Again, I find this passage abhorrent. It’s passages like this one in Leviticus as well our reading in Luke that empowered Moses Stuart of Andover Seminary in Massachusetts, the nation’s most learned biblical scholar in the era leading up to the American Civil War, to publish a major tract on the subject of slavery entitled Conscience and the Constitution. Stuart stated that abolitionists “must give up the New Testament authority, or abandon the fiery course which they are pursuing” (p. 55). In other words, he argued, you can’t hold the abolitionist position that all slavery is evil and the New Testament with both hands. You have to let go of one to hold on to the other.
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This is Part 2 of The Christian Normalization of Social Evils
(Read this series from its beginning here.)
In The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Mark Noll writes of the uphill battle Christian abolitionists faced in using the Bible for their arguments against slavery:
Biblical attacks on American slavery faced rough going precisely because they were nuanced. This position could not simply be read out of any one biblical text; it could not be lifted directly from the page. Rather, it needed patient reflection on the entirety of the Scriptures; it required expert knowledge of the historical circumstances of ancient Near Eastern and Roman slave systems as well as of the actually existing conditions in the slave states; and it demanded that sophisticated interpretative practice replace a commonsensically literal approach to the sacred text. (Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis [The Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era], Kindle Edition. Kindle location 645)
Our reading this week belongs to a series of passages in Luke that don’t speak against slavery but assume it is a permanent part of human society. Other passages in Luke include:
Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves. (Luke 12:35-38)
And:
For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves. (Luke 22:27)
This week’s reading normalizes slavery. One of the dangers of readings like the one we’re reading this week is that they normalize for Christians behaviors and societal evils that we should react to with much more concern. They desensitize us to just how evil some things really are. This explains much of what we are witnessing in American Christianity right now. We’ll unpack this more in Part 3.
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