{"id":1710,"date":"2015-04-08T10:54:28","date_gmt":"2015-04-08T16:54:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=1710"},"modified":"2015-04-08T10:56:39","modified_gmt":"2015-04-08T16:56:39","slug":"so-what-about-slavery-anyway-frank-bruni-and-morality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/04\/so-what-about-slavery-anyway-frank-bruni-and-morality.html","title":{"rendered":"So what about slavery, anyway? (Frank Bruni and morality)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Back last week, New York Times columnist Frani Bruni wrote a piece<\/a> saying that, basically, Christians should be persuaded and\/or compelled, as needed, to cease considering gay or lesbian sexual acts as sins, in the same manner as, for most Christian groups, neither divorce nor contraception are considered sins any longer. \u00a0Of course, mainline Protestant groups such as Episcopalians, ELCA-Lutherans, and USA-Presbyterians have already done so, in the same way as they\u2019re \u201cpro-choice\u201d with respect to abortion, and really have no complaint against non-marital sex in general, so long as it\u2019s not coerced. \u00a0But he, and the individuals he quotes, want all Christians to fall in line. \u00a0His money quote comes at the end, citing gay activist Mitchell Gold, that \u201cchurch leaders must be made \u2018to take homosexuality off the sin list.'\u201d<\/p>\n

So far, nothing new here. \u00a0But there was one statement that struck me as worth thinking about more. \u00a0Citing, David Gushee, an evangelical Christian who teaches Christian ethics at Mercer University and who supports the sin-redefinition project, he says,<\/p>\n

For a very long time, he noted, \u201cMany Christians thought slavery wasn\u2019t sinful, until we finally concluded that it was.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

which is true. \u00a0Now, I wouldn\u2019t go in the contrary direction, to say that our recognition that somethings are sinful, that we hadn\u2019t been aware of before, means that we should also feel free to reshuffle things in the opposite direction. \u00a0But it would be worthwhile to look at the process by which slavery came to be seen as a sin.<\/p>\n

Certainly, in the time of the Early Church, slavery was, for the most part, simply a given about the world\u2019s economy; it wouldn\u2019t have necessarily seemed any more unjust than the fact that some people were landowners and others landless. \u00a0To be a slave could mean living in your master\u2019s household and having a fair amount of independence, depending on the particular circumstances. \u00a0And slavery did evolve, during the Early Middle Ages, into serfdom, in which peasants farmed land that they had rights to, even as they were at the same time, bound to the land. \u00a0What did early Christian writers have to say about slaves? \u00a0My guess is that there was counsel to treat them humanely but never a notion that the very concept of owning slaves was invalid, any more than the idea would have been that the Roman emperor didn\u2019t have the right to rule, however tyrannical he may been.<\/p>\n

Of course, throughout the Middle Ages, there was no longer any explicit slave-ownership in Christendom; the only way it appeared would have been Christians being taken by Arab raiders. \u00a0It didn\u2019t re-emerge until the Spanish\/Portugese conquest of the Americas. \u00a0So anyway \u2014 I\u2019d be interested to know when Catholic theologians (and Popes, in official declarations of dogma) moved from urging humane treatment of slaves to statements that the very concept of one human being owning another, goes against natural law and is intrinsically sinful, regardless of the humaneness of the owner\u2019s treatment of the slave.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back last week, New York Times columnist Frani Bruni wrote a piece saying that, basically, Christians should be persuaded and\/or compelled, as needed, to cease considering gay or lesbian sexual acts as sins, in the same manner as, for most Christian groups, neither divorce nor contraception are considered sins any longer. \u00a0Of course, mainline Protestant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nSo what about slavery, anyway? 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