Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
I am Corey J.
Mahler. And I'm Wo.
Today's episode of Stone Choir is going to be discussing the made-up
sin of slavery.
As we did a couple weeks ago, one about racism.
We're g now going to touching on another extremely hot topic.
Uh this is not a debt issue.
Slavery is something that although it has been eliminated in the West,
it still exists in other parts of the world.
But the reason that it's still controversial is that it is fundamentally
rooted in much of the gospel message itself.
So the theme that we're going to present today is not only
is slavery itself not a sin per se, but in fact you
can't actually understand scripture if you do not accept slavery qua slavery.
Uh before we get into the meat of this I wanted to
issue two brief corrections from last week's episode.
Um one the last two episodes ran about five hours combined.
That's longer than we want these to be.
In both cases we were working line by line through things that
the Missouri Senate Corporation had issued.
So we really didn't have quite the editorial control over what we
had to discuss.
We do have that control today, so we're going to keep this
under 90 minutes, even if it means we have to cut our
own microphones.
So I'm not sure exactly how long this will be, but I
promise you it will be a regular length episode.
As I was listening again to last week's episode, I heard myself
say something that really rubbed me the wrong way, so I'm sure
it bugged some of you, and so I'd like to issue a
correction of what I said.
I mentioned that I had gone hunting with my dad and I
said I didn't really like it and I said something about clover
and bees and when I was listening I thought man that guy
sounds like a complete hippie tree hugger.
That is not me.
So I want to clarify for the record in honor of my
father and all of my ancestors and my and mighty hunters like
Nimrod, I do not think that hunting is a moral wrong.
I think that hunting is a great thing.
As apex predators, as the pinnacle of creation, man in many places
must hunt simply because we have displaced the other apex predators.
So I have no problems with hunting.
What I said and what what I meant was that I personally,
just as an aesthetic choice, when I see a wide wild animal
out my window or when I'm walking around in in nature, my
first thought is what a miracle it is that all these wild
creatures live entirely by God's providence, that all their food, that their
shelter, that everything is by Is by their wits and their cunning
and directly from God's blessings.
And I take that as a as reassurance because our own lives,
particularly mine, are is so separated from the immediacy of God's providence.
So I have a roof over my head.
It's warm in the winter.
It's cool in the summer.
Whenever I get hungry, if I don't have food in the house,
I can go to the grocery store and they have food.
That's life on easy mode.
A wild animal doesn't have that.
So when I see a wild animal, my first thought is not
that my first thought is that I I'm reminded of God's blessings
to all of us and I don't want the animal happening across
me to be the reason that its own life ended.
But for hunters, God bless you.
I I appreciate it.
You go out, you kill animals.
I know that those responsible hunters respect and understand that that sacrifice
is something that God is giving to them.
So I have zero moral problems with it.
Hunting is great.
We need more of it, not less.
if kids were spending more time outside doing that, it'd be a
better place.
when I was hunting as a kid, it was zero degrees and
four a.m.
So it was kind of unpleasant for for those reasons.
The
other thing that I said
that I realized um wasn't wasn't a mistake, but w I I
said something a little unusual.
When we were talking specifically about slavery, the first two times I
referred to the political events in the United States in the eighteen
hundreds, I said prohibition twice before correcting myself to say abolition.
Yeah, I was thinking about why I made that mistake and I
realized that something was happening that it was a little bit interesting
at least to me.
Um I'm very analytical about my own mistakes.
I always go back over and try to figure out why I
get something wrong.
When I couldn't remember the word abolition the first two times I
said prohibition, for one thing prohibition was equally accurate.
We did prohibit slavery, but it's not the precise term that was
used at that time for the political movement.
I think that what my brain was doing was preventing me from
saying abolition because it's really lousy framing.
Abolition is today a very loaded morally tinged word that is the
opposite frame of the one that I hold.
I hold that slavery was prohibited.
It was legal and then it was made illegal.
And while I think that that is a permissible policy choice for
a nation, the anti-slavery moral positioning that abolition was the stamping
out of an ontological evil and that that itself was an absolute
moral good that justified any manner of evil in its name.
I fundamentally object to that, and that is why we're doing this
episode. And so I think my brain was protecting me from fumbling
into the adversary's framing by calling it abolition.
So anyway, I noticed that I I said that and I had
mentioned in the episode we might do a slavery episode in the
future. We decided let's do it next because it was also one
of the made up sins that the LCMS president condemned explicitly.
He said that we were pro-slavery, which is a lie, but that's
a very profound question.
So as I promised, today we are going to be going through
scripture not line by line, but we're gonna go through many of
the places where slavery is acknowledged, where it is permitted, where it
is in some cases commanded, where it's used, and the fact that
it is never explicitly prohibited condemned as a sin anyway.
And I wanna acknowledge up front that because you know, if we
were to do the full treatment of this episode of this topic
the way we did for race, which took five episodes over probably
about ten hours.
This could easily be probably a thirty hour series.
We're not gonna do that.
It's ninety minutes.
What we're gonna talk about today is specifically what scripture says in
favor of slavery.
We're gonna almost completely ignore all the arguments that are trotted out,
principally from the New Testament, to justify abolition.
The reason for that is that it's a case that we've made
before. If you are talking about something and you're saying scripture prohibits
it, prohibits it, you must deal with the places where scripture doesn't
prohibit it.
So we're just going to give you all the places where God
says this is fine.
I do not have a problem with this, and I am the
Lord your God.
If somebody else wants to come along and make an argument the
scripture, oh actually God says that, they have to deal with everything
we're saying.
So this is the affirmative case for why slavery itself is not
a sin.
So we're gonna spend the entire ninety minutes minus my intro talking
about Talking specifically in scripture.
So
I thought about first starting with Abraham, but I think in fact,
to go roughly chronologically, we have to start earlier than Abraham.
We have to start with Job, because Job is almost certainly the
oldest book in the Bible, and the treatment in Job is very
brief. We really only need two verses from Job, three verses from
Job. But it makes the point very succinctly, and really it makes
the totality of the point, but of course we won't end the
episode there.
Job is described in the opening of the book of Job as
a man who was blameless and upright, one who feared God and
turned away from evil.
He is described as a good man.
He is described as righteous throughout the Book of Job.
He fears God.
He does not sin with his lips.
Through most of the book of Job.
But what's noteworthy there is Scripture notes the wealth of Job.
He possessed sheep, camels, yoke of oxen, female donkeys.
There's a reason they're specified as female donkeys, but that's for another
time, and very many slaves.
Some modern translations will say servants, they weren't servants, they were slaves.
He owned these people.
They depended on him for their livelihood, for their shelter, their bread,
their clothing.
He owned these people, they were his property.
And he is commended as being blameless and upright, despite being a
slave owner.
Of course that goes against what modern individuals, modern men would tell
you. They'd say that you can't be morally upright if you're a
slave owner, because slavery itself is wicked.
Well it's not what Scripture says.
And then at the end of Job, chapter forty-two, it says that
God restores to him twice as much as he had before.
That includes twice as many slaves as he had before.
God gave Job slaves.
And so if someone wants to argue
that trading in slaves, giving someone slaves, possessing slaves, is sin, well
you've just accused God of sin, and you've said that Scripture is
wrong when it calls a man righteous who owns slaves.
And that's just the oldest book in the Bible.
It's throughout the entirety of the Bible that you see
this accurate, this correct teaching on scripture.
And so we'll move to Genesis and deal with Abraham, starting of
course as Abram, since we start with the call of Abram, which
is in Genesis twelve.
And in Genesis twelve it is noted that Abram has slaves.
That would be Genesis twelve five, and Abram took Sarai his wife,
and Lot his brother's son, and all their possessions that they had
gathered, and the people that they had acquired in Haran, and they
set out to go to the land of Canaan.
Those people they acquired those are slaves.
They acquired them.
You acquire property.
And so the beginning of God dealing with Abram, who would become
Abraham, Abram has slaves.
God doesn't tell him to put away his slaves, God doesn't tell
him to leave his slaves, because slavery is not a sin.
God told him to leave the idolatry of the land in which
he lived, to leave those things that were sin behind.
He did not tell him to leave his slaves.
And then, of course, how does God bless him?
Well, he gives him more slaves, because he acquires more slaves when
he sojourns in
Egypt, and that's the same chapter, chapter twelve, slightly later on, verse
sixteen. And for her sake, that is Sarai, he dealt well with
Abram, and he had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male servants, female servants,
female donkeys, and camels.
Of course those are again slaves.
This is I'm reading from the ESV, which sometimes liked to play
little games.
But when it says servants it means slaves.
Because in this era, you didn't have servants, you had slaves, you
had men and women you owned as property, and they performed various
tasks for you.
And these were given to Abram by Pharaoh.
So he gave him slaves.
God blessed Abram with these things.
And so moving on to the next chapter, chapter thirteen.
Here we get an idea of
just how many slaves Abram had.
Because this is where Abram has to separate from Lot, because they
cannot dwell together, because their flocks and the number of people they
have to care for those flocks and their households is so large
that they overburden the land, they have to split.
That's how many slaves God gave Abram as a blessing.
And so here in the beginning of scripture, we see that having
slaves is not a sin, rather it is a blessing from God,
at least under these circumstances.
It's not saying that slavery is always a blessing from God.
But if it can be a blessing from God, then it cannot
be a sin.
And that, of course, is the point.
This is something that comes up explicitly in Genesis 24 when A.
Abram Abraham sends out his servant or his slave, one of his
chief slaves, to find a wife for Isaac.
And when he comes to Laban and speaks to him, his Abraham's
servant says, I am Abraham's servant.
The Lord has greatly blessed my master, and he has become great.
He has given him flocks and herds, silver and gold, male slaves
and female slaves, camels and donkeys.
So explicitly it says the giving of slaves is a gift from
God. There's no circumstance in which enslavement can possibly be a sin
per se when God is saying, hey, here's a blessing to you,
have some slaves.
And I think that one of the problems that we have in
our modern minds is that the idea of being enslaved to us
seems so horrific based on Hollywood portrayals that we don't consider whether
the transaction of God giving Abraham slaves was not a blessing to
both Abraham and to the slave.
Because imagine if you lived in that time and God gave you
into the hand of Abraham to be his property.
Is that a curse or is that a blessing?
I I think that if you believe what scripture says about the
sort of man that Abraham was, then the idea that you would
belong to that man is a profound honor.
It is something that we don't really understand today because it's alien
to our culture, but to be owned by a man not only
is it not inherently morally tinged either way, but it can actually
be a tremendous blessing.
Now indeed there were certainly slave owners in every era and every
culture who were horrible, and there are also many who were great
men, who were kind, who were honest, who treated their slaves well.
And if one's lot in life was to be a slave, then
to be owned by a man who was a good man was
a blessing from God.
So I think it's important that we don't permit the Marxist dialectic
approach to these questions of power dynamics structure how we think about
these relationships.
Because there are two men in that relationship.
There's Abraham the master, and then there's a slave.
Now this was one of his chief slaves that had been sent
on this crucial mission.
He was one of his most trusted servants, but he owned him.
Abraham owned this man.
This man loved Abraham.
He was sent far away with money and with gifts and with
a profound mission for his master, and it was his greatest privilege
to serve that.
And I that's the reason I said at the beginning that the
Christian life can only be understood I think I think in the
context of the proper understanding of slavery, because we all have duties.
You know, as Lutherans we call things vocation, but there are obligations
that we have to do certain things.
And sometimes it's just narrowly within your own household, sometimes it's within
your n within your neighborhood or whatever.
But regardless of the context, we have obligations to do things.
That is not freedom the way Americans want to think about it.
That is a type of slavery.
It is a type of ownership where one's licit moral choices are
bounded by the obligations we have.
And those obligations are inherited ultimately from God through the headship under
which we are placed.
And in certain times and places throughout most of history, a big
part of that was the institution of men owning other men.
And we also see in the slaves that are transferred to the
ownership of Abraham, particularly the ones from Pharaoh, we see that promise
of God to bless all nations in the seed of Abraham already
taking place because they are coming into the family, the extended family
in this case, of Abraham, and so they will hear that gospel.
They will hear the Messiah who is to come.
And so we already see God fulfilling his plan for humanity via
slavery. And so it's difficult to say that slavery is an evil
when God is using it for the ultimate good.
And before we move on to Exodus, I think it's worth just
pulling out a quick comment from Genesis twenty one.
When God addresses Hagar, when God addresses the issue of Hagar speaking
to Abraham, he says, be not displeased because of the boy and
because of your slave woman.
He says slave woman, he doesn't use her name.
Whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for through
Isaac shall your offspring be named, and I will make a nation
of the son of the slave woman also, because he is your
offspring. To most modern ears it's going to sound terrible that God
says slave woman.
He doesn't use her name, God of course knows her name.
He addresses her later on in Genesis and does use her name
there, but here he just calls her the slave woman because he's
noting that relationship between Abraham and Hagar.
Abraham even though Hagar is now his concubine, he still owns her.
She's still his property.
Briefly before we get into Exodus, I just want to point out
that not only did Abraham receive tremendous blessings from God, in large
part by having numerous slaves, but Isaac and Jacob were also similarly
blessed. So although we're pointing back to this early period in the
Old Testament, it's important to refute the notion that, oh well that
was cultural.
On one hand you have God giving his blessings to his own
people. I mean at this point Abraham had become a believer in
God and God was richly blessing him, had promised that he would
be the source of the Messiah, th his lineage would be.
And but it's not just that it was oh old timey and
so they had slaves.
It wasn't that that was then and this is now.
And that's one of the it's one of the things that I
think Americans in particular, but really everyone in the West has been
just fundamentally brain damaged by the post Enlightenment thinking that we've talked
about in the last few episodes about the priors from the Enlightenment,
from the French Revolution in particular, that became our own creed of
liberty being a paramount moral virtue.
When I I hope that we're making the pattern clear that liberty
as it is held up in the secular world is nothing of
the sort.
It is not a blessing.
It's actually a curse.
It is wickedness.
It is itself rebellion against God.
And it And it always follows in the on the heels of
tremendous evil and evil springs from it.
So when slavery existed in these periods, both among believers and among
unbelievers in myriad forms, for example, the the slave that Abraham sent
to find Isaac a wife was certainly one of his most senior
slaves. He would have had a higher station in s in civilization
than the slave who was mucking the stalls.
Now that's that flies in the face of oh we're all created
equal. We all have equality.
No, we don't.
Some men are really only equipped for mucking stalls.
And if that is what you were equipped for, that is a
blessing. Do it, do it well.
If all you can do is clean toilets, make 'em the cleanest
toilets you can.
That is you blessing your neighbors by being the gift that God
wants you to be for your those in your life.
It is not diminishing the value of a man inherently to say
he's only good for shoveling cow manure or cleaning toilets.
It is saying that here's what you can do, do it well.
The men who can do better, who can do more law lofty
and more respected things equally well are given higher station, but God
also spends a great deal of time in Scripture talking about the
fact that you know the first shall be last and the last
shall be first.
Now, it's not only talking about power dynamics, it's not talking about
only the rich and the poor.
Abraham was tremendously wealthy, and he is certainly not the least in
heaven. So I don't want to make it strictly about that, but
it's to say that When you have someone who has a lowly
station in life, maybe someone is a slave of slaves, if they're
a faithful believer, God will reward them.
And the things that they have lacked in this life, God promises
they will receive in the new earth.
And so as we deal with these questions of equality and inequality
and how men rank hierarchically, how we perform our duties hierarchically.
I think it's important to note, as we always say, we're not
talking about our standing before God.
God shows no partiality.
In this life and in the hierarchy of order that God has
instituted, there are differences.
Just as there are differences in the angels, there are angels and
there are archangels.
God is a god of hierarchy and order.
So the fact that we find these patterns in all times and
all places, it's not some historical aberration.
It's not that, oh, they didn't understand democracy yet.
They didn't understand liberty and freedom and equality.
And now that we have those things, we're better than them.
That's absolutely not the case.
These men were living godly lives and they were blessed by God
for it, and that included the inequality of man before man.
And so unlike dealing with slavery in Genesis, the issue is a
more general one in Exodus, and I want to address it more
generally instead of pulling out particular verses and highlighting those because yes,
there are many times that slavery is mentioned, particularly in Genesis, and
the following books where it says that God took them out of
the house of slavery in Egypt, and that phrase out of the
house of slavery is repeated many times, but I want to highlight
something about slavery and Exodus.
Yes, the Israelites are enslaved by the Egyptians in Egypt for centuries.
But slavery itself is never once condemned in Exodus.
In fact, beyond that, Pharaoh and the Egyptians are never condemned for
enslaving the Israelites.
There isn't a single verse condemning that in Scripture.
Not one in Exodus, not one anywhere else.
What is
noted in passing and it could be argued that it is condemned,
and I think it's a fair argument, is is the oppression and
the affliction.
They were mistreating the Israelites as their slaves, because there is a
standard to which slave masters are held with regard to their slaves.
That comes later in Scripture, but that is relevant here.
And so when they tell them you don't get hay, but you
still have to make bricks, that's mistreating your slaves, and that's not
acceptable. But reducing them to slavery and keeping them as slaves is
not condemned.
What is condemned, what God makes the point in Exodus is that
ultimately the Israelites, even though they are for a time slaves to
the Egyptians, they belong to God.
They're his slaves, he owns them.
And so when he tells Pharaoh, give me my property, and Pharaoh
says
no, that's the problem.
The problem is not that they were reduced to slavery, not they
were kept as slaves, not they were treated as slaves.
The problem is that they were not given back to God when
he told Pharaoh, give me back my people that they may go
and serve me.
Yeah,
it's absolutely the case.
When f when God said let my people go, we ignore the
my part.
That's possessive.
God is saying, These are mine, you've had them, I want them
back. As you said, Pharaoh said no.
That was the entire problem.
There were other slaves in Egypt.
In fact, as an Egyptian, you belonged to the Pharaoh.
You had to worship Pharaoh as God, which was another part of
of the problem God was dealing with was the Egyptians' idolatry.
But there was no notion that oh no slavery is bad, you
need to free all the people who are captive.
Every Egyptian was fundamentally a captive to the Pharaoh.
God was saying, the Israelites are mine, I want 'em back.
If you don't do it, these are the consequences.
And the consequences, as you said last week, included God delivering genocide
against the Egyptians as judgment for not giving God his property, his
people.
And
when God says let my people go, because it does say that,
it says in one place, let my son go, that he may
serve me.
Let my people go, that they may serve me.
It's always the point of letting them go so they may serve
their ultimate master, which of course is God.
It's not letting them free, it's not liberating them, it is transferring
them to their rightful master.
Because as we will get into in the New Testament, certainly, we
are all slaves of God And that is a fundamental truth of
the Christian faith.
You are God's property.
You cannot be anything else.
Even if you are in rebellion, you're still God's property.
You are just rebellious useless property instead of useful property.
Those terms mean something, and we'll get into that soon enough as
well.
I
want to specifically highlight Exodus twenty-one where it talks about the rules
for slaves just because it explicitly eliminates several of the claims that
are made that while ancient slavery was one sort of thing, but
more modern forms of slavery, particularly as we had in the antebellum
south, those were evil.
The stuff before wasn't evil and there are certain patterns that are
permissible or impermissible.
I'm going to read this passage and just point out a couple
things because it's vital to dismissing those arguments against slavery per se.
Now these are the rules that you shall set before them.
When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and
in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.
If he comes in single, he shall go out single.
If he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with
him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him
sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her masters,
and he shall go out alone.
But if the slave plainly says, I love my master, my wife,
and my children, I will not go out free, then his master
shall bring him to God, and he shall bring him to the
door or to the door post, and his master shall bore his
ear through with an all, and he shall be his slave forever.
Now two things there.
One, slavery was permitted for life, two, you could absolutely be born
into slavery.
So those are claims that are made elsewhere in history as oh
well one kind of slavery back in the olden Bible days was
maybe that was okay for a time, but what they did over
here was evil.
Well, two of those specific examples are shown here.
You can absolutely be born into slavery and you can be owned
your entire life.
And as as Corey mentioned earlier, the ESV butchers the word slave
in most In most places in scripture, it's it's one of the
few places where modern corrupt thinking is snuck into it.
In some of the later quotes from the New Testament, I went
in and just edited it because it was nonsense.
when you read the term bond servant, just read slave.
When you t read the word servant, you should usually think slave.
There may be cases where it was actually closer to a servant
like Potiphar's servant.
You know, th they're they're very highly placed men who are
they're given higher status in l in life, but fundamentally they're still
slaves, which is to say fundamentally they're still owned by another man,
which is the definition of a slave.
It is not social status principally.
It is not wealth principally.
It is are you free to go to come and go as
you please and to do as you please without another other m
another man saying no, you may not do this.
So
in scripture and in time after scripture, that is the fundamental definition
of slavery.
If you're owned, even for a time.
I have ancestors I know, one who came over on the Mayflower,
who was an indentured servant.
He was effectively a slave.
He was a slave for a period of time while he worked
off a debt.
But nevertheless he was owned.
He was not free to come and go as he pleased.
He had to rack up a certain amount of profit for his
owner before he could be freed, before the indenture ended.
And so we play these word games because we get in the
twenty first century we go so squeamish about the very word slavery,
but if you look at things just plainly in terms of well,
m one man owns another man and determines what he can and
cannot do, that is not inherently a moral question.
And the second part of the Exodus twenty one passage I just
want to mention briefly, when a man sells his daughter as a
slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do.
If she does not please her master who has designated her for
himself, then he shall sell her he shall let her be redeemed.
He shall have no right to sell her to foreign people, since
he has broken faith with her.
Now God is literally saying when a man sells his daughter,
so this also acknowledges that the oranges of slavery are not necessarily
kidnapping, which we'll get to later.
There can be conquest, there can be transfer of title.
And God acknowledges that it is permissible in principle morally for a
man, for a father, to transfer the title of his daughter to
someone else as property.
That's utterly shocking to us.
I don't like the sound of it.
I'm not I'm not saying, oh, this is great.
I'm saying this is what God says and we don't get to
accuse God of sin.
So if you hear an argument in favor of abolition that says
these are sins, just know that the man who's making that argument
is accusing God of sin.
That's why I wanted to highlight Exodus twenty-one particularly, because it puts
to death several notions that say, well, this slavery was okay, but
this slavery is bad.
No. The slavery that was seen in the West in the latter
eighteenth, nineteenth century was itself somewhere in the middle on the scale
of how bad slavery could get for people.
We'll get to some examples of what slavery was like in Roman
days that were far worse than anything that we've ever even heard
about in our days.
So don't let someone try to pluck things out of history and
then misconstrue them in ways that can lead to conclusions that condemn
God.
It
is also worth noting that God permits corporal punishment of your slaves
here, the only restrictions being that if you kill your slave, you
are to be punished unless he survives for a day or two
after you inflict the injury that ultimately causes his death, and if
you damage his eye or his tooth, he is allowed to go
free. And so even physically punishing your slaves is permitted in scripture,
and so those who argue that, well, they whipped them or beat
them, that's permitted by God.
You cannot argue that is sin, that is something God says is
fine. And it is also worth highlighting that God says that you
are not allowed to sell your women to foreign peoples.
Perhaps for a future episode on another topic, but it's worth noting
that is in scripture, that is a restriction here.
Since Since you brought up the the difference there between servant and
slave, and yes, the ESV and other modern translations sometimes play games
with that, which is unfortunate.
We have several places in Scripture where it's extremely clear that there
is a difference between these and just what that difference is.
I will pull up that verse here helps if I'm not typing
in Greek.
In Mark ten, you have Christ speaking, but it shall not be
so among you speaking as those who lord over others amongst the
the heathen, but whoever would be great among you must be your
servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of
all. Well we have the two words right there, both servant and
slave clearly differentiated, and so it's inexcusable that some of these translations
play games with the word dulos, which is what slave is there,
and servant is diaconos.
So we have both of these terms, and they are different, they're
used in scripture, they're used in the exact same passages, contrasting.
So we need We know what these terms mean.
Modern translations should not get away with the little games they like
to play.
I don't mind bondservant because bondservant historically is basically equivalent to slave.
The
the problem with bondservant is it's like chattel.
You mentioned chattel slavery last week.
Chattel slavery is
it is.
It's a redundancy.
And the the problem is that when modern years hear bondservant, everyone
wants to like pop in the monocle and nod sagely, oh yes,
bondservant. Like no, they were slaves.
They were slaves with a price.
They were not their own.
They were bought with a price.
We're gonna get to that passage.
It was very clearly understood that regardless of the terms and conditions
of the slavery.
Maybe it was ownership, maybe it was a lease, which is basically
what bond servants are.
You're still a slave.
You're still owned.
You're still property in the custody of someone who determines what you
can and cannot do.
And so when terms like bondservant and chattel get thrown around, our
brains check out and like, oh well that yeah, that's that's a
it's that special magical Bible thing.
Like no man.
it's just a basic term for a legal concept.
There's nothing sophisticated about it.
But when people are permitted they permit themselves to be divorced from
what was actually happening, we get lazy and say, well that doesn't
apply to me.
That doesn't apply to this.
That doesn't apply to that.
You just you tune out and say oh bond servant, whatever that
is, it's I guess they had that, but we don't have those
anymore, so I can ignore that passage.
And that's fundamentally the point that I think we need to make.
Yeah,
there are a lot of different historical terms for different types of
slavery. Is really what it comes down to.
Bond servant is one, serfs, by and large, were slaves, indentured servitude,
also slaves, slaves for a period of time, often treated actually worse
than slaves, because obviously if you have a slave for a period
of time, it can set up a perverse incentive if you're the
sort of person who is weak to that.
And that was the case for some of the slave owners in
the colonies certainly, because they realized the indentured servant they had for
X number of years, whereas the slave, you have the slave for
his entire life, you don't need to get as much work out
of him as possible in this set period of time.
And we see the same.
The reason I bring it up is partly because that is our
own context, but partly that's also the same two-tier system that we
see in scripture.
Because God permitted the Israelites to have their fellow Israelites as slaves,
but they were permitted to have them as slaves only for a
period of six years, and then they were to go free in
the seventh year.
You also have to factor in Jubilee, which makes it a little
more complicated, but that's the basic rule that God gives them.
Whereas foreign slaves could be slaves for life, and you owned their
children and their grandchildren, their great grandchildren, they were your property in
perpetuity, whereas your own people had to be permitted to go free
or be redeemed.
And that's really roughly the same thing we saw in the slavery
system in the US, the difference between a slave and an indentured
servant.
And the crucial point to be highlighted in your nation and other
nations is that was fundamentally racial slavery.
God made racial differences in the in the disparate treatment of slaves.
If they were your own people, you get one set of rules.
If they're other nations, other races, they get a different, worse set
of rules.
You treat foreigners worse than you treat your own race.
That was codified by God in the law regarding the ownership of
human beings.
We don't get to paper that over.
We don't get to ignore it.
We don't get to condemn it.
We have to deal with it head on.
And it's simple reality.
God does not condemn certain things that today's post-Enlightenment, post-French Revolution morality
condemns. And that's why this podcast series exists, is that we're basically
fighting the Enlightenment in reverse.
We're trying to undo the damage done by these perverse moralities that
have been inserted by Satan into our hearts and minds.
W so we're pointing to scripture because people will make arguments on
moral grounds that are not in accord with scripture.
And so I said at the beginning, we're going to ignore some
of the arguments against slavery that are made from scripture because they're
proof texting.
They must necessarily either ignore these passages or condemn them or resort
to Marcionism where you say, well, that was the demiurge, that was
the Old Testament God.
We have a different God now.
Well, yes, some of those people do have, in fact, have a
different God, and that is a that's a dangerous thing that we're
facing today.
And just to highlight that difference from scripture, I'll read one of
the passages that deals with that from Leviticus twenty five.
For they, speaking of the Hebrews, are my servants whom I brought
out of the land of Egypt, they shall not be sold as
slaves. You shall not rule over him ruthlessly but shall fear your
God. As for your male and female slaves, whom you may have,
you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that
are around you.
You may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you,
and their clans that are with you, who have been born in
your land, and they may be your property.
You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as
a possession for ever.
You may make slaves of them, but over your brothers the people
of Israel, you shall not rule, one over another ruthlessly.
And so that emphasizes what was just said.
The Israelites were allowed to purchase as slaves and to keep as
slaves in perpetuity those from other nations.
God commanded them, required of them that they treat their own race
differently from those of a foreign race.
And this is something that shows up in uh first Kings five
when King Solomon is building the temple.
Uh he gets help from King Hiram of Tyre, uh who is
a friend to his father David, and when Solomon was blessed by
God with peace peace and prosperity he had the the means, the
motive and the opportunity to build the temple that David had wanted
to build.
And so as the temple was being built, first Kings five makes
clear in the commentaries go into detail to
bolster the point, there were tens, if not hundreds of thousands of
slaves who were used in the construction of the temple, and King
Solomon in particular used Canaanite slaves, conquered alien race of people,
as slave labor in the construction of the temple.
Now I highlight this fact because the temple is not just like
a building.
The temple
was God's home on earth.
It was where the Holy of Holies was built, where the Ark
of the Covenant was placed, where God had a special presence as
He has never had at any other point in human history.
The temple was blessed by God.
God supervised its construction.
He was talking to Solomon on a regular basis about his its
construction. God knew that these racial Canaanite slaves were being forced to
labor on the temple.
Now the reason I highlight this is that in 1 Kings 6
it mentions when the house was built, it was with stone prepared
at the quarry so that neither hammer nor axe nor any tool
of iron was heard in the house while it was being built.
Now this the temple wasn't even complete at that point, it hadn't
been consecrated, they had not finished it, but it was still such
a holy important
place that they banned hammers and tools so that there would be
no racket, there would be no clatter, the temple was to be
as quiet and solemn as possible.
That's how much they cared about the construction of the temple.
So you cannot ignore the fact that racial slave labor was used
in the construction of the temple.
That is not a small point.
And those slaves were were blessed to be a part of it.
And again, that's part of those two sides of this equation, regardless
of what the Canaanites thought about their slave labor for Solomon, they
were blessed.
They were blessed to be a part of something that was magnificent,
that was blessed by God in it in an absolutely unique way.
And God would not have blessed that if it were not in
perfect accord with his will.
He would not have come down to a place that was evil,
that was tainted by the original sin of racism and slavery because
slaves helped build it.
And yet, these are arguments that we hear in the lips of
some of our own men today.
This is not Christianity.
So these small vignettes that we were plucking from Scripture, we're not
saying that this is the whole point of the Old Testament or
the or the New Testament for that matter.
We're saying that when God mentions as an aside, oh, by the
way, my holy house is built by slave labor who were racially
chosen to be slaves.
We don't get to say yeah, but that's sin.
I don't like that.
God consecrated it by blessing the temple, we do not get to
ignore that and we do not get to dispute it.
I
was going to go to the same place.
I was going to go to First Kings 9, though, where it
is specifically noted that all the people who were left of the
Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, who were
not of the people of Israel, their descendants, who were left after
them in the land, whom the people of Israel were unable to
devote to destruction, these Solomon drafted to be slaves, and so they
are to this day.
But of the people of Israel Solomon made no slaves.
So not only was slave labor used to build the temple, it
was exclusively non-Israelite slave labor, exclusively foreign slave labor.
The first passage in the New Testament that I wanted to highlight
that is one that also disputes one of the other arguments in
favor of
a hypothetical form of freedom that doesn't actually exist.
So this is from Romans 6.
Paul writes, What then?
Are we to sin because we are not under the law but
under grace?
By no means.
Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as
obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either
of sin which leads to death, or of obedience which leaves to
righteousness. But thanks be to God, the you who were once slaves
of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of
teaching to which you were committed, and having been set free from
sin, have become slaves of righteousness.
Now I highlight this because I think this goes back to the
Garden of Eden.
What was the proposition that Satan was making to Eve?
He said, You will not surely die, you will be like God.
And I think that that is the echo that we hear from
the Garden of Eden through scripture up through all the recent historical
events that we mentioned in past episodes through to today.
There it's not a coincidence.
We mentioned last week when we were talking about slavery there that
CFW Walther wrote up in opposition to the abolitionists, and he specifically
mentioned that the people who were abolitionists were overwhelmingly atheists, they were
anarchists, all other manner of evil godless people.
Anarchy in particular is interesting because one of the slogans of anarchy,
which is itself, it it's an anti-government of sorts, but fundamentally it's
just pure hatred of God.
In the 1800s, the slogan that was used among anarchists and is
used to this day, it's still popular.
And you've probably heard it: no gods, no masters.
Well, that's basically what Satan was trying to sell to Eve.
You will be like God, which is saying you're going to be
on equal footing.
You will have no God.
You will have no master.
You will be your own God.
That is that's Luther's explanation of the first commandment that if we
fear, love, and trust nothing above ourselves, we become our own gods.
And every sin is rooted in that disobedience.
Every sin is rooted in I'm God for for the next thirty
seconds I'm gonna do this thing, I'm gonna do it in opposition
to God.
I know what he wants, I'm gonna do something different.
That is saying I am God.
That is a first commandment violation.
It's the most serious sin you can commit because you are in
open defiance.
Anarchy is open defiance of God.
Despising slavery is fundamentally open defiance of God God.
Because what does Paul say here?
He doesn't say you've been set free from sin, and so now
you're free.
He says you're slaves to righteousness.
We've mentioned in past episodes, and one of the reasons that Corey
and I both love to point to Job is that God is
our creator.
And in the the libertarian or the uh Austrian conception of the
creation of property, it's mixing your labor with the soil.
So if you go down out in the wilderness, you dig a
trench, you cut down trees.
The act of taking something that was unclaimed and converting it into
something useful is you making it your property.
Well the very first mixing labor with soil was what God did
when he created Adam.
He mixed his labor with the soil and he formed Adam from
the ground, from the dirt, from the clay.
And so that is why we are God's creature.
He made us.
And the creature creator paradigm is fundamentally one of property.
And that's something that Austrian economics gets right.
That property is made yours by your working with it.
You've made something new.
Now you're claiming it.
The difference is that God is creator, literally created from nothing.
And so all things belong to him.
There's nothing in creation that doesn't belong to God.
Especially us.
And the problem that we face today as Christians when we assume
these egalitarian post-Enlightenment anti-slavery priors is that when you set your morality
in opposition to slavery, you gloss over or you ignore or you
have to repudiate these very passages that are intended for our comfort.
We are slaves to Christ.
We We are slaves to righteousness because we're owned by God twice
over. Every man is owned by God because we're creatures and God
is our creator.
Every Christian is owned twice over by God because God redeemed us.
When he shed his blood for us on the cross, he purchased
us with a price.
And that was the price.
It was his precious blood being shed for the remission of our
sins. That purchase price purchased us back from the damnation we have
earned by our sin.
So we're owned as creatures and we're owned secondarily, well not secondarily,
but we are owned yet again, twice over as Christians, as believers
who are covered in Christ's blood, that is ownership.
When we put put on the cloak of Christ's righteousness, that is
like a yoke of slavery.
Now we don't look at it as a burden, which is the
whole point of this episode.
Slavery is not a burden.
That is the lie that we have been sold for the last
couple of centuries.
That oh if you're a slave, you're burdened.
You're being mistreated, you have to flee.
There's some passages we'll get to in a minute where it specifically
talks about slaves being mistreated and bearing up underneath it, that you
don't flee if you're mistreated, and God certainly doesn't mistreat us.
We are first and foremost his property.
So when Paul writes, when the Holy Spirit writes, we have been
set free from sin to become slaves to righteousness, we need to
take that seriously, and we must be slaves to righteousness.
Now Lutherans get squeamish 'cause well that that doesn't sound like the
gospel. That sounds like is that works righteousness?
No. It's the post soteriological life of the Christian.
You are saved now what?
Now you are to be slaves to righteousness.
It is a word that we must learn to redeem because we
we need to redeem it from our own lies and our own
wayward hearts.
And we need to embrace it because it is God's will for
us to be his slaves again, not to be slaves to Satan
and slaves to sin.
And
when you mentioned that slogan of the anarchist that has long been
their slogan and still is today, it also brings to mind two
other things.
One
quote that is frequently used in this area in one passage of
scripture dealing with the same sort of false conception of freedom, the
literally satanic conception of freedom.
The quote is from the French French Jesuit trained philosopher of the
Enlightenment, what a cursed trivium that is, but Diderot Men will never
be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of
the last priest.
And I would hope, as Christians, and particularly listeners of this podcast,
that people can see the problem with that.
If you want to subvert the king, then you are attempting to
subvert the right rulership.
of your nation, you are attempting to subvert the left hand kingdom
of Christ, and then of course destroying priests is somewhat self-explanatory, I
would think.
The passage from scripture is Isaiah fourteen, of course, it's the
statement that is attributed to Sargon, but really it's Sargon the second,
echoing Satan.
You said in your heart, I will ascend to heaven above the
stars of God, I will set my throne on high, I will
sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the
north, I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will
make myself like the most high.
And that is the cry of every single person who wants to
subvert hierarchy, order, God's intended rule and creation, and it's also the
same cry of every man who sins, because that is exactly what
you're doing when you sin.
You're saying, no, I am my own God.
I will do whatever I want, regardless of what my creator intends
for me or says I must do or must not do.
And that is this false conception of freedom or liberty that has
become one of the core idols of the modern world.
And it's why slavery grates so much against the modern mind, because
it runs directly counter to this idea of unbounded freedom as one
of the highest goods.
Which, of course, is ridiculous because one, there's no such thing as
unbounded freedom, and two, it's not a good, even if you approach
it, attempt to achieve it.
And even today, just as a purely practical matter, we still have
the equivalent of slavery.
We still have actual slavery, but we have the equivalent as well,
because if you're an employee, your employer owns you to a certain
degree. Yes, it may only be for X number of hours per
day, whatever the terms of your contract are, but also you get
less for it, because historically at the very least, and we can
get into more of the history in a little bit, the slave
master had to provide at least basic necessities for the slave clothing,
shelter, food, whereas your employer just pays you some lump sum for
X amount of your time and then good luck deal with everything
else yourself.
In some ways, many modern relationships of employee and employer are worse
than the historical relation of serf and lord or master and slave.
The second passage that I referred to a minute ago, but I
want to read in its entirety is from first Corinthians six.
Paul writes, Do you not know that your bodies are members of
Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them
members of a prostitute?
Never. Or do you not know that he who is joined to
a prostitute becomes one body with her?
For as it is written, the two will become one flesh.
But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with
him, flee from sexual immorality.
Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the
sexually immoral person sins against his own body.
Or do you not know that your body is a temple of
the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God.
You are not your own, for you were bought with a price,
so glorify God in your body.
Now I think the error that we make today is we kind
of gloss over that for you were not your own, for you
were bought with a price.
And we just think of it as kind of you know flowery
language or it's it's nice, it's a sentiment.
When Paul wrote this, the audience of his day knew exactly what
Exactly what he meant because he was writing to believers of all
stripes, of all stations, of all, you know, regardless of their race,
regardless of their where they were in the social hierarchy, he was
saying, you are not your own.
Now that was a a big countercultural thing to be saying to
some of the wealthy people who were his own uh benefactors.
There were some people who were not slaves, who were were rich,
independent citizens of Rome and of other nations.
And so for him to say you are not your own, for
you were bought with the price, I don't want to say it
stings, but it actually would cut to the quick for a man
who would own perhaps hundreds, even maybe even thousands of slaves and
servants, for some of the very wealthy ones, for him to say
you are not your own either, he would know exactly what that
meant. And for the slaves, for the the household slaves for the
muck slaves for the highest or the lowest who were owned as
property, they would hear what I had mentioned earlier, that they are
in fact owned twice over.
They're owned by their masters and they're owned by God.
And so this notion of ownership of humans that is so antithetical
to our ears is not antithetical to the Christian faith.
So I mentioned up front, this is a really important episode because
this is not we're not talking about something that's this weird anachronism.
it's it's a historical blip.
It's something we got rid of, and I'm glad it's gone.
We're talking about
the human condition as it relates to our faith and whether or
not slavery exists today.
I don't have a position on whether it should come back or
not. I don't care.
I don't think that what we have today is an improvement over
what history has shown in the past.
I think in many ways it's far worse.
So if you want to m start making moral arguments apart from
slavery being prevented, I would suggest you not do that because you
might lose strictly on pragmatic grounds.
If the employees of Amazon of Amazon and Jeff Bezos are not
slaves and they're literally working themselves to death in his robot warehouses,
I can show you a system where them being slaves would give
better outcomes in their lives than being almost owned by a man
who can then just dispose of them in a way that scripture
would would condemn if they were his property and yet because they're
not his property, we pretend that they just fall through the cracks.
No, this these are moral matters that are active today, both in
pragmatic terms in our our lives and how our our workplaces and
our societies are structured, they're also fundamentally important in terms of how
we understand the Christian faith.
Because again, if you are slaves to righteousness, and if you are
not your own because you were bought with the price of Christ's
blood on the cross, that
locks you in.
You are shackled by that.
You are in chains for God's sake.
There are things that you can no longer do that you could
do before.
You could do them in ignorance.
It was sinful.
It was wicked.
You didn't know.
Now that you know, now that you are slaves to righteousness, you
must stop doing them because you know that you belong to God.
And so, this the slavery in this ownership stuff, it is not
everything that there is to say about the Christian life.
We don't want to give that impression because ultimately true Christian freedom
is understanding this.
It's freedom in service to Christ.
But the freedom is not an unbounded freedom, as Corey said.
It is freedom that's imperfect in this life because we're still slaves
to sin to some degree.
we're freed by degrees through sanctification.
I don't know how to say that exactly properly.
It's we're both.
We have one foot in both worlds, and it's why in Romans
7, Paul laments his own struggle against this flesh, where he doesn't
do that which he wants to do, but he does the sin
that is within him.
We all face that, and being Christians doesn't end our sinfulness.
But what it does end is our absolute slavery to that sin.
The absolute slavery is ended, and we instead become slaves to righteousness
where we know how to obey God as He wishes.
And so these terms need to make a comeback.
Talking about slavery in favorable terms needs to make a comeback.
Not necessarily just in spiritual terms, but the notion that as a
husband, you are a slave to your family, even as you are
the head, because what can you do?
You can't just go run off and get drunk.
You can't disappear for days at a time.
You must serve them faithfully.
I think the the aspect that's missing from the discussion of master
and slave is that the master is also a slave by degree,
because the master has obligations.
And when you look at the moral obligations in scripture in joining
master's actions, they become slaves to their slaves, not in the same
sense, not in the sense of directing actions one versus the other,
but in the sense that the master has obligations, has a vocation
to preserve the health, the welfare, the spiritual care of those under
his household, those whom he owns.
And so it's not like you have freedom on one hand and
then abject shackled slavery on the other hand.
There are obligations in every direction because God made us as social
creatures and a hierarchy is not in opposition to society.
Hierarchy is the way a godly society functions.
In a godly functioning society, hierarchy will have masters and it will
have slaves by whatever name, but it is not extraction from the
weak and enrichment of the wealthy, it is it's a form of
symbiosis, but in a godly fashion.
And so these terms are not alien to the Christian faith, but
the fact that they become alien to our own minds is why
we are having so many of these problems today.
And you started off that section with a quote from First Corinthians,
but another letter of Paul's was making the round same time, that's
Romans. And that of course starts off
the second word is slave Paulas Dulas Christiesu, Paul a slave
of Christ Jesus.
That is the proper conception of what it means to be a
Christian. You are a slave of Christ.
You are a slave of God because you were bought with a
price. You belong to God.
And And when you bring up the issue of how employees and
others are treated under our current system versus slaves, it it brings
to mind, I don't make it a point of necessarily quoting Kipling
every episode, but it brings to mind a certain line nor call
too loud on freedom to cloak your weariness because that's really what
we're doing.
Our system allows those who are, by virtue of their position and
their power, by virtue of their authority and means, they are masters,
and they are masters over slaves.
You can call them employees, you can call them at will employees,
you can call them whatever it is you like, but it's just
like if you call yourself a president instead of an archbishop or
a district president instead of a bishop.
God doesn't care what you call yourself, God cares what your position
is, what your duties are that flow from that position.
And so
it's going to be the same for these individuals who have the
role of master in our society, but do not live up to
the standard of what a master is supposed to do.
And one of the things a master is supposed to do is
see that his slaves, see that those under him, those entrusted to
his care, see that they are properly instructed in the faith.
Can you name a single master in the left hand kingdom who
does that to any degree?
It'd be a challenge.
there may be a few here and there, but it would certainly
be a challenge.
And there's also the consideration that it's largely and quickly becoming illegal
in our system to do that, but that is a a separate
issue. But I think the when you were mentioning the saint and
sinner the symbol there
What really you're you're touching on is the progressive nature of sanctification.
We are justified, of course, immediately.
Justification is a one-time thing, it is immediate, it is not progressive,
it is not you're justified a little bit now and fully later
on. It's not God does a little and then you do some
or God does a lot and you do some.
It's none of that.
Justification, holy God's work, monergistic
it happens, it's done.
But sanctification is progressive.
We get better over time as we remain in the faith.
No, we're never perfect in this life, but as you progress in
your faith, you will
start to sin less, at least in certain ways.
There comes with that the recognition of more sins.
And so you are never going to get to the point where
you think, I am the holiest person ever to live.
I am without sin.
If you get to that point, you're in a very dangerous place
because you've probably apostatized.
But what you will do is some of those sins that plagued
you in the past, as you are progressively sanctified by the Holy
Spirit, those will fall away.
But the Holy Spirit will point out, well, there's this other thing
over here that you're doing.
And so you'll notice more sins.
And so the Christian life is, of course, one of constant struggle
in this life against sin, against the flesh, against the world, against
the devil.
But there is progress.
it's not a standstill.
It's not stagnation You are getting better as you live as a
Christian.
The next passage that I want to read is from Ephesians 6,
and this is one that is mirrored very closely in Colossians 3.
I'm not going to read both for time, but you should go
read both.
Uh The reason I'm pointing out that it's repeated is that Paul
uses some of the same words verbatim, some of the same phrases.
This highlights that this passage from Ephesians 6 and Colossians 3, it's
not just an aside.
When he says, slaves obey your earthly masters here in a second,
it's not just oh I I'm I'm thinking about this now, so
I'm just gonna mention it.
This was clearly a core part of Paul's preaching.
It was a core part of his ministry to those to whom
he was reaching with the gospel.
And so the fact that we would see phrases repeated verbatim, I
think is significant.
There's not a whole lot of that.
I mean it's almost like you have almost a a synoptic epistle
here, with this passage.
So in Ephesians six, Paul writes, Slaves obey your earthly masters with
fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, not
by the way of eye service as people pleasers, but as slaves
of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service
with a good will, as to the Lord and not to man,
knowing that whatever good anyone does, he will receive back from the
Lord, whether he is a slave or is free.
Masters do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that
he who is both their master and yours in heaven, and that
there is no partiality with him.
So again, Pa Paul is highlighting what I mentioned earlier, the you
were Bob of the Price will hit both the master and the
slave in different ways, but very profoundly.
And so I think we today we gloss over this.
We don't think in terms of master and slave, but I think
I firmly believe that a proper understanding of the Christian faith, which
again can only come from scripture.
Like we're not making anything new up here.
we're going through all of these passages.
They're repeat over and over again.
Slaves, your slaves, be good slaves.
Masters, your masters, be good masters.
There's never any commandment for a slave to run away.
There's never commandment for a master to free his slaves, and we'll
get to Philemon here at the end, but we're saving that for
last for a reason.
But while it is an argument from silence, that works when you're
talking about God, because if God doesn't condemn something as sin, we
can't come along later and say, Well, God just forgot to mention
it. That's not how the Christian faith works.
As I said last week, we don't get to discover new sins.
So we deal with the text that we're given because Scripture is
inspired by the Holy Spirit for us to receive these things.
If it's not there, you don't get to believe it.
And when God doesn't condemn something, you have to assume that's for
a reason.
You must believe that's for a reason.
That's not a wild of something.
That is listening to the voice of God.
And when he's silent, you know that you don't have to worry
about that.
If it were sin, God would tell you in no uncertain terms.
So slaves obey your earthly masters all by itself.
If that were the only passage in scripture, that would be condoning
slavery qua slavery.
And
so when a Christian sees, a modern Christian at least, sees that
we're going to discuss the topic of slavery, probably the first book
that jumps to mind is Philemon.
Because Philemon deals specifically with a runaway slave.
And so
Many modern exegetes, really Isegetes in most cases, will use the book
of Philemon in an attempt to argue that slavery is sinful because
reasons. The problem is, if you actually read Philemon and you have
no excuse not to read Philemon, I'm looking at it right now
open on my computer, it takes up less than my screen.
It is a very short letter.
If you read Philemon, there is no condemnation of slavery in it.
And if you are familiar with Scripture, you should of course know
that coming to Philemon, because Scripture never contradicts Scripture.
God does not change, and so if you are familiar with the
Old Testament, you know that God not only permitted slavery, but gave
slaves to the patriarchs, and to others, Job, for instance, as a
reward, he blessed individuals with slaves, with that form of property, and
so Philemon cannot possibly argue against slavery qua slavery.
And it doesn't.
Because if you look at Philemon, the core of the letter is
Paul returning the runaway slave Onesimus to his master.
That is the core of what this letter is.
Now there's more to the letter, to the specifics of how Paul
is dealing in the letter with Onesimus' master, etc, but the core
of the letter is Paul returning a runaway slave.
There is no way you can conceive of or argue that this
letter is a condemnation of the practice of slavery.
It's an absolutely insane position to take.
And that's why historically, no one has taken that position.
That is a modern innovation.
It is seeking for a conclusion that was predetermined and then attempting
to shoehorn it into scripture instead of reading what is actually on
the page.
One of the things that leapt out to me this past time
that I was reading through was in the second to last paragraph,
he says, So if you consider me your partner, receive him as
you re would receive me.
If he has wronged you at all or owes you anything, charge
that to my account.
Now I think I found that interesting as I was reading through
this in the context of this discussion because what Paul is describing
there is fundamentally transactional.
He is saying, Onesimus is your property.
He is not his own, for he was Bob with the price,
the price that Philemon paid for him, and Philemon, as you as
you mentioned, is a is a very rich man.
You can tell from the context of the letter that he has
a large household.
So for one thing, Onesimus would not be his only slave.
And that is one of the profound arguments from silence we find
here. If this were Paul just trying to be politely correcting the
sin of effectively a parishioner slash patron, he would have said, Hey
man, you need to free all of your slaves.
Don't you know that you're sinning by owning another man?
Not only does he not do that but he effectively says in
that in that passage, I'll buy him from you.
Oh, by the way, you also owe me a great deal.
So if we want to talk about money, maybe you want to
call it even, but I'll leave that up to you.
So it it's very friendly, it's very loving, but it's also very
slick, and I I don't say that in a in a condemning
fashion, but Paul's saying, like, look, this guy who in all likelihood
ran away, there are different theories about how Onesimus ended up in
the same place as Paul.
There's questions surrounding did he steal something, what did he steal, and
perhaps the money is part of that.
I think the one thing that cannot be disputed, the one thing
that is clearly in the text by necessary inference is that Onesimus
stole himself.
He violated the tenth commandment.
He stole his master's property by leaving because he was not his
own. He was bought with a price, the price the Philemon paid.
And so Paul is acknowledging that in the end of this letter,
saying, if he owes you anything, charge it to my account, which
by the way has a substantial credit, so you know, maybe you
don't I don't need to actually pay you any money.
But this isn't fundamentally transactional and not moral.
A little bit of context is necessary here for most modern readers,
because most modern readers are going to miss some of the subtext
here because they don't understand Roman slavery.
First off, under the system of Roman slavery, a slave was not
a person, persona in Latin.
A slave was a race, R E S, a thing, a piece
of property.
Legally that was the status of a slave.
And masters had more or less
absolute authority over their slaves.
There were some reforms here and there in the Roman system that
required, for instance, a reason to beat your slave to death because
originally you didn't even need a reason, but that was the sort
of nature of the reforms that you would have in the Roman
system. And so the ordinary course of events, if a runaway slave
were returned to his master, if Onesimus were returned to Philemon, is
that Philemon would choose between killing him outright or literally branding his
forehead with the Latin word for runaway slave from which we get
fugitive fugitivus, usually just F V G, because Latin used the V
instead of the U.
And so those were the two options.
And if he had been subjected to the latter option, he would
have been branded and then kept as a menial slave, doing manual
labor, most likely, for the rest of his life.
And so that's the subtext you have here.
Paul is saying, I recognize the rights that you have under the
law to dispense with your property.
I am asking you to forego those because of this man's service
to me in my captivity, because he is now a brother in
Christ. He's not saying to free him, he's saying don't kill him
or brand him and make him dig ditches the rest of his
life. And that's a subtext that a modern reader is going to
miss if you are not familiar with Roman slavery, with the system
in which Paul is writing this letter and operating.
And that was something that uh if you happen to get your
hands on the Philemon commentary from Concordia Publishing House for a letter
that's basically one page, the the commentary is hundreds of pages and
there's a lot of great historical context for what slavery was like
in this period.
And that's why I said early on, when people hear stories about
slavery in the Americas, they think, oh, that's the worst it could
possibly be.
No, that was many of those slaves were treated quite well.
Some of them were treated poorly, some were horribly mistreated, which is
expressly condemned by scripture.
No one's okay with that because God says it's sinful.
And even someone who didn't have faith would know that some treatment
is well beyond the line of what is permissible to another human
being. The commentary by Norling from CPH interestingly directly
contradicts the statement that we re read last week from the Missouri
Senate Corporation discussing pro-slavery being an abomination.
What the CPH commentary says is that our modern notions have are
completely anachronistic.
We don't even understand slavery as itself.
We understand the Hollywood version of it.
And when you look at historical slavery, it was fundamental to human
civilization. And so the book goes into great detail on many different
facets of different degrees and categories and ranks of slaves, there were
some slaves who were far richer than anyone who will ever listen
to this podcast.
They're literally millionaires, by by gray stretches, some more than that perhaps.
Yet they were still slaves, meaning they were still owned by other
men. So this modern notion that we have been fed that if
you're a slave, you're basically an animal, there's nothing lower than that.
That's not what slave means.
That's what mistreatment means.
That's what dehumanization means.
There are words for those things, but the word is not slave.
Enslavement doesn't necessarily mean that a sin has occurred.
When Solomon took slaves, he was permitted to do that.
Now, we don't have the legal regime for it today, and so
it's not a question that we need to deal with how might
one become a slave today.
But as Corey mentioned, anyone in prison is functionally a slave.
If they're doing forced labor, they're getting paid I don't know like
twenty five cents a day or something, like it's nominal.
They're slaves.
It's slave labor.
And the thirteenth Amendment permits it because we didn't abolish slavery.
We abolished non-state slavery.
So
these notions had all buried and they
Yes. Which is the are form of slavery we still have.
This is Sparta and the least cool way possible.
Um and so the like the the Philemon book goes or sorry,
I'm the Philemon commentary goes to great lengths to describe all the
various myriad fashions of enslavement and how some of them had very
high social status.
Again, there were the right-hand man in a household mate was usually
going to be a slave.
He would be he would have very high station in life.
He would be paid.
Like these were slaves who were not just given quarters and food,
they were also remunerated, which was something that was done in the
West as well.
Like it's not it's not alien to the concept of a man
owning another man.
Just as today when Jeff Bezos almost owns someone, he pays him
something. It's not nearly enough.
But owning a man is not per se sinful.
Scripture never makes that case.
And even in this in the one epistle that is directly dealing
with a slave, like there's no there's no playing around that Onesimus
was a bond servant or he was this or that.
He was a slave, he was runaway property.
He sinned against Philemon by stealing himself.
And as Cory said, the punishment was death or disfigurement.
Paul was saying he was a useless slave to you, but now
that he has become Christian, I'm getting some use out of him.
So let's get get this useless slave off your books and let's
put him to work as a slave to righteousness.
See, Paul was not asking for a Nesimus' freedom.
He was asking for
the slave to righteousness that he had already become in Christ to
be his sole vocation, so that he was no longer divided between
his obligations to God and in serving Paul and whatever his master
Philemon may have still required of him.
It was transactional, it was for the sake of the church, and
in no way does it in any fashion condemn the institution of
slavery itself, by any means.
There was far worse slavery that occurred in those days, and scripture
remained silent.
Except for saying, Masters, don't do horrible things to your slaves.
Like that's the Christian approach, not abolition, but let's treat them well.
I want to read briefly just because it's directly related to this
from first Peter 2.
Servants. And this is one case where the ESV is not butchering
us, so I left servant here.
It's using a different word, but basically it's the highest form of
slave. Servant here basically means the house slave, so it's still not
a free man.
We're not talking about a butler in a tuxedo.
We're not talking about someone who, you know, is has a savings
account of in his you know we're not talking about Alfred in
Batman. We're talking about someone who's owned by his master.
Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to
the good and gentle, but also to the unjust.
For it is a gracious thing when mindful of God, one endures
sorrows while suffering unjustly.
For what credit is it if when you sin you are beaten
for it you endure?
But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure,
this is a gracious thing in the sight of God, for to
this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving
you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.
He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth.
When he was reviled he did not revile in return, when he
suffered he did not threaten, but continued in trusting himself to him
who judges justly.
He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree that
we might die to sin and live to righteousness.
By his wounds you have been healed, for you were straying like
sheep, but now have been returned to the shepherd and overseer of
your souls.
The reason I read that whole passage, even though the second half
doesn't have anything to do with slavery, is that it does.
That's the gospel.
Christ was a slave for the sake of our righteousness by imputing
his to us the act the of sacrifice that God gave on
the cross was an act of submission.
And so when Christ is given as a model of slavery to
slaves, and we say, ah, slavery's bad, how is that not a
condemnation of Christ?
That's why this is a gospel issue.
That's why this is how Christians need to return to talking.
If you are afraid to say that slavery is good, how do
you deal with passages like this?
How do you deal with the fact that when Paul is a
slave and Christ is described as in as suffering as an example
to slaves?
The only way a Christian faithfully deal with these passages is to
set aside the enlightenment priors that condemn these things and to embrace
that which is holy and then to condemn that which God condemns
as He condemns it.
God condemns cruelty, he condemns being merciless, he condemns being unjust and
unfair. What he does not condemn is that slavery is per se
any of those things.
Slavery can be some or all of those things, slavery can also
be none of those things.
And if and when slavery exists as a human institution, we are
not permitted to say well God doesn't want that either.
That is no longer speaking in God's name.
And this sort of morality has become the norm among us and
is truly destructive.
Again, that's why Stone Choir exists.
We're talking about these things that many pastors are deathly afraid to
talk of for good reason.
There may be people in their parishes, in their pews, in their
congregations who will revolt, who either attack them, try to get them
fired, or just never come back.
Stop giving money.
Like any matter, uh any number of bad things may happen so
socially, organizationally, when someone in the pews hears what God says about
slavery. We don't have to deal with those problems immediately, so we're
free to speak in these terms.
But we need to get as a church back to the point
that all Christians are speaking in the same terms that God uses.
If you can't talk like God, you can't be godly.
And
so I think we'll close out this episode by refuting one salient
argument
not sound but salient argument from the other side.
And that is the hyperfocus on
one Greek word in 1st Timothy 110.
And the word is mistranslated in the ESV as enslavers.
Now it is worth noting
first, this is a hapax legomanon.
It appears once in scripture, and that's right here.
There are some other places where the equivalent concept appears, but it
is obvious that it is the equivalent concept only if you know
what the term means.
And so in this case, to figure out what the term means,
it is entirely proper to turn to extra biblical materials because this
would because this word appears once, again, appears one time in scripture.
The term is anthropodistes, but I went ahead and looked this term
up in various Greek writings.
I looked it up in Plato, Polybius, and Philo
And the term means kidnapper.
And it is worth noting that actually the
Lutheran study bible gets this one absolutely correct.
In the footnote for Timothy one, the Lutheran Study Bible, unlike the
leadership of Synod right now, notes that this term actually means kidnappers,
involved in illegal slave trade.
And that's absolutely what it means.
It does not mean enslavers, it does not mean slave dealers, because
obviously if scripture permits slavery, slave dealing can't be a sin, that
would be a wildly incoherent argument.
And so what this is saying is you cannot set upon your
neighbor in the dead of night, bind him and sell him into
slavery. Because that was something that happened in the ancient world.
That is a sin.
You are not permitted to do that.
That is what is being banned here in first Timothy one ten.
And so when someone tries to make the argument that, well, Scripture
says you can't be an enslaver, and so you can't have slavery
because you can't have slave dealing, point out the actual sense of
this term and the fact that it appears once in Scripture.
You cannot make an argument
about a doctrine from scripture, about a fact from scripture that relies
on a term that appears once, if that argument that you are
making is contrary to the balance of Scripture, you know that obviously
you are wrong, as stated earlier, Scripture does not contradict Scripture.
So Scripture permits slavery, as we very clearly demonstrated it does in
many places, to Does not condemn slavery.
This one word, this Greek word that appears once, cannot possibly be
an argument for condemning slavery qua slavery.
It condemns kidnapping and selling into slavery in an improper way.
This is not a condemnation of taking captives in war that is
permitted in the Old Testament.
It is arguing against this one specific ancient practice that still does
occur in some parts of the world, not as much of a
problem in the Western world, but it still occurs in some places.
That is what is mentioned here in First Timothy, and so that
is how you respond to that particular argument that does unfortunately get
raised by some who have well a mercenary approach to scripture in
order to seek the end they want.
And that's exactly what we see when these questions come up.
We've criticized repeatedly in past episodes.
Men will take modern morality, they will cherry pick one or two
proof texts and nullify the entire history of the Christian faith.
The reason that this term only shows up once in scripture is
that it wasn't that common.
In an environment where s slavery of all kinds was universal.
So on its face, the notion that what they are saying is
the origin of all slavery condemns all slavery just mathematically is it
it's a blatant lie and that's the only response that's necessary to
such a claim.
I think to wrap up here I just want to reiterate that
this is a more important subject than than some of the others.
It's more important than the racism subject, which was also talking about
a made-up sin, because this is a much more fundamental one in
terms of the direct attack on the faith.
We as we say at the beginning, this could have been a
a 20-hour episode.
We could have done a marathon just on the verses dealing with
it. We barely scratched the surface and we really rushed through dealing
with the text we talked about because we wanted want to keep
it under 90 minutes, which we're right at it this time.
So I'm just gonna say there's no way for a Christian to
read the Bible and come away thinking that slavery's sin.
Full stop.
If someone comes to you and says that slavery is a sin,
either they haven't read the Bible or they despise it.
Those are the only two options.
And when it's a Christian who has a collar, you know they've
read the Bible, which means that the only option is they despise
it. And that is a crucial emergency for us facing all of
our denominations today because again we're importing this evil from the world.
Stonequire exists to point out, hey, maybe we believe scripture and if
our modern institutions disagree with it, we figure out what problem we
need to solve there.
But we begin and end in scripture because that is what God
has given to us for the preservation of the faith.
And
if you want a one word not a one word, but a
one line response to anyone who tells you that slavery is a
sin. Jesus Christ is a slave master.
And if you want to follow up, the thing that you want
to hear from him when you get to the judgment room, when
you get to the throne, is well done, good and faithful slave.
I do want to mention one last thing.
I forgot to mention this earlier.
Lord is synonym with master.
Every time you read Lord in Scripture, if you replace that in
your head with Master, it is a synonym.
When you pray the Lord's Prayer, you're praying the Master's Prayer.
It means exactly the same thing.
We are owned by God.
We have a master.
Just as unbelievers have a master.
Their master is Satan.
Our master is Christ.
Our master is God.
So when you say Lord, Lord and you mean it faithfully, you
are saying master, master as someone who is above you.
It's not, you know, we've criticized neighbor as being this nebulous thing.
Lord is not a nebulous thing.
It is not just a cozy relationship.
We have a loving relationship with God because we are adopted as
sons of Christ, as sons of God through Christ's blood.
However, Lord remains master, and that relationship is the reason for the
loving relationship that we had.
He owns us and he loves us.
He could own us and hate us.
And he hates our sin and he hates the evildoers who will
not repent of their sin.
He wishes simultaneously that they become believers through the gospel.
If we cannot speak clearly in these terms, if we cannot call
a Lord Lord and a master, master, and realize that they're the
same, we're losing sight of the God that we claim to confess.
Because you can use all the words, you can quote this the
Bible passages, and you cannot believe in your heart.
That's what we're facing in our churches.
People who say the words, they mouth them.
But when you say God is your master, they rebel and they
say, I have no gods, I have no masters.
It's one or the other.
We all have a master, and either it's sin in the devil
or it is God and his righteousness.
And as Christians, we are blessed to be able to continue to
choose God's righteousness, because that is a gift that comes solely from
God, not through any merit or worthiness in ourselves, it is given
to us freely, and is our duty to share that gospel with
others so that they too can become slaves to God's righteousness.