If the Bible Accepts
Slavery, How Can Slavery be Wrong?
I’ve been reading the book Bounds
of Their Habitation, Race and Religion in American History, by Paul Harvey,
a professor of history at a branch campus of the University of Colorado.[1]
In the first chapters of that book Harvey describes how the racist slaveowners
in the antebellum American south used evangelical Christianity as a foundation
for a theology and social theory that justified and even romanticized the
horrors and injustices of the slave system upon which their economy depended.
In their theology these self-identified Christians pointed to the way that
neither Testament of the Bible ever condemns or rejects slavery. They were
right about that of course. They don’t. In Exodus Moses gets angry with and
kills an overseer of Hebrew slaves and has to flee the country. Exodus thus
condemns the mistreatment of the Hebrew slaves, but it never condemns slavery
as an institution. In the Torah Hebrews are expressly permitted to own slaves
as long as the enslaved person is not another Hebrew. St. Paul never condemns
slavery. At least in texts attributed to him he counsels slaves to be obedient
to their masters. In Philemon he sends a slave back to his slave-owner master.
The slaveowners of the American south understood this truth of Christian
scripture. It never condemns the institution of slavery. These supposed
Christians combined that truth about the Bible with the evangelical belief that
everything in the Bible is divinely inspired. Thus, they insisted, slavery is
part of God’s will for humanity. The Holy Spirit inspired the biblical texts
that accepted it, so it can’t be wrong. They taught this theology to the slaves
and hurled it at northern abolitionists. It constituted a foundational aspect
of their justification of the brutal, inhumane, profoundly unjust, un-Christian,
and sinful institution upon which their economy and their society depended.
So if the Bible accepts and never
condemns slavery, which it undeniably does, how can slavery be wrong? Not many
American Christians today accept the divine sanction of slavery the way their
antebellum ancestors did, yet a great many of them continue to insist that
everything in the Bible is at lease divinely inspired if not actually divinely
dictated. Are they not then faced with a radical inconsistency in their
thinking? Yes they are, and in order to avoid that inconsistency while
maintaining our moral aversion to slavery we must somehow obviate the notion
that the passages in the Bible that accept slavery are divinely inspired. There
are at least two ways to do that. One is to assert that while the Bible is
divinely inspired in everything necessary to salvation it also contains some
human error. The Bible’s acceptance of slavery is human error, therefore the
Bible’s acceptance of slavery is not inconsistent with the Bible’s divine
inspiration. The other is to reject the idea of the divine inspiration of the
Bible altogether and to reject its acceptance of slavery as both inconsistent
with other parts of it and wholly inconsistent with any notion of morality and
justice. I will examine both of these alternatives here.
A great many American Christians
believe that the Bible is divinely inspired in everything necessary for
salvation but that it also contains some human error. In my book Liberating
the Bible, Revised Edition, Volume One,[2]
I (citing the late Marcus Borg) call this position the soft version of the
belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible. It functions well enough as a
refuge for people who must believe in some divine inspiration of the Bible
while being unable to accept everything in it as either factually true or
morally acceptable. Yet as I explain in my book there is a fatal flaw in this
conception. It unavoidable creates the necessity of distinguishing between
those parts of the Bible that one believes are divinely inspired and those that
one believes are not. It is certainly possible to do that, but to do it with
any integrity one must be able to express the criteria one uses to make the
distinction. It is also certainly possible to do that, but any attempt to do it
is necessarily subjective. The stated criteria may be valid for the person
stating them, but there is no way to establish that they are objectively valid
for everyone. There are possible criteria that are wholly contradictory. One
person might say that everything in the Bible is divinely inspired that speaks
of divine love. Another might say that everything in the Bible is divinely
inspired that speaks of divine wrath and judgment. Which is the appropriate
criterion? There is no valid, objective way to answer that question. The notion
that some things in the Bible are divinely inspired and some things are not fails
because of this unavoidable internal contradiction.
The other way to avoid the
conclusion that the things in the Bible that accept slavery are divinely
inspired is to abandon the idea of the divine inspiration of the Bible
altogether. This is the solution I advance in Liberating the Bible. It
is simply undeniable that there are a great many things in the Bible that are
not and cannot be divinely inspired, at least if they’re taken literally the
way that those who insist on divine inspiration always insist we must take them.
No, Joshua did not make the sun stand still in the sky so he would have more
daylight hours to slay his enemies. The author of the book of Joshua thought
that was possible because he thought the sun revolves around the earth as it
appears to do. We know it is impossible because we know that the sun does not
revolve around the earth as it appears to do and that the earth is rapidly
spinning on its axis. There’s no way to stop it, but if you could it would
destroy the earth in an instant. There is no geological evidence for a
universal flood that killed everything living on land except Noah, his family,
and a few animals in a big boat. The story of Noah and the flood is simply not
factually true. The New Testament too contains things that cannot be literally
true. Did Mary and Joseph live in Bethlehem when Jesus was born as Matthew says
or did they live in Nazareth and travel to Bethlehem as Luke says? Both of
those assertions cannot be literally true. Did the Holy Family flee to Egypt
after Jesus’ birth to escape the wrath of King Herod as Matthew says, or did
they not as is unavoidably implied by the fact that no New Testament author
other than Matthew has any awareness of that happening? Was Jesus baptized in
the Jordan by John the Baptist as he is in Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Or did he
encounter John but not get baptized by him as in John? It really can’t be both.
We must assume that God would not make mistakes like these, yet each of these
things is undeniably in the Bible. It is easy to produce other examples of
statements of the impossible and internal contradictions in the Bible. The
notion that any of the Bible is divinely inspired just doesn’t work.
So how then are we to understand
the Bible and its authority, if any? We could reject it as a fraud having no
authority whatsoever. Most of us Christians however are loathe to do that. Here’s
how I propose solving this problem in Liberating
the Bible.
Let me suggest that you think of the Bible as invitation. The
Bible doesn’t dictate truth to us. Rather, its ancient authors say here are the
experiences and understandings of some of your ancient forbears in the faith.
Generation after generation of faithful Jewish and Christian people have found
meaning, hope, comfort, and challenge in these pages. So come on in. Learn what
we have to say. Do the difficult work of really understanding our ancient texts
on their own terms. Then do your own discernment. We did ours, now you do
yours. We hope that what you read here will light your path to God, but we
cannot relieve you of your duty to discern God’s truth for you and your world.
We don’t all say the same thing. We didn’t all understand God the same way. We
didn’t understand the universe and human nature the way you do. But come on in.
Learn from us. There is great wisdom here. Learn from us, but don’t parrot back
what we had to say. We invite you not to rote responses and easy answers. We
invite you to the hard but sacred work of study and discernment. May God be
with you in that work. Amen.[3]
What I propose in this passage is
that we consider the Bible to be what it truly is, a human product created by
human beings as fallible as we are that contains great wisdom but to which we
must bring our own minds, understandings, and questions. Once we see the Bible as
not divinely inspired all of the problems with rejecting the Bible’s acceptance
of slavery disappear (as indeed do a great many other problems that arise when
we cling to the notion of divine biblical inspiration). We are free to read the
Bible as a proclamation of God’s will for peace and freedom for every human
being without getting hung up on expressions of ancient cultural ways and
understandings that no longer apply in our world (if indeed they ever did
properly apply to any other world, which I doubt).
Two hundred years ago many American
Christians thought they could use the Bible to justify and defend slavery and
the sea of horrors associated with it. They were wrong. Their use of the Bible
in this way surely was driven primarily by what they perceived to be their own
economic and social interests. Yet turning the Bible into a justification for
the horrors of race-based slavery in the United States required an
understanding of the Bible and everything in it as divinely inspired. Once that
proposition is accepted seeing the Bible as a justification for slavery is
nearly if not quite totally impossible. Once we understand what the Bible truly
is, namely, a wholly human product, we can free ourselves from erroneous and
even sinful uses of it. May more and more of us come at long last to a proper
understanding of Christianity’s foundational document.
[1]
Harvey, Paul, The Bounds of Their Habitation, Race and Religion in American
History, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland, 2017.
[2]
Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating the Bible, Revised Edition, Volume One,
Approaching the Bible, Coffee Press, 2018.
[3]
Id., page 211. I consider this paragraph to be perhaps the best thing I have
ever written.
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