I am no expert on slavery. I am not an ethicist. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person with an interest in how Christians should think through particular issues. Here I am not trying to talk Christians out of enslaving others; I don’t reckon there’s much danger there—not now, thank God. But from a biblical perspective, slavery is a potentially tricky issue, and there have been many arguments made favoring slavery—or, at least, anti-anti-slavery—based on the Bible. Giving consideration to slavery might provide some guidance to other issues, but, here, I am not talking about those other issues, just slavery.

Can we make an argument against slavery from biblical grounds?

Notice the assignment as I have described it? I have not asked the question, “what does the Bible say about slavery?” Nor have I asked, “Is the Bible opposed to slavery?” These distinct questions are not our concern at the moment, though they are both interesting and overlap with the present task. I want to assume that slavery is wrong, and I want to know how a case against slavery could be based on the Bible?

Assuming that Slavery Is Wrong

Let’s pause. Are we justified in making the assumption that slavery is wrong? The problem with this assumption, as I see it, is twofold: first, our Scripture does not explicitly talk about slavery as being wrong or sinful; and second, most human societies throughout history have countenanced some form of slavery. It is only relatively recently, since the end of the seventeenth century, that the idea gained traction that slavery might be morally problematic. And yet, in general, we do not and ought not to take our cues from society when it comes to morality. Usually we should be wary, dubious, about what society has to teach us about morality. So, if our Scripture does not explicitly condemn slavery, and most human societies have been fine with slavery, why should we consider slavery wrong?

Listen, the answer is yes, we are justified in assuming that slavery is wrong. And we base that belief not so much on Scripture or on society but because we feel it in our bones that slavery is wrong. Okay, right, most people have not felt its wrongness in their bones, I presume; they have been fine with the peculiar institution; and we feel its wrongness because we were raised to feel this way. We have been conditioned against slavery—and people a few hundred years ago were not so conditioned. I recognize this fact of historical situatedness, but that does not mean I think that slavery’s wickedness is conditional on society. (It does seem that Gregory of Nyssa overcame his own historical situatedness and promoted a proto-abolitionism; see, e.g., Tom Holland, ch. 5, pp. 142–43.)

I am trying to put all my philosophical presuppositions—at least the ones I recognize as important here—out on the table so you can recognize them and examine them.

I happen to think that our society has led us in the right direction here, but of course our society has been indelibly marked by Christianity, and while Christians played a part in defending the institution of slavery, there were also plenty of abolitionists motivated by their devotion to Christ.

The apostle Paul says that the works of the flesh are evident, and it is evident to me that enslaving another human being is a work of the flesh.

So, yes, we are justified, at least for the moment, in assuming that slavery is wrong. But there are two reasons that it doesn’t really matter whether this is a correct assumption, and briefly stated, those reasons are the following: (1) we have a habit of constantly examining Scripture, which informs and refines all of our presuppositions, just as our interpretations of Scripture are refined by our life experiences, including the societies in which we live; this is the hermeneutical spiral. (2) For the purposes of this presentation, we can just assume the wickedness of slavery for the sake of argument.

But let me make one more point about this assumption: we should assume the wickedness of slavery until persuaded otherwise. Our default position as human beings, and certainly as Christians, ought to be that owning someone is morally wrong. The burden of proof should be on the one who says that it is not morally wrong.

The Old Testament on Slavery

Neither does this essay concern what the Bible has to say about slavery or whether the Bible is opposed to slavery. Again, let’s pause and consider these points before getting to the main point. The Bible’s depiction of slavery is complicated. As I have said, the Bible never explicitly condemns slavery, though it does mention slavery a number of times. Note, however, that the Bible does not promote slavery. I think you would be hard-pressed to find in the Bible instructions on how to enslave people, or when people deserve slavery, or how best to exploit your slave labor. While the Bible contains a verse instructing Christian disciples to go into the world making disciples of all nations, there is no verse about making slaves of all nations. On the pro-slavery side, the Bible is at best neutral, not promoting it but not explicitly condemning it.

The Bible does mention slavery several times, in the Old Testament and the New—and the essential teaching here in these passages that reference slavery is the regulation of a social reality. The Bible does not say what I wish it said about this issue. (I have mentioned that before.) In the Old Testament, there are instructions for masters, some not altogether pleasant.

​​When you buy a male Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, but in the seventh he shall go out a free person, without debt. If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s and he shall go out alone. But if the slave declares, “I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out a free person,” then his master shall bring him before God. He shall be brought to the door or the doorpost; and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall serve him for life. (Exod 21:2–6; cf. Lev 25:39–55; Deut 15:12–18)

This passage raises for me several questions for which I have no answers. Mostly here the master is addressed. The thoughts of the slave are considered, if he is a male slave, and it is considered possible that he might want to continue his slavery rather than be emancipated. This regulation seems to envision a type of slavery that might not be altogether unwelcome to the slave—or, preferable to some other likely life situations. But that’s as far down that path as I am inclined to go.

On Slavery

Maybe this is a good time to problematize the very notion of slavery. When I say the word “slavery,” what comes to mind? For me, it’s the nineteenth century American South, and the slavery practiced there was chattel slavery, in which people were enslaved for life with no legal recourse, and their children also automatically became life slaves. Slave owners did sometimes emancipate their slaves, but that was at the whim of the slaveowner, and some states had laws in place to discourage or prohibit emancipation. There are stories of slaveowners wanting to emancipate their slaves but being legally prohibited, so they would move to a different state where emancipation was permitted.

As I understand it, the slaves that populated the antebellum southern United States came from Africa, having been kidnapped there and sold to Europeans for transportation across the Atlantic Ocean. The 1789 memoir of Olaudah Equiano describes his own experience of having lived in Africa—probably modern Nigeria—and as a young adolescent being attacked by a neighboring tribe and bopped on the head and shoved in a bag. He grew up free until he was eleven or twelve, and then he was kidnapped.

I wonder how often pro-slavery apologists in the nineteenth century American South allowed themselves to be curious about the origins of these slaves. Yes, they knew they came from Africa, which contributed to an ideology about their fitness for slavery, the idea that they had been savages and that slavery was good for them, domesticated them, or the idea that they were under the curse of God as spelled out in the Bible, the illusory Curse of Ham, supposedly from the end of Genesis 9 but which actually does not exist; there is, however, in Genesis 9, a curse on Canaan, a curse which engenders its own ethical problems, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with Black Africans. But when I ask about whether pro-slavery apologists were curious about the origins of their slaves, I mean not their African descent but how they became slaves, the kidnapping that had to happen for this person to be sold on an auction block in Savannah or New Orleans. My guess is, they refused to think about it. Probably the prohibition of the Atlantic Slave Trade in America in 1808 helped nineteenth century slaveowners ignore how slaves became slaves; from then on, in America, slaves were born slaves—though slaves continued to be imported illegally even until 1873.

I recently read the 1855 defense of slavery by James Shannon, at the time the president of the University of Missouri and a preacher in the Stone-Campbell Movement and sometime associate of Alexander Campbell. In the tract, Shannon never wonders about how the slaves became slaves. I will say that I have had a conversation with a preacher in the Churches of Christ about slavery and racism, and he told me, very confidently, that African slaves in America were the rejects from Africa, the people that the Africans didn’t want anymore, so they expelled them, and sent them to America. This justification for slavery is … um … not accurate. At any rate, whether you come up with an idiotic theory about the curse of Ham or about African rejects, or you just don’t allow yourselves to question the origins of the slaves, it’s certainly easier, on Christian principles, to accept slavery as an existing institution if you don’t connect it to kidnapping. It’s interesting that in one of Paul’s lists of sins, in 1 Timothy 1:10, “menstealing” appears. Of course, the slaveholders in the American South were not doing the actual stealing, just aiding and abetting the stealing, and so they found it easy to justify themselves, like the lawyer who asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbour?”

I’m trying to get to the different types of slavery. I am talking about chattel slavery, which I have described. Other kinds of slavery include debt slavery or slavery created during warfare, perhaps other forms. I have thought much less about these other forms of slavery, and I want to exempt them from my comments today. My comments might apply to them, but I’m not sure. I don’t know about the rules often practiced with those forms of slavery: how to become a slave, how to get out of it, the legal recourse a slave might have. But I will say that all the types of slavery currently practiced, though illegal, such as human trafficking and child slave armies and other types of forced labor, all these types of slavery seem to me clearly immoral and contrary to Christianity as articulated in Christian Scripture.

The New Testament on Slavery

But, like I said, I’m addressing chattel enslavement particularly, the dominant type of slavery in the nineteenth century American South as also in the ancient Greco-Roman world. I’ve briefly mentioned the Old Testament laws on slavery. In the New Testament, the instructions address the slave more than the master. Does this mean that the slave was more likely to be a Christian than was the master? The slave is told to serve his master well. He is not told to seek his freedom. “Were you a slave when called,” Paul asks in 1 Corinthians 7:21. “Do not be concerned about it.” The best way to translate the next phrase in the verse is difficult and debated. The ESV says: “If you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.” In other words, in this interpretation, Paul is acknowledging that freedom is better than slavery, and while the slave should not be overly concerned about his enslavement, he should become free if the opportunity presents itself. But the NRSV doesn’t say “avail yourself of the opportunity,” but rather “make use of your present condition now more than ever.” This seems to mean that you shouldn’t seek your freedom even if you can, but you should serve your master all the more, presumably using the opportunity of living with someone else to testify to the grace of God through Jesus. The KJV represents the Greek most literally: “use it rather,” but what are you supposed to use? The Greek expression is confusing and I’m not sure what it means or how best to translate it. I don’t know what counsel Paul was giving slaves in situations where they might become free.

We do, however, have an entire letter—rather brief by New Testament standards—from Paul to a slavemaster, and the major topic of the letter is an enslaved person. That person’s name is Onesimus, and Philemon is his owner. Again, the correct interpretation of Paul’s intentions in this letter are debated; was Paul subtly telling Philemon to emancipate Onesimus? That seems to me the most likely interpretation, but at any rate what Paul says out in the open in the letter is that Philemon should not treat Onesimus like a runaway slave—though he is that—but like a brother in Christ. And there are the household codes (e.g. Col 3:18–4:1; Eph 5:21–6:9; 1 Pet 2:17–3:7), which routinely encourage slaves to obey their masters. And yet, the slave is accorded a rare dignity, as the biblical scholar Larry Hurtado pointed out in reference to 1 Peter 2:18–25…

…where the author likens any unjust sufferings that they may bear, likely as Christian slaves of pagan masters, to the sufferings of Christ (vv. 21–25). This linkage of the suffering of slaves with Christ effectively ennobles the situation of slaves, at least at the level of the discourse, a striking step in a world in which slaves typically counted for little as to dignity. Of course, this did not amount to the abolition of slavery or even securing the freedom of slaves, at least at that point. But this sort of compassionate rhetoric addressed to slaves was unusual, if not unique, in the Roman world. (p. 177)

The biblical passages on slavery are not utterly unhelpful from a modern perspective, but clearly they do not go as far as we wish they had.

So, when we turn our attention to biblical passages that mention slavery, we easily see the difficulty with the moral question: the passages mentioning slavery regulate the institution rather than prohibiting it—or, I hasten to add, promoting it. We can see how a pro-slavery apologist could use the Bible, and many of them did. Moreover, the triumph of Christianity within the Roman Empire, the cultural and political triumph, did not lead to the abolition of slavery, and for many centuries it was a fairly common practice for Christians to own slaves. These are the rudiments of the pro-slavery position from the Bible.

A Biblical Argument against Slavery

But let us recall that our question is whether an anti-slavery argument can be made from the Bible. And it’s time that I give this a shot. Enough throat-clearing. To make such an argument my mind gravitates toward an obscure verse in the middle of Leviticus 19 that goes like this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

And that’s it, that’s the argument, the biblical argument against slavery. That didn’t take long.

Well, perhaps there is more to say.

First, it’s hard for me to see how Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” can stand in harmony with the practice of holding someone in bondage against their will and not as punishment for some crime. I don’t even mention the other practices that often accompany enslavement, the beatings, the rapings, the selling of children, the breaking up of families, the things that Frederick Douglass so forcefully disparaged in the appendix to his first memoir.

And then there’s the racism that formed a necessary component of American slavery. These things are so obviously contradictory to Christianity that we need not mention them, and no defender of slavery would defend such practices, not on Christian principles, anyway. Well, they might try to defend racism on Christian principles, even though racism is explicitly condemned in Scripture (see, e.g., Ephesians 2). As for the other things I mentioned, the beatings and rapings and such like, the nineteenth-century Christian defenders of slavery that I have read did not even mention such practices, except to deny their existence, or at least their prominence. Again, I am focused solely on the economic, political, and social reality of owning a human being, holding them against their will. Whatever the practice of slavery, it is the mere fact of enslavement that I cannot harmonize with loving one’s neighbor.

But we have all these biblical regulations about slavery to balance out Leviticus 19:18. On the one hand, we have laws about slavery. On the other hand, we have a law about loving one’s neighbor. Which should take precedence? If we find that they are in tension, these two sets of laws, should one outweigh the other? Is one of these laws more important? If only the Bible answered that question!

Fortunately for us, the Bible does answer that question. You might recall that Jesus responded to an inquiry about the most important commandment by highlighting first the Shema, from Deuteronomy, about loving God, and then pointing to Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” identifying this as the second most important commandment. The slave laws did not come up. But Jesus did say that the entire law and prophets depend on these two commandments. Which commandment should take precedence? Jesus has told us. If we find a practice difficult to harmonize with love of neighbor, we better dump the practice and love our neighbor.

But that’s not all. You might also remember that Paul, on more than one occasion, identified Leviticus 19:18 as the fulfillment of the law (Rom 13:9; Gal 5:14), and James called it the royal law (James 2:8). And I’ll add one more related biblical injunction here; the Golden Rule of Matthew 7:12, which Jesus says is equivalent to the entire law and prophets. It is very helpful for the Bible to so explicitly and repeatedly tell us what to concentrate on if we would be disciples of the Rabbi from Nazareth.

The Implications of the Gospel

Is this an argument that Christians in the nineteenth century American South should have recognized? Yes, yes, they should have recognized it. I mean, for goodness sake, there were people making that exact argument, loudly. The way some Christian ministers swatted away what I would consider such a powerful argument from the Bible is disconcerting to me, and makes me wonder about my own blindness, but I can say that they were blind, willfully so.

Is this an argument that earlier Christians should have recognized? In the centuries before the abolitionist movement, when slavery was taken for granted by apparently everyone, those Christians bear, I think, less blame. But should they have recognized Leviticus 19:18 as the second most important commandment? Yes, of course. Should that have led them to emancipation? Certainly it should have led them to love their neighbor as themselves, to do unto others as they would have those others do unto them.

It seems to me that this is a situation in which we today recognize the implications of the gospel more clearly than earlier generations, specifically the implication that the second greatest commandment will not permit the enslavement of others. That seems to me a clear implication; we might want to call it a necessary inference. But apparently it wasn’t so clear five centuries ago, or a millennium ago. Apparently it wasn’t even clear in the first century. I don’t say we understand the implications of the gospel better than the New Testament, just better than first century Christians, but not better than Jesus and Paul. As Jesus has taught us, there are some biblical commands that are less important than others, and there are some biblical commands that are in place specifically because of the hardness of human hearts.

My larger question is whether Christianity is good for us, morally good for us? Does it make us better people? Christianity was seen to be consistent with enslaving others for a distressingly long time, and up until distressingly recently. But, as I have argued here, I don’t see how this practice coheres with what Jesus identifies as the most important parts of Scripture. To defend slavery from the Bible, you have to concentrate on the passages that mention slavery and ignore the most important parts of the Bible. A lot of Christians have been willing to do that, also distressing.

Is Christianity good for us? Does it make us more morally upright? Yes, it ought to, if we will attend to the parts of our Scripture that Jesus told us to stress, and let everything else hang from there.

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