Did Jesus Condone Slavery?

No, Jesus never condoned slavery.  He doesn’t really mention it, except that he talks about slaves in his stories and it’s mentioned as a frequent part of the culture he’s in.  But to not mention it, is not approval.  Such arguments from silence are really flimsy.  We can make Jesus condone child abuse, spousal abuse, and incest, if we insist that what he never commented on, he must have approved.  

But clearly, slavery is a part of his world and the world of the the Law and Apostles who DO comment on slavery. Now, we do well to note the slavery of that time is not what we assume since it was very different from American slavery.  The American slave trade was built on racist premises.  The black man was considered inferior to the white man and so it was his lot, his nature to serve.

Biblical slavery even from Moses time, was mostly economic.  You became a slave if your people were conquered in war, so as an alternative to killing all the conquered who lost the war, a person would often become the property of the victor.  This was considered (by both sides) just “booty”, reward for winning a conflict.  But a much more common form of slavery was indentured servitude which was when you sold yourself into slavery to pay unpayable debts.  As an alternative to death or prison, you could give the only thing you had left – your labor, permanently.

Now, because slavery in Bible times was a tool of economic "justice" mostly, you could buy your way out of it, or a relative could free you.  And in Israel, for Jewish slaves, there was this startling develop:  God said slave status would never last for more than 7 years, because in the Sabbath year all slaves were freed.

For this reason we shouldn’t be too aghast that the Bible doesn’t come forward with stronger condemnations of slavery.

• First, it was not built on the horror of racist ideology.  
• Second it wasn’t a life sentence, as it was for every black in America, who no matter what they gave to their masters, could never be free (laws were instituted that if a slave escaped to the North, they had to be returned, and if a Northern black came to the south, his free status was not honored).  
• Third, slavery was checked by putting an upper limit on the value of slave labor – instead of saying a debtor must sell himself in perpetuity, the Sabbath and Jubilee years said, no debt is worth a lifetime of servitude.  Essentially then, human value got elevated in the Law since a person was too valuable to keep in slave status forever.  No debt was worth that much.

Thus the Mosaic law always seems to be taming slavery, putting limits on masters which essentially gave slaves rights (Ex 21:8-11)!!  That God would even give laws about slavery seems that he’s condoning it.  In actually, he’s beginning the process of ending it!  Slavery isn’t invented in the Law, remember – it pre-exists the Law.  So the law is containing it, limiting its abuses, even if it doesn’t abolish it in one move.

Then, Jesus shows up and he doesn’t teach anything about it specifically, but he declares that his kingdom is for the poor and oppressed to set them free.  This was first understood in a spiritual sense, and slaves flocked to the early church.  There they were taught that while they were someone else’s slave, in Christ they were free.  Their future was the kingdom of heaven.  They were blessed, not cursed.  So they were told to obey their master’s because they worked for God, not men, and the God who loved them would reward them.  If they could get their freedom, they should, of course, but don’t be too anxious if they can’t, God was on their side (1 Cor 7). 

Masters also were in the church and they were told to love their slaves, not treat them harshly but fairly and like brothers.  And to remember that they were Christ's slave.  In fact, in one case, a Master (Philemon) is told to forgive and we may presume also free a runaway slave (Onesimus) because this slave is a brother.  This is incredible!  How could Masters and Slaves be brothers in the same churches?  This teaching forecast that the institution of slavery could not long endure, with such radical ideas like the Gospel at the center of the New Community. 

You could say the apostles should have been more direct in their condemnation of slavery.  But I would say their approach was much shrewder, and therefore more effective.  They attacked the values upon which slavery was based.  So without imposing a ban on slavery from a position of ecclesiastical authority, a ban which may have hopelessly divided a very young church and derailed her from her primary mission in the world, Paul undermines the whole institution with his words, “there is no longer slave nor free, for you are all one in Christ... Masters, serve your slaves as brothers, ETC.” (Gal. 3:28; Eph. 6:7-9, Philemon)

So in fact, slavery did die out first in the Church and then in all of Europe as the Church expanded.  Nowhere else on planet earth did this happen.  Not in China, not in the Middle East under Islam, not in Africa (where blacks enslaved blacks for millennia).  During the so called Dark Ages, slavery became almost unheard of in Europe, except of course, for the millions of slaves the Muslim hordes carried off to Arabia.  In fact, we get our word, "slave" from those millions, mostly Slavs - taken from Slovakia and other places in Eastern Europe.

Not until the other races of Africa and America were discovered, does slavery rise up again in Christendom.  But it was voices in the Church that railed against it.  You hear about Christian military men and governors and explorers who were avid slave traders.  But most of these were as Christian as your very nominal Christian neighbor is today.  EVERYONE in Europe was baptized Christian, but only a percentage were truly devout.  Meanwhile, the really devoted Christians, the Dominican monks, the Jesuits, and the papacy through repeated edicts railed against Slavery.  It advanced in spite of real Christians not because of them.

So the economy of Europe quickly became dependent on the slave trade and all sorts of Christian justifications ensued.  But these reasons were ridiculous.  For example, using the prophesy against Ham in Genesis.  Or the New Testament rules for slaves.  The hypocrisy and deliberate blindness of these lines of reasoning were self-evident, for any who took Scripture sincerely.  If it truly was the Bible, clearly understood and applied, that gave backing and justification for American slavery, why were the Scriptural rules allowing for the freeing of slaves, never invoked for the black man?

There is only one REAL reason, which has been repeatedly exposed in the laws and writings of the time:  It wasn't the Bible, it was the evil of racist ideology.  Black men were assumed inferior.  Whites of the time (even some emancipation fighters from the North) had a hard time believing the African was in any way his equal.  This particularly odious idea could have never come from a Bible which declares repeatedly that humans are all genetically linked to exact same first parents, establishing our fraternity and equality forever.

So finally, it was the church again, by Papal Bull in the South Americas, and under names of devout Christians like Wilberforce and Lincoln in the North, who understood the full force of God’s Word regarding human dignity and value and equality, who lead the way to abolish the slave trade and eventually emancipate all slaves.  Every historian acknowledges the debt the world owes to the Evangelical church in England and the Northern states for leading the way for abolition.

Read again Lincoln’s second inaugural address and see all the Bible verses he quotes and alludes to, and ask if he thought that Jesus (or Scripture overall) condoned slavery.  Not a chance!

HOW CAN JESUS BE BOTH FULLY GOD AND FULLY HUMAN AT THE SAME TIME?

This is a great question!  In fact it’s the second major question about Jesus that preoccupied the best minds in the church in the early centuries of Christendom. 

The first major question about Jesus was how he could be God and address God as Father at the same time.  What did these biblical statements infer about the nature of God?  The Church eventually settled on a Trinitarian formula – that God was one in being, three in person, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

It is sometimes asserted that because this first question wasn’t fully settled until the 4th century that this means the Church essentially picked this view of a fully deified Son out of thin air, and foisted this late developing view onto history.  “Da Vinci Code” anyone?  

But history shows that Christ’s divinity was never in doubt by the Church because, despite its disparate views on Christ, all sides were deriving their view fundamentally from the 4 gospels and the letters of Paul – all first century documents.  The 2nd century Gnostics were not really serious players in the debate, but even they never doubted that Jesus was divine.

The questions were about exactly HOW the Father shared his divinity with the Son – was the Son a mode of God, or the highest created thing in which God’s nature was fully reflected, or fully God?  This unanimity on the main point is due to the fact that the debates were anchored, not in the whims of church leaders, but the New Testament documents themselves.

Like scientists who disagreed about which theory captures the data best but agree on the data itself, the early church mostly agreed that those earliest documents were their trusted data field.  So in the end, each view they rejected lost out because there was scriptural data it could not fully incorporate.  The view that “won” – the Trinity – was the view that captured ALL the data.

So once the Church articulated the Trinitarian nature of God, they then turned to your question:  Since the Bible is clear that Jesus is fully God, and equally clear that he lived as a normal human man, how do you fuse those two natures?  After they answered how God could be three and one, they asked, how can a person be both truly a human being and truly God?

For starters, it was taken for granted that the reason for the Incarnation was that God had to assume human nature in order to save it.  He could not put right what was wrong in us, if he did not take on a complete human nature to redeem it.

So the first way that Christians put these two natures together was to say Jesus was like us, with a body, a mind and a spirit, but that the Second Person of the Trinity displaced the human spirit of Jesus the man.  But the Church  soon realized that if Jesus did not have a human spirit, then he wasn’t TRULY a human.  That meant God could not redeem and save the human spirit.  So this view was eventually rejected.

Another view, Nestorianism, came to the fore.  This agreed there had to be a full human and divine nature in Christ, but saw them as two persons fused in Jesus.  But this too was condemned because it imagined two actual persons within Jesus nature. Scripture did not show a Christ who had two personalities, talking to each other, one possessing the other etc.  Jesus is clearly one person.

So after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the Church established two bumpers to define a biblical position.  They developed a motto, “Never confusing the natures, never dividing the person.”  They formed a Creed as follows:

We confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man … one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the difference of the natures being by no means taken away because of the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person …not divided or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ.

4th Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon
451 A.D.

So, condemning the view of God displacing a human nature, the Church also condemned the 2-persons-in-one view.  That left their Creed, two complete natures, one person.  

Now, they left it open as to the HOW, yet the basic idea was clear.  If you cut through all the debate, the overly-careful redundancy of the Creed, the fancy words, like “consubstantial” and “subsistence” etc., the Church finally landed in a very simple place:

They acknowledged the biblical minimums without committing to confusing speculation.  Those minimums boil down to this:  A man came who was really and wholly a human man and yet he claimed to be God, having all the prerogatives and qualities of God.  Yet this man never showed signs of being possessed, internally conflicted or schizophrenic – a cohesive, complete, undivided, singular person.

 

So he was two and yet he was one.

Now, as to the “how” question, more modern debate has centered on Philippians 2 for help on that.  Paul there states:

Phil 2:7: Instead He emptied Himself by assuming the form of a slave, taking on the likeness of men.

The key Greek word is “kenosis” – to empty.  This suggests that in order for a full divine nature to fuse with a human nature in one person, the Son was emptied of some divine privileges in the Incarnation.  And this perhaps comes as close as we can get to answering the “HOW” question regarding the seeming impossibility of an infinite God merging with finite humanity.

However, even here we must be very careful how much we lean on that one word “emptying” – since if Jesus was emptied of any core aspect of deity or any essential divine attributes, he ceased to be God.  God cannot be less than God and still be God.

So we should say that by becoming human, the Son emptied himself of some divine privileges, yet he did this willfully and only temporarily WITHOUT losing divine attributes.  To go back to what was established at Chalcedon, we can say that what is true of one nature was not always true of the other, yet whatever was true of one nature had to be true for Jesus, the one Person.

And that best makes sense of everything Jesus said and did.  For example, when Jesus claimed the Father was greater than he (John 14:28), that was certainly true of his human nature, but it was not true of his divine nature.  Yet the one Person Jesus experienced the Father’s greatness and lived in submission to it.  This is part of the Kenosis.

Another example: when Jesus claimed that he didn’t know the hour of his return (Matt 24:36), that was true in his human nature.  But his divine nature was omniscient (John 21:17).  So he was emptied and therefore didn't consciously have access to all knowledge during his life on earth.  Also when Jesus died, he could die because he had a human nature, but his divine nature could not die.  So the “emptying” of Phil 2 gives us the reason that some aspects of His divine nature were ‘hidden’ to him or left “unconscious”.

And yet – and here is the beautiful mystery – because Jesus is one Person his divine nature which cannot die, tasted death, so that he experienced through his human nature everything we as humans do.  Why?  For this purpose:

Heb 2:14-15: Because God's children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. 15 Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying.