Arguing the Affirmative: JOHN THE ATHEIST
Arguing the Negative: RANDAL THE CHRISTIAN
John’s Opening Statement
This topic raises the issue of the goodness of the divine revelation in the Bible for a good, omnipotent, and omniscient God. It also raises the problem of suffering (or evil) if such a God exists. If any issue speaks against the goodness of the biblical conception of God, this is it.
Former American slave Frederick Douglass described how his Christian master whipped his aunt right before his young eyes:
He took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist. He made her get upon the stool, and he tied her hands to a hook in the joist. After rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood came dripping to the floor. . . . No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood clotted cowskin.[12]
A religion should be judged based on how it treats the defenseless. Slaves are the most defenseless of them all. Given the cruelty toward slaves that we see in the Bible and that has been acted out in history, all civilized people should reject Christianity as nothing but a religion created in a barbaric era.
The pro-slavery movement had the better arguments. They argued slavery was never condemned in the Bible but instead divinely sanctioned by the patriarchs (Gen. 9:24–27; 12:5, 16; 14:14; 16:1–9; 20:14; 24:35–36; 26:13–14; 47:15–25), incorporated into Israel’s national laws (Exodus 21; Leviticus 25), and authorized by Jesus (Luke 12:35–48; 14:15–24) and the apostles (Eph. 6:5; Col. 3:22–25; 1 Tim. 6:1–6; Titus 2:9–10; Philemon; 1 Pet. 2:18–19). They denied the abolitionist claim that other passages dissolved the social distinction between master and slave (1 Cor. 12:13; Gal. 3:28; Col. 3:11) since the apostles spoke elsewhere about this relationship, even to the point of saying a person was “called” to be a slave (1 Cor. 7:20–22) or to suffer under a harsh master (1 Pet. 2:18–19). Biblical scholar Hector Avalos argues with regard to Galatians 3:28: “Paul does not mean that slaves do not exist literally anymore. Thus, ‘there is no slave or free’ cannot mean ‘there exist no slaves or free people.’ Otherwise, if slaves do not literally exist anymore, then nor do free people.”[13] Only abuses were discouraged (Col. 4:1), although the Bible did not regard beating a slave nearly to death as abusive (Exod. 21:20–21).
Some apologists claim the word for slaves in the Old Testament (’ebed) does not connote ownership of the person. But Avalos argues such a conclusion “is clearly contradicted” by Leviticus 25, “for it uses the word ’ebed when describing how the Israelites are allowed to buy slaves. Verse 45 states that an ’ebed ‘may be your property’ and may be inherited by the slavemaster’s children (v. 46).” Avalos asks, “If buying and inheriting an ’ebed does not ‘connote ownership of a person,’ then what does?”[14] Contrary to apologists who claim the abolition movement was inspired by the Bible, Avalos argues convincingly that “the Bible’s stance on slavery posed an enormous, and sometimes insuperable, challenge for abolitionists.”[15]
To say evil men distorted the Bible for their own greedy purposes defies the facts. To say we would think otherwise if we were Caucasian born and raised in the Antebellum South defies the facts. To say God could not have unequivocally condemned slavery in the Bible defies the facts.
Nonetheless, why would a good God give human beings the freedom that we have so badly abused? A two-year-old child should not be given a razor blade. If we give him or her one, then we will be blamed if that child hurts himself or herself or others with it. The giver of a gift is to be blamed when he or she gives something to a person knowing in advance that the person will abuse the gift. Likewise, if God gave us the freedom to enslave others, he is to be blamed for what we do with that gift. God could have created us all with one color of skin so there would be no race-based slavery. He could have implanted in us an inviolable moral code against enslaving others, or made us suffer from severe nausea at the very thought of it. But he didn’t.
Randal’s Opening Statement
On October 28, 1787, young politician William Wilberforce wrote in his journal: “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners [or morals].” Based on this call, Wilberforce spent the rest of his life as a member of Parliament in Britain, working first for the abolition of the slave trade (achieved in 1807) and then of slavery itself (achieved in 1833), driven by the conviction that God desires to liberate all peoples.
But wait a minute. Wasn’t Wilberforce aware that God doesn’t really care about slaves? After all, God approved of the institution of slavery in ancient Israel. And the apostle Paul directed the escaped slave Onesimus to return to his slave boss (Philem. 1:12).
In his A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Wilberforce addresses the role of slavery in the Bible. To begin with, he notes that the belief that God made a concession to slavery in ancient Israel doesn’t oblige one to accept the morality of the institution today. (By analogy, conceding that a developing economy may require protectionist trade policies doesn’t allow us to conclude similar policies are defensible for a developed economy.) Moreover, he points out that God advised the merciful treatment of slaves and stipulated that they should be emancipated after a fixed period of time.[16] Finally, Wilberforce pointed out that we are now in a radically different situation since Christ “has done away with all distinctions of nations, and made mankind all one great family, all our fellow creatures are now our brethren.”[17] Indeed this theme is reflected in the two Bible passages that adorn the title page of his book:
There is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all. Put on therefore . . . bowels of mercies, kindness.
Colossians 3:11–12 KJV
And [God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.
Acts 17:26 KJV
We can summarize Wilberforce’s views as follows: When God entered into history, he accommodated himself to the flawed social institutions of the time. But as he did so, he began to renovate those institutions from the inside out with the end goal being the liberation of all peoples. This brings us to Paul’s decision to send escaped slave Onesimus back to Philemon. Yes, he sends him back, but at the same time he appeals to the master to welcome the slave as he would welcome Paul himself (Philem. 1:17). Paul knew that no institution of slavery can be sustained once one truly grasps the gospel of grace and accepts the full equality of the oppressed class. In other words, the letter we call “Philemon” is not a concession to slavery but a Trojan horse into its heart.
While there is much to commend Wilberforce’s redemptive view of history, some Christians will remain reluctant to accept the notion that God ever accommodated himself to slavery. For these people there is another more radical possibility. Perhaps the ancient Israelites were simply mistaken to believe that God had consented to the institution of slavery. Maybe they forgot the lessons of the liberation from slavery in Egypt as they immediately fell into the pattern of enslaving others while rationalizing their behavior by projecting their actions onto the will of the Almighty. And maybe God allowed this errant reading of his will to be included within his book precisely as a sober warning to the rest of us—a demonstration of how quickly we also move from liberation to the oppression of others. (Think, for example, of the parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18:21–35.) In this view the tension with the oppression of other peoples hinted at in prophets like Ezekiel emerges fully with the life, teachings, and sacrificial death of Christ.
While these two views diverge sharply on their assessment of slavery in ancient Israel, they agree that God sent Christ to establish a kingdom of mercy and justice for all people in which “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Whatever one thinks of slavery in ancient Israel, this theme of the blessing of all nations is consistent in Scripture from the calling of Abraham (Gen. 18:18) to the culmination of the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:26). And it is this theme and hope that has inspired Christian reformers from William Wilberforce in the eighteenth century to the International Justice Mission in the twenty-first. For that reason, Christians everywhere work for that day so beautifully described by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
When all of God’s children—, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”[18]
John’s Rebuttal
The information given on Wilberforce is sorely outdated. He discouraged the use of the Bible in debates about slavery, and he threw his support behind another form of slavery in Sierra Leone known as apprenticeships.[19] Paul in Acts 17:26 basically repeats Seneca and Cicero’s sentiments, so there isn’t anything there that can be credited to Christianity.[20]
I find it incredibly dense to see Christians like Wilberforce arguing that God did the best he could to abolish slavery. He could have condemned it from the beginning, consistently saying, “Thou shalt not enslave human beings or beat them into servitude.” There are no circumstances where a loving God could ever think it was expedient to allow such an utterly vile institution to exist. None.
If instead the Israelites misunderstood what God was saying, then they probably got other things wrong, such as the very existence of that God. So either God did not do his best or the ancient Israelites invented their particular God from out of their own superstitious barbaric outlook, in an era when slavery was acceptable.
Randal’s Rebuttal
While John carefully amasses a number of alleged biblical problem texts on slavery, he all but ignores the key redemptive passages like Galatians 3:28—a text that Paul Jewett and Marguerite Shuster rightly refer to as the “Magna Carta of humanity.”[21] John does deal briefly with this text by quoting Hector Avalos’s observation that Paul cannot be interpreted as denying the existence of slaves. While this is true, it is also wholly irrelevant. The real lesson here is that when this text affirms the equality of all people in Christ, it definitively undermines the moral justification for slavery. While the Christian has a clear mandate to fight slavery, in what does John root his moral indignation? Ironically, it appears that John critiques the Christian tradition on slavery by tacitly drawing upon the moral absolutes of that very tradition.
John’s Closing Statement
It’s irrelevant if an atheist makes this argument. The facts speak for themselves. Christians are leaving their faith because of it. So where does Randal get his own sense of moral indignation when his God does not share it? He gets it from our advancing culture and the sciences, just like I do.
Randal’s Closing Statement
John charges that God should have been clearer in his condemnation of slavery. I charge that John should be clearer on the objective ground that drives his condemnation of slavery. Reformers from William Wilberforce to Martin Luther King Jr. have been driven by the inherent equality of all people made in the image of God as they work for his peaceable kingdom. What drives John?