Paul was a brilliant theologian, but…

I am finishing Doug Moo’s new Colossians/Philemon commentary (Pillar, 2008) and I have benefited much from this book.  One particularly thorny issue is the matter of slavery in the NT.  Why did Paul, the theological sage, not outright condemn the practice of slavery when he championed equality on so many levels?  There are certainly some answers out there.  Moo himself throws out the common response that quickly dismissing (i.e. freeing) slaves might send them away only to a life of starvation and poverty.  Moo is, I think rightly, not completely satisfied with this answer.  What Moo goes on to say is quite wise, though probably difficult for an evangelical to admit.

‘We might…very tentatively suggest that Paul…did not always recognize all the implications of the theological principles that [he himself] enunciated.  We believe that God preserved [him] from contradicting those principles.  But we are not sure that he always enabled [Paul] to see the full range of application of those principles.  From our vantage point, Paul’s principle of “neither slave nor free in Christ” (Gal 3:28; Col 3:11) jars with his failure to ask Christian slave owners to release their slaves (see Col 4:1).  And we rightly draw from Paul’s principle the conclusion — that Christians must not own slaves — that he did not explicitly draw in his own day’ (377)