Theopedia

Slavery

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

— Galatians 3:28

Definition

Slavery is the ownership or compulsory service of one human being by another. Scripture regulates slavery as it existed in the ancient Near East and Greco-Roman world, an institution built on debt, war captivity, or birth rather than race, offering many slaves a path to freedom.1 God instituted marriage and the family before the fall, “but not slavery.”2 Old Testament law limits servitude, requiring release, rest, and provision for the enslaved,3 and the New Testament condemns man-stealing, the practice behind race-based chattel slavery, outright (1 Tim. 1:10), while declaring slave and free equal in standing before God (Gal. 3:28).

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession does not name slavery and has no chapter devoted to it. Its chapter on the law of God states the general category the wider Reformed confessional family draws on: the moral law continued after the fall as “a perfect rule of righteousness,” delivered “in ten commandments… written in two tables, the four first containing our duty towards God, and the other six, our duty to man.”4 The Westminster Larger Catechism, part of that same confessional family, enumerates what the eighth commandment forbids under that general category, and names the specific sin at issue: “theft, robbery, man-stealing, and receiving anything that is stolen; fraudulent dealing… and all other unjust or sinful ways of taking or withholding from our neighbor what belongs to him.”5 Man-stealing, the seizure of a human being to hold or sell as property, is the mechanism Exodus 21:16 punishes with death and 1 Timothy 1:10 condemns among “the lawless and disobedient”; it is this practice, rather than every form of bonded service the ancient world knew, that the confessional family’s own eighth-commandment category names as theft of the worst kind, a person rather than a possession.

Biblical Basis

Old Testament servitude law

Israel’s law regulates rather than establishes servitude, and its regulations consistently limit a master’s power and open a path to freedom. The Decalogue itself requires that household slaves rest on the Sabbath (Exod. 20:10; Deut. 5:14). A man who sold himself into service because of poverty was to be treated as a hired worker and released in the year of Jubilee (Lev. 25:39-40), and could be redeemed by a relative at any time before then (Lev. 25:47-55). An Israelite sold into slavery within Israel was to be freed after six years (Exod. 21:2; cf. Deut. 15:12), sent away with generous provisions of flock, grain, and wine rather than empty-handed (Deut. 15:13-14), a law grounded explicitly in Israel’s own memory of bondage: “you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you” (Deut. 15:15). A master who permanently injured a slave, even by striking out an eye or a tooth, was required to let the slave go free (Exod. 21:26-27). Ken Magnuson summarizes the effect of these provisions against the wider practice of the ancient Near East: “its laws largely aim at the humane treatment of slaves/servants, with provisions for their freedom.”3

Slavery in the New Testament world

First-century Greco-Roman slavery differed from the race-based chattel slavery of early modern America in ways that bear directly on how the New Testament addresses it. As Scott Bartchy’s summary, quoted by Magnuson, puts it: “Racial factors played no role… many slaves carried out sensitive and highly responsible social functions… the majority of urban and domestic slaves could legitimately anticipate being emancipated by the age of 30.”1 A freed slave who gained Roman citizenship could “blend into the general population within one generation,” unlike the New World, where “skin color often continued to identify the children of slaves and ex-slaves for many generations.”1

Paul instructs slaves to obey their masters with a willing spirit (Eph. 6:5-8; Col. 3:22-25; 1 Tim. 6:1-2; 1 Pet. 2:18-21) and tells them not to be anxious about their status, though they should take an opportunity for freedom if one comes (1 Cor. 7:20-22). Masters, in turn, are required to treat their slaves justly and without threats, “knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him” (Eph. 6:9; Col. 4:1). Kidnapping and the slave trade are named among the acts that mark someone as “lawless and disobedient” (1 Tim. 1:10). Ken Magnuson identifies the most significant New Testament claim as this: “slaves and freemen are equal in standing before God and in receiving the gospel (Gal. 3:28).”6

Philemon

Paul’s letter to Philemon puts that equality to a concrete test. Paul sends the runaway slave Onesimus, now a believer, back to his owner Philemon with the appeal to receive him back “no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother” (Philem. 16). Joel White’s close study of the letter’s rhetoric argues that Paul did want Philemon to free Onesimus, but as one goal within a larger one: replacing the household’s language of social hierarchy with the language of family, since “if Philemon begins to regard Onesimus as his brother, it becomes impossible to hold him as a slave. People of integrity did not treat their siblings like that in the ancient world.”7 White is careful about how urgent that goal was to Paul: “his attitude was not ‘Onesimus must immediately be released at all costs,’ but rather ‘other things being equal, it is a good thing for a slave to gain freedom’ (see 1 Cor 7:21).”7

Historical Development

The American Presbyterian debate: Dabney and Hodge

The nineteenth-century American debate over slavery split even theologians who otherwise shared a confession. The Presbyterian Church in the USA (PCUSA) condemned slaveholding in its 1818 General Assembly as “a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature… utterly inconsistent with the law of God.”8 By 1845, seeking to hold the denomination together across regional lines, the Old School General Assembly retreated from that position, resolving that the church could “not, therefore, denounce the holding of slaves as necessarily a heinous and scandalous sin.”9

Robert Dabney, a Confederate chaplain and professor at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, defended Southern slavery as part of what he called “Bible Republicanism.”10 Dabney read Paul’s instruction that Philemon receive Onesimus back “not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved” (Philem. 16, KJV) as changing nothing about Onesimus’s enslaved status: “the obvious sense of these words is, that Philemon should now receive Onesimus back, not as a slave only, but as both a slave and Christian brother.”11

Charles Hodge of Princeton Seminary took what Isaac Tuttle calls a “moderate path, condemning both radical abolitionists who considered slaveholding inherently sinful as well as pro-slavery advocates who wanted to perpetuate the institution.”12 Hodge and Dabney agreed that treating an enslaved person as mere property was “unbiblical and dehumanizing,”12 but Hodge argued that slavery itself rests on “the inferiority of one class of society to another,” and that perpetuating it necessarily meant “preventing the improvement of the subject class.”13 As early as 1836 Hodge followed that argument to a conclusion many of his contemporaries found scandalous: “if the slaves are allowed so to improve as to become freemen, the next step in their progress is that they should become citizens. We admit that it is so… Still they are men; their colour does not place them beyond the operation of the principles of the gospel, or from under the protection of God.”13 The German Reformed church historian Philip Schaff, writing in 1861, named what made the American case uniquely difficult to resolve: “Of all forms of slavery the American is the most difficult to dispose of, because it is not only a question of domestic institution and political economy, but of race. The negro question lies far deeper than the slavery question.”14

Southern Old School Presbyterians left the denomination in 1861 over the Gardiner Spring Resolution, which required support for the Union, and reorganized as the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America.9 With hope of reunion lost, the PCUSA General Assembly in 1864 approved a statement, which Hodge himself supported, declaring slavery “an evil and guilt… that concrete system… designed and adapted to keep a certain class of our fellow-men in a state of degradation.”15 Dabney, unreconciled, called the declaration “infidel ground.”16 American chattel slavery itself ended with the Union’s victory in 1865.17

The “curse of Ham” and segregation-era apologetics

Pro-slavery and, later, pro-segregation writers appealed to Genesis 9:20-27, Noah’s curse on Canaan, as a supposed sanction for the subjugation of black Africans. Magnuson names this among the fallacious “biblical” arguments made first for slavery and then for segregation after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling.18

Opposing Views

Two readings of the same biblical texts divided nineteenth-century Christians, and the division was not primarily about whether Scripture regulates servitude (all sides agreed that it does) but about what that regulation was taken to license. Dabney’s “biblical slavery” read the Old Testament provisions and the New Testament household codes as a positive charter for a permanent, hereditary institution, provided masters treated their slaves paternally; on this reading, Paul’s words to Philemon left Onesimus’s status as a slave untouched, only adding Christian brotherhood on top of it.11 Hodge, and the wider mainstream that the PCUSA’s own 1864 statement eventually represented, read the same texts as regulating a tragic feature of a fallen social order rather than commending it: gospel principles worked against treating any class of human beings as permanently unfree, since “their colour does not place them beyond the operation of the principles of the gospel.”13

Objections and Responses

If slavery is wrong, why does Scripture regulate it instead of prohibiting it outright? Scripture does prohibit the specific act that produces race-based chattel slavery: man-stealing, seizing a person to hold or sell as property, is condemned by name (Exod. 21:16; 1 Tim. 1:10) and named among the sins the eighth commandment forbids.5 What Old Testament law regulates instead is closer to indentured servitude than permanent chattel bondage, with built-in limits: a maximum term of six years for an Israelite sold into service, a Jubilee release, redemption by a relative at any time, and freedom for a slave permanently injured by a master’s own hand.3

Doesn’t Paul’s instruction that slaves obey their masters amount to an endorsement of slavery? Paul addresses how an existing relationship should be conducted rather than commanding its abolition by fiat, but the household codes also relativize the relationship they regulate: masters are warned that they too answer to a heavenly Master who shows “no partiality” (Eph. 6:9), and slave and free are declared equal in Christ (Gal. 3:28). In the one case where Paul addresses a specific master and slave directly, he presses for the relationship to be transformed into something a slaveholding society could not sustain, “a beloved brother” (Philem. 16), and Joel White’s study of the letter argues Paul wanted this to issue in Onesimus’s actual manumission.7

Was the “curse of Ham” a legitimate basis for race-based slavery? No: Magnuson names it among the fallacious “biblical” arguments made first for slavery and later for segregation. The argument rests on reading a curse pronounced on Noah’s grandson Canaan (Gen. 9:25) as though it named an entire race yet to exist, a connection the text itself does not make.18

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Ken Magnuson, “16. Race Relations,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020), quoting Scott Bartchy: “Racial factors played no role; education was greatly encouraged (some slaves were better educated than their owners) and enhanced a slave’s value; many slaves carried out sensitive and highly responsible social functions; slaves could own property (including other slaves!); their religious and culture traditions were the same as those of the freeborn; no laws prohibited public assembly of slaves; and (perhaps above all) the majority of urban and domestic slaves could legitimately anticipate being emancipated by the age of 30.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Philip Schaff, quoted in Isaac Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres: Robert Dabney and Charles Hodge on the Submission of Wives and Enslaved People,” Themelios 50, no. 1 (2025): 128: God “instituted marriage and the family relation before the fall, but not slavery.” ↩

  3. Magnuson, “16. Race Relations”: “Though the Bible is sometimes portrayed as supporting slavery, and was used in defense of the American slave trade, its laws largely aim at the humane treatment of slaves/servants, with provisions for their freedom.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 2. ↩

  5. The Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), Q. 142. ↩ ↩2

  6. Magnuson, “16. Race Relations”: “The New Testament authors do not reject slavery outright, perhaps because of the various types of slavery and the good standing that many slaves had within their household. Yet masters are required to treat their slaves well and not threaten them (Eph. 6:9; Col. 4:1), and kidnapping and the slave trade are condemned (1 Tim. 1:10). Most significantly, and radically, slaves and freemen are equal in standing before God and in receiving the gospel (Gal. 3:28).” ↩

  7. Joel White, “Who Was Philemon, What Did Paul Want from Him, and Why?” Themelios 49, no. 3 (2024): 631. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres,” 116-17. ↩

  9. Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres,” 117. ↩ ↩2

  10. Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres,” 117-18. ↩

  11. Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres,” 121-22. ↩ ↩2

  12. Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres,” 125. ↩ ↩2

  13. Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres,” 126. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  14. Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres,” 126-27. ↩

  15. Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres,” 127. ↩

  16. Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres,” 127. ↩

  17. Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres,” 122. ↩

  18. Magnuson, “16. Race Relations,” citing Kenneth A. Matthews, “The Table of Nations: The ‘Also Peoples,’” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 5, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 42-43, and Peter Kolchin, “Slavery in the United States,” in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, eds. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 1733-34. ↩ ↩2