Is Slavery Christian?

© 2012 by Carl Wells. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/17/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7495-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7494-1 (e)

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1.   God Owns Us

Chapter 2.   Slaves of Sin

Chapter 3.   Slaves of Righteousness

Chapter 4.   Bad News/Good News

Chapter 5.   How the Israelites Became Slaves

Chapter 6.   How Another People Became Slaves

Chapter 7.   Finding the Main Point

Chapter 8.   How a Non-Christian Can Get Out of Slavery

Chapter 9.   How a Christian Can Get Out of Slavery

Chapter 10.   What Replaces Slavery?

Chapter 11.   Slavery in the South

Chapter 12.   How Would You Like to Be Sold Into Slavery?

Chapter 13.   Is Slavery Christian?

Appendix I.   A Prayer

Footnotes

Afterword

Other Books by the Author

This book is dedicated, with love and admiration, to the memory of French economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850). With all his noble heart, he respected and defended the property of his neighbors.

But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.

Romans 6:17-18

Introduction

"For I proclaim the name of the LORD;

Ascribe greatness to our God!

The Rock! His work is perfect,

For all His ways are just;

A God of faithfulness and without injustice,

Righteous and upright is He."

Deuteronomy 32:3-4

The Bible affirms over and over again that God is never unjust.

Yet God permitted slavery in Old Testament times. And even in New Testament writings those reckoned his greatest servants (Paul, Peter) refused to condemn slavery.

But everyone knows that slavery is a completely bad thing.

What is going on here?

The humanist has an answer. There really is no God, he says. The Bible is not a supernatural book written by God. The Bible was written by fallible men. The morality of the Bible simply reflects the morality of the time in which it was written.

The treatment of slavery in the Bible, says the humanist, is an excellent proof of that. Slavery was an accepted fact of life, during the centuries when the various books of the Bible were written. Therefore slavery is not condemned by the Bible. It is only in relatively recent centuries that mankind has realized that slavery is morally wrong. Like many other things, religious and moral sentiments evolve, says the humanist. There is no absolutely unchanging God with absolutely unchanging ethical standards.

The Christian rejects the humanist claims. God exists, and His book the Bible is a supernaturally written book, without error. God is good and just, and His ethical standards have always been perfectly just.

How does slavery fit into the picture, according to the Christian? Well . . .

Most Christians are not at all sure. Christians—having experienced salvation from eternal death by means of Jesus Christ’s incredibly generous substitutionary death on the cross—know that God is good and merciful and kind. But exactly how slavery fits into the picture, Christians don’t know. For the most part the issue is not thought about at all. If the issue of slavery in the Bible is thought about, it is with a kind of vague uneasiness.

This vague uneasiness does not overwhelm the Christian. Every believer is used to bumping up against ways of God which he can’t understand. ‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts,/Neither are your ways My ways, declares the LORD./For as the heavens are higher than the earth,/So are My ways higher than your ways,/And My thoughts than your thoughts’ (Isa. 55:8-9).

Nevertheless, if this vague uneasiness on the issue of slavery can be removed, it would be a good thing. Christians are to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). The more we learn to think God’s thoughts after Him, the more we learn that He is good and reliable and wise. It is not God’s thinking that needs to be cleaned up, it is ours. And as we do that hard but necessary work, we are both humbled and encouraged. We learn that God is indeed a ‘God of faithfulness and without injustice,/Righteous and upright is He’ (Deut. 32:4).

The goal of this book is to make a beginning contribution to the serious and vexing issue of biblical slavery. Why does God permit slavery in the Old Testament? Does He permit or encourage slavery even in New Testament times? ‘Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?’, as Abraham asked (Gen. 18:25).

Obviously, I hope and believe that I have begun to understand why God has given us His teaching on slavery—otherwise I wouldn’t have written this book! The reader will decide for himself whether I am on the right track.

But even if I am wrong, there may be some value to this book. My errors may spark others, with more biblical insight, to think and write and respond. Historically, one of the benefits of theological error by one thinker or group of thinkers, has been to cause God’s church to thrash through ideas and eventually come up with a clear expression of God’s truth.

It will be egg on my face if my only contribution to the understanding of biblical slavery, is to bring out a phalanx of biblical scholars who demolish all my theories. But God can use even error to bring glory to Himself, and may He indeed do so if my book serves Him in no other way.

If clear, biblical thinking on the issue of slavery can be arrived at—one way or another—it is my belief that there will be incredible benefits to the Christian army. Because slavery is a very important issue—and the issue won’t go away, as a recent event shows us.

Curiously, as I was in the process of preparing this book for publication, a mini controversy arose concerning the trustworthiness of the Bible in regard to slavery. Dan Savage, a gay-rights activist and anti-bullying advocate, said the Bible got it all wrong in regard to issues like slavery and homosexuality. If Mr. Savage is correct that the Bible is a document that gets lots of important issues wrong, then it must not be a book that comes from the holy and all-powerful creator of the universe. Our Christian faith becomes a sentimental preference, rather than something based in reality.

This short introductory book, Is Slavery Christian?, attempts to show that God knew exactly what He was doing in regard to slavery. If we can learn to think God’s thoughts after Him on this important issue, maybe it will encourage us to hope that He is similarly on the right track on other issues as well. At the worst, it is better to face challenging issues head on, rather than to hope they will not come up in polite company. The recent comments by Dan Savage show that even if we sweep these issues under the rug successfully for a while, a lump will show up eventually. Better to try to deal with the supposed problem. If I don’t get it right, someone else will, to the benefit of us all.

Chapter 1.

God Owns Us

Know that the LORD Himself is God;

It is He who made us, and not we ourselves;

We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.

Psalm 100:3

God owns us.

Understanding this is a key to understanding reality, to being plugged into the real world.

The Bible stresses, over and over, that it was God who created everything, including mankind. As we would expect, and quite justly, He has the right of ownership over His creation. God doesn’t have to consult the United States Constitution or the latest United Nation Declaration on the Rights of Fussbudgets (or whatever) to determine how He can and will deal with man. Everything belongs to Him. He owns us.

The Bible makes that clear from the start. Verse one of the Bible reads In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:1), and the rest of chapter one of Genesis tells more about God’s creating activity—including His creation of mankind. And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them (Gen. 1:27; compare Gen. 5:1-2). And numerous times in the Bible, it is repeated that God is the creator of all things.

Being our creator and owner, God has the right to do with His own what He will, and to tell us what to do. It is a right He exercises justly, wisely, and often mercifully, but it is His right: ‘who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, Why did you make me like this, will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use, and another for common use?’ (Rom. 9:20-21).

It can be a frightening thought to recognize oneself to be owned by God.

Have you ever wondered why evolutionists are so determined to deny the obvious truth that God created the world? (And Paul stresses how obvious that truth is, in Romans 1:20.) Evolutionists instinctively sense—quite logically and correctly sense—that if they once acknowledge God as creator, they will have to acknowledge Him as having the right to tell them how to live their lives. This idea they hate! Like all non-believers, they want to live their lives without reference to God’s instructions. So the pleasant fiction of evolutionary theory, no matter how childish and anti-scientific, must be maintained at all costs.

Being owned by God can be a bit unsettling even to the Christian. Wait a minute. God owns me? Where are my human rights? What if God tells me to do something I prefer to avoid doing? He might, you know.

He not only might, He does. His instructions to us often go against the sinful inclinations we have, due to the indwelling sin we have remaining in our hearts (despite our salvation). Paul spoke frankly about that indwelling sin in chapter 7 of Romans.

But our occasional queasiness at being owned by God does not change the rock hard fact that we are owned by God. Can anything exceed the simple clarity and truth with which Paul (moved by the Holy Spirit) spoke to all men, believers and non-believers alike, whoever happened to be listening, at Athens?

"The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; neither is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all life and breath and all things; and He made from one, every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times, and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His offspring.’ Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man. Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to