(July 14, 2011 at 9:44 pm)everythingafter Wrote: Did a forum search on this topic and didn't find much. Apologies for any overlap.
I'm interested to hear what folks think about what the Bible says about slavery. You will hear apologists defend the Bible by claiming that it does not condone forced slavery, just indentured servitude. Basically, people would become the property of another person if they were in debt or had other financial problems. Other believers will just claim that we should not make moral judgments about other societies that were vastly different from our own.
I tend to think it's yet another sign that the Bible is written as we should expect in an ancient society, and not by an all-knowing God who would have known that millions would suffer and/or die in the 18th and 19th centuries during the slave trade, and didn't think it important to condemn slavery outright in his special book to mankind.
The issue of slavery in the Bible is an odd one. I remember reading a book by a person claiming to be a Christian economist which actually condoned slavery, and seemed rather disappointed that we had gotten away from it. It was written in 1981. When I read the part about slavery I actually dropped the book and said, "what?!" out loud. That experience kind of brought up slavery as an issue for me again.
The inside track about slavery in the Bible is that if you're using a very literal, modern method of interpreting the Bible, it's actually pretty hard to argue that slavery is wrong. Christians had to let their experience of the horrors of slavery shape the way the saw the Bible. It was a matter of heart as well as head. So people ended up bringing more compassion to their reading and read the Bible as a bigger story rather than a list of rules. This lead to a situation where some Christians were running the slave trade and some were leading the abolitionist movement. You saw the same split in the Civil Rights movement of the sixties, with a southern pastor by the name of Dr. King leading a group of Christians to try and reach the hearts of a bitterly divided nation, while others claiming to be Christians tried to kill him. Honestly it's a little weird. Christians usually end up being on the best and worst side of the issue at the same time. Two different ways of looking at the Bible on each pole, both seemingly valid, but which lead to completely different conclusions. Like I said, it's weird.
That being said it's hard to overlook how often the Bible challenges things like sexism and slavery. Sure the Bible says, "slaves obey your masters" but it also has passages in Philemon where Paul is encouraging a slave owner not to treat his slave like property, but as a brother. Paul even refers to a slave as his very heart. There are also verses like, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galations 3:28) which seems to be encouraging equality for everyone. And whenever Paul talks about a wife's responsibility to her husband, he also talks about a husband's duty to his wife. Their bodies are not their own, but reciprocally belong to one another. This was very counter-culture since the Greeks and most Jews did not believe that a man had any responsibility to his wife, she was property. So for every issue where the Bible seems to be behind the times on some ethical issue, there are verses that make it seem more in step. I'm not going to deny that there are verses that sound really bad though. I'm just saying both sides are there, and it's not as easy as saying that the book was written thousands of years ago and is dangerously out of touch now. The issue of what to make of the Bible now is a big one that's not going to be resolved in a trite way. I'm interested to see how it works out, because I study that particular issue pretty much all the time and, wow, there is a lot of information to take in.
