Can one argue from the Bible that slavery is divinely ordained?

Can one argue from the Bible that slavery is divinely ordained?

Guest Commentary by Kurt Queller

My friend Nick Gier recently ended a piece discussing Doug Wilson’s views on slavery with the observation that those who take the Bible to be without error might well conclude that slavery is an institution ordained by God. 

So, let’s admit that scripture acknowledges the existence of slavery, and indeed contains no blanket proscription against it. For those who take a high view of scriptural authority, can this really be said to entail the notion that such an institution is divinely ordained?  I’d like to suggest a counter-argument or two (which I imagine Nick would affirm, though I can’t speak for our friend Doug).

The story of Israel is the story of liberation

First, the central story of Israel — rehearsed and celebrated at every Passover seder — is one of liberation from slavery. And while slavery remained a grim reality in ancient Israel (as in every other contemporary civilization), the Sabbath-year jubilee laws (Deuteronomy 15, Leviticus 25) put strict constraints on it. These laws ultimately envision the eradication slavery — chiefly through regularly recurring cancellation of the debt burdens that were the chief cause of enslavement.

Numerous sayings of Jesus invoke this principle, sometimes directly, as in the parable of the man whose debt had been canceled but who would not forgive his own debtors (Matthew 18:23ff). Elsewhere, the allusion is more indirect, as in Jesus’ inaugural sermon in Luke (4:16ff, cf. Isaiah 61).

Here, the announcing of “good news to the poor” is widely understood by biblical scholars to signify a jubilee proclamation of debt forgiveness, again with the goal of ending slavery. And Jesus’ injunction to “lend, expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:35) clearly invokes the jubilee ordinance against refusing to lend to the poor for fear of losing the principle in an ensuing sabbatical debt cancellation (Deuteronomy 15:7ff).

Just because something is in scripture does not mean God approves it

A second, more general point: scriptural acknowledgment of institutions of oppression does not imply divine approval of them, let alone that they are eternally ordained by God. This is illustrated with particular clarity in the gospel controversy story in which Jesus’ opponents ask him how a man might legally divorce his wife (Mark 10:1ff and parallels).

Crucial for an understanding of this passage is the fact that, in ancient patriarchal societies, marriage was a transaction whereby a man acquired a woman as marital property. Divorce was the means by which he could later dispose of this property, should he so choose. Within this patriarchal dispensation, a woman did not “own” her husband (as her husband “owned” her). Accordingly, the idea that she might divorce him was simply inconceivable.

Jesus asks his opponents about the relevant law, and they dutifully cite Deuteronomy 24:1ff — an ordinance that presumes the conventional patriarchal notion of divorce as a sexual property transaction, without necessarily condoning it. Jesus replies, “For the hardness of your heart [Moses] wrote you this precept. But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female” — equally, that is, in God’s own image and likeness (compare Genesis 1:26f). The implication seems clear: for either to treat the other as property would be to violate God’s original intention for humanity.

God’s grudging concessions to men’s hard-heartedness

Jesus goes on to proclaim that men should not divorce their wives — nor should wives divorce their husbands. The latter stricture presumes the notion (again, nonsensical in that patriarchal cultural context) that a woman could “own” a man as her sexual property. Being nonsensical, this stricture is clearly not intended as new legislation.

Rather, by invoking God’s original intent in creation, Jesus frames the whole debate over how men might legally dispose of their human sexual property as contrary to the divine will, and the relevant legislation not as an ordinance for all time, but rather as a grudging concession to men’s patriarchal hard-heartedness. Yes, the idea that a wife might treat her husband as property was thoroughly unconventional, even absurd — but no more absurd than the thoroughly conventional ideology and practice of patriarchal marriage itself!

Both these institutions — debt slavery and patriarchal marriage — depended on the notion that human persons could rightfully be treated as the property of other persons. Both were tightly woven into the very fabric of ancient Mediterranean civilization (not just in Israel, but everywhere). It is thus not at all surprising that scripture should have acknowledged these institutions, nor that their outright abolition should have seemed inconceivable. What is surprising is that neither institution is treated as divinely ordained (at least insofar as the practice of humans owning humans is concerned), and that both should have come under such strong indictment (at least in some passages of scripture).

Quick thought about Genesis and the gender binary

A final note: having alluded to the Genesis account of the creation of humanity, male and female, in the image and likeness of God, let me hasten to plead that we put an end to the use of this passage as a supposed proof text against those whose gender identities cannot be fit neatly into a male/female binary.

This narrative tells of God bringing order to primeval chaos by dividing it into a series of binaries: light and dark, land and sea, rain and snow vs. lakes, rivers and seas. At each stage, God delights in the resulting order, pronouncing it “good.” But as Walter Hesford has recently pointed out, this hardly means that God abominates people or things that fail to fit neatly into the various binaries.

God pronounces the light and the dark “good;” does this imply that twilight is an abomination? Or are we to assume that the existence of wetlands contravenes God’s intention in separating the waters from the dry land? No more should we conclude that the division of primordial humanity into two canonical genders (male and female) implies that non-binary individuals are anathema. We might well be thankful that God’s grace and love are infinitely deeper and more comprehensive than our own.

The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. FāVS News values diverse perspectives and thoughtful analysis on matters of faith and spirituality.