The Biblical Logic of Slavery

Reflections on the Lectionary for October 2nd

(recently excavated slave quarters, Pompeii)

Most of us know, intellectually, that the bible comes from a dramatically different time and place than the ones we live in. We know that the bible was written down between 2000 and 3000 years ago, in agrarian settings and among the burgeoning cities of the ancient Mediterranean, and that much of the social, political, and economic life described in the bible doesn’t bear much relation to the world we live in. We can translate it to our own contexts, and some of what the bible talks about is timeless in the sense that it deals with things humans in all times and places must think about. But sometimes, we can be taken aback by the realization of how true is that old saying, attributed to L.P. Hartley: “the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”

The lectionary readings for October 2nd certainly speak to that. I’m struck, reading them, how they depict a world that is both familiar and foreign to us. The bulk of the readings, including the ones from Lamentations, the Psalms, and Habakkuk, are expressions of despair and lament in the wake of destruction and exile. They relate the experiences of knowing defeat, of losing home, and of feeling hounded by enemies—things that still resonate with the experiences of millions of people today. Even if the circumstances are different, migrants and refugees today face many of the same sorrows and challenges that these texts describe.

But the passage from Luke is something completely different. It’s short enough to reproduce here:

The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!" The Lord replied, "If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it would obey you. "Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, 'Come here at once and take your place at the table'? Would you not rather say to him, 'Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink'? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, 'We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!'"

There’s something striking about this passage, and it goes to the heart of what’s difficult about reading and interpreting the bible today. The striking thing is that the text not only acknowledges and reproduces patterns of inequality and injustice, but it also buys into their logic. It’s one thing for the biblical text to portray enslaved people, for instance, and to matter-of-factly talk about the experiences of enslaved people. But it’s another thing entirely for the biblical text to record Jesus encouraging people to think from inside systems of enslavement and oppression, and using that way of thinking to make a theological point. Jesus, here, isn’t simply pointing out the existence of slavery; he is asking us to agree with a certain logic of control and extraction of labor—a logic of domination—that he assumes that we will share. “Yes, of course,” goes the expected answer to his questions. “Of course we would expect our slaves to come in from the fields and serve us while we eat and drink, before they have a chance to eat themselves.” The text, and Jesus, expects us to nod along with the words “worthless slaves.”

This is something I have been pointing out more and more frequently to my students: how much the New Testament depends on the logic of slavery and other forms of domination. I have been influenced by the work of scholars like Jennifer Glancy, Katherine Shaner, and my new colleague Christy Cobb to think carefully and critically about slavery in the New Testament world. Once you start noticing it, it’s everywhere, both explicitly and implicitly. Some of Jesus’ teachings and parables, like this one, depend on examples from slavery. Paul calls himself a “slave of Jesus Christ” (Romans 1:1, for example), relying on the reader to understand the full implications of that claim. Like Jesus, Paul also uses slavery as a metaphor, sliding easily into descriptions of slavery as a way to talk about morality or belonging (Galatians 4, Romans 6). And perhaps most pervasive of all, the word that often stands in for Jesus and for God, the word “Lord” in English, relies on the same Greek word that can also refer to the head of a household or a slaveholder. When Paul calls himself a slave of Jesus Christ, he’s buying into the logic of a slave/master relationship, calling Jesus “Lord” in the way a slave would be expected to call a master by the same word. That might not be the only resonance of the word “Lord” in the New Testament, but I think it would have been in the background for any hearer or reader of the New Testament in the ancient world, and for some in the modern world.

So what? After all, it’s not news to anyone that the bible comes from a time and place with different values than the ones we hold. What difference does it make if the bible relies on logics of slavery and injustice?

At the very least, it underscores an important point: that when we read the bible (or anything else), we are always importing our own world into the text, and populating it with our own experiences, interests, desires, and commitments. We are never, ever reading it “as it is,” or “literally,” as if we have no stake in the text or its reading. We can only read from own position, with our own particular experiences and biases. In the case of reading passages about slavery in the bible, I would argue that this is a good thing—that being from a place and time that rejects slavery (mostly) helps us read the text more justly than others might have read it in the past. But on a basic level, we are still reading around the biblical text, glossing over places where its values don’t fit our own.

But I think there is a deeper theological level to think about here—one that is not so easily dealt with. What do we do with the fact that these texts presume and even proffer ideas that are abhorrent to us? How do we read something that we so clearly consider to be wrong, and still hold the text in a high regard? Since at least the time of Rudolf Bultmann, some have claimed that we can “demythologize” the text, separating its eternal truths (the kerygma, for Bultmann) from the particularities of time and place in which they are embedded (the mythos). Like sifting gold flakes out of pans of gravel in a creek, the thinking goes, we can sort the good from the bad, tossing aside the slag and keeping the nuggets that emerge from the throwaway stuff. This seems to be the default position of many Christians today, even if they don’t realize it, and it’s one that I have adopted myself in a lot of my work. But as many others have been pointing out for a long time, this way of reading the bible is intellectually dishonest and ethically suspect. It’s like trying to eat the carrots and peas out of a soup without getting any broth—it’s all so mixed up together that we are kidding ourselves if we think we can pick out only the parts we like and never touch the rest.

In Luke 17, Jesus was trying to make a point about service to God. The best model he could come up with, in that moment, was to think about the ways humans serve each other within the institution of slavery, and to use that as a model for how God demands service from people. It’s not an especially coherent metaphor, in my opinion, especially as it’s translated, because it’s not clear what “faith” (17:5, 6) has to do with the commanding of 17:9. If we think about a broader semantic range of the word pistis in verses 5 and 6, and render it trustworthiness or fidelity instead of faith, then maybe it makes more sense with Jesus’ comments about masters who command slaves. Slaves don’t need a category for fidelity, Jesus might be saying, because they should simply be doing what the master says. They shouldn’t have to decide whether to act with trustworthiness, they should simply act upon command. I think that makes a bit more sense of this passage.

But that just pushes us more deeply into the logic of slavery, and it mires Jesus’ words more hopelessly in the muck of systems we would consider immoral and illegitimate. I am not sure what can be done about it. For those of us who read biblical texts as sacred or even just important or foundational, and who are not willing to simply dump them, this is a major problem. There seems to be no way of reading bible that isn’t compromised on some level. Maybe that’s the end of it, for some of us; maybe, like others before us, we simply decide that the bible isn’t worth reading. For others of us, it might be that we see the text as deeply flawed but nevertheless useful for structuring life, either in spite of or because of its flaws. Still others might embrace the text as an uncomplicated source of morality and ethics, ignoring or waving away passages like this one. I think I’m in that middle category, but the more I spend time with passages like this one, the less certain I am.