On today's show, we're still looking at some big questions that often get asked when talking to people about Jesus. This week we're looking at the Bible's position on slavery.
SPEAKER_00The Evangelist Podcast from Revival. Find out what's new in telling people the good news about God, the world, and you. With Andy Brinkley and Glenn Scrivener.
SPEAKER_01Welcome back to the Evangelist Podcast. This is the show where we try to unravel difficulties in sharing the gospel and give a reason for the hope that we have. I'm Andy Brinkley, Revival's Media Producer, and with me is Revival's Evangelist Glenn Scrivener. Hello. Just before we go on, I want to tell you about a valuable resource. It's called the International Daily Prayer Bulletin. It's a small twenty four page booklet that tells thirty-one stories of what God is doing around the world. Did you know that Christian radio programmes are reaching thousands in Thailand? Or that persecution of Christians in China has led to dramatic church growth? Or did you know that God's love is being shown to Syrian refugees? Well you can hear more about it in our prayer bulletin. You can get it free of charge by going to revivalmedia.org slash bulletin. So Glenn, we're looking at slavery, and generally here in England, we're horrified by it, the statistics and stories we hear, etcetera. Why are we a culture that prizes freedom?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well you're right to say that we we hate the idea of slavery today, and there are it's estimated twenty-seven million slaves in the world today, so it's not just a a a problem from the past, it's very much something that that Christians and churches are are fighting still today, and and well, we we all hate uh the idea of slavery, and I I think we we prize freedom so much because uh uh I I think we were meant to flourish and thrive as the people we're meant to be, but but I think our culture in particular uh is very much like the the younger son in in sort of the parable of the prodigal son, you know, going off into the far country to squander the wealth and and you can sort of get that real sense that as as the younger son goes off into the far country to enjoy himself with wild living and the wind's in his hair, you know, he feels very free. Um but I think it's a fine line between being free and being lost. I think um in a in a sense, the minute the the younger son left the father's house, he started to feel very lost and in actually ended up enslaving himself in all sorts of ways. Um you know, in the in the pig sty, he wasn't as free as he wanted to be. And I think our culture uh as well really prizes freedom and wants freedom and longs for freedom, but ends up enslaving itself in all sorts of different ways. But uh but with this with this, you know, real uh uh sense of freedom that that kind of thrills our hearts, uh any talk of slavery uh just smacks of something uh horrendous and old fashioned and um and and quite rightly we're we're we're revulsed by it.
SPEAKER_01So I suppose we need to sort of define slavery when we when we talk about it. Yeah. What what exactly are we talking about in this context?
SPEAKER_03Well, it could be talking about all sorts of different things, couldn't we, with slavery? Um probably what springs to mind mostly today, well, maybe it would be human trafficking and sex trafficking and that kind of thing in terms of modern slavery. Um but I wonder if you stop someone on the street and ask them to think of an example of slavery, they might well uh pick the transag uh transatlantic uh slave trade of the sort of sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, um, which was a particularly horrendous brand of of slavery, you know, stealing people from West Africa and shipping them across to to plantations in the south, uh where they you know die along the way, and then for generations afterwards, uh whole generations growing up in America in slavery, and it's completely a racial thing, uh uh completely money motivated and brutal. Um so that's that's what some people might think of by slavery. But I I would want to sort of uh differentiate that quite clearly from first century slavery in the in the Greco-Roman world, um, which on average, um, scholars say um lasted on average ten years for people, and and in which you s you could sort of be an indentured servant to somebody and pay off debts, or perhaps you're uh uh captured in war and um this is the way that you were sort of uh in rather than being a prisoner of war, you're a slave, or all sorts of reasons why you might get into slavery. It wasn't a racial issue at all in the Greco-Roman world. Uh but I'm not I'm not saying it was a walk in the park either. But again, I would differentiate that again from sort of Hebrew slavery in the Old Testament, where again, sort of where we would sort of uh have bankruptcy, they would basically um put themselves or their families into slavery. So we need to we need to differentiate lots of different kinds of slavery and and when we talk about slavery in the Bible, we're not talking about what people like William Wilberforce in the 19th century opposed so uh so strongly.
SPEAKER_01That's quite a clear distinction, isn't it? Because as you say, you know, you automatically think of Amazing Grace, you know, the uh the film and John Newton and Wilberforce and all that kind of crowd that would were trying to get it out of, you know, ban it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So when you s when you think about films, you might think about Amazing Grace, or there's a film Amistad, which I think was Spielberg, but um and you might think about that as an example of slavery. But why don't we why don't we think of Downton Abbey as well? Yeah. In in terms of you know Upstairs, downstairs. Upstairs, downstairs, and and all that kind of and where where does the line blur? You know, I've I've stayed with Indian families where um they support whole, you know, families of servants, and it's almost the extended family. Yeah. Is that slavery?
SPEAKER_01What's what's going on then? And and you know, missionaries into Africa they would have loads of people working for them. Yes. Um they had a job. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And if they weren't the servants, what yeah, where would they be? So it's not at all obvious what the answer to slavery is in general, because slavery is such a multifaceted thing.
SPEAKER_01So when it says in the Bible um about slaves, I mean Paul doesn't come out and say, you know, you shouldn't have any slaves or anything. No. He says, Come on, slaves, do a do a proper job. You know. It's not all he says. No, no. He says to masters, you know, to to treat your slaves well and that. Yes. But back in in the day, didn't Christians use the Bible to support slavery?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, I I I guess Christians could point to those particular verses. So we're if we're talking about sort of 17th, 18th, 19th century in particular, Christians coming out against slavery, the the reasons why arguments against slavery in the nineteenth century were so biblical was that unfortunately there were many arguments being put in favour of slavery that were biblical and needed biblical answers. And thank God that the biblical answers that were given were the ones that won, and I think they are the stronger arguments from the scriptures. But you could point to the Bible and and just you know pick out things like uh Ephesians 6 or Colossians 3 and 4, which do say, look, slaves do a good job for your master. But no, you know, know that, 1 Corinthians 7, you are the Lord's freed man, and yet, you know, you're a slave in this situation, you know, serve as you're so you would serve Christ, and masters realize that you have a master in heaven. Uh and so in that in that sense, Paul assumes slavery. Now, is that very problematic? Well, I don't know. Imagine if you imagine if you went to India or somewhere. Imagine you went to an area in which there were um, you know, families of household servants, and there was no real way out for those servants. They were with the they were with the families. And then uh imagine that the slave masters, if you want to call them that, were converted to Christ. If you're a pastor, what would you say to the master in that household? In a culture in which this kind of thing just goes on, I don't think you'd just counsel immediate you know, dissolution of the whole enterprise. What you would say is what Paul says, which is treat them well and you know, know that you you know, you master, you're a slave of Christ, says Paul in one Corinthians seven. And you slave, you're the Lord's free man, says Paul in one Corinthians seven. But of course that's not all that Paul says. Paul also says things like uh 1 Timothy 1, that man stealing is a great sin, yeah. Uh which immediately would cut the throat of the of the transatlantic slave trade, that's that's for certain. And I think far more subversively, what Paul does, what the New Testament does with slavery, is not so much a revolt of the slaves, but a kind of a revolt of our thinking, a complete revolution. Paul says in Philippians 2, think about the Lord Jesus Christ, who took the very nature of a slave and as a slave serving us was exalted by you know by the Father to the right hand and uh that actually we we worship someone who was the master who became the slave. So what what Paul is up to is something far deeper than a political movement to abolish slavery. Because of course that option wasn't open to him. You couldn't start a lobby group with you know with Caesar's palace. Let's let's go to Caesar and start a, you know, with placards, no to no to slavery. Like the early church were just not in that position. What they were in a position to do was to model something very different among Christians. And you see with Philemon, for instance, Paul has such familial relations with with this slave and and and deals with Philemon in such an interesting way. So within the church community something different's modelled, but within the New Testament, what you have is such a different vision of of humanity and what service looks like and the freedom that we have in Christ. Um that's the real revolution, not a not a revolt of the slaves.
SPEAKER_01And I mean it talks about in the Old Testament about slaves, and it talks about if a slave wants to become a permanent slave, you know, pin his ear to the doorpost with an all, and then he becomes sort of like a permanent thing, like a bond slave. Yeah. And uh, you know, a slave, if you like, of love.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_01Um and it's a another picture again of of relationship with Christ.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and that's that's in Exodus chapter twenty-one, which which begins, Exodus twenty-one, if you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years, but in the seventh year he shall go free without paying anything. And so always at you know, every seven years there's there's that freedom that's pronounced, and and the seventh of those seven years was the year of Jubilee, which is when you know all the slaves go free and all the land goes you you return to the land and and all this guy, all debts are released and all these sorts of things. Uh course when Jesus comes in Luke chapter four, he unrolls the scroll of Isaiah 61 and says, The year of Jubilee has come, and he says, I have fulfilled it. So here comes Jesus, this sort of fulfilment of of slaves being freed and all that so so when you understand Jesus and who he is and you see how he redeems slavery through himself being a slave, all the things are in in place for us to have our modern views that we have about why you know, why do we th why do we think that slavery is so bad? Because from what I've read of of uh slavery in antiquity, um slaves themselves weren't particularly, you know, ha having these movements for Jubilee, having having these movements for for freedom themselves. Like I say, the you know the average length of slavery was was for ten years and it was a system that everyone just lived with. Um and I think th the reason for that is that in the ancient world you have this very steep hierarchy with sort of the emperor at the top and maybe the gods above the emperor and uh and the slaves are at the bottom, and everyone knows their place, and it's very much upstairs, downstairs, but by with a massive kind of gradient. Very steep incline, all the way up to the you know, the top to the bottom. A and nobody in that those sorts of systems was particularly moving for for a change. And then into this culture comes the Lord Jesus, the Lord who becomes a slave, who is born to the Lord's servant, as Luke one calls Mary, and born as this sort of peasant, this Jew in a backwater of the Roman Empire, this nobody executed as a blasphemer, and the Lord exalts him. Suddenly you've got this massive difference in how you conceive of of society and humanity. That's what makes possible, I think, our modern views on freedom and slavery.
SPEAKER_01But someone might come up to you, Glenn, and they might say, Yeah, but a lot of this is the Bible's fault. If the Bible didn't say all this about slavery, wouldn't we wouldn't have slavery today.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, people do say that. People sort of imagine that if if there was no Bible, you know, no one would have thought of slavery. And yet, you know, in antiquity you've got, you know, Aristotle saying that um that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary but expedient, says Aristotle. From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection and others for rule. And that's just that just seemed utterly natural to the Greek mind of Aristotle. Plato was the same. He says that nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker, and in many ways nature shows among men as as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior. Which is interesting, you know. That's that's like Plato looking at nature and saying It happens there.
SPEAKER_01It happens. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Which I think Plato's got a really strong argument. When you look at nature, don't you don't you exactly see that? Don't you precisely see that some have more and others have less, and some are better at handling their own lives than others. So why not why not give them authority over the people who aren't good at handling their own lives? Yeah, it's it's very obvious, isn't it? You you look at nature, you look at humanity, isn't it obvious that some people are better at ruling than others? Well then, put those who aren't good at ruling under the authority of those who rule, and it wouldn't won't society be better? That's I mean that like if you're just looking at nature, if you're just looking at the way things are, then Aristotle and Plato are right. And against that background, Thomas Jefferson in the the Declaration of Independence, you know, July 4th, we've just had July 4th, in 1776, Thomas Jeff Jefferson introduced the Declaration of Independence uh independence, saying, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Which is a coming from a very different place from Plato and Aristotle, actually. But for some reason Jefferson is able to look at at the world and say, these truths are self-evident, all men are equal. Which is a really odd thing to look at the whole world. Surely when you look at the whole world you you notice rampant inequality when you look at nature. I think if you just look at nature, Aristotle and Plato far more have it right. You know, Plato called slaves living tools, as did Aristotle, living tools. And does not nature tell you that, you know, some people are just born to be tools that are expedient to use and and why not why not enslave them? So I I I So this that's the sort of thought that's going on in antiquity that undergirds slavery and has undergirded slavery throughout human history. And then like an asteroid coming down, the Lord becomes a slave in the midst of that and serves us and he is exalted as as the man among men, Jesus Christ. And he gives us this different vision. So I I I just think it's just it's naive for us to think that without the Bible we'd get rid of this horrible notion of slavery. What Jesus comes and and does through his slavery is redeem slavery and and transform our vision of of of what freedom looks like, what liberty, what equality looks like. Um it it all comes from Jesus. So I think ditch the Bible and y I think you're left with the Aristotle Plato thing. With the Bible, with Jesus, you've got a very different vision.
SPEAKER_01Well, thanks, Len. I think we've uh knocked some of it on the head there. Maybe. Um if you have any comments or you want to share a point that's come to you while you've been listening, then you can do that by just going to revivalmedia.org slash TEP15. Thanks for listening to the Evangelist Podcast. I hope you like listening each week. If so, we'd really appreciate a rating and review on iTunes. It's very easy, just go to revivalmedia.org slash iTunes, and that will take you directly to the podcast page where you can leave us a review. We'd be very happy if you could do that. And there's a book that Glenn's found useful. It's called Atheist Delusions, the Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies by David Bentley Hart.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's a great, it's a fantastic book, and it and I think it it really does knock on the head these sort of myths that we have that without nasty Christians we'd be freed from slaveries and all that sort of stuff. It doesn't just deal with slavery, it deals with all sorts of issues. Um about how the the Christian revolution um in the uh the the early centuries wa was just so profound and so uh like a bolt from the blue that only Jesus Christ and and his gospel can sort of explain our modern world and and why we think in these ways. It's a fantastic read.
SPEAKER_01Okay, great. Well, as I say, that will be a uh a link to that on the web address for this episode. The web address for this episode, which is just simply revivalmedia.org slash T E P fifteen.