Not Your Own - The Bible and Slavery (Part I)

“Slavery” is a loaded term in the 21st century West. One can’t help but recall images from textbooks and historical documentaries and motion pictures of the inhuman nightmare that was the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Plenty of ink and celluloid and speech have been deployed to make sure that we never forget, downplay, or make even the slightest move to repeat the horror of race-based chattel slavery. It has been called America’s Original Sin and its immense power is still politically weaponized to this day in order to bully and browbeat people into supporting this or that issue, candidate, or party.

It is a massively weighty issue, one that demands our utmost consideration and seriousness.

So what are we to make of the charge that the Bible condones slavery? Like a cudgel used to beat those who might extol the virtues and beauty of the faith, its ideological opponents play this particular card as soon and as often as they perceive the opportunity rising. It is one of the two punches most often thrown by the New Atheist crowd (along with the notion that the God of the Old Testament is a kind of misogynistic, homicidal maniac); indeed, their arguments rely much more heavily on claims that God is a jerk and the Bible is stupid than they do on any kind of objective or scientific proofs that He doesn’t exist. The apparently primitive and barbaric morality of the Bible is the justification for many people’s rejection of Christianity, and its apparent endorsement of slavery is certainly one of their chief evidences.

So the challenge must be answered. But here I will seek not just to answer it, but also to give credence to it. Because, when all is said and done, contrary to the prevalent sensibilities of those of us residing within Western civilization who have been brought up to believe that freedom is the ultimate virtue of human existence and that slavery is perhaps its ultimate evil, I contend that the Bible not only does endorse a kind of slavery, it, in fact, requires it.

But, first things first.

Let me make something abundantly clear: the Bible does not endorse the kind of slavery most modern people think of when they hear the word. When the claim is made by its opponents that the Bible condones slavery, they mean the kind of chattel slavery that was prevalent from the 1500’s on through to the middle of the 19th century. And they will point to things like the claims of slave owners in the antebellum American South to prove their points.

But, wait.

I Timothy 1:9-10 says, “…the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.” (emphasis mine) The word “enslavers” used here is, in the original Greek, “andrapodistés” (ἀνδραποδιστής), a word translated to mean, “one who forcibly enslaves, a kidnapper, man-stealer, one who unjustly reduces free men to slavery,” according to Strong’s Concordance and Thayer’s Greek Lexicon.

In short, right here at the beginning of Paul’s first letter to Timothy, the entire Transatlantic Slave Trade was expressly forbidden.

Thus, the claim that the Bible somehow promotes the kind of slavery that the United States ended up fighting the Civil War over is a complete and total lie.

Now, issues still remain. After all, the entire book of Philemon is about Paul sending back an escaped slave, Onesimus, to a fellow believer (Philemon) who happens to be Onesimus’s master. Not only that, but Paul tells Philemon, “For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother—especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord,” in verses 15-16. So, Paul sends a Christian slave back to his Christian slave owner and does not require the slave owner to free the slave, but to welcome him as he would Paul himself.

Clearly, within the dynamics of Christian love laid out for us by the Holy Spirit throughout the Scriptures, there is a very real way in which Christians can relate to each other as masters and slaves while still remaining unified in the faith.

It is important to note here, however, that the nature of slavery in the Roman world in which Paul was writing was essentially very different from the race-based chattel slavery so prevalent in most Western minds. It was far more wide-spread throughout society, it was not based on a theory of racial superiority or eugenics, and it was not typically considered to be a permanent position or way of life. This is not to say that there weren’t abuses. Of course there were. But the slavery the Bible tends to both address and tolerate is a far cry from the kind of thing Western nations took part in and which the Bible itself explicitly forbids.

That being said, Christ’s second highest commandment of, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” (Matthew 22:39) must have applied to the master-slave relationship. In a culture where slavery was more akin to what we might call “indentured service,” both masters and slaves were called to treat one another with the same honor, respect, and dignity they would themselves want if the roles were reversed.

But what about that reversal of roles? Why didn’t the Apostles require all Christian slave holders within the Roman world to free their human servants?