“When a man strikes his male or female slaves with a rod, and the slaves dies under his abuse, the owner must be punished. However, if the slave can stand up after a day or two, the owner should not be punished because he is his owner’s property. . .When a man strikes the eye of his male or female slaves and destroys it, he must let the slave go free in compensation for the his eye. If he knocks out the tooth of his male or female salve, he must let the slave go free in compensation for his tooth.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the charges leveled against the Scriptures by critical scholars and skeptics is that they condone slavery. To a certain extent, this is an argument from silence. Because none of the various authors ever explicitly say slavery is wrong, and because there are several passages (like this one) in which the instructions assume on the existence and even continuation of the practice, therefore, they collectively support it. There are several reasons why this argument is flawed. LEt’s talk about some of them and what to do with what we see here.

Slavery has been normative across human history. Every culture in the world has practiced slavery in some form or fashion since there have been two distinct tribes. The one tribe convinced themselves that their people were of greater value than the people of the other tribe. This only made sense too because if the people of the other tribe were of equal value as them, then they would have been a part of their tribe. The first time those tribes had some measure of conflict, the surviving warriors and probably their families too were taken as slaves by the victorious tribe. Even today when in the cultural West we recoil in horror at the very idea of slavery (our vision of which is entirely shaped by the particularly ugly and racially-rooted form it took mostly in the U.S. South in the decades leading up to the American Civil War) there are more people living as slaves in the world than there have been at any other point in human history. As long as people exist and should our Lord tarry, there will be slavery in the world.

Slavery’s ubiquitous existence across human history means that we have generally always been okay with it. Indeed, if you remove Christianity from the picture for the moment, while there have occasionally been a handful of critics of the practice of slavery in one form or fashion, these have generally been pretty few and far between. The truth is that there is only one worldview – religious or otherwise – whose adherents have consistently opposed the practice of human slavery. This is the Christian worldview. No other worldview has come close to the kind of consistent and systematized opposition to slavery as Christian worldview has unless its members became convinced by the arguments of Christians that were rooted explicitly in Christian theology and subsequently incorporated those ideas into their own thinking. Where there are non-Christian opponents of slavery today their ideas exist on a foundation that was laid by Christianity.

How could this possibly be, though, if the Scriptures so clearly support it? If the Scriptures obviously condone slavery as modern critics of the faith allege (and to be clear, this is a distinctly modern argument against Christianity that has really only existed with any kind of emphasis to it in the last 50 years or so), why were Christians opposing it so early on in their history? What made them suddenly go against their founding documents and against the opinion of the rest of the world and often in a manner that came with a high personal cost?

Now, does this general opposition to the practice of slavery mean that all people confessing Christ across the last 2,000 years have gotten this right? Absolutely not. At various points over the last 2,000 years Christians have leaned into the broader culture assumption of slavery and found verses to give themselves what felt like theological cover for doing so. Some of the most nuanced and detailed theological treatises ever written were composed by confessedly Christian apologists for slavery in the antebellum South. There are verses that can undeniably be taken out of context – both their immediate context and the context of the whole story – and used to give apparent justification for all kinds of awful things. And without an exception that I have yet encountered, whenever a critic today points to one of these passages as “proof” that the Bible or God condone slavery, this kind of careful contextual work has never been done and has often been rejected.

And yet there is still this thing where people confessing Christ as Lord and who were at least by their own word committed to the authority of the Scriptures started publicly opposing the practice really early on in the history of the church. Why would they do this when there was nothing in the worldview of the broader culture at the time to support such a thinking? The answer that seems obvious to me is that they spent time studying the Scriptures and came to more and more clearly see that the moral trajectory of the whole of God’s story pointed in the direction of the equal dignity of all people, a belief with which the practice of slavery is wildly inconsistent. You cannot simultaneously think all people are possessed of equal dignity while owning another person.

The doctrine of the equal dignity of all people is not merely rooted in something Jesus or one of the apostles said either. It is far more foundational than that for Christian theology. That doctrine is rooted in the Hebrew creation story in Genesis that Christians have always accepted as true and authoritative. When God got to the end of creation and finally brought people into existence, Moses tells us in Genesis 1 that He made male and female equally in His image. There were not two or more different kinds of people. All people were made in the image of God and thus equally bore the dignity of His character in them.

But what about laws like this one? Well, as Saint Augustine argued, slavery is a result of sin. Once sin entered the picture of creation, so did slavery. By the time God began the work of creating a people for Himself who would bear His name and become the vehicle of His efforts to reveal Himself to the whole world and to fulfill His promise to Abraham to bless the world, slavery was totally normalized. Because of this, because slavery was simply assumed by the cultures originally receiving the various documents we now recognize to be Scripture, those authors’ simply declaring it to be wrong wouldn’t have made any sense to their audiences. So, God took a different direction. Instead of outright denouncing it, God gave commands that regulated and restricted its practice in such a way that began introducing once again to them the idea of the full humanity, dignity, and worth of slaves. He met the people where they were, and began working with them to get their minds around where they should have been. This is what we see here.

Slave owners who beat their slaves to the point that they died were to be punished for it. That sounds awful to us, of course, but in its time when slaves could be treated however the owners pleased up to and including killing them without any kind of moral judgment against them at all. More than that, if a master did any kind of physical damage to his slave, the slave was to be freed in compensation. The references to eye and tooth were not exhaustive. No other ancient culture had anything like this in its laws regarding the treatment of slaves. While the assumption of property was still in place, slaves were to be afforded equal dignity and care as non-slaves.

Now, does this alone prove the Scriptures don’t support slavery? Of course not. But it is part of the larger trajectory that followers of Jesus studied and eventually understood was pointing in the direction of the equal dignity of all people and against the practice of slavery. Effecting moral change in a people takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Fortunately, God consistently meets us where we are in all of our brokenness and misunderstanding of His character and ways and gently directs us forward from there. He did it in the ancient world, He still does it today. God is patient and humble and we are all the better for it.