What kind of slavery do you mean? There's absolutely nothing wrong in principle with slavery. Indeed, Scripture certainly does condone one sort of slavery. It goes so far as to command it. We're to be slaves of Christ. However, it certainly throws the categories of human slavery and mastership all askew. Slaves are free in Christ. Those who are free from human masters are slaves of Christ. There is no slave or free in Christ. These categories mean nothing among believers. In Philemon, a slaveholder

is just about told to free his believing slave who ran away. Slaveholders in churches are commanded that if they do nothing else they need to treat their slaves with kindness. Slaves in churches are told to treat their masters with respect and obey them for the sake of the gospel, so that their masters will see Christ in them.

Does this amount to condoning slavery? Not necessarily. God never ordains slavery in the Bible. However, it is regulated. God ordains marriage and then regulates it, but this doesn't mean that any such regulated relationship is ordained by God.

Additionally, slavery in the NT period in the Roman world was nothing like slavery in the U.S. before the Civil War. It was much more like the kind of relationship between those running a monastery in the Middle Ages and those living there. There's no income changing hands, and the lifestyle wasn't exactly top of the line, but they lived comfortably enough that it could be said that the monastery took good care of them. They worked a good bit to ensure that there were animals and crops providing enough food for them, but they had free time to pursue other things, and the masters certainly didn't see the slaves as sub-human.

They couldn't vote because they weren't citizens, but that doesn't mean that there was some magical line in nature between the two, as the slaveholders in the U.S. saw between them and the black slaves under them. They recognized it as a relationship in roles in society and not much more. The fact that anyone (ethnically) could be a slave and anyone could be a master affirms this. Someone who was already a Roman citizen could not easily become a slave (though see the movie Gladiator for a case of this), but any ethnicity could be.

Any bond-servants in OT Israel had it even better off. First off, it was voluntarily initiated in many cases, more like indentured servant hood (though some conquered people were made slaves). It even had a time limit. They were basically adopted into the family and cared for as children. The Greeks and Romans saw slaves as part of their household in terms of taking care of their needs, but Israel had more of a family-like bond than that between master and slave.

If the New Testament had been written in 1840 or something, then I'm sure more would have been in there about slavery. That fact that there isn't as much as you would like simply reflects the sort of slavery there was, but it does contain what God did have to say about how Christians should live in a society with that sort of slavery. Remember that the Bible never makes any attempts to be a political manual (i.e., a guide for how people should construct a society in all contexts).

Slavery in some ways parallels war. A pacifist wouldn't buy the following argument, but a just war theorist should. Just war theorists believe that war can be the correct choice for a government in executing justice in the right circumstances and if care is taken to prevent certain abuses, etc. However, there is no assuring that innocents will not die. There is no assuring that those carrying out the justice won't additionally have vengeance as a motivation. People are imperfect. Just war theorists admit this, since we are all fallen. It doesn't mean was is always wrong, even though every war will always be carried out by fallen people and even though the war itself is saddening, and the would be better if it weren't needed.

Now if the ideal of a just war can never be reached, and yet just wars exist and can be carried out without being perfect, think about the parallel. If slavery to Christ, a perfect man, is a wonderful thing, as I've argued, then the fact that humans who are at times imperfect will never be perfect masters doesn't automatically make it wrong for them to have slaves, as long as they're making efforts to be good masters. If this were not so, it would be wrong to hire people for any task. With slavery, the wages just work differently, and the contracts involve commitments to serve for indefinite amounts of time until the debt is paid off, etc. So if I decide to get out of debt by finding someone who will agree to absorb my debt if I agree to work for him for seven years, giving up my rights to the income I would otherwise have earned because it covers the debt instead, with an agreed provision for my family's needs in terms of shelter, food, etc., then it very much resembles the slavery in the Old Testament. Yet it doesn't seem as if any wrong is done by the person who agrees to do this for me. It really is just like that kind of slavery.

Slavery comes in degrees, and let’s say that I am a University lecturer. And in a sense I am a slave to a university because I have signed a contract with them. I'm committed to doing certain things. I'm not free to decide to sleep in certain days. I'm forced by my master to show up and teach. I'm not free to assign grades to my students based on the length of their hair. I'm not free to have romantic relationships with my students. I'm not free to work at any other job for pay except in the summer. I'm not free to proselytize in the classroom in any explicit way. I'm a waged slave. I gave up freedoms and am expected to work in exchange for some provision for my needs. Pretty much that's what slave owners do. It's just that most of them have done it in very bad ways, not providing enough and taking away more freedoms than anyone would willingly give up. They acquired these slaves against their will, and there was no sense of proportionality. All this ignores the racial issues in American slavery, which is a further evil, though that has hardly ever been part of any other kind slavery in the history of the world.

So it's not just that there are cases when slavery is good. Slavery happens all the time. We're all slaves. The difference between me and a slave in ancient Israel is a difference of degree, not a difference of kind. The degree of various elements makes a difference in whether a master-boss is being just in that role. The injustices of slaveries in the past could just as easily appear in an ordinary job nowadays. In fact, lots of so-called legitimate employment today around the world is more like American slavery of the past than it is like what most of us do every day. Yet for some reason people won't call it slavery, simply because they get money from it.

So here's what mostly people dont understand, how can we ALL be slaves? We get PAID for doing work that we dont want to do and are SOOOO unlike all those slaves in ancient Roman history or in Jerusalem or those that you supposedly read about in the bible. So here's my very brief, but totally understandable explaination

Labels: slavery