way Portia argues against Antonio's death by cutting the legs out from under it. Jesus inhabited the slave role. Paul calls himself a slave of Christ, loves a runaway slave as his very heart, and insists

that slave and free are equal in Christ. With no room for superiority, exploitation, or coercion, but rather brotherhood and shared identity, the New Testament created a tectonic tension that would ultimately erupt in the abolition of slavery. Now, we'll talk about abolition and church history in just a minute to finish off. One quick objection before we get to that, though. Someone is going to say, okay, fine, but that's not good enough. You know, okay, fine, the gospel is sort of undermining slavery, but it's not making it technically illegal. Not good enough. It should have done that too. There should have been a complete cessation of slavery. The abolition movement should have happened in 1800 BC, not 1880.

The first of the Ten Commandments should have been, thou shalt not have any slaves in this way of thinking. And I can, what I appreciate about this is the sense of urgency for justice. So I don't want to be dismissive of this concern. Jennifer Glancy has this book and she's, she brings some heavy hitting concerns and attacks, you know, she's responding to another scholar who is basically saying, slavery was necessary to proclaim the gospel, you couldn't abolish it as an institution right away. And she responds and says, what Towner does not realize is whether such accommodation to the patterns of a slaveholding society itself compromises the gospel. Because he was saying, oh, you have to have slavery in order for the gospel to go forward. And she's saying, but does that

itself compromise the gospel? Now, here's my response to that. What I would say is, I don't think the New Testament is accommodating to all the patterns of a slaveholding society. I think there is, upturning of societal norms. And I think, and I'll talk a little bit about the early church in a second. But if the expectation here is that Christianity should have resulted in a kind of social revolt, social revolution right away, I think we have to think through how that would have played out. There were slave uprisings in the ancient world, but they never really resulted in the institution of slavery as such being affected. At best, it would just be certain slaves going free if they were successful, but much more commonly, there would be absolutely

brutal backlash, often crucifixion, you know, punishment, torture, terrible. And the simple fact is the early Christians weren't in a position to abolish slavery throughout society. And you might say, well, why didn't Paul at least command Christian masters to immediately let their slaves go free? Fair question, but there are complexities to that. There are legal complexities. What if someone had just sold themselves into slavery to pay off a debt? What if that person doesn't want to leave? You know, sometimes that puts the slave into a more vulnerable position. Again, we have to understand the kind of slavery that's in play here. And there are also laws at play that limit the extent to which you can free slaves. Peter Williams talks about this a little bit. I'll play

his clip. Firstly, the idea that the Christians in the New Testament could all change slavery is rather naive, because let's remember that back then they had no. votes. So they couldn't just change the legal system. So for Paul to write to them in letters about what the ideal legal system would have been, writing something a bit like Plato's Republic, would have been no help whatsoever to people leading their lives. Moreover, telling slaves to rebel would simply end up with them being executed, probably by crucifixion. That would help nothing. The Romans would certainly win against the slave rebellion that had been tried in the days of Spartacus. But in fact, there are legal limits to how many,

many slaves anyone could free. Paul could say masters free your slaves, but if they'd tried to free their slaves, they would not have been free. Because of the Lex Fufia-Caninia, for instance. We said if you have three slaves, you can only free two of them. If you have ten slaves, you can only free five of them. If you have 30 slaves, you can only free ten of them. Moreover, because of another law, the Lex Ilya sentia, it could be the case that actually by being freed too early, you would suffer some disadvantage. Because if you got freed before 30, it would be very, very hard to become a citizen and so on. So what we find is we might sit in our armchairs and think,

oh, Paul should have written and said, masters free your servants, free your slaves. But they would not have been free. If they'd tried to do it, they would not all have been legally free. Those people would actually have been quite vulnerable. However, even if someone retains this concern about whether the New Testament goes far enough or says enough, then that would be the concern

not that the Bible endorses slavery. No, the Bible doesn't endorse slavery. What Paul says in 1st Timothy 110 is there. Slavery is wrong. He's writing letters telling people how to function in that society. If you think he should have said more, okay, but that's not a matter of endorsing the institution. All right. Last point. If you're still watching the video, God bless you. I hope you're as interested in this topic as I am. I'm really interested in it because I think people struggle with this. It's a fair, fair concern, you know. Let's finish it off here. The history of abolitionism has a significant Christian influence. Earlier I mentioned Kyle Harper's claim about the early church accommodating itself. You know, I said I'd come back to that. Well, the first thing, we do want to

acknowledge. There's a lot of sin in church history. There's a lot of hypocrisy. So in no way would I ever want to try to deny that. There's a lot we can grieve over. And when the abolition movement does come up, you can find Christians quoting the Bible on both sides of the debate, of course, as we know. That's tough, you know. However, it's not true that Christians just completely accommodated to Roman values. You can see from the beginning, Christian advocacy for the marginalized and the vulnerable. One of the clearest ways you see this is opposition to the practice of child exposure. Basically, it was common for people to throw out babies they didn't want. Christians were the ones railing against this and standing up for them.

they were also fiercely opposed to the sexual exploitation and promiscuity of the Roman Empire. And they were sort of mocked and opposed for this. They also did, while there's an accommodation to the institution of slavery at times and to a large extent, they also do rail against abuses of it. John Chrysostom talks about slavery 5,000 times in his surviving corpus. And he's frequently railing against the abuses of it. Augustine does that as well a bit. Now, to be fair, you know, there's some tough passages in people like John and Augustine where you can kind of see like, okay, wow, that's very different from how probably you and I would approach this today.

Oh, they didn't go far enough. They didn't John Chrysostom, Augustin, these others, they didn't condemn the institution outright. They were just speaking against some of the worst abuses. Well, almost nobody was condemning the institution outright at that time. It's not fair to single out just Christians, you know? Furthermore, the first time you do see a full-throated condemnation of slavery as an institution, it is from a Christian. And I was so gripped by Gregory of Nisa's fiery sermon that he preached during Lent in 379 AD. I took several months to study it and give a talk about it. You can watch the whole talk. One historian has called his sermon, the most scathing critique of slaveholding in all of antiquity. He starts off the sermon basically just saying, can you even imagine, can you even fathom the arrogance,

of thinking that you can own another human being. And what made his sermon so radical is he's saying, it's not just the abuses of it, it's the whole idea of it. I'll just read a bit here. He says, tell me what sort of price you paid. What did you find in creation with a value corresponding to the nature of your purchase? What price did you put on rationality? For how many obols did you value the image of God?

For how many coins did you sell this nature formed by God? God said, let us make human beings in our own image and likeness. When we are talking about one who is in the image of God, who has dominion over the whole earth, and who has been granted by God, authority over everything on the earth, tell me who is the seller and who is the buyer. God would not make a slave of humankind. It was God who, through his will, called us back to freedom when we were slaves of sin. If God does not enslave a free person, then who would consider their own authority higher than gods?

And he goes on and on. Again, you have to appreciate how radical that was at that time. Even Harper, who qualifies this a bit, says 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 you can say, hey, why weren't there more Gregory of Nisas? Why didn't more Christians stand up and say slavery as such is bad? I think one reasonable answer to that is in that historical context, a world without slavery was hard for many people to imagine. It was what they'd always known.

Again, they thought of it kind of like poverty. In the final paragraph of his book. Final sentences. Kyle Harper is talking about the mindset of Christian preachers like Chris Ostum, 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. I think that's a realistic assessment. You know, we all have, we have to appreciate the differences of historical context between our day and theirs and how radical prophecies like Micah 4-4 were. that every man shall sit under his own vine and under his fig tree. You know, that was a radical thought in the ancient world.

What's interesting is that this actually happened. Towards the end of the 18th century, there's a sea change in public sentiment about slavery, and the abolitionist cause gains traction to an extent unprecedented in all of human history. And it was Christians like William Wilberforce, who led the charge precisely because of their Christianity. Alec Riri has an excellent book on Protestants, and he's honest with the historical data. He shows that there were Christians on both sides, but then he says abolitionism was a religious movement first and last. The Protestant argument against the slave trade was simple. Even if the Bible had not specifically condemned man stealing, Christ's so-called golden rule,

due into others as you would have them do unto you, could hardly justify kidnapping people, shipping them across the world in hellish conditions, and selling them into perpetual slavery. Even if you accepted slavery itself, it was almost impossible. to construct a Christian defense of the slave trade, and hardly anyone tried. And he argues it was Protestant Christianity specifically that was best positioned to spearhead this reversal in human law and in human thought about this institution because of Protestant's willingness to reconsider precedent. It's kind of an interesting case.

A really great book he wrote. Check it out. I'll put a link to that one in the video description too. And he gives a lot of documentation for this, you know? Just to finish it off. I love this quote from Frederick Douglass because this was the idea, the image of God is what they all used. He said 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.

You can understand the resources that Christianity can offer to something like the abolition movement, with this doctrine of the image of God, but with other doctrines like the doctrine of judgment day. That came in handy, you know. The simple fact is that this, slavery is a human universe. it's only been overcome once, and that happened because of Christians. And they did so because of theological reasons bound up with Christianity. Not only Christians, but mainly Christians. And Christianity has good resources to explain how to go about that.

Here's my final thought to finish the video. If you're an atheist, it seems to me those resources do not as obviously exist. It's really difficult to see what is the ontological basis for human equality. Where do you get? universal human rights on atheism. Whenever I ask about this, people confuse the ontological with the epistemological, the order of being, the order of knowing, they say, oh, we don't need the Bible to tell us that we're all equal. Okay, that's an epistemological question. Granted, what I'm talking about is what actually makes human beings equal? In atheism, what is it that makes

the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence true? In this statement, the idea that all men are created equal is predicated upon not just the existence of God, but a particular divine action being got at with this verb endowed. So God is giving human beings certain rights. And that's connected with our equality. And that makes sense. If you believe in God, you have this kind of framework to explain that. My challenge to my atheist friends would be to say, in your worldview, where do you get that? Okay. The history of Christianity and before it of Judaism is a messy history. because human history is messy, but it's telling us a story of how we got to the current moment. If you're an atheist, where do you ground this?

What is your basis for saying human beings are equal and slavery is objectively wrong? You can't just say it's common sense. You can't just appeal to something like human flourishing. You have to say, what is it that actually makes it wrong? I know then we get into the moral argument of, I know some of the responses to that, but that's the challenge I would give. Here's a final thought to encourage someone who's maybe on the fence on this. If you get to a point where you're just open to the possibility, like maybe,

Maybe Christianity is true. Maybe Jesus is giving us a true revelation of God. Here's the kind of God that you're considering, and it's happy to think about this. This is a God who became a servant. This is a God who became a slave. And the person of Jesus, the highest one, the creator, the God, took the lowest place. He became born as a man to serve and to surrender his life. If that's true, if that's who God is, that's a God you can trust.

That's a God you can surrender your life to. That's why I say, you know, all the challenges of this issue, you know, work through them all. But the ultimate main message of the Bible, the heart of the Bible, the central focus, what it's all building towards is Jesus, who came and served us by providing salvation for us, by going to the cross for us. If that's not true, it's an incredibly beautiful story. And I'm convinced it's true. Happiest thought of my life. I think it's true. I think Jesus was the son of God, and I think he rose from the dead. So I'll make this video, hoping to help others push others in that direction as well.

Thanks for watching. Let me know what you think in the comments. Be on the lookout for a video on the conquest of Canaan, even more challenging topic, I think, than this one in the next month or two to be coming out soon. Okay, take care, everybody.