The Case for Slavery
With such an array of texts and precedents extending throughout all of scripture it would not be hard, even today, to make a biblical case for slavery. Nowhere does the Bible condemn it; everywhere in the Bible it is the practice. The curse of Ham provides the justification for the subjugation of one tribe or race to another, and the counsels of Paul forbid tampering with a lawfully established institution. That Paul sees slavery as annulled in the kingdom means only that until the kingdom finally does come, what is, prevails; and what is, is slavery.
In antebellum America all of these arguments were well known. Slavery might offend the conscience or the moral sensibilities, as it clearly did with George Washington, who freed his slaves upon his death, and with Thomas Jefferson, who imagined a world without slavery but could not quite see his way clear to making such a world, but to those who took both slavery and the Bible seriously, the one supported the other. As we have seen, what perhaps more than anything else offended the southern Christian slaveholder before the Civil War was the northern notion that he suffered a guilty conscience, was a hypocrite, and could not possibly be a good Christian, since he held slaves. Such southerners took comfort not only from their sense of a superior civilization, but from their Bibles as well. Their peculiar institution was built upon a firm biblical foundation.
When in 1856 the Reverend Thornton Stringfellow, a Virginia Baptist, published his sermon “A Scriptural View of Slavery,” he argued that God himself had sanctioned slavery through Noah, Abraham, and Joseph, and that the biblical record was unambiguous. When a convention of Confederate ministers in Richmond, Virginia, in April 1863, published their “Address to Christians Throughout the World,” making the case for the morality of the Confederate cause as Christians, they said of slavery that they knew it more intimately than their critics. “We are…alive to all their interests; and we testify in the sight of God that the relations of master and slave among us, however we may deplore abuses in this, as in other relations of mankind, is not incompatible with our holy Christianity, and that the presence of the Africans in our land is an occasion of gratitude on their behalf, before God.” Arguing that the South had done more than any people on earth for the African race, the ministers further argued that “the practicable plan for benefitting the African race must be the Providential plan—the Scriptural plan.” To make their biblical position clear, the ministers cite I Timothy 6:1–2, where the Apostle instructs the young minister of Jesus on the subject of slavery:
Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them because they are brethren; but rather do them service because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach and exhort. If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings, perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself.
They could have cited with equal approval Titus 2:9–10, “Bid slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to be refractory, nor to pilfer, but to show entire and true fidelity, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.” And they could have added Paul’s advice to the Ephesians, repeated also in Colossians, where he urges slaves to be obedient to their masters in the same way that they would obey Christ, “not in the way of eye service, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not men.” Masters are required to treat their slaves in the same way, “…and forbear threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.” (Ephesians 6:5–9)
Southern Christians were quick to point out that slavery was not an accidental or an incidental matter in biblical times, and that the Apostle Paul took considerable pains in nearly all of his letters to regulate slavery, a social fact that he accepted, within the ethics of a Christian society. Acceptance of the reality of slavery was not necessarily approval or endorsement. In heaven, where there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage, as Jesus points out, there is presumably no slavery, no master and no free, for as Paul says, in Christ there is neither free nor slave. On earth and in this life, however, for as long as it lasts, marriage and slavery obtain. Paul endorses neither, and neither does he condemn either. He accepts both. For the southern apologist for the comparability of slavery and Christianity, the principle that what is not proscribed in scripture is permitted is the principle. Southern slave-holding Christians demanded that they be judged on the basis of their conformity to the body of ethical and moral precepts regulating the relationships between slaves and their masters as recorded beyond dispute in the New Testament.
The Challenge to Scripture
It may be argued that the issue of slavery in the New World stimulated one of the most controversial debates about the nature of scripture and its interpretation since the formation of the scriptural canon at the end of primitive Christianity, anticipating both in scope and in intensity the turmoils characteristic of the battle between scripture and science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the debates about authority and interpretation that pitted modernists against fundamentalists in the twentieth century. In many ways this was the first battle for the Bible and the conflict between its letter and its spirit, exposing its interior contradictions and pitting biblical ideals and principles against biblical practice and example. This was not a debate about authorship or translation, or the finer points of exegesis. Nor was it a dispute about the proper role and use of scripture in relation to the teachings of the Christian faith, the sort of debate that provoked and enlivened the controversies of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation period. This was a dispute about the authority and morality of the Bible itself, and about how it ought to be read, interpreted, and applied.
Those who wished to challenge the morality of slavery found that they had to challenge both the authority and the interpretation of scripture. They found also that it was not as easy as it might appear, for, as we have seen, the biblical case for slavery was both strong and consistent. There was, however, a moral case to be made, and the morality for that case was made from the Bible itself. Here, the Bible’s moral principles argued against the social practices to be found within the Bible, and as we saw in the biblical debate on temperance, principle in the hands of the reformers took precedence over practice, and claimed for itself the sanction of the Bible.
The issue of slavery was first debated in the West in the context of the Spanish empire and its ruthless approach to the indigenous peoples of its New World possessions. The Most Catholic King of Spain and his Imperial Ministers regarded the native peoples of Latin America as so many biblical Canaanites to be exterminated or enslaved. The land was regarded as a gift from God to the Spaniards, just as the Old Testament lands were God’s gift to the children of Israel. They found in their reading of the Old Testament, particularly in the first five books of Moses, ample precedent for their campaign of conquest and subjugation in the New World. This Iberian conquest of what we now call Latin America, fueled by the joint enterprise of Spain and Portugal, had as one of its stated goals a missionary dimension and a desire to claim these benighted lands for Christ and the Catholic Church. Bernal Díaz, one of the conquistadores who served with Cortés in the campaigns in Mexico, recorded in his memoirs: “After we had abolished idolatry and other abominations from among the Indians, the Almighty blessed our endeavors and we baptized the men, women, and all the children born after the conquest, whose souls would otherwise have gone to the infernal regions.”3
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sp; The conquest and plunder of the native cultures at the hands of Cortés and Pizarro, under both papal and governmental auspices, is well known, as is their introduction of Negro slavery. Pizarro’s treachery is particularly infamous. It was he who murdered the emperor of the Incas, Atahualpa, by giving the hapless sovereign the choice of being burned at the stake as a heathen or of being baptized and strangled as a Christian. These excesses were applauded by Christians at home and justified on biblical grounds, but there were some Spanish Christians for whom these outrages, particularly slavery, were intolerable. Arguing against the notion that the Spanish conquest was a just war against infidels, supported by scripture, opponents criticized bitterly these actions, also on biblical grounds. Chief among these critics was a reform-minded missionary, Bartolemé de Las Casas, the bishop of Chiapas in Mexico, who in 1550 wrote In Defense of the Indians, in which he argued that the biblical texts used to justify the enslavement of the native populations were all historically conditioned and, in fact, overruled and superseded by the biblical principles of love and charity toward neighbors and enemies as exemplified in the teachings of Jesus. The Bible could not be used to justify actions contrary to the moral law of Christ. His arguments did not prevail, but they are important because they mark a significant instance of the use of scriptural principle against scriptural practice, and the establishment of a hierarchy of moral values within scripture based upon the teaching and practice of Jesus.
Two centuries later, English evangelists John Wesley and George Whitefield would make the same case against the slave trade in English North America. They argued that the holding of slaves, although permitted in scripture, was inconsistent with an understanding of the New Testament’s paramount teachings on spiritual rebirth, sanctification, and evangelism. Slaveholders were guilty also, in this view, of gross materialism and greed, in that they regarded slaves as property for gain and profit. The New Testament teachings against materialism and obsession with worldly goods were principles to be invoked here, and slaveholders should release their slaves and make Christians of them as an exercise in evangelism.
These arguments from scripture, amplified by a zeal for social reform not found in scripture but inspired and sustained by scripture, became the basis for the antislavery crusades in England throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which, under William Wilberforce, led to the abolition of the English slave trade in 1833, and the provision by Parliament in that year of twenty billion pounds in compensation for the slaveholders. This was not accomplished without objection and appeals to the Bible, and no less a figure than James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson, wrote, “To abolish a status which in all ages God has sanctioned and many have continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow subjects, but it would be an extreme cruelty to the African savages, a portion of whom it saved from massacre and introduced to a happier life.”4
In America, the antislavery cause accelerated in the aftermath of the Revolution, and the major evangelical Calvinist denominations criticized slavery as inconsistent with the biblical principles of justice and mercy as found in the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Ezekiel, and with the American ideal of an elect and chosen nation in covenant with God. Such arguments were the basis of Samuel Hopkins’s 1776 sermon “Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans.” The Quaker John Woolman, in his Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, and his Journal, both published on the eve of the Revolution, argued that slavery was inconsistent with New Testament principles, and based his arguments on Matthew 6:19 and Matthew 25:44.
In the first third of the nineteenth century these arguments would be amplified and fortified by the spirit of social reform throughout the northeastern portion of the United States and by argument—reminiscent of the “two wine” theory in the crusade for temperance—that suggested that the kind of slavery in the Greco-Roman world with which Saint Paul was familiar, and in which he acquiesced, was notably different from the kind of chattel slavery that had been introduced into the West by the African slave trade. The American version of slavery was far more brutal and unacceptable than the biblical one, and hence the clear teachings of the New Testament did not apply. By this reading, slaves were not obliged, as a Christian duty, to obey their masters, and masters, as a Christian duty, were obliged to release their slaves. David Walker, an African American, wrote in 1829 his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, in which he condemned the slaveholders as acting contrary to the substance of Peter’s famous sermon in Acts 10, where at verse 34–36 the Apostle says, “Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the word which he sent to Israel, preaching the good news of peace by Jesus Christ.” Against those Christians who did not repent of their slave-holding Walker invoked the punishment of the returning Christ, in Revelation 22:11–12: “Let the evildoer still do evil, and the filthy still be filthy, and the righteous still do right, and the holy still be holy. Behold, I am coming soon, bringing recompense, to repay every one for what he has done.”
Abolitionism, essentially a radical and secular political reform movement, would take its moral mandate from this sense of injustice and judgment. Its agenda was not to reform the Bible, but to use, according to its members, the clear moral principles of the Bible and its social sanction to obliterate slavery from the nation. The abolitionists had no patience with the exegetical niceties of their Christian slave-holding opponents, and thought of them as Pharisees who, while straining a gnat from their soup, would willingly swallow a camel. They knew that the devil could quote scripture for his own purposes, and their purpose was to destroy the devil and all his works, and to redeem scripture itself.
After the War. the Battle Begins
One could argue that the chief victim of the Civil War was not the vanquished South, but the Bible.5 Its authority had been challenged. Those who had trusted in it to preserve the righteousness of the southern case for slavery were utterly defeated and disappointed. Those who had been used to a clear and consistent view of biblical morality and authority were saddened, and perhaps surprised, to see that the Bible could be read in so many different ways, and could be heard to speak in contradictory and divisive terms. We tend to think that the Bible suffered at the hands of the new and rampant science, and that Darwinism, with its challenge to the intellectual authority of the Bible, compromised its unity and credibility. It may well be argued, however, that the battle for the Bible that counted and contributed to a radically different way of interpreting its messages was substantially a moral one, and the issues were by no means settled by the military cessation of hostilities at Appomatox Court House. Brothers went to war and shed blood in the most divisive form of human conflict, a civil war, and did so in large measure on the authority of mutually exclusive readings of scripture. Those who “won” won the right to view themselves as on the right side of the battle for the Bible. Those who “lost,” however, contrary to all logic, neither capitulated their reading of the Bible to their victors, nor abandoned the Bible for themselves.
A historian of the Southern Baptists, writing of the period 1865 to 1900, noted that in accepting the defeat of the South in the Civil War as “providential” and “the will of God,” they absolved themselves of responsibility and never repudiated either secession or slavery, the ostensible cause of the conflict. In fact, to the notion that the war might have been God’s means of abolishing slavery, one Southern Baptist correspondent of the period responded that the very idea was preposterous, as it was well and widely known that slavery was approved of in both the Old and the New Testaments. While for others God might have overruled their views on slavery through the means of the terrible war, they would accept God’s will but they would not change their minds. In 1869, a writer to The Christian Index, a Southern Baptist journal of opinion, said, “Now I would certainly be opposed to the restoration of slavery in this country, but I have undergone no change
on the righteousness of slavery, nor can I change until convinced that our Bible is not the book of God.”6
Racism is the mother of slavery, segregation is the child of slavery, and all were believed to be amply supported by the Bible. As the Southern Baptists were not willing to give up their Bibles, neither were they willing to change their reading of the divine arrangements for society as described in the Bible. Their accommodation to the new world order imposed by their loss of the Civil War was the system of racial segregation that emerged to preserve the southern way and, like slavery, was found to be sanctioned in the Bible. In the struggles against racial desegregation, which began in earnest in the South after World War II, and the desegregation of the armed forces at the executive order of President Truman, himself a Southern Baptist, the South, in the memorable phrase of Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia, offered “massive resistance,” arguing that “you can’t legislate morality,” and that “you can’t go against the Bible.” The incident that inspired Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was a letter addressed to him from largely Southern Baptist clergymen who, in the name of civil peace and scripture, urged him to end his crusade for civil rights. Part of their argument was that King’s actions were unbiblical and uncharitable, and that no one in the name of religion should be coerced into changing his mind on deeply held, devoutly held, principle.
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