Slavery and Bible? How to explain to a non-believer?

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Christ, who never condemned slavery, left it to His followers to discover gradually that slavery as an institution was inconsistent with following Him. So real Catholics believe what the Church teaches and endeavour to live that teaching, but should seek to know what may be further clarified by research and discussion, and what may be refuted. So what denotes real slavery and how that has or has not been imposed, versus serfdom and servitude (penal, indentured and of those captured in a just war) can be clarified.

In, *Development or Reversal?, *the late Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., in First Things, October 2005 – debunks the often preconceived conclusions over slavery and the Church.

“Slavery was practiced by almost every known society until modern times. Throughout the biblical era, Noonan shows, slavery was taken as a given, although the Israelites practiced rather mild forms of slavery and did not permanently enslave their compatriots. Jesus, though he repeatedly denounced sin as a kind of moral slavery, said not a word against slavery as a social institution. Nor did the writers of the New Testament. Peter and Paul exhort slaves to be obedient to their masters. Paul urges Philemon to treat his converted slave Onesimus as a brother in Christ. While discreetly suggesting that he manumit Onesimus, he does not say that Philemon is morally obliged to free Onesimus and any other slaves he may have had.

“Serfdom did not involve the humiliation and brutality people today ordinarily associate with slavery. Moral theologians recognized that slaves, unlike mere chattels, had certain rights even against their masters, who no longer had over them the power of life and death, as had been the case in pagan antiquity.

“For St. Thomas, slaves (servi) had the right to food, sleep, marriage, and the rearing of their children. Provision had also to be made for them to fulfil their religious duties, and they were to be treated with benevolence.

“John Paul II in 1992: Speaking at the infamous “House of Slaves” on the Island of Gorée in Senegal, from which innumerable slaves had been exported, he declared: ‘It is fitting to confess in all truth and humility this sin of man against man, this sin of man against God.’ The pope is here speaking of the slave trade, which had repeatedly been condemned. Far from changing the doctrine, John Paul is explicitly reaffirming the position of Pope Pius II, whom he quotes as having declared in 1492 that the slave trade was an enormous crime, magnum scelus.
Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., holds the Laurence J. McGinley Chair in Religion and Society at Fordham University.
firstthings.com/article/2005/10/development-or-reversal
 
It is true that slavery was everywhere, but remember that the Torah specifically made rules concerning slavery. That slaves could not be treated harshly, that fellow Israelites could not be enslaved, that in Jubilee slaves had to be freed. The Law also provided that a man who sold himself to slavery to pay a debt after seven years had to have his property returned to him along with what he had earned for his master above the debt repayment so that he could restored along with his property. So the slavery of the Israelites was nothing like it was among the Egyptians, the Assyrians and later the Babylonians and Persians.

We recoil at the thought of slavery (as we should) but there was no mercantile class back then and there was no monetary exchange and most people lived subsistence lives, and so it benefited them to be attached to a wealthy man and his property so that they may have a steady supply of food and shelter. Remember even as far back as Abraham there is the thought that one of Abraham’s slaves is going to inherit his wealth if Abraham does not have a son. So clearly among the righteous there was more of an employee/employer relationship than what we would associate with the American slave trade.

Concerning the New Testament, in the Greco-Roman world the single largest socio-economic group in their entire society was the slave class. There was simply no way to overthrow slavery in that time. But the New Testament writers did something much more profound. They declared that in Christ the social division of that world had disappeared. Remember that to be a Roman Citizen made a you a person that had the right to appeal directly to Caesar to get justice, but if you were just a run of the mill person, good luck, and of you were a slave, well…

But the writers stressed that these social division disappeared in Christ and that the Christians must not treat each other with the preferences of their old lives. James and Paul both explicitly say that masters are to be fair and kind to the servants and Paul says again and again that even those who think themselves high and mighty are slaves, and all that are saved are slaves to Christ. And so men are to see women as their equals, there will be no distinctions between Roman, Greek or Jew and there will be no distinction between slave or free.

Now to our ears the fact that Paul and Peter told slaves to be obedient rubs us the wrong way, and I understand why, but we forget time and place when we do so. And furthermore we forget what a thunderstruck moment it would have been for the Greeks and the Jews and the slaves and the women in the Churches to hear read aloud, from the pen of the Apostles!) that their social divisions were null and void because they were all one in Christ.

And I have proof that the Church understood the message this way. Because as the mercantile class did develop and fiefdoms disappeared and states formed and the social need for a slave class became an anachronism, the Church spoke vociferously against the practice of slavery, and especially against the practice of captive African, Native American slavery as was practiced by the Dutch, Portugese, Spanish and English and was perpetuated by the Americans. The Church was loud in its protest against the practice and was men of Faith that led the charge against slavery in Britain and in America.

So to say that Christianity did not act strongly against slavery because of the Bible is the reverse of the truth. It is because of the revolutionary (for its day and time) teachings in Bible that Christianity took up the fight against slavery, and won.

God Bless
 
Ask them to define slavery.

In Biblical (Judaic) slavery, the person themselves remained a human person, with rights. What was owned was that person’s labor.

Contrast that to chattle slavery, where the humanity of the person is denied.

The modern equivalent to biblical slavery is when judges compel a person to do community service, or when prisoners are assigned work in the prison (washing dishes, making license plates). The law owns their labor and can compel it. But it does not deny the very personhood of the person.
 
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