'Throughout the Old Testament there is an underlying assumption of slavery, regulations for dealing with it and no moral rejection of it as an institution.'

Nigel Varndell, Christian Aid’s Inter Faith Manager, argued at Greenbelt that slavery was Biblical. Precis by Andy Jackson

I am going to tell you some good news and I am going to tell you some bad news.

I am going to start with the bad news, which has to do with the problem we encounter when we try and construct Biblical ethics.

And that problem revolves around the fact that everyone within the church who takes an ethical stance on an issue does so on the basis that they are Biblical and that they are honestly and correctly interpreting scripture.

And yet people draw entirely different conclusions about what the Bible says. I want to demonstrate that with two historical examples.

Then I want to look at a few contemporary situations in which people have taken opposite views on what scripture says and have a look at how they have justified their positions.

I hope is the good news is to look at one way in which we might break the impasse and move beyond exegetical paralysis to a position of some kind of consensus where the church can actually do some good.

Slavery

At the start of Genesis we have a Biblical injunction declaring that some people should be slaves. But it doesn’t end there. Later on we see that Abraham is blessed by God with slaves, i.e. God creates slavery to reward people and if you want to take a look at Exodus 21 what you find there are regulations about the way that you treat slaves.

Throughout the Old Testament there is an underlying assumption of slavery, regulations for dealing with it and no moral rejection of it as an institution.

And just so that we are clear this also seems to be the case in the New Testament too. In Ephesians we read that slaves are to obey their masters just as they would obey Christ and in 1 Corinthians says that slaves should stay slaves if they were called to Christianity as slaves.

So not only have we established that slavery is endorsed, but contesting that fact amounts to nothing less than blasphemy.

Just so we are clear in the New Testament slaves who do not honour their masters are committing blasphemy!

Question number one is, does the Bible support slavery?

Just so we are clear, this is not a trick question I am not talking about slavery to sin as a description of the human condition, I am not trying to catch you out with a play on words and really we should all be slaves to Christ.

Practice

Question 2 is who thinks in this day and age that slavery is an acceptable practice for the church or for wider society?

So here we have the crux of the problem, according to the Biblical account you can create a fairly convincing argument for slavery, and yet none of us are convinced – we all think it is wrong.

So there is an interesting question here about how we make ethical decisions as it doesn’t appear to be on the basis of a fairly plain reading of the text. When we make ethical decisions like those against slavery – are we being Biblical or are we kidding ourselves?

Just to add to the argument I want to look at some of the historical background to this issue when slavery was a live issue a few hundred years ago.

There is a common notion these days, largely because of the efforts of people like Wilberforce and others to stamp out the slave trade, that the debate about slavery was a fight between evil capitalists who wanted to make money, and the radical abolitionists – driven by a moral rage rooted in the Gospel. We tend to look at this as an argument between Biblical Christians and the rest.

But it ain’t necessarily so. The records show that the pro-slavery lobby saw itself in terms of being Biblical and regarded the abolitionists as liberal revolutionaries.

Scriptual

It wasn’t just the abolitionists, both sides in this debate seriously thought of themselves as being Biblical – as being right and being scriptural, and as the other side as being heretics.

Slavery is wrong and all of us are happy to condemn it and to celebrate the efforts of people like Wilberforce, who did so much to do away with it.

The big question then is how did we get from there to here? What changed? And what, therefore, can history teach us about the ethical, moral and theological debates of today?

Apartheid is a far more recent example of an ethical debate in which the churches were caught up.

It was a debate that yet again split the church – at least the global church. It is a debate that had good sincere Bible believing Christians on both sides.

We look back now with astonishment to think that Christians supported apartheid and yet when we look at the history we realise that not only did they support apartheid but they did so by justifying it Biblically.

Narrative

And even more interestingly they did it often, not with odd proof texts, but by looking at the overarching Biblical narrative, exactly the kind of argument about exegesis that we thought might help us out with the issue of slavery.

The Dutch Reformed Church, supported apartheid by reference to the Exodus narrative.

But once that interpretive framework has been established then all other aspects can be drawn from the Bible, prohibitions against inter-marriage, the oppression and slavery of the local peoples. Apartheid becomes not a new form of slavery and discrimination, but an outworking of God’s plan to liberate slaves from oppression.

What is more is that now anyone who opposes you is no longer merely against you, but struggling against the will of God. When the British moved towards the abolition of slavery, then they take on the role of the Egyptians, who are oppressing the people of God.

So the ultimate irony of this is not only can the Bible be made to say two different things – which when we consider that it was written over a period of well over a thousand years and by many different authors – is not so surprising, but that actually the very same passage in the Biblical text can be read in two utterly contrasting ways.

In the case of the Exodus narrative we have a situation where as long as we can identify ourselves with the under dog, with the oppressed Israelites, enslaved by Pharaoh then we can pretty much justify our own actions as God’s liberation, as God’s will and ultimately we can, without too much effort, end up being good bible believing apartheid supporting Christians.

Problem

So that is the problem that we find ourselves stuck with. The Bible seems to be able to be made to support anything. Even issues like slavery and apartheid which many of us today would regard as no-brainers when it comes to ethics.

So far then we have engaged in an interesting historical look at problems of Biblical interpretation and discovered that ethics are harder to think about Biblically than we first expected they would be.

So does it matter? Is this purely a historical question or do these kinds of dilemmas still play out today? Are there issues where theology has been destructive, where it has been divisive where it has got on the way of us being the people of God?

I am guessing that if we sat down for five minutes we could come up with a pretty long list of those kinds of issues, but I am going to touch on just two, that have been relevant to the work of Christian Aid.

Just last month Christian Aid published a paper on HIV in Sudan and we need to remember that this is not an issue confined to the developing world.

The report investigated the response of religious communities to HIV. It is very clear that some of them still maintain an attitude that strongly sees HIV as a punishment from God for ‘sinful’ behaviour.

Isolate

The point here yet again is that the religious leadership who isolate people living with HIV are not doing it to be cruel. I think it is too easy for us to dismiss these people as somehow vindictive or in fact unfaithful and as manipulating religious tradition and religious faith for their own nefarious and devious ends. It may make it easier for us to deal with if we can pretend that this is the case but I don’t think it is that simple.

Here again we have a moral and theological issue that has left us in a dead end either HIV is caused by sin or it is not and Bible believing Christians have taken opposite sides on the issue. What that means is that the churches respond in different ways to the issue. So how do we find some consensus, how do we move the debate on?

One of the key factors in getting the debate about slavery to shift in the UK was the struggle to get the British public and the British Government to see slavery for what it was. The abolitionists used a very sophisticated public information campaign designed to get people to see slaves as a fellow human beings.

Famously they used Wedgwood to design pin lapels with the picture of slave inscribed with the words “Am I not a man and a brother?” If I had come into a Greenbelt venue eight or nine years ago and looked round I would doubtless have seen a large number of people wearing chain lapels to highlight the very urgent issues of debt and debt relief.

Well trust me there is nothing new in campaigning. When we thought we were being innovative with the drop of the debt campaign chains we should have realised that we were about 200 years behind the abolitionist movement.

Another crucial point was the role played by Olaudah Equiano the freed former slave from Ghana who had his story printed and distributed in 1789 – it became a best seller.

Perspective

People began to see the experience of being a slave not from the privileged position of the well off well educated slave owner but the perspective of a slave. They got to see the problem with a new point of view.

Finally of course there was the experience of John Newton of Amazing Grace fame who wrote down his experiences on what it meant to be a slave trader in Thoughts upon the African slave trade.

I want to suggest that when it comes to issues of HIV or conflict we need to hear the voice of the victims.

We need the experience of the person with HIV, who has been marginalised and stigmatised, to impinge into the Church debate about sin and judgement.

We need the voice of the Palestinians who have had their homes demolished and of the people who have lost loved ones to suicide bombers to impinge upon the debate about who owns the promised land.

When we see the debate from a new perspective then we will find ourselves asking different questions about the issue and of finding new ways for the Church to be church.

In spite of what the Church once said, slavery maybe Biblical but it is not of God – and it never was.

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