(This is part of an email I recently wrote to a thoughtful Christian acquaintance, who I shall call “Linus.” Obviously, our discussion was set off by Dan Savages recent remarks. My thanks to Linus for his kind permission to include some quotes from his letter. The occasional links were added by me just now, not part of the original correspondence. –Amp]
I guess I am really taking exception to Savage’s characterization of the Bible as “pro-slavery” when a proper reading makes it clear that over the course of the narrative, the pro-slavery statements are turned on their ear and negated. By my understanding, Christians haven’t altered their views on slavery from what the Bible says; they are anti-slavery because the Bible is anti-slavery.
By labeling out-of-context statements about slavery as “bullshit”, putting forth an argument that the Bible is pro-slavery, and then equating them to different moral teachings that he disagrees with, Savage is not treating the Bible or its present-day adherents with any fairness. […]
I think it is important to reflect that while Christians hold the entirety of scripture to be inspired by God – it is still written in a historical context by a human author. Paul, in situ, is writing as a pastor to a member of his flock, instructing him on how he is to receive a returned runaway slave. I suggest you read Philemon to get a sense of the exchange, it is only a few paragraphs long, but the tone is appropriate for a pastor’s instruction in the form of a letter. A full-on command to free the slave or an emancipation declaration might not have achieved Paul’s purpose, but his wording and tone make it clear where he stands on the issue. I cannot tell you why God would use subtle language and tone in this case, or the many other cases where he is mysterious – it is a question that has the potential to be an entire theological discussion by itself.
I think your interpretation is, while not unreasonable, EXTREMELY strained. It’s the interpretation of a good person who is strongly motivated to believe the Bible doesn’t condone slavery, and who has found a way to interpret the text to support that reading.
But it’s not a straightforward, obvious reading of the text. Philemon, which you’re putting great weight on, is ambiguous at best. Especially in light of other passages of the New Testament (e.g., in Titus when Paul says “tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back, not to pilfer, but to show complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they may be an ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior”), a much more straightforward interpretation is that Paul expected Philemon to return as BOTH a slave and a brother in Christ, and would have seen nothing greatly wrong with that outcome.
This is Savage’s point (if I’ve understood it). When you genuinely want to, you subscribe to a “subtle” — I’d say generous — interpretation of the text to reconcile the NT’s condoning slavery with your own belief that condoning slavery is wrong.
If you genuinely wanted to, you could make a similar generous reconciliation for homosexuality. For instance, you argue that we should bear in mind that the scriptures were “written in a historical context by a human author.” But the human authors who wrote scripture simply didn’t have a concept of “gay and lesbian people” as we do. In Paul’s time, it’s very plausible that the homosexual acts he was condemning were between adult men and young boys, and he wasn’t familiar with the idea of two adult men or women living together in a consensual relationship.
Etc, etc. I’m sure you know the arguments; they do require you to interpret the text a bit, but not in a more extreme way than what you do to argue that the NT isn’t condoning slavery.
Please know that I don’t say that with any sense of satisfaction – it has very real implications for how I practice my personal faith – but I feel like it is the only consistent position I can take based on how I understand Christianity and the teachings of the Bible.
This is bothersome because you’re speaking as if you have no choice. You could decide that the Bible does not condemn consensual, loving same-sex relationships between adults; you have chosen not to. You could even more easily decide that the Bible doesn’t say anything about what civil law regarding same-sex marriage should be. Your understanding of the Bible, and your view of when it is and is not okay to interpret the text (as you do when considering slavery), and what that means for civil law, is not an objective fact. It is your own subjective judgment.
The Bible isn’t forcing you to treat lgbt people unequally. Nothing in the text of the Bible forces you to believe that Paul was intending to condemn two adult women living together and forming a loving family. At some level, perhaps unconsciously, you’re choosing to believe that. (And I say this without any sense of satisfaction, by the way! I would much prefer to welcome you as an ally than to disagree with you on this issue.)
[More from the letter in a later post.]
I would highly, highly recommend to your friend Rabbi Gordon Tucker’s opinion Halakhic and Metahalakhic Arguments Concerning Judaism and Homosexuality. Obviously, a Jewish rather than a Christian take, but as an articulation of a method of doing Biblical interpretation, I think he might find it very useful and interesting.
Blech — broke the link. Here it is.
Great response. I also highly recommend the documentary “For the Bible Tells Me So” for its outstanding exegesis on the subject by Christian and Jewish religious leaders, who make it clear that one doesn’t have to be nearly so “subtle” as your friend’s interpretation of the slavery passages in order to conclude that contemporary understandings of same-sex relationships are not what the Bible was on about.
Amp – what’s your opinion on religious abolitionism?
I think the standard view is that people who were very strongly motivated to believe the Bible supported slavery, took strongly abolitionist views, simply because they read the bible as being abolitionist. And historically, that things went the other way. Interpretations of the bible as anti-slavery preceeded growing anti-slavery sentiment. Do you think they were just confused and if they’d had your level of biblical insight they wouldn’t have bothered?
james, as usual, you’re pretending to miss the point. Amp is not saying “you must always strictly interpret the Bible.” He’s observing that it’s dishonest to tailor “how strictly I interpret the Bible” to fit one’s preconceived ideas. It would be equally dishonest to claim that slavery ought to be legal because the Bible says so, but we should take a more relaxed approach to the question of giving charity.
I’m not pretending to miss the point. Amp pretty clearly says he thinks the NT condones slavery and that readings otherwise are very strained and charitable. Yet for more than the last two centuries not only has the dominant interpretation been anti-slavery, but biblically inspired activism resulted in abolition. You’d think that would be worth a mention.
Either by googling Titus Amp has managed to see something and come to a conclusion that most all mainstream biblical interpretation has missed since modern biblical interpretation began, or he’s wrong. If he’s right it’d just be interesting for us all if he spelt out exactly what his theological disagreement with the abolitionists is and where they went wrong.
This is the not treating the Bible or its adherents with any fairness that your friend is complaining about. People made the same call as your friend when they didn’t genuinely want to. It is not difficult for you to take an anti-slavery stance. In reality Christians were on the forefront of the anti-slavery movement when condemning slavery was the difficult choice. It’s not that things have changed and now people take an anti-slavery view of the bible; things changed because people took an anti-slavery view of the bible.
No. What Amp said is that his friend can’t have his exegesis both ways. “Generous when I like it, strict when I don’t” is not an honest way to read the Bible.
Amp already spelled out, with citations to the Bible, why he believes a strict interpretation of the Bible condones slavery. Since you believe his theology is wrong, that would be on you to explain it, not on Amp to refute it. Since the abolitionists have already done the work for you, it shouldn’t be hard.
“In reality Christians were on the forefront of the anti-slavery movement when condemning slavery was the difficult choice.”
Christians were also on the forefront of defending slavery, and the Christians on the forefront of defending slavery had the stronger textual basis for their arguments.
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3403
Abolitionist arguments based on the bible were based on generous readings of the moral message of the bible, not on strict readings of specific texts. Strict readings were used by the numerous anti-abolitionist Christians to justify doing nothing to end the institution of slavery. The sorts of arguments that Christians make for opposing same sex marriage are the same sorts of arguments that Christians made for excusing slavery (find a line that supports your position, although anti-abolitionists had much better and more numerous lines than homophobes do). The sorts of arguments that Christians use for supporting same sex marriage are the same sorts of arguments that Christians made for abolitionism (derive a moral system from the whole of the bible and apply that moral system to your life).
A brief explanation of what the Abolitionists (a group of mostly British Christians who spearheaded the drive to eliminate modern-day slavery) believed about the Biblical take on slavery. Much of this is drawn from http://www.churchsociety.org/crossway/documents/Cway_105_SlaveryAbolitionism.pdf, which is Christian-oriented but quite accessible even to you pagan heathen atheists, and in which I found no gross historical errors. It’s a pretty straightforward account.
A strict interpretation of the Bible condones Mosaic-law slavery. It does not condone the 16th – 19th century variety. The fact that the word is the same does not mean that the legal status, economic arrangement, method of enslavement, etc. is the same. A slave in the eras when the Old Testament was being codified was a very different entity than a slave in the Caribbean or the Americas. He or she had a lot more rights, a lot more protection under the law, a higher social status, a generally-legitimate if rarely-exercised route to freedom, and a whole bunch of other things that would have been totally alien to an African transported to Haiti.
It was the differences in the forms of slavery, in fact, which inspired the Abolitionists, who were mostly extremely devout Christians, to seek out an exegesis of the Bible which would condemn the modern form. They based that exegesis on four main themes.
1. Made in God’s Image. The Bible is explicit that the people of every land derive from the Adamic root stock, that all human life is one family, and that every single human being is made in God’s image. Abolitionists also promoted the writings of accomplished black intellectuals of the day to undermine the Enlightenment consensus that Africans were mentally inferior.
Genesis 1: 26-27 (Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”)
Acts 17: 26 (‘…he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth’)
2. Equality of Rights. The Abolitionists believed that liberty and freedom were gifts from God, not attainments of man, and that therefore to forcibly deprive someone of their equal God-given liberty was immoral. John Wesley wrote “Liberty is the right of every human creature.” The Exodus was cited as historical precedent that God did not approve of forcible bondage of entire peoples, and approved human efforts to overturn it and to win back to the natural state of freedom. They also held that equality of rights forbade the oppression of the poor, and who is poorer than a slave?
Proverbs 14: 31 (‘Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker’)
Job 30: 25 (‘Did not I weep for him whose day was hard to show God’s compassion for the poor’)
Jesus’ words in Luke: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…to preach deliverance to the captives, to release the prisoners.’
3. The Golden Rule. Jesus taught explicitly that the most important rule, the One Rule to Rule Them All, was ‘Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.’ IE, if the law or the prophets are telling you to do something (like keep slaves) that contradicts how you yourself would want to be treated (I don’t want to be a slave), then either the law and the prophets are wrong, or you have misinterpreted them, and you should do what you know bloody well in your heart is the right thing to do.
Abolitionists worked hard to evangelize slaves and former slaves, both from their own sense of duty as to the salvation of souls, but also to increase empathy and commonality between slaves and the British Christian population. It is, sadly, easier to understand that the Golden Rule applies to one’s co-religionist than it is to see its applicability to a pagan from an alien tradition. This effort was successful; at the opening of the 19th century, one-third of the Methodist denomination was of African ancestry.
4. God’s Judgment. [This section I’m just cutting and pasting, because they said it just right.] The abolitionists appealed to people’s consciences by warning them of God’s judgement and wrath against sin, especially God’s anger at the exploitation of the poor. The Quaker Anthony Benezet warned ‘Will not the groans of this deeply afflicted and oppressed people reach heaven, and must not the inevitable consequence be pouring forth of the judgement of God upon their oppressors, must we not tremble to think what a load of guilt lies upon our Nation.’ The abolitionists emphasised to the people that ‘national sins produce national judgements’. Abraham Booth likened Bristol and Liverpool [centers of the British trade] to the ancient cities of Tyre and Sidon.
So: the Abolitionists did not rely on a minute textual criticism of the Bible to find niggling or nuanced technical reasons why slavery was wrong; they went to the broad moral principles and universal rules to establish why, in their time and place, enslavement of Africans was wrong, while not needing to account for Old Testament-era slavery. The institution was different, therefore the teaching could be different, and no reconciliation of substance was required.
Thank you, Robert, that was really interesting. (I’m Jewish, so I’m not sure whether I fit in under ‘pagan’ or ‘heathen’ there.)
And it supports exactly what Amp is saying. The abolitionists took a broad reading of the Bible, based on the principles of Christianity and the words of Jesus, to say that even though the Bible permitted slavery in some circumstances (or at least set out rules for how it was to be conducted), Christians ought to be opposed to it based on the more important goals of Christianity. The exact same approach can be applied to same-sex relationships. It makes no sense to be an expansionist as to slavery but a strict constructionist as to homosexuality, as it were.
I’ve heard similar approaches from Jewish vegetarians, by the way, who argue that while the Torah has laws for slaughter, they are about how to conduct oneself if one does eat meat, not that meat-eating is favored or required; and that vegetarianism is more consonant with the values of the Torah.
Robert,
I have a post in moderation (!) saying much the same thing, but you said it much better.
Credit to the source; I know the military part of the abolitionist movement but their actual theology was all news to me. I don’t have a dog in this fight, so whether it buttresses or annihilates Amp’s point is just gravy. I just wanted to know what the original guys thought, and now I do. ;)
“This is bothersome because you’re speaking as if you have no choice. You could decide that the Bible does not condemn consensual, loving same-sex relationships between adults; you have chosen not to. You could even more easily decide that the Bible doesn’t say anything about what civil law regarding same-sex marriage should be. Your understanding of the Bible, and your view of when it is and is not okay to interpret the text (as you do when considering slavery), and what that means for civil law, is not an objective fact. It is your own subjective judgment.”
This is not right you cannot decide that sins aren’t sins.
The bible allows for the ownership of slaves and it gives guidelines for the proper treatment of slaves, but it doesn’t say we must practice slavery or that our society needs to allow slavery. Those decision were left to us.
The bible says homosexuality is a sin. We can argue how bad a sin it is and we can say that we are all sinners and that we shouldn’t throw stones, but we cannot say that it isn’t a sin because that isn’t our decision to make.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/looking-for-love/
It’s tangential to the post, but since the post derived from Savage…
I do think Y-Love has, in the short time he’s been out, done more for gay Jews than Savage has. And demanding interpretation in this way is entirely in keeping with Jewish theology.
(Obligatory on point comment: Sometimes religion, by its nature does have to turn away from external circumstance, no matter how unjust that circumstance, to the individual practitioner’s mind/soul for the simple reason that that is the core area of concern for religion. Some people have a tendency to let external circumstance interfere with their inner journey. When the opinion the practitioner has about those external circumstances is true, then it is only that much easier. For some people, and I emphasize only for some, though I am one, the correct teaching is that they have to turn inwards first before they can direct that energy out. In my practice, we teach that the Bodhisattva ideal is to forgo our own enlightenment to save all beings, but we always tell people, “First get enlightenment; then save all beings.”)
Bible quotes about being gay:
http://www.holy-bibles.org/search5/homosexual.htm
Bible verses about slaves:
http://www.holy-bibles.org/search5/slave.htm