WEBVTT 00:00:00.480 --> 00:00:13.200 Hey. Just a heads up that we are dealing with slavery in this episode, both the ancient form and the modern scourge. It's distressing stuff, so please stay safe. 00:00:14.275 --> 00:00:52.155 And they said, well, marriage, family, and the elimination of violence takes the power ultimately from the master and places it somewhere else. So they argue that collectively, those things were meant to lead Christians to becoming abolitionists. They say that it's impossible to practice slavery as it existed in the reco Roman world and actually follow all the teachings and commands of Jesus. The important part about this though, is they didn't say you should Christianize slavery. That's not what they said. 00:00:52.370 --> 00:00:55.730 They ultimately said, the abolitionists said, you just can't do it. 00:00:58.850 --> 00:01:36.485 The bible, in my view, can't be the the real repository of our moral wisdom in any sense because when you go to read it, you are forced to ignore certain passages or reinterpret them rather aggressively to conform to what you now in the twenty first century have every reason to believe is good or a direction worth going socially. So, know, it it is just an inconvenient fact that slavery is endorsed in the Bible. It's it's explicitly endorsed in the Old Testament, and it's it's certainly not repudiated in the New. Right? And, you know, Jesus told slaves to serve their masters and serve their Christian masters especially well. 00:01:36.565 --> 00:01:48.805 So there's no place in the Bible where you can get a a truly compelling case against slavery because the creator of the universe clearly expected slavery to be a humanist. 00:01:48.805 --> 00:02:26.870 Well, except for abolition. That's Sam Harris, the American neuroscientist, philosopher, and outspoken atheist offering a very common complaint about the bible. Christianity can't claim any moral authority because the Bible itself endorses the evil of slavery. In a speech titled A Designer Universe, the Nobel Prize winning physicist Stephen Weinberg declared, and I quote, with or without religion, good people can behave well, and bad people can do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion. 00:02:27.590 --> 00:03:04.905 This statement is often quoted in skeptical circles. In fact, it even comes on a t shirt. Weinberg was in particular talking about the evil of American slavery. He makes the point that preaching in defense of slavery allowed good people of the South in America to feel comfortable perpetuating this dehumanizing practice. Weinberg mentions an anecdote from Mark Twain, the famous American author, who described his mother as a genuinely good person, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery. 00:03:05.065 --> 00:03:45.360 Because in years of living in Antebellum, Missouri, she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. So his point is that the Bible makes good people do bad things. Well, you might imagine that I don't entirely agree with that. It's undeniable that Christians have supported slavery throughout history. I'd just like to point out that good secular humanists have supported slavery through history as well, and I hope I'm not being impolite in greater proportions. 00:03:46.000 --> 00:05:03.800 A strong historical argument can be made that while Christians and secular thinkers could both be found defending slavery, the organized movement to abolish slavery was overwhelmingly Christian in inspiration, in rhetoric, and in leadership. Now I know it's not as cool, but I reckon the more truthful t shirt that would be wearable would say for bad people to turn good, that takes religion, or at least Christianity. Still, we shouldn't rush to William Wilberforce and the Christian abolitionists so quickly that we gloss over the uncomfortable fact that Christians really did use the bible to keep slaves in their place. Secular thinkers defended slavery using science, philosophy, politics, economics, and sheer pragmatism. But there's no doubt many Christians provided sort of moral cover by quoting passages from the Old Testament that seemed to endorse slavery, and passages from the New Testament that seemed to just, at the very least, put up with slavery. 00:05:04.120 --> 00:05:46.235 So here's the thing. What do we do about slavery in the Bible and slavery today? I'm John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions. Every episode of Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture, or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. 00:06:16.585 --> 00:06:37.070 I mean, there's a bunch of things that people kind of get confused. It's because one of the things I would say is that when people compare the two slavery, they tend to think that they're comparing like American slavery to Christian slavery. But that's actually not what's happening. You're talking about American race based chattel slavery to slavery in the Greco Roman Empire. 00:06:37.325 --> 00:07:00.420 That's Esau McAuley. He's the Jonathan Blanchard associate professor of New Testament and public theology at Wheaton College in Illinois. Esau is the author of several books, including his best selling Reading While Black, African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. He's also a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. 00:07:00.740 --> 00:07:11.115 Right. Both of these are like, in this sense, pagan manifestations into which Christianity kind of operates. So both of them were bad. Right? There wasn't like until the Greco 00:07:11.115 --> 00:07:13.275 Roman That's good starting point. A a lot. 00:07:13.275 --> 00:07:15.835 Greco Roman and antebellum slavery were bad. 00:07:16.235 --> 00:07:48.135 Slavery is ancient, even prehistoric. It turns out humans have been pretty horrible to each other from pretty much the starting whistle. Historian David Wengrow suggests that some form of slavery predates agricultural societies that emerged around twelve thousand years ago. There's evidence of social hierarchies and enslavement even among hunter gatherer societies around the Ice Age. One of the first written laws mentioning slavery is from ancient Babylon. 00:07:48.135 --> 00:08:19.850 It's the code of Hammurabi about seventeen hundred fifty BC. It sets out laws for slave ownership, punishments, and what to do with escapes. Slavery eventually became foundational to the economy of Rome. Scholars estimate that anywhere between 1020% of the whole Roman Empire were slaves with a population of around 60,000,000 in the first century. That's six to 12,000,000 slaves. 00:08:20.090 --> 00:09:02.815 Imagine walking along the street of Sydney or Chicago and knowing that, like, one in every seven person that passed you was a slave? When we think of slavery today, though, most of us are probably thinking of American slavery, antebellum slavery. Antebellum just means before the war, before the civil war in America that was fought in large part over the question of slavery. But Esau says there are differences between the kind of slavery we would have seen in the American South in the eighteen hundreds, and Greco Roman slavery, the sort of slavery that the Apostle Paul would have seen in his day. 00:09:03.295 --> 00:09:37.920 Greco Roman slavery, it's kinda hard to talk about one form of Greco Roman slavery. It was different than what happened in America, But there were, you know, there was kind of urban city based slavery where there was like five to 10 people, maybe two to three who were who were living in the house, often with their their their enslavers. And most of what Paul would have seen would have something like urban enslavement. Now, it's that would not necessarily be like the plantations that you see. They were in some kind of rural areas in Rome and also in the antebellum South, but a slave in the Roman world could have had a variety of jobs they wouldn't necessarily consider slave labor. 00:09:37.920 --> 00:09:44.240 So you could be an actress, you could be a like a doctor, you could be a 00:09:45.040 --> 00:09:47.120 like A tutor. A tutor of letters. Tutor. 00:09:47.120 --> 00:10:08.315 Yeah. And so there was no single experience of Roman slavery. What you did have was effectively no legal recourse to mistreatment. So the thing being and you could be sorry, I can't say this so much. You could be a slave of the emperor and own slaves yourself, and work in the government to be a part of of a senior's household. 00:10:08.315 --> 00:10:25.615 So you could be, what you could say, relatively socially powerful or be someone who worked on a plantation. The thing that united you was that you had no legal standings. You couldn't go to court. You couldn't sue. You you your children weren't legally recognized. 00:10:25.855 --> 00:10:55.175 Mhmm. And so, what united Greco Roman slavery was what they called social death, you had no political or cultural power. Now, this is where you get a little bit of controversy around like how to describe what happens. The best stuff that I can say is that it was relatively common for and it's impossible to find out percentages, for slaves to be freed sometime around the age of 30. And in the Roman Empire, when you were freed, you were often given citizenship. 00:10:55.255 --> 00:11:17.480 We do know, and tell me if I'm getting too nerdy, we do know that during, like, Paul's day, around that time, manumage was common enough that they actually passed laws to limit the amount of people you could manumit at one time. Oftentimes, manumission occurred at death. So you die and then you'd manumit your slaves. Now, it's important to say that that was all an issue of social control. Right? 00:11:17.480 --> 00:11:34.605 You should if you're good, I will set you free. So even the relatively, compared to United States, high rate of manumission was meant to keep the slave the enslaved people in line. You could be enslaved because you lost a war. Right? So you go to war, you lost all the people who were brought into slavery. 00:11:35.130 --> 00:11:52.505 You could also be enslaved because you were in debt. You could sell yourself into slavery because of debt. And, oftentimes, this is often happening with women, is that the the a child could be exposed. A female child could be exposed, they didn't wanna keep them. They would just, like, leave them out, and people would come and get the child and then enslave them. 00:11:52.585 --> 00:11:57.865 So the three forms of slavery were debt, war, and kind of exposure. 00:11:58.825 --> 00:12:33.840 Greco Roman slavery was deeply embedded into the economic fabric of the Roman world. And so it's important to remember the kind of cultural river that we're swimming in at this point. There's no insurance in this period, no welfare, No safety net in the Greco Roman world at all. A bad harvest could be catastrophic. So as bizarre as it is for us to think about today, in the ancient world, people literally sold themselves into slavery, just so they could avoid starvation. 00:12:34.160 --> 00:12:58.760 So it wasn't just, warfare that led to slavery or kidnapping or losing a battle to the Romans. It was sometimes people's own choice. What about the earlier slavery of the Old Testament? Slavery seems to be endorsed by God's chosen people, by God himself. At the very least, it's assumed and regulated. 00:12:58.760 --> 00:13:01.080 Take this passage from Leviticus. 00:13:03.240 --> 00:13:32.200 Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you. From them, you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly. Leviticus chapter 25. 00:13:33.320 --> 00:14:07.865 Sounds pretty damning. Now in many cases, these people would have sold themselves into slavery for economic reasons, but still, here's the bible just regulating slavery, not reforming it. On the other hand, there are some hints at striking reforms there in the Old Testament. Take Exodus twenty one sixteen, which specifically prohibits stealing a person to sell them on punishment of death. So that's the core of the slave trade gone. 00:14:08.265 --> 00:14:46.575 Further on in that chapter, there are prohibitions against mistreating slaves. That itself is odd in an ancient setting. Nahum Sanna, who's a Jewish biblical scholar from Brandeis University of Massachusetts, has written this. This law, the protection of slaves from maltreatment by their masters, is found nowhere else in the entire existing corpus of ancient Near Eastern legislation. So slavery is assumed in the Old Testament, but it's also constrained. 00:14:47.295 --> 00:14:57.540 It's similar in the New Testament. Right? Maybe. I mean, the common complaint Yeah. Is that the Bible simply endorses slavery. 00:14:57.700 --> 00:15:07.525 Yeah. There's the Old Testament that's got all sorts of laws about slavery. Yep. And then the New Testament, the apostles say to slaves, obey your masters. 00:15:07.765 --> 00:15:08.165 Yeah. 00:15:08.165 --> 00:15:15.925 That's the simple story, and it's pretty damning. Yeah. Talk us through the data. 00:15:17.030 --> 00:15:41.345 Well, I think it's I think it's really interesting about it's it's it's a little bit I think the question of slavery gets to how you read the bible broadly speaking. I think it's kinda like a key like, maybe an essential question. And I think that what we tend to do when it comes to the issue of slavery is we get shockingly non canonical. Right? We tend to say we're going to focus only on the passage that mentions the word slavery. 00:15:41.550 --> 00:16:21.710 Mhmm. Let me give you some examples as to maybe the best way to talk about this is talk about how the abolitionists, the black Christian abolitionists used the bible to talk about slavery. One of the things they did, I think this is amazing, at least to me, John, I never thought about this, and I was a bible scholar, and I think they're gonna outsmart you too. One of the things that they did is they started arguing about, and these were slave people, they began with the the Christian teaching about marriage and parenting. And they said, hey, the duty of a husband is to love his wife, the duty of the wife is to submit to her husband, but that's impossible if there's a third person who can intervene into that relationship. 00:16:22.190 --> 00:17:01.115 So if a master can intervene and tell a wife to do something and overrule the husband, then you actually can't have Christian marriage and slavery being like, you can't do it. Mhmm. They tell this story of a a kid and the parent calls the kid and and the and the master calls the kid. And they asked the question, who are they supposed to listen to? And they said, if you have, like, Christian marriage and you have children and the family is supposed to be kept together, then you cannot sell or separate a family. 00:17:01.435 --> 00:17:25.085 You can't actually force a family to move. Because once you do that, you're intervening in the family. And so, they're arguing then that, well, then that means that Christian family and Christian marriage is kind of in significant tension with slavery. They also said, hey, the bible says you should bury each other's burdens so fulfill the law of Christ. And he said, well, I can't bear your burdens if you make me do it. 00:17:25.245 --> 00:17:36.045 So, we should be free. They didn't say, hey, let's look at the teachings of Jesus. I mean, there's I wish I could do this. I would just I'll do a little bit more, and then you can interrupt me. They talked about the teachings of Jesus. 00:17:37.370 --> 00:18:04.635 And they said, hey, Jesus, in his first sermon, said that he came to fulfill the law and the prophets. I said, okay, then let's look at the law and the prophets. Well, the prophets often spoke negatively about oppression, and who's more oppressed than the slave. They went to Matthew 25, John, and they said, hey, if you go to Matthew 25, you see a list of the kinds of people whom God's going to condemn you for not caring for. The imprisoned, the hungry, the naked. 00:18:04.635 --> 00:18:35.185 He said, you know who fits this description? All of these people, Enslaved people. He said, okay, the way that you treat them is gonna be the basis of your judgment. They then said, hey, hey, hey, what about this, like, love your neighbor as yourself, and do unto others as they would have them do unto you? And they said, well, to love your neighbor, or to do unto your neighbor what you would have do unto you, requires you to see in your neighbor a person apart from yourself who has duties and rights that you don't control. 00:18:36.130 --> 00:19:04.080 And so it's not loving to actually, like, mistreat your neighbor. The reason this is important is because it begins to explain a lot of the enslaved narratives that begin to be written in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century or the nineteenth century, they're saying, hey, this is the actual experience of slavery, the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass. And they said, okay, you look at how I'm treated and ask, is this loving? Which also leads to kind of counter propaganda. 00:19:04.160 --> 00:19:32.470 These are the stories of the happy slaves. And so even though it may seem like biography is not necessarily exegesis, but it actually was. The slave narratives were a long interpretation of the love command. And so when you begin to look at, like, how they read the bible, they said, well, collectively, if you look at the teachings of the New Testament, you see the New Testament teaches the love of God and love of neighbor. The teaching of the New Testament speaks about the oppression of the poor. 00:19:32.790 --> 00:19:50.005 The the teaching of the New Testament about marriage and family and inter Christian relationships, all of these things exist in significant path, I'm thinking, with with, like, the New Testament. I mean, with with slavery. And so they asked this question. This is, like, this is the other one. They talked about violence. 00:19:50.005 --> 00:20:06.800 It's the the big issue with the issue of violence. Because Paul says in a couple places, do not be harsh with your slaves. Right? Don't even yell at them. And the abolitionists made this argument, which I think is at least interesting whether or not you're convinced by it or not, I think it's interesting. 00:20:07.760 --> 00:20:28.110 They said that slavery can only be maintained by violence. What happens if a slave doesn't do what you want them to do? Well, you have to beat them to get them to obey. Well, if Christianity outlaws violence against the against enslaved people, they argue that it's not slavery. Now, I'm not saying that they're actually correct, I'm talking about the logic of their argument. 00:20:28.110 --> 00:21:14.675 They're saying, in order to have an institution called slavery, it requires complete, unfettered control over the enslaved person. And they said, well, marriage, family, and the elimination of violence takes the power ultimately from the master and places it somewhere else. So they argue that collectively, those things were meant to lead Christians to becoming abolitionists. They say that it's impossible to practice slavery as it existed in the reco Roman world and actually follow all the teachings and commands of Jesus. The important part about this though, is they didn't say you should Christianize slavery. 00:21:14.675 --> 00:21:22.010 That's not what they said. They ultimately said, the abolitionists said, you just can't do it. Made one more argument if I can say more than can I can 00:21:22.010 --> 00:21:23.450 I keep Go going, for 00:21:23.450 --> 00:21:24.170 it, mate? 00:21:25.290 --> 00:21:42.415 They talked about and I think this is really, really interesting about, like, how you do epics. They talked about ceilings and floors. So they said, okay, you have to imagine the church in an empire where there was no votes. You couldn't vote slavery out. I mean, they had no power. 00:21:42.895 --> 00:22:25.320 And so, this, for Paul, they said these are interventions into an empire where the Christian could not actualize their ideals. So, we might compare that to say, what kind of advice would you give to a Christian in a closed Islamic country where they have no access to power? What kind of ethical questions might you say about, like, whether you know, that you wouldn't say in a different context? And they said, what happened is that you then took those bare minimums and you you articulated them as an ideal. And they said that once Christians have access to all the levels of power in the government, in society, and education, then the responsibility of Christians change. 00:22:25.965 --> 00:22:38.605 Because there is no empire to submit to. The abolitionists made this argument. They said, we're a democracy. We're the power. So it's not actually that you submit to, like, the president, you just vote them out. 00:22:38.925 --> 00:23:19.100 And so they said the moral responsibility of a Christian community that own that controls all levels of government is different from a Christian community that control no levels of government. And so when you're in a Christian community that controls all levels of government, you begin to ask the question, what was God's will for human flourishing? So that then gets into, like, a much larger conversation. But they they they basically said, and this is probably what I I might wanna say kind of as a summary, this is what I mean when I talk about Christian theology. One way to deal with difficult problems in in the bible is to kinda, like, take some scissors and they and you cut off the bits that you don't like. 00:23:19.180 --> 00:23:25.915 Go, I don't like this passage, just throw it away. Mhmm. But, ultimately, that ends up making you God. 00:23:26.075 --> 00:23:26.315 Mhmm. 00:23:26.315 --> 00:23:44.800 You create your own canon. Right? You say, I know what is good. And historically, whenever you've had a social consensus, said, oh, we all know what's gonna happen, this will be great for us, It tends to lead to black people in particular being oppressed. Like, the trust us, leave the bible alone hasn't actually ever worked. 00:23:45.040 --> 00:24:03.005 We've often been strongest when we use the bible to push back against society. So what do you do? Well, you do what's called Christian theology. And and this is what I wanna say is is a nuance. You don't set texts aside, you bring them into conversation with one another. 00:24:03.565 --> 00:24:25.735 And so you have to ask the question, right, When I'm thinking about God's purposes in the world, do I think about creation? Right? God created humanity equal. There was no slavery there. You you think of the fundamental narrative that that keeps the that sets the entire story of the bible going, that it's referred to over and over again, is the Exodus narrative. 00:24:26.535 --> 00:24:45.630 You look at and I bet you can do this well. You can bring an old testament person on here. I will take a stand on this ground. That you see laws in the old testament that that are there are no comparable laws anywhere in the ancient Near East around some of the some of the some of the interventions into slavery. I'll give you a couple of them. 00:24:45.630 --> 00:25:17.060 Like, one of them is if a slave from anywhere else, like, escapes and they come to you, they're not they're not to be returned. So the entirety of Israel was a sanctuary city. Yeah. And so the scholars debate this is this is a scholarly debate, but I can talk about it more. The scholars debate whether or not that sanctuary was for foreign slaves who came into United States, into into Israel, or was the slavery, like, within Israel? 00:25:17.060 --> 00:25:44.240 I actually think it was both. Right? I think it was actually a foreign slave who escaped to Israel, were not to be sitting back, and any Israelite who escaped was not to be sitting back. Which meant that, like, every there was no fugitive slave laws in Israel. There's another one that I think is at least interesting that talks about if a slave is injured and they their tooth is knocked out, they need to be freed for compensation for the tooth. 00:25:44.655 --> 00:26:02.720 But the interesting thing about that is it gives the slave legal standing, that the slave was compensated, not necessarily his master. And so you begin to ask this question, okay, I'm looking at the bible. I'm looking at creation. I'm looking at the fall. I'm looking at the exodus. 00:26:03.280 --> 00:26:17.185 I'm looking at God's eschatological redemption of all things. You look at something like Isaiah. And Isaiah says a couple of things. You know, when the messianic age comes, they will study war no more. Well, that's one of the major sources of slavery. 00:26:17.185 --> 00:26:42.885 The end of war means the end of capturing people for slavery. The other major cause of slavery was, like, poverty. Well, the other thing in the messianic age was material abundance. A third thing you might say, well, they said that Israel was supposed to be so glorious and so holy that all the nations of the world were gonna ask, well, how did they get so holy? Well, they they got so holy by the Torah. 00:26:42.885 --> 00:27:03.710 And so then the people were gonna say, well, teach us the Torah. And as soon as you open up the Torah, you know what that actually means? That means the jubilee would have spread to all the surrounding nations if they adopted the Torah. The same manumission after seven years would have would have spread to the nations if they adopted the Torah. The sanctuary places would have expanded if they adopted the Torah. 00:27:03.710 --> 00:27:16.835 But we all know what happens. Right? That the nations don't come and learn from Yahweh. That and which is the reason why they said, when the king comes, then that's going to occur. Well, the the king has come in the person of Jesus. 00:27:17.235 --> 00:27:50.635 And so, if you wanna say, when I imagine God's picture of the kingdom, do I actually see something like a racial hierarchy and slavery, or do I actually see a picture of the messianic age where there is no war, there is no slavery, and there is no oppression? Well, then what does the Christian do? All Christian ethics is informed by our eschatology. What we think is going to happen at the end is brought forward, like, into our lives. So we, as Christians, in the present age, as best as we can, embody the ethics of the kingdom. 00:27:51.140 --> 00:28:16.395 And so, if you were saying Christian theology, a canonical reading of the scriptures leads me to say, no. I think that God intended the tension to resolve on behalf of freedom. Because there is. There's a tension between the slave text in the bible and the liberative kind of ethos of the narrative, and you have to decide. And so you're a theologian. 00:28:16.715 --> 00:28:41.495 Everyone's a theologian. Theologians bringing together bits of the bible, and they say, as I read the entire canon, what is more definitive to how I understand God's purposes in the world? Is it second Timothy chapter six verse one, slays him with your masters, or is it the Exodus narrative? And, you can say that without denying the inspiration of Timothy. You're saying, as I put these texts together, this is how I'm making it count. 00:28:41.495 --> 00:28:54.400 That's what theology is. Right? Mhmm. And so, in some sense, I think the slavery debate is similar. It's wrong to say that every single passage in the bible neatly fits into my framework. 00:28:54.800 --> 00:29:11.875 But I think it best accounts for all of the data, and that's what it means to be a theologian. I think as I looked at the data, I've said the people who saw in this text a god who sets the captives free were better theologians than those who did not. 00:29:12.195 --> 00:29:41.875 It's absolutely true that the New Testament nowhere tells Christians to put an end to slavery. I would wish that that were the case. In fact, it tacitly tolerates slavery when it urges slaves to work hard for their masters, and also urges masters to treat slaves fairly because you also have a master in heaven. That's Colossians chapter three. Now this is not quite approval of slavery. 00:29:41.955 --> 00:30:04.145 It's an instruction about how to live in a seemingly unchangeable Roman system. We need to remember, this is a period where, you know, the church didn't have the Vatican. It wasn't calling the shots. For the first three centuries after Jesus, Christianity was very small. It was a persecuted minority within the Roman world. 00:30:04.385 --> 00:30:25.480 Their power to change any system was basically nil. An analogy might be the instruction in the New Testament to honor and obey the emperor. There are some clear instructions. One Peter chapter two says, fear God, honor the emperor. Paul says something similar in Romans 13. 00:30:25.800 --> 00:30:55.950 Be subject to the governing authorities, And he means the Roman emperor and his representatives. So these instructions, I guess, one way, do tacitly tolerate pagan hereditary dictatorships. That's what the Roman system was. But it can't really be construed as an endorsement of that political setup. It's more like wisdom for living within an as yet unchangeable system. 00:30:56.585 --> 00:31:18.880 But it's not actually a biblical affirmation of the system. I see the instructions about slaves obeying masters in a similar way. That said, there's some more data to include here. The New Testament, for example, does explicitly forbid slave trading. That's in one Timothy chapter one verse nine. 00:31:19.440 --> 00:31:42.295 It it calls it unholy and contrary to sound doctrine. The New Testament also urges slaves to gain their freedom if they're able, and it insists that no one should choose to become a slave. That's one Corinthians seven. That very often happened in the ancient world too. People actually chose to go into slavery for various reasons. 00:31:43.070 --> 00:32:25.600 Almost unbelievably, we have very early evidence just after the New Testament period, so end of first century, that Christians did sometimes sell themselves into slavery in order to donate that sale price to the destitute. That's a pretty extreme attempt to honor Jesus' teaching about caring for the poor. We have instructions in one Clement act actually forbidding that selling yourself for the sake of the poor. In the second and third centuries, Christians took innovative measures to moderate slavery from within. Remus, there's still a tiny minority without any power. 00:32:26.055 --> 00:32:52.800 So by a d 01/15, churches were establishing a dedicated fund for manumission, the formal release of slaves. So you know how, like, we, you know, might put money in a basket or something at at church, and it goes to support ministry. Well, they had a little collection that was just to free local slaves. Amazing stuff. This ministry actually grew to become a really significant aspect of Christian charity in the first few centuries. 00:32:53.120 --> 00:33:14.800 Partly in recognition of this, the emperor Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, granted bishops the authority formally to manumit slaves in church. And as a result of church manumission, the slave would become a Roman citizen. Pretty cool. You've made a brilliant macro case. 00:33:14.960 --> 00:33:15.280 Yeah. 00:33:15.280 --> 00:33:35.855 Great. And and in some ways, you've answered a question I was I was gonna pose immediately after the New Testament period, you know, like in one Clement and in the letters of Ignatius and so on Yeah. You get these attempts to free slaves, like, instantly after the New Testament period. And then you think, but the New Testament doesn't tell them to do that. Why did they do that? 00:33:36.340 --> 00:33:54.685 And I think what you've just said is the answer. Right? Why did they immediately start a regular church collection to buy Demetrius his freedom? And when they bought Demetrius, they did they they they saved up more money and they bought, you know, Brutus. 00:33:55.085 --> 00:34:09.550 Why why did enslaved people join churches? Yeah. I wanna say a couple of things. I wanna a couple of things. Like, I wanna do a little bible stuff if that's a little bit important. 00:34:09.550 --> 00:34:10.670 Yeah. Well, I wanna pin 00:34:10.670 --> 00:34:13.310 you down on on a couple of actual texts in the New Testament. 00:34:13.310 --> 00:34:15.550 Give some text. That's what I mean. I can talk about a text. 00:34:15.550 --> 00:34:19.150 Okay. So you're an Ephesians scholar. Right? You've just had your head in Ephesians. 00:34:19.150 --> 00:34:25.075 I just finished Colossians. So ask me the Colossians and Ephesians. So go ahead. I Okay. I'm literally editing that commentary right now. 00:34:25.075 --> 00:34:26.755 The the Ephesians one or the Colossians one? 00:34:26.755 --> 00:34:29.555 Colossians one, but they're they're they're, you know, they're closely related. 00:34:29.555 --> 00:34:34.195 So the passage is, slaves, submit to your masters. 00:34:35.880 --> 00:35:07.980 Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear and with sincerity of heart just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. Serve wholeheartedly as if you were serving the Lord, not people, because you know that the Lord will reward each one for whatever good they do, whether they are slave or free. Ephesians chapter six. 00:35:09.260 --> 00:35:17.660 Yeah. What is Paul thinking? Is this a contradiction of the beautiful macro story that you've just told? 00:35:18.535 --> 00:35:29.335 Here it goes. This is versus five down and following. Slaves obey your masters. Says obey not submit. Submission is is is related to women and men. 00:35:29.735 --> 00:35:44.820 Slaves obey your earthly masters with respect and fear. And then they actually go we go all we go all the way down. He says all of that stuff about all of those things. Then in verse nine, which people like to pay attention to, and masters treat your slaves in the exact same way. That's actually what he says. 00:35:45.895 --> 00:36:01.260 And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them since you know that he who is both their master and yours is in heaven and there is no favoritism with him. Ephesians chapter six. 00:36:02.540 --> 00:36:04.940 And so he it's just 00:36:04.940 --> 00:36:06.540 the interesting thing about Paul. 00:36:07.420 --> 00:36:28.260 It seems like he is affirming the status quo. Slaves, obey your masters. But then in verse nine, he says masters treat in the same way. So that means that masters were to obey like slaves? And that seems so radical that people think it can't actually mean that. 00:36:28.260 --> 00:36:59.110 They're like, treat your slaves in the same way. So he's saying in the exact same way that you want the slaves to treat you, you treat them. There is no there is no ancient text that is asking for a reciprocal relationship between slaves and masters. So I think what's happening there, and this is where you wanna be honest, right, the revolution is not complete, right, Paul does not, like, abolish slavery. He says that, okay, in the world that we have, there will still be slaves and masters. 00:36:59.510 --> 00:37:18.460 And in the slave master relationship, in general, the the enslaved person should listen to the master. Okay. Understood. Master, you listen to them as well. Well, that also puts you in a larger context, and this is actually where I think the Ephesians five twenty one passage becomes so important. 00:37:18.860 --> 00:37:47.960 Because we often argue as to whether or not this five twenty one submit to one another out of reference to Christ. Whether it relates to marriage or if it's just about the church, well, they're Christians in the church. So, any passage relating to the church influences Christian interaction. So, you have a passage in which Paul is calling for, on one hand, obedience, and on the other hand, reciprocity. Now, if you go over to Colossians, you see a similar phenomenon. 00:37:48.280 --> 00:38:12.870 We go, slaves, submit to your masters all I mean, obey your masters. And then he says, this is really interesting, masters give to your slaves what is just and fair. But, once again, our translation, I think, are influenced by a bunch of other things that are inadequate there. Because the language of fairness is actually the word it's the word for equity. It's the exact same thing that Paul uses, I think, in second Corinthians when they're taking the offering up. 00:38:12.870 --> 00:38:17.030 And he says, I want everyone to get the same thing Mhmm. So that can be equity. 00:38:17.190 --> 00:38:17.750 Yeah. 00:38:17.830 --> 00:38:39.560 Right? So, he doesn't just say treat them fairly in some, like like, you know, whatever society thinks of as fair. He says, actually, masters, you owe your slaves equity. So, if Paul says something like, hey, enslave people, like, everything is not perfect. Right? 00:38:39.560 --> 00:39:02.005 Mhmm. But equity and justice and reciprocity of treatment seems to be Paul undercutting the institution from within. So this is not actually running from these texts in my opinion. Mhmm. It is actually and and this and this is this is kind of what I was what I'm trying to get at. 00:39:02.005 --> 00:39:32.475 And and this is one thing you could you could take a look at. And this is actually whatever you say about men and women in these household codes, and children, and parents, and enslaved, masters. What you see in every case is that Paul putting limits on the person with more power in ways that would have been countercultural. Because in the Roman Empire, a master had total control. He had total power over an enslaved person. 00:39:32.795 --> 00:39:50.660 There is no language of justice and equity. I could talk about what the stoic said. The stoic said, it doesn't matter if you're a slave or free as long as you're free in your mind. Mhmm. But that kind of intellectual kind of mind game doesn't actually lead to a change in the institution. 00:39:51.425 --> 00:40:20.190 It seems that Paul thought that the gospel influenced how people interact with each other in these intimate relationships. And so I don't think that the institution remains unchanged by an intervention with Christianity. And the question then becomes, well, if you have equity, you have justice and reciprocity, well, it makes sense just to make it free. And if there's one person in the first five centuries of the Christian era who is an abolitionist Boom. None of the philosophers. 00:40:20.355 --> 00:40:25.075 None of the other people do it. It's what? You know who it is? Gregory. Gregory. 00:40:25.235 --> 00:40:31.315 So what is it? And and and it's I know. We have one. Right? But it's Christianity one, secular world zero. 00:40:33.650 --> 00:40:58.765 This is what makes Gregory of Ness' speech against slavery, fifteen hundred years before the modern abolition movement, so remarkable. It's a bright beam of light in the dark history of humanity and the church. His argument is the obvious one. Obvious to us now anyway. Human beings are made in the image of God. 00:40:58.765 --> 00:41:55.065 They are therefore equally and inestimably precious and can't belong to anyone. Now this is precisely the premise that would win the day for abolition in the eighteenth century England and nineteenth century America. The preeminent American authority on modern slavery, David Brian Davis, the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, titled his sweeping history of the subject In the Image of God. In it, he points out that the abolition movement in England and then America, at least in part, was the result of what he calls a revivified sense of the image of God in man. Well, Gregory of Nyssa was making this connection as the bishop of a really important region in the Roman Empire in the three hundreds AD. 00:41:55.545 --> 00:41:59.065 Here's a portion of this incredible sermon. 00:42:02.640 --> 00:42:49.845 You condemn man to slavery when his nature is free and possesses free will, and you legislate in competition with God, overturning his law for the human species, The one made on the specific terms that he should be the owner of the earth and appointed to government by the creator, him you bring under the yoke of slavery as though defying and fighting against the divine decree. By dividing the human species in two with slavery and ownership, you have caused it to be enslaved to itself and to be the owner of itself. For what price? Tell me. What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? 00:42:50.245 --> 00:43:11.100 What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many status did you get for selling the being shaped by God? God said, let us make man in our own image and likeness. Genesis one twenty six. 00:43:11.925 --> 00:43:37.920 Whenever a human being is for sale, therefore, nothing less than the owner of the earth is led into the sale room. But has the scrap of paper and the written contract and the counting out of obeles deceived you into thinking yourself the master of the image of God. What folly. Gregory of Nyssa, homily for On Ecclesiastes. 00:43:39.915 --> 00:43:53.515 I have often wondered how different history might have ended up if it was Gregory of Nyssa who had risen to chief prominence and gained the ear of the emperor. 00:43:54.340 --> 00:44:08.180 And so, Gregory saw it. He saw, like, and is rooted in a Christian anthropology. Mhmm. Because part of what it makes slavery this is what I mean when I talk about the the need to be a theologian. Part of what makes slavery justifiable is the anthropology. 00:44:08.835 --> 00:44:40.545 What people think a person is. Which is why in order to have race based chattel slavery, you have to make the person lesser. Once you make the person lesser, you can can you can oppress them. But if a person is a person, which is what the image of God teaches, then the implications of that is, if this is a person, now treat them with justice, equity, and reciprocity, then the natural conclusion is Christian neighborly love requires freedom. And it's more of an indictment on the church that they didn't see that than it is on, like, anything else. 00:44:41.185 --> 00:45:19.190 Now, we did a whole episode on this idea of human beings being made in the image of God. It's episode one seven four titled God's Image. Genesis chapter one gives the radical idea that every human being, male and female, regardless of utility, capacity, is precious to God, made in his image. If you think that through logically, obviously, you can't have slavery in a world where there's the belief in the image of God. Now, Gregory of Nyssa wasn't the only one to have spotted this in the course of history. 00:45:19.670 --> 00:46:18.240 By the fifth and sixth centuries, ransoming captives and freeing slaves, especially war slaves, had become a standard part of Christian moral exhortation. We have a really good letter from Bishop Remigius of Rhymes to King Clovis the first around the year 500, in which the bishop urges the king to free those in bonds. And one day, we really have to do an entire episode on bishop Aligius in the six hundreds AD. He's in the middle of France, and he, frees slaves with his own money at enormous, personal expense, and then goes around France preaching that true conversion to Christ means you have to free your slaves. You can't own slaves and follow Jesus Christ. 00:46:18.400 --> 00:46:56.065 That would be a great episode. So we can say quite firmly that apart from slave rebellions, of course, the only identifiable speeches and efforts to undermine slavery in the ancient and medieval worlds came from Christians. Yes, they were too slow, but they're the only ones doing anything. But after the break, we head to the early modern world when Europeans and Americans forgot what it means to say human beings are made in the image of God. 00:46:57.745 --> 00:47:22.160 On this beautiful day in March, we're called to stand on the right side of history. Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of the millions who suffered the indignity of the slave trade and those who continue to suffer racial discrimination. 00:47:23.815 --> 00:47:41.380 That's the president of Ghana, John Dramani Mahama, who was introducing a resolution at the United Nations to recognize the transatlantic slavery as the gravest crime against humanity. Here's some coverage from the BBC. 00:47:41.860 --> 00:47:58.835 The result of the vote is as follows. In favor, 123 against three abstentions, 52. Therefore, draft resolution a slash eight zero slash l 48 is adopted. The 00:48:01.555 --> 00:48:54.455 Transatlantic slave trade forcibly transported some 12,000,000 African men, women, and children to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. In North America, enslaved Africans began arriving in Virginia in the early sixteen hundreds. In 1662, Virginia declared that children born to enslaved mothers were also enslaved, and that created, obviously, generations of hereditary slavery. The trade surged through the eighteenth century with demand for labor on sugar, tobacco, coffee, and cotton plantations. In eighteen o seven, The United States outlawed the Transatlantic slave trade, but slavery itself continued in the country. 00:48:54.855 --> 00:49:31.150 As plantations expanded, the domestic slave trade grew, separating families and forcing many into really harsh conditions in the Deep South. It took almost another sixty years and a civil war for slavery to be abolished in The United States. Esau McCulley's ancestors were also enslaved on a plantation in Maysville, Alabama, and he tells his family's remarkable story of survival and hope in the book, How Far to the Promised Land. We're gonna put a link to it in the show notes. 00:49:39.150 --> 00:50:07.580 In the South in America, slave were primarily race based. They initially started trying to enslave Native Americans because they could easily escape because they knew the land. That was very difficult. They then had indentured servants who often came to places like Ireland, but they would only serve for seven years, and then they could be as indentured servants, they'd be free and then set free to kind of live. And it's actually the early African Americans enslaved people were indentured servants. 00:50:07.580 --> 00:50:32.260 Some of those happened. They then quickly figured out, oh, if you enslave people from, like, another country and they're black, then you can actually enslave them for life, and that becomes a better financial investment. So, race based chattel slavery was rooted in greed. It was a way to increase profits. In order to increase profits, they turned to justification. 00:50:32.260 --> 00:50:52.280 How do you justify slavery? You dehumanize the person. You say, okay, this person is fit for slavery because they're intellectually and culturally inferior. And so, the racial stereotypes that were kinda latent takes off and they begin to grow as slavery becomes entrenched in America. The last part about slavery, then we talk about the bible. 00:50:52.440 --> 00:51:33.395 It's important to understand that this was not simply there was Christianification. This is also commonly justified in the highest levels of the scientific community. Like professors at Harvard and other places are doing things like measuring skulls and saying, oh, we can tell scientifically. And even one of the funniest, one of the interesting ones was they had even the what becomes the American Academy of Psychiatry initially started one of their earliest things to justifying an intellectual justification for slavery, they they called slave tendency to run away a mental illness. Yeah. 00:51:33.395 --> 00:51:57.070 And so even in, like, the mental health world, it was often also used to justify slavery. So slavery in America then becomes economically, culturally, scientifically, and religiously justified, all of which has the ultimate goal of creating an underclass rooted in like the the oldest sin in the book, which is creed. So that's the historical context, then we can talk about the bible. 00:51:57.815 --> 00:52:09.815 Some skeptical people, thoughtful people, say that the bible really kept slavery alive in America longer than it would have survived if there was no bible. What do you think of that? 00:52:10.295 --> 00:52:27.300 It's not true. So let me let me let's let's let's just, like, look at what happened regionally. Why did slavery end in the North much sooner than it did in the South? Well, because the economic end like, you sorry. The economic engine of the South was cotton. 00:52:27.905 --> 00:52:58.350 And because they weren't the same large plantations, the same economic incentives in both the North Of The United States and in England, slavery ended there. And it was greed and the money that was available to the southerners that led them to double down on the issue of, like, slavery. So I think that you can actually say that it was the economic driver that led to the continue continuation of slavery, not necessarily the bible. 00:52:59.665 --> 00:53:07.185 The cliche is that the South the southerners were the bible people and the northerners were the enlightened, more secular people. 00:53:07.185 --> 00:53:29.965 That's not true. I'm just saying it's like you have Christian abolitionists. And one of the interesting things about this, they talk about this a lot, it is not to me surprising that people with all the economic, political, and social advantages from continuing slavery read the bible in such a way that justified slavery. Because you know who you know who else whose votes never counted? Literally, all black people. 00:53:30.045 --> 00:53:50.000 And when I say about this, this is an important argument. You can say you can just say it maybe it's sixty forty, seventy thirty, however you want to divide the North and the South on the issue of slavery. But you would say the church is divided amongst the empowered class. Interestingly enough, it was 100 to zero amongst the black Christians. 00:53:50.240 --> 00:53:50.480 Yeah. 00:53:50.480 --> 00:54:16.390 There wasn't like 40% of black Christians going, yeah, I I can see how you're reading this. So then, what is it that led all the black Christians to go, this is not right, and only some of the white Christians to say this is not right? Well, maybe what was motivating to get was economic gain. And I think there is a little bit of centering it's ignoring the voice of the black church to ignore the consensus. Because we all said it. 00:54:16.950 --> 00:54:36.185 And, literally, the way of reading the bible that I just articulated to you was available in the eighteen hundreds. We told them. Everybody who reads the canonical way of reading the bible, it was available. Here's the other thing. If the bible was such a great idea, why did they edit it? 00:54:36.185 --> 00:54:48.700 You can look at the slave bible. When they gave the enslaved people my ancestors of the Bible, they said, hey, let's take out the Exodus narrative. Let's take out the prophets, because we don't want them reading that stuff. Mhmm. 00:54:48.940 --> 00:55:35.800 The Slave Bible's official title was Parts of the Holy Bible Selected for the Use of the Negro Slaves in the British West India Islands, published in eighteen o seven. It removed about 90% of the Old Testament and half of the New Testament, producing an approved bible designed to keep slaves in their place. Gone, Galatians three twenty eight, there is neither bond nor free, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. Kept, Ephesians six five, servants, be obedient to them that are your masters. Gone, the entire Exodus story where Moses demands of pharaoh, let my people go. 00:55:36.440 --> 00:55:49.160 There's no giving slaves ideas of freedom in this bible. Of course, you get the idea. The slave bible wasn't just an abridged bible. It was an ideologically edited one. 00:55:50.975 --> 00:56:05.135 During the the Great Awakening, and this is where I mean, the slaves were smart. The Great Awakening happened, they come down to the South. And they're not preaching abolition. Some of them are, but most of them aren't. They're preaching justification by faith and the atoning work of Jesus. 00:56:06.170 --> 00:56:24.375 And the enslaved people were you can read it. They're going, hold on. You're telling me that if if Jesus died for you and for me, and we're both saved on the same basis. Like, he doesn't have to do extra atoning for black people. We both kind of are saved by the same blood of Jesus. 00:56:25.095 --> 00:57:06.950 So that means my humanity and your humanity are basically the same, because he doesn't have to work extra hard to save me. Well, if the justification by faith is true, and your brothers in Christ is true, then why do you enslave me? So actually, it was like they took they took Christian evangelical doctrines and, like, grabbed them and said, hold on. And so it is a it is a oversimplification of the narrative to say that the bible led to the to the continuation of slavery, because you can make a direct link between the continuation of slavery and the economic benefit of people. In the exact same way that you don't need the bible to to further materialism. 00:57:07.350 --> 00:57:15.590 But you can also find Christians today who are saying, yeah, God wants you to be rich. And so, I think that's an oversimplification of the data. 00:57:19.235 --> 00:58:34.890 See yon southern Tamar as she goes weeping from the couch of her master to which she has been first dragged and then thrust away in that after hate which in mean minds sated lust generates towards its victims. Behold her as she goes weeping from the house to the plantation of her ravisher, or it may be sold to the Far South at the instance of a jealous mistress, going along weeping and bearing all the weaknesses and woes of maternity alone. Amid the evening scourgings, the brief and broken slumbers, the morning shell blow and wasting toil, and driver's blasphemies, and hurried meals of insufficient food, and all the paraphernalia of that hell on earth, a Southern cotton plantation. And tell me, what one evil has been perpetrated upon the person of that wretched young woman which is not provided for and sanctioned by the law of slavery, which is not of the essence of the slaveholding power? Jonathan Blanchard, a debate on slavery. 00:58:36.010 --> 00:59:29.615 For twenty four hours spread over four days in October 1845 in the city of Cincinnati, two Presbyterian ministers, Jonathan Blanchard and Nathan Lewis Rice, held vigorous debate in the largest room in the city on the question, is slaveholding in itself sinful? Blanchard was a farmer, a scholar, and a preacher who became Wheaton College's first president. And it's so cool that Esau Macaulay was appointed to the Jonathan Blanchard chair of New Testament and public theology just a few years ago, and my office looks directly out to the beautiful 1860 Blanchard Building. Maybe we'll put a little photo I snapped in the show notes. In the debate, Blanchard took the affirmative. 00:59:29.775 --> 00:59:32.490 Slaveholding is sinful. 00:59:34.570 --> 01:00:08.540 You know, and there are plenty of living instances to show that adultery is no crime when perpetrated upon a slave. Why? Because the principle of slavery is the cattle principle. The slave code here and everywhere, formally and now and ever, places female slaves precisely in the condition of female cattle on a common. It was never contemplated that they should have husbands and their children fathers. 01:00:09.580 --> 01:00:30.520 Oh, listen. When shall I sit down and weep for sorrow while you listen to a minister of the gospel justifying slavery itself as no sin, yet turning around and telling us that he is opposed to the cruel laws of slavery. Jonathan Blanchard, a debate on slavery. 01:00:31.640 --> 01:00:42.545 I'd love a little reflection on Blanchard. Oh, man. Because You you you still hold the Blanchard chair? Yeah? 01:00:42.545 --> 01:00:44.065 Yeah. Have a Blanchard I have a Blanchard chair. 01:00:44.065 --> 01:00:49.745 And we and we look out to the beautiful Blanchard building on campus? Yeah. Tell me that story. 01:00:50.305 --> 01:00:57.320 Blanchard actually was an abolitionist who who argue it's funny. I'm writing a book on this, it's probably that you can hear about it. 01:00:57.320 --> 01:00:57.800 Awesome. 01:00:57.800 --> 01:01:00.520 You didn't know about this? Yeah. It's coming in about two years. 01:01:00.760 --> 01:01:03.240 Yeah. Yeah. Like all my books. 01:01:03.240 --> 01:01:20.815 Yeah. They're coming. But I'm finishing up some so I was Blanchard was a Christian abolitionist who a lot of the arguments that I made, some of them were made by him. Mhmm. And he it was funny, like, it'd be more complicated to tell the entire story, Blanchard. 01:01:21.020 --> 01:01:40.195 He was, like, almost as good as you can get. There was, like, there was kind of, like, the radical abolitionists were, like, the absolute equality people. He was an abolitionist who kind of was he thought the slavery was sinful, but he had a little bit of prejudices that he hadn't completely worked out. 01:01:40.275 --> 01:01:47.715 How does it feel to sit in the Blanchard chair? Just given your history and all of that. I'm just I guess I'm thinking I think it's awesome. 01:01:47.715 --> 01:02:14.585 My first lecture when I gave that's what I mean, I wish you had told me, I wouldn't have had it. My first lecture that I gave when I when I was received the chair was a was a lecture on the bible and slavery where I quoted Blanchard extensively. And I feel like it's interesting. This is what I wanna say that I feel like it's interesting for me, is that sometimes we think about issues of slavery, which was a political and legal issue. Right? 01:02:14.585 --> 01:02:37.895 It was a political issue and a legal issue. And we think that those things are distractions from the gospel. And I think that I am carrying on the word Blanchard in two ways. One, I'm actually picking up the exact issue that he talked about in slavery and freedom, but also, as much as I talk about the ways in which Christianity presses on the issues of the day, that's not new. Right? 01:02:37.895 --> 01:03:14.295 We think of slavery simply as a moral issue, but it was a it was a state policy. And it to me, it means that with wisdom and charity and humility, it is part of the church's job to engage in complex moral reasoning. And this is one of the things I will say about Blanchard that's actually important, that I that I also want to carry on. The abolitionist movement split into, like, a bunch of different, like, pockets. And Blanchard was a part of the abolitionist stream that was very keen to maintain the authority of scripture in the midst of the debates. 01:03:14.855 --> 01:03:29.710 And he was called by his opponents a bad Christian who didn't take the bible seriously because he was an abolitionist. And and Blanchard, amongst others, were people who were saying the bible and justice, not the bible against justice. 01:03:30.175 --> 01:04:14.090 It's well known that the leaders of the modern abolition movements were often outspoken Christians with overtly religious arguments. People like Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce in Britain, and Jonathan Blanchard, William Lloyd Garrison, and, of course, Frederick Douglass in The United States. Abolitionism was not a secular movement. In an interview with the Center for Public Christianity a few years ago, professor Rowan Williams of Cambridge and the former archbishop of Canterbury said these remarkable words. If the abolition of slavery had been left to enlightened secularists in the eighteenth century, we would still be waiting. 01:04:14.490 --> 01:04:32.825 Now that may sound a bit harsh, but Williams has a point. The push to end slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries just was not a secular project. It was a religious one. There was religion on both sides, for sure. It's shameful that that was so. 01:04:33.420 --> 01:05:50.235 The difference is the arguments against slavery were almost entirely religious or quasi religious, whereas the arguments for slavery were economic, scientific, philosophical, and pragmatic, as well as religious. The great American campaigner and former slave, Frederick Douglass, was scathing about churches in particular that supported slavery. In his public lectures on both sides of the Atlantic, he described them as the bulwark of American slavery. To Douglass, slaves supporting churches and theologians were especially culpable partly because they were providing moral cover for an evil economic system, and partly because they were contradicting the very core of their own allegedly biblical beliefs that the creator loves all people stamped with the likeness of the eternal God, as Douglas himself put it in a letter to William Lloyd Garrison. It's clear from his speeches that he believed he was calling churches not forward in a kind of progressive vision of life. 01:05:50.235 --> 01:06:18.975 He was calling them back to their foundational doctrine that all men and women share a common creator and therefore deserve filial love and respect. Yes. Christian acceptance of slavery was an inexcusable blind spot for Christians for centuries. But as Douglas and many others pointed out, it was not an outcome of their Christianity. It was in opposition to it. 01:06:23.775 --> 01:06:55.765 After the civil war, president Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 01/01/1863. This declared all slaves in The United States free. Two years later, on 06/19/1865, union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas to enforce that declaration in the last slavery stronghold. Americans to this day celebrate Juneteenth as the practical end of slavery in The United States. But here's the thing. 01:06:56.300 --> 01:07:11.020 While chattel slavery might be outlawed in every country on Earth, The United Nations estimates that 50,000,000 people today live in conditions of modern slavery. That's after the break. 01:07:12.825 --> 01:07:24.425 And it is easy, as you say, John, for us to think, oh, you know, slavery's been eliminated. It's a thing of the past, and be completely unaware that it's actually more of a problem today than it ever was. 01:07:25.390 --> 01:07:54.185 That's Jim Martin, vice president of spiritual formation at the International Justice Mission. IJM is a Christian human rights organization working to protect people in poverty from violence and exploitation. They work with local authorities to fight slavery, human trafficking, sexual violence, and child abuse, and to strengthen the justice systems so that vulnerable people are protected for the long haul. Buff and I love IJM, so I was thrilled to talk with Jim. 01:07:55.040 --> 01:08:18.355 So we see it in forms all over the world, like human trafficking, forced labor. New things come up all the time because evil is creative, and it it finds its way into places where these days in we're dealing with things like forced labor scamming. 01:08:18.355 --> 01:08:18.675 Yeah. 01:08:18.675 --> 01:09:25.430 So we have these situations where people are transited to these essentially factory buildings where they are forced to be the people who are scamming other people in internet scam situations to the point where, you know, we have millions and millions of people who are trapped in this modern day horror. The interesting thing about slavery today versus two two hundred and fifty years ago is that it's still illegal. So all of these, you know, the work that our brothers and sisters did a couple hundred years ago to make it illegal was was groundbreaking and important. And so all of the forms of slavery that we encounter in today's world are illegal and they're operating underneath either the protection of law and governments or outside of the reach of public justice systems in these various parts of the world. So if you are a person who lives outside of the reach of rule of law, which is a huge number of people in this world today, then what you live under is the rule of might. 01:09:25.430 --> 01:10:45.025 Whoever has a little bit more power than you can use that power to abuse you. So what often happens in various situations, so take forced labor slavery for instance, you have a family who's subsisting and trying to make it in the world and something happens like an illness or some other tragedy where they need a little bit of money, more than they have in savings or something like that, and a money lender comes and says, I'd be happy to lend you this money as long as you give me your child to work on my farm, and they can work off the debt. And usually, that is the the lure that traps then this person or the family in that in that situation of slavery. And they're held there by some form of violence, either the threat of actual physical violence, often verbal abuse is just rife, and they they can't get away under threat of being hurt or even killed. So we have just story after tragic story of people who have been lured by some small loan, any anywhere from 50 to $200 that ends up keeping them trapped for years upon years because of course, they're supposedly working off the debt, but everything's structured in a way where they just get more and more deeply in debt as they go and they never get out. 01:10:45.390 --> 01:11:12.585 So this can happen in labor situations like farms, brick kilns in South Asia, the fishing industry in the Gulf Of Thailand, similar things where people are traveling thinking they have a legitimate work opportunity and they end up arriving in the country. They transit borders. They arrive in this new country where they don't speak the language. They don't know how to get around. Their passport is confiscated, and they're forced to work. 01:11:12.585 --> 01:11:18.390 And they are just held for as long as the perpetrators can physically hold them to do this work. 01:11:18.550 --> 01:11:41.465 We're seeing victims, from over 80 different countries being trafficked into the scam centers. They're specifically playing out across Asia. Criminal networks are luring people with the promise of a job. The job opportunities are be advertised on social media networks by and large. They present completely as a regular job. 01:11:41.465 --> 01:12:17.209 They're recruiting people who often speak English very well, who often have graduate degrees, some level of education. But when the the victims themselves show up at the scam center, their passports are confiscated, they're often subjected to physical or mental abuse, They are often unable to leave, and they find themselves in circumstances that are well beyond their control. This is one of the fastest growing areas of human trafficking in the world. It is highly organized. It's highly, highly profitable, and it's increasingly global. 01:12:19.610 --> 01:13:09.980 That's the director of the International Organization for Migration talking about the rise of forced scamming, especially in Cambodia and Myanmar. At one notorious compound called KK Park on the Thailand Myanmar border, as many as 20,000 people were lured by promises of good jobs and then forced to work up to twenty hours a day running scams, and they were beaten if they missed their set targets. It's really strange to think that those people trying to scam you on the phone, you know, the people you get really annoyed at, may themselves be the victim of human trafficking. Effectively, they're a modern slave. As Jim says, evil can be creative. 01:13:10.460 --> 01:13:34.495 How do we tackle this thing that's hidden in plain sight and so interwoven into society? I mean, the the stuff I might buy at the supermarket or at the the clothing store might have come from a slave situation. So I guess my question is the question many listeners might be, having, what on earth can I do from from my armchair? 01:13:36.080 --> 01:13:59.855 Yeah. It's such a great question. And I think supply chain awareness is really important and helpful and and can help us feel better about our participation in the world from a perspective of first do no harm. Right? We let's let's be careful about what we're doing so that we know we're doing what we can to not exacerbate the the the problem. 01:14:00.650 --> 01:14:31.940 But the real change is going to happen when laws are enforced at the point where the crime is being committed. So I think that there's there's probably two things other than sort of a supply chain awareness. One is find the organizations that are doing this work and demonstrably making change in the world. There are some wonderful small organizations working in specific countries in on the African Continent and in other places. There there are other organizations like IJM. 01:14:31.940 --> 01:15:05.370 There are stateside. There are organizations that are working against against trafficking. These are all wonderful organizations to support because they are gonna engage at the point of need at the height of the abuse and they're gonna bring rescue and restoration and help work to prevent the crime from from continuing, from perpetuating. The so I yeah. I would say without supporting this the the direct service organizations, we're gonna have a hard time actually making a significant dent in this crime. 01:15:05.370 --> 01:15:34.735 So I think that's that's an important thing. Secondly, in places like The United States and in several European countries, in Australia as well, awareness actually matters. So when I learn about the issue of human trafficking and I'm aware of what the hotlines are that I can call when I when I see when I see signs of human trafficking. So whenever I travel now in airports and I see posters with hotline numbers, I think, oh, that's great. I have that number stored in my phone. 01:15:34.815 --> 01:16:14.465 And as a daily citizen when I'm walking around the planet, I just want to be aware because many of our governments in in the parts of the world that I that I live in, in the part of the world that I live in that and that you live in, actually do have this functionality where when they learn of this kind of crime, they can go ahead and prosecute it themselves. They have the resources and they have the skills to do it. And so awareness in those cases actually makes a difference. And so what IJM has decided to do is we're gonna we're gonna focus on the places where the government does not yet have that capability, and we're gonna build that capability into it. And that's what the frontline organizations are doing and I think why it's important to support that work. 01:16:15.290 --> 01:16:47.490 I know I've said it before, but Buff and I really love IJM. And I'd encourage any listeners to go check them out and to consider supporting them. All of us in the wealthy West have touch points with slavery, whether we know it or not. Scammers, yes. But also, often, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, our beloved electronics, a lot of that is supercharged because of modern slavery that's invisible to us. 01:16:48.130 --> 01:17:11.055 I hardly know what to do about it, but supporting an organization like IJM, Christian to the core and so absolutely committed to serving everyone regardless of creed, is a good place to start. No. They didn't sponsor this episode. I just believe in their work. It's not everything, but it's not nothing. 01:17:11.775 --> 01:17:15.695 So I asked Esau Macaulay to reflect on this conundrum a little. 01:17:16.820 --> 01:17:36.185 It is it is nearly impossible for anybody who who lives in a democracy to almost view something as unchangeable. Mhmm. Because we're always an election away. Mhmm. And so our imagination is, if there's something we don't like, we advocate for and the laws change. 01:17:36.185 --> 01:17:37.625 It's kind of how we are there. 01:17:37.625 --> 01:17:38.665 Yeah. Yeah. 01:17:38.905 --> 01:18:17.260 And so whether or not it came to Paul's mind, there'll be a legal situation one day where they could affect national policy seems to be something that, like, him so I'm not even sure the apostles were pragmatic in the sense of saying, until the circumstances change. I think it was more of a pastoral intervention Mhmm. Into a difficult situation. And the very fact that they they engage that system leads them to it's funny because there's no Roman empire to blame. It's like the church is left holding the bill for an empire that it like an empire that it didn't create. 01:18:17.660 --> 01:18:34.075 I use this example in a lot for my students. We talk about this every year in class. And I tell them, hey, students, like, pull out your phones. And they all pull out their phones. I said, okay, like, we've we've done no no research, but like, who made these phones? 01:18:34.075 --> 01:18:51.520 They said, probably someone in some majority world country. I said, were they fed and clothed and paid properly? Like, no, they all make like 2ยข an hour and they're like, you know, working under harsh conditions and I said, you all know this. Right? Like, there's no one actually thinks that the creation of our technologies are fundamentally just. 01:18:51.520 --> 01:19:05.155 And I said, if we extend that to our clothes, our shoes, our all of it. We all know. And I said, well, why don't you all, like, end capitalism? I know it sounds crazy. Right? 01:19:05.155 --> 01:19:32.585 I'm not saying we should be communist, so don't hear me this. Like, I'm saying that we all know that there's a system, right, that operates on the exploitation of an underclass in socialism and communism and in capitalism. We actually can't imagine an economic system that doesn't actually, like, relay on it. And one day, people are gonna look back and go, well, how did the Christians not do anything about that? They go, oh, no. 01:19:32.585 --> 01:19:55.124 What we do is I I I recycled a lot and I, like, I I try to be an ethical Christian in a materialistic culture. Well, no, you're tainted by it. Like, we're all tainted by it. And so, it's easy for us to wave our fingers at the apostles and say, they didn't do enough to resist to resist their system. And, I'm not being flippant when I say, Christian, look in the mirror. 01:19:55.205 --> 01:20:24.365 And, if we were to expand that to, like, so many things that the church knows about, that it just doesn't actually actively engage. We know. I mean, like, when I say this we know, we know that the internet is like a a a a a a significant numbers amount of revenue comes from the exploitation of people in the adult drug industry. And we know it. And we have control of so many levels of power. 01:20:24.605 --> 01:20:53.365 And given the technology, we could actually eliminate it. But somehow, we've kind of got and so what I'm saying to you is, when we see the apostles engaging in a system and saying to a master, I don't care what the government says about all of your power, you have to treat these people with equity, with justice, and with no abuse. Is that everything? No, it's not. It's not everything. 01:20:53.365 --> 01:21:02.300 But is it nothing? It's not nothing. And so I think that then you ask the question. You have these texts. Now we have all of these powers. 01:21:02.860 --> 01:21:25.860 And then you wanna ask, if you had Paul, and he arrives this sorry. This is theology again. You have something like AI, or you have, like, all the medical ethical ethics issues. Well, you're gonna say, well, there's tons of things that Paul didn't imagine, but there's enough of a orientation from the bible to figure out how to answer these questions. So now we ask this question. 01:21:26.340 --> 01:21:53.305 If you have the apostles, when they're addressing a church that has all the economic and political and social power of the church, do you think that the advice would have been the exact same thing that they gave to the people without any power? And so that's part of theological imagination, which leads me to say, no. I think that I'm pretty confident that the the conclusion of the abolitionist got to the heart of what the New Testament was trying to teach and the Old Testament. 01:21:54.180 --> 01:22:08.580 Final question. Put your finger on why you think the Bible says slavery is wrong. What's the central idea that rules out slavery? 01:22:09.965 --> 01:22:33.440 I think creation and new creation. I think when you see creation is the creation all humanity is created in the image of God. And the before the fall, there was no hierarchy. There was, like, mutual love and affection. So God's intention for humanity was never to be enslaved. 01:22:33.760 --> 01:22:53.930 Slavery is a result of the fall. New creation. Also, I don't think anybody actually argues that new creation is gonna involve slavery. So slavery to me is a manifestation of the fall. And what you see is, in a lot of places, God in his grace intervening to undo the effects of the fall. 01:22:54.330 --> 01:23:23.999 In the call of Abraham, in the Exodus narrative, in the vision of the prophets, in climactic in a person of Jesus, who is the image of God and the the forerunner of the new creation. And so I wanna say, like, creation in the image of God being Christ, new creation in Christ, themselves have no slavery involved in them. And so I don't feel like I'm bound by any particular system that is rooted fundamentally as an implication of human sinfulness. 01:23:24.400 --> 01:23:26.240 Mason McAuley, thank you so much. 01:23:26.240 --> 01:23:27.520 Thank you so much for having me. 01:23:48.610 --> 01:24:03.565 Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dickson, produced by Kelly Payne, and directed by the wonderful Mark Hadley. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Siobhan McGinnis, our online librarian. Lindy Leverston remains my wonderful assistant. Santino DeMarco, he's alright too. 01:24:03.565 --> 01:24:22.770 He's chief finance and operations consultant. And our voice actors today are Yannick Laurie and Dakota Love. Love your work, guys. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of undeceptions.com, letting the truth out. An undeceptions podcast.