SLAVERY AND THE HISTORY OF REDEMPTION (5/5)
This is the final post of five addressing the claim that Christianity has contributed to racism and the oppression of people of color. As we have stated before, two reasons are often given in support of this claim:
Christianity has contributed to racism and the oppression of people of color because Christianity’s book, the Bible, condones slavery.
Christianity has contributed to racism and the oppression of people of color because many white American Christians possessed slaves in the antebellum South and used the Bible to justify it.
In the past three posts, I endeavored to address these claims by looking at how slavery was handled by the Old and New Testaments, and by the Church throughout history. In these posts, we saw that biblical writers permitted a mitigated and regulated form of slavery but never defended it as an ideal. We also saw how the seeds of abolition planted in the Old and New Testaments eventually bloomed into the abolitionist movement led by Christians.
In today’s post, we seek the heart of God on the matter of slavery. How can we be sure that God is against slavery if the Word of God, the Bible, never directly argues against it? To answer this question, we will seek to understand slavery within the story of redemption, which unfolds in four movements—creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.
CREATION
In Matthew 19, Jesus was asked by a group of Jewish leaders whether or not it was “lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause.” In his answer, Jesus pointed back to God’s original design for marriage at creation and concluded: “What therefore God has joined together let no man separate” (Matt 19:6). In other words, marriage was God’s idea, not ours, and we would be wise not to mess with God’s design.
When asked for clarification given that Moses allowed divorce, Jesus replied, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” In other words, there are things that God regulated in the Law of Moses given the hardness of people’s hearts, but if you really want to know God’s heart on a matter, look at his original design.
Jesus’ approach to the question of marriage is the same approach we ought to use when thinking about slavery.[1] When we look at how God originally designed the world, we find two humans, male and female, equal in dignity and worth having been made in the image of God (Gen 1:27). What we find is a world where image-bearers are given the mission to fill a good world with worshipers who commune with God in a cultivated garden temple spanning the globe. What we don’t find is slavery. Hamilton has correctly noted that “there is not even a whisper of slavery in Genesis 1–2”.[2] Slavery was our idea, not God’s. What God does in the rest of the Bible is regulate it given the hardness of our hearts.
FALL
When our first parents decided they would rather be like God on their own terms than on God’s terms, humanity and all of creation fell under a curse. In a moment, humanity contracted a fatal disease infecting and enslaving all subsequent generations (Rom 5:12, 8:18-24). It is a disease that ruins God’s good design by giving those infected an appetite for self-serving power. This disease is the disease of sin, and slavery is just one of its symptoms.[3]
No one really knows when the first person was enslaved by another, but the first mention of it in the Bible comes from the mouth of Noah as he utters a curse against Canaan and his descendents in Genesis 9:25–27. Slavery is never viewed in the Bible as something essential or natural to the human condition; it is a distortion of God’s design for human relationships, and all that falls short of God’s design is sin.[4]
In the Bible, the enslavement of fellow humans is assumed to be a great evil listed alongside murder (1 Tim 1:10); and worthy of the death penalty (Exod 21:16). Yet the Bible spoke into a world in which slavery was already deeply entrenched, and so God moved to work within the cultural framework of that time—to regulate it with law, and to abolish it through redemption.
REDEMPTION
Much of the story of redemption is a story of subversion and reversal. Bauckham labels the story of God’s people as a “story of resistance” against the “dominant narratives of the great empires from Pharaoh to Rome”—stories “justifying oppression and suppression of all dissent.” The story of God’s people not only stands against the imperial pursuits of fallen humanity, it leads back to Eden. But the way back to Eden does not come by way of oppressing the oppressors, but through a cross.[5]
At the cross, Jesus took “the form of a servant” (a slave) in order to reverse the curse of Adam’s disobedience by “becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross”—a death reserved for slaves and criminals (Phil 2:6-8). In other words, Jesus became a slave to free others from their enslavement to every kind of sin (Rom 6:5-11). And in so doing, Jesus established a different kind of kingdom than the ones that came before—a kingdom liberating the captive and oppressed (Lk 4:18f; cf. Isa 61:1f). In Jesus, the cycle of slavery and oppression is broken. Any attempt by a Christian or anyone else to use the Bible to support slavery ignores the biblical meaning of the cross and misunderstands the very essence Christianity.[6]
RESTORATION
In the Christian story of reality, we are all headed back to Eden, back to God’s original design and intention for humanity. God’s original intention for humanity never included humans oppressing other humans in order to bring glory to themselves. Instead, God’s vision was for humans to work side by side to bring glory to God.[7] In the New Heavens and New Earth there is no hint of slavery, only fully restored humans operating as royal-priests bringing glory to God (Rev 21-22).
CONCLUSION
Counter to the claims of some, Christianity did not contribute to racism or the oppression of people of color. The Christian story of reality is one that began with a good world in which slavery had no place. It is a story that ends in a restored world with no place for enslavers. The Old and New Testaments did permit a mitigated and regulated form of slavery, but this was because of the hardness of our hearts.
God did not create slavery, fallen humans did. Nowhere does the Bible endorse it. And so, while it is true that many Christian slave-owners in the antebellum South used the Bible to support slavery; they did so contrary to the teachings of the Bible and the heart of God as seen in his design for humanity.
Thanks be to God that in Jesus we are given a heart that beats in time with his and that a restored world completely liberated from slavery and every other sin awaits those who belong to him.
__________
[1] Dan Kimball, How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-Women, Anti-Science, Pro-Violence, Pro-Slavery and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020), 92.
[2] Jim M. Hamilton, “Does the Bible Condone Slavery and Sexism?” in In Defense of the Bible: A Comprehensive Apologetic for the Authority of Scripture, Edited by Steven B. Cowan and Terry L. Wilder (Nashville: B & H Academic, 2013), 339. See also, Thomas R. Schreiner, New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 799.
[3] Kimball, How (Not) to Read the Bible, 91.
[4] Christopher J. H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011), 337.
[5] Richard Bauckham, “Reading Scripture as a Coherent Story” in The Art of Reading Scripture, Edited by Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 51–52.
[6] Bauckham, “Reading Scripture as a Coherent Story,” 52.
[7] Copan reminds us that “the Genesis ideal is that all humans are equal and that they do not work for another; rather, each person under God’s care is to be his own ‘master,’ sitting under his own vine and fig tree (1 Kings 4:25; Micah 4:4; Zech 3:10).” Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster: Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Grand Rapids: BakerBooks, 2011), 134.