@Ed Walsh
Ed:
This is something that I may write more on. Here's a little something that I've written (in the conclusion to my Hodge volume published in the Fall) about the Philemon situation.
I do see this as a bit of a biblical test case for the spirituality of the church. Paul did not command emancipation because this would have confused the gospel with its consequences, though clearly the consequences of a life transformed by the gospel should impact our whole life, particularly how we show love to our fellow Christian especially and fellow man more broadly. Now the quote:
While it is true that Christ and the apostles did not abolish slavery, it is also the case that the consequences of the gospel would tend to ameliorate if not eliminate such (seen in Paul’s letter to Philemon).[1]
Had Christ or Paul ordered the end of all slavery, it would have rendered the gospel revolutionary and made its central concern social, political and economic equity. If Paul, for instance, had simply commanded Philemon to free Onesimus and not suggested that he be emancipated as a consequence of the new relationship that they sustained in the gospel, Christians would have viewed such an apostolic command as binding, necessitating the abolition of slavery immediately everywhere. This would have obscured the true spiritual message of the gospel—salvation in Christ to all that believe on Him—and have rendered the Christian faith another competing, indeed radical political agenda, especially in the Greco-Roman world, with so much of the population in slavery. The New Testament contains no explicit commands to abolish slavery—though it prohibits man-stealing (I Timothy 1:10) and thus proscribes American slavery—leaving it to the outworking of the gospel to address such in the Greco-Roman world of its day.[2]
[1] As seen in the practices of Christians in the early church, in A. J. Harrill
The Manumission of Slaves in Early Christianity. (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Siebeck, 1995). Though opposition to slavery itself, as opposed merely to slavery’s abuses, was long in coming, as seen in Trevor Dennis, “Man Beyond Price: Gregory of Nyssa and Slavery,” in
Heaven and Earth: Essex Essays in Theology and Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Peter J. Wexler (Worthing, West Sussex: Churchman Publishing Limited, 1986), it was Christianity, or Christendom, at least in part, that brought slavery to an effective end between the fourth and tenth centuries, with serfdom developing in seignorialism and feudalism subsequent to slavery’s diminution.
[2] Though Kyle Harper, in
Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), showed that slavery lasted deep into the Christian era, in his most recent book,
From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), he shows that Christianity’s strict moral code was particularly sympathetic to the sexual exploitation of the slave. So Christianity played an important role in reforming and ultimately ending ancient slavery.
Peace,
Alan
