One of the most common criticisms of biblical ethics antichristians make is that the Bible supports slavery. However, it is a gross misrepresentation of biblical teaching to claim that the Bible “supports” slavery just because there is no explicit condemnation of slavery in the Bible. In this post, I will briefly examine what the Bible actually says about slavery, and consider what Christian theology has to say about it.
The Old Testament
The Old Testament Law contains numerous laws regarding slaves. It did not establish the institution of slavery; it merely assumed the existence of slavery, since slavery already existed in virtually every ancient culture, including ancient Israel.
Compared to other ancient (and modern) slave cultures, the Old Testament’s regulations concerning the treatment of slaves are remarkably humane. A man does not have the right to kill his slave; he must be punished if he does so (Ex 21:20). In fact, if he inflicts any permanent injury on a slave, he must set the slave free as compensation (Ex 21:26-27). If a man marries his slave, or arranges for his son to marry her, she must be treated the same as a free wife; if she is not, she has the right to be set free and leave him (Ex 21:9-11).
Significantly, the Old Testament Law makes a sharp distinction between fellow Israelites who are enslaved and slaves who are foreigners. While foreigners may be kept permanently enslaved, Israelite slaves may only be kept for six years, and must be set free in the seventh year (Ex 21:1-2). Furthermore, in the Year of Jubilee, every fifty years, all Israelite slaves must be set free, regardless of how long they have served their masters (Lev 25:39-55). In the Exodus, the foundational event of Old Testament salvation history, God freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt; this is why the idea of permanently enslaving one’s fellow Israelite was considered theologically unthinkable. In fact, the Old Testament Law goes so far as to command the death penalty for kidnappers and those who try to enslave a person by force (Ex 21:16; Deut 24:7).
This does not mean that the Old Testament Law has no concern at all for foreign slaves, though. It commands, “If slaves should escape from their masters and take refuge with you, you must not hand them over to their masters. Let them live among you in any town they choose, and do not oppress them” (Deut 23:15-16). This is part of the Old Testament Law’s broader teaching that the Israelites should treat foreigners well.
The New Testament
The New Testament epistles contain a number of “household codes,” which include instructions for slaves and masters. These household codes instruct slaves to obey their masters and serve them well (Eph 6:5-8; Col 3:22-25; 1 Tim 6:1-3; Titus 2:9-10; 1 Pet 2:18). They also instruct masters to treat their slaves justly and fairly, and not to threaten them (Eph 6:9; Col 4:1). Again, these household codes do not establish slavery or encourage it; they merely assume that there were slaves and masters in these churches, as slavery was widespread in first century Roman society, and provide instruction for slaves and masters to treat each other well.
Critics of Christianity often claim that the New Testament allowing Christians to have slaves provides support for treating slaves with brutality and violence. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The New Testament clearly teaches that Christians should treat all people, even their enemies, with love, kindness, and gentleness, and never use violence against anyone. If Christian masters are forbidden to even threaten their slaves (Eph 6:9), then they certainly are forbidden to use violence against them.
The basic teaching of the New Testament about slaves and masters in the Church is that they are fundamentally equal, and are one in Christ (Col 3:11). This does not erase the economic difference between masters and slaves, but it does radically transform it. The apostle Paul instructs Philemon to receive back his runaway slave Onesimus, now a Christian, “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother” (Philemon 16). Treating one’s slaves as brothers and sisters obviously means a radically different relationship between master and slave than that which was typical in the pagan Roman world.
It is somewhat surprising that the New Testament never brings up the Old Testament Law’s teaching that fellow Israelites could only be temporarily enslaved and applies it to masters and slaves in the Church. Perhaps this is because the New Testament authors thought Jesus could be coming back anytime, and so were not thinking about setting timetables for such things seven years in the future. Or perhaps the apostles did not consider the issue of freeing slaves to be that important because the radical new way of life of Gospel living would radically transform master-slave relationships and subvert the institution of slavery from within. As Jacques Ellul puts it, “Neither Jesus nor the apostles thought that they could solve the problem of slavery as a social problem. They did not revolt against the practice. They did not attempt institutional transformation. The first Christians were content to adopt an individual relation to slaves which changed the situation from within. This is what finally brought about, after many centuries, the abolition of slavery.”[1]Jacques Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), 475.
While the New Testament does not condemn slavery per se, its teachings about the equality of all human beings and love for all humanity seriously call slavery into question. While not condemning slave owners, the New Testament explicitly condemns slave traders (1 Tim 1:10), which undermines and points to the eventual dissolution of the institution of slavery. Indeed, once Christianity gained greater influence, the Medieval Church effectively abolished European slavery. In the early modern period, slavery was revived, this time in a racialized form, for the sake of supporting European colonial empires. But evangelical Christian abolitionists such as William Wilberforce were able to convince Western Civilization to once again abolish slavery.
The historical fact is, it is only because of Christianity that the institution of slavery was ever seriously called into question and abolished. In the modern period, European Christians then spread this abolitionist crusade to other civilizations.[2]See Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 428-434. The widespread opposition to the institution of slavery that exists today is a result of the influence of Christianity. Christians today who oppose slavery do not need explicit biblical prohibitions of slavery per se in order to do so, as their opposition to slavery is based on broader biblical teachings about the equality of all human beings and love for all humanity.