Did Jesus make a clear anti-slavery statement? Christian apologist Tom Gilson says yes (part 1).

I disagree. Let’s wrap up with Gilson’s attempt to show my logical errors and some concluding remarks.

My errors brought to light

Gilson tried to expose my logical errors. Let C = the claim “Jesus was the Son of God whose primary mission on earth was to die for our sins and reconcile us to God.” My “huge” error, Gilson tells us, is

1. Assume C is false.
2. Conclude C is false.

In other words, I’m charged with circular reasoning.

Nope. I do conclude that Jesus wasn’t a god, and my argument is this entire blog. But I’m pretty much on board with the various reasons Christians give for Jesus’s visit to earth, according to the Bible. So no, no circular reasoning.

I am confused, though. The idea of Jesus coming to earth “to die for our sins and reconcile us to God” is popular, so I’ll accept that. But then what does that do to Gilson’s reference to “[Jesus’s] mission of revolution at the level of the heart”? He needs to get his own story straight before scolding me for not understanding Jesus’s mission. Those two missions don’t sound synonymous.

And if Gilson is saying that Jesus’s “primary mission was to . . . reconcile us to God,” it sounds like he’s agreeing with me. He’s saying that Jesus had more important matters to deal with than attacking slavery. Fine—then stop saying that he attacked slavery.

[Jesus] proved by demonstration that all persons are of equal worth. He taught love for all.

Jesus did hang out with prostitutes and tax collectors. But he also emphasized that he “was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel” (Matthew 15:24). He dismissed non-Jews as dogs (Matt. 15:26) and pigs (Matt. 7:6). The social hierarchy was clear in Jesus’s mind.

[Teaching love for all] was insurrection enough on its own to get himself executed for it.

Huh? Do you really not know why Jesus was executed? All four gospels agree on few things, but they all report that the accusation against Jesus was written on the cross: “King of the Jews.” Setting yourself up in opposition to Rome’s king—that was insurrection.

Still, he didn’t use the word slavery, though, so, hey, “How good was he?”

Dismiss the sarcasm, and Gilson is on target here. The Son of Man was given an easy pitch, and he swung and missed. Gilson wants to dismiss that as unimportant, but what does it mean that Jesus gets a trivial moral test wrong? This is how outsiders test Christianity’s claims. Jesus can’t be a god and get “Is slavery morally okay?” wrong.

Summary points

Gilson tries to summarize my fourth post with two points. That sounds like an easy job since my arguments are simple, but he fails. Is it that hard to read an atheist without bias?

1. A lot of Christians have either misunderstood or failed to follow Jesus’ teachings.

Here, Gilson throws imperfect Christians under the bus, but this isn’t my point. I argued that an objective, unbiased reading of the Bible gives far more support for the slave-owner than the abolitionist.

2. Jesus didn’t use the word “slavery,” so therefore he wasn’t against it.

Does Gilson actually think this is an accurate summary, or is this a deliberate strawman? My position is simply that slavery is a test of Christian claims for Jesus. Is Jesus an omni-benevolent being? Then surely he would make at least a tiny fraction of his message a clear rejection of slavery. The Golden Rule, a vague condemnation of greed, or rules of sexual morality aren’t the same thing.

To state the obvious, I will be the judge of this test. Gilson always has the fallback that Jesus’s lack of an obvious anti-slavery message might make some sort of sense in God’s mind, but then his argument degrades to, “Sure, I realize that Jesus appears to not be particularly benevolent, but—who knows?—maybe we just can’t understand.” (More on what this argument imposes on the Christian here.)

Let’s take a step back

Why is this hard?

I’m kidding of course—I know why it’s hard. By addressing the slavery question, Gilson shows that he understands that it’s an Achilles heel. He’s a product of Western morality, and he’s surely as horrified by slavery as any of us. But the best he can come up with is weak arguments like, “The principles Jesus taught cut every leg out from under slavery” when the simple and obvious explanation is that Jesus was just an ordinary person (or literary figure) of his time who couldn’t imagine a society where slavery was both dispensable and dispensed with.

Jesus sounds like a product of his time. His story isn’t that of a timeless god sharing wisdom with no expiration date. He was just another prophet or mythological god-man like countless others from the Ancient Near East. If he were an omni-benevolent god, he’d sound like it.

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Image from Kevin Jarrett (free-use license)
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Did Jesus make a clear anti-slavery statement? Christian apologist Tom Gilson insists that he did. In part 1, we got into Gilson’s rebuttal to my argument that Jesus didn’t say anything of note about slavery.

By the way, did I mention that Gilson has a new book out? He could talk about little else in his rebuttal, which made for a confused foundation. Let’s be clear: I’m interested only in the question of the morality of Jesus as evidenced by his stance on slavery.

We’ll continue with Gilson’s attacks to my argument.

A literal approach to the Bible?

Gilson said:

[Jesus’s morality] cuts the legs out from any possible motive for slavery. It takes a special kind of wooden fundamentalism to notice that [and] yet think Jesus failed to say anything about slavery.

I never said Jesus said nothing. Jesus did mention slavery but only in passing. He never criticized it. And from the standpoint of the twenty-first century West, that silence is deafening.

Jesus had no problem redefining Old Testament rules about murder, adultery, divorce, and more in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5). If he cared about slavery, he could’ve changed its rules, too. Imagine this brief statement added to the list:

You have heard it said that you may own people as slaves for life. But I tell you, a person is not a beast that may be owned by another person. Nor are people Jew or Gentile such that one can own the other. All are equal in the eyes of the Lord.

Just in case it’s not obvious, that’s not in the Bible. It was my invention.

An imperfect person can figure this out, but this morality is apparently beyond Jesus.

“Barker’s and Seidensticker’s Silly Simile”

I end most posts with a quote that might be relevant to the topic of the post, or maybe I thought it funny or witty. My second post ended with a quote that had Gilson wrapped around the axle for a dozen paragraphs:

Asking, “If there is no god, what is the purpose of life?”
is like asking, “If there is no master, whose slave will I be?”
— Dan Barker

Gilson was clutching his pearls as he imagined Barker setting “god” and “slave-owning master” as equivalent. Gilson said, “Now, if there is a god for whom that’s true, I don’t believe in it either. It’s certainly not the God I believe in.”

Barker wasn’t referring to Yahweh (that is, God with a capital-G) but rather “god.” This wasn’t specific to Christianity. And doesn’t the Christian God assign a purpose? Christians celebrate this and even try to use this as a bragging point against atheists: they have an objective purpose, and those poor atheists don’t.

Explaining something so straightforward feels like explaining a joke, but since Gilson seemed confused, let me try. “God” and “slave master” in the aphorism are used as purpose-defining beings. You aren’t a slave, so don’t look to a master to define your purpose. You do that yourself.

And by the same logic, the lack of a god (or pope or pastor) to constrain you is freeing—you’re an adult, and you can ignore them and define your own purpose for your life.

Finally, given that Gilson got Dan Barker’s job title wrong (Barker is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation), let me add a little color that I imagine was also lost on him. Barker’s quote echoes “No Gods, No Masters,” the slogan of a newsletter launched in 1914 by feminist Margaret Sanger. It is also the subtitle of Women Without Superstition by Annie Laurie Gaylor, the other co-president of the FFRF.

So no, not a “silly simile” but a thought-provoking comparison.

Let’s return to Gilson, horrified at any suggestion of equivalence between Yahweh and a slave master.

Our God is not like any slave-holder they’ve encountered.

Here’s what God World is like. Think of sleeping children who startle awake at a noise and wonder in terror if this is the Armageddon their parents have said is imminent. Or the children taught to hate the classmate with two mommies. Or parents who treat their sick children with prayer instead of medicine. Or Christians bullied on how to vote to keep Jesus from crying. Or gays driven to suicide after Christian bullying. Or Catholic bureaucrats who put the church’s reputation over the mental health of children and shuffle around pedophile priests. Or Jim Jones.

To this, I expect a cheerful, “Well, I also don’t believe in a god who would have anything to do with that!” This misses the point. These are the consequences of a god that some believe in, and they built that belief on your Bible. I agree that God is different in important ways from a slave master, but Christians are still chained by their beliefs.

I do get a bit perplexed when [skeptics] take question-begging approach like Seidensticker does, for example assuming that Jesus’ primary mission to seek and save the lost couldn’t possibly take precedence over stopping slavery.

I never assumed that. There are 85,000 words in the gospels, and no one is saying that that should be one long diatribe against slavery. I’m just asking for a couple of sentences making clear his rejection of the institution and what his followers should do about it. Not finding this, I conclude that Jesus isn’t the benevolent god Christianity claims.

And if you’re explaining why Jesus didn’t attack slavery, you’re just undercutting the central point of your argument. It doesn’t matter why he didn’t attack slavery; I’m simply pointing out that he didn’t.

Concluded in part 3.

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Image from Zulmaury Saavedra (free-use license)
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We’ve read ten points in Tom Gilson’s argument that Jesus was ardently anti-slavery despite not saying a word against it in the Bible. Let’s wrap up some loose ends in this final post in the series, looking at what the American Civil War can teach us about which side made the stronger biblical case for its position, the reason you wouldn’t expect Jesus to care about slavery, and some final thoughts. (Part 1 of this series is here.)

American Civil War: which side had the stronger biblical case?

I’ll agree that we can do the Gilson two-step and select only Bible verses that reject slavery (or, given that there are none, verses that speak of peripheral issues like brotherly love or sexual morality). Christians did this in the lead-up to the American Civil War. But of course their pro-slavery opponents did the same thing, making their own argument necklace by stringing a very different set of beads.

Here is a comparison of the Northern and Southern biblical arguments from a modern American historian. Not only did Jesus not make a clear anti-slavery statement, but the Bible was the more effective weapon in the hands of the pro-slavery South.

Professor Eugene Genovese, who has studied these biblical debates over slavery in minute detail, concludes that the pro-slavery faction clearly emerged victorious over the abolitionists except for one specious argument based on the so-called Curse of Ham (Gen 9:18-27). For our purposes, it is important to realize that the South won this crucial contest with the North by using the prevailing hermeneutic, or method of interpretation, on which both sides agreed. So decisive was its triumph that the South mounted a vigorous counterattack on the abolitionists as infidels who had abandoned the plain words of Scripture for the secular ideology of the Enlightenment.

Why Jesus didn’t reject slavery

Jesus didn’t end slavery because the harm it caused in society wasn’t important to him.

Life for the common people was hard, and for more reasons than just slavery. There were taxes, droughts, famines, war, highway bandits, disease, and more. Life wasn’t easy in first-century Palestine.

Jesus cured a few people to prove that he was supernatural (see John 5:36), but he didn’t eliminate any diseases. He magically fed crowds a few times, but he didn’t end hunger. He didn’t free Judea from Roman rule. Improving this life wasn’t his goal—why tidy your cabin if the ship is sinking?

Jesus was an Apocalypticist. He felt that the current corrupt Age, ruled by an evil being, was soon to end. This would usher in a new Age with a benevolent ruler. Under this thinking, even the problem of Jesus the god who failed to end slavery goes away because Jesus was just the messenger.

Jesus made clear his short-term focus when he said, “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (Matt. 24:34). A few verses earlier he identified “these things” as the sun and moon darkening and the stars falling to earth.

Jesus didn’t end slavery because, in his mind, the end of this Age was at hand. Slavery would end at the same time. (I explore the consequences of Jesus’s short-term focus in more depth here.)

Now I’ll undercut my own defense of the logic of Jesus’s position. If the end were nigh, why worry about any social ill? If you’re not going to bother with slavery, why worry about the poor? The near-term future held, not simply a decent meal each day, but life with every pain removed.

And how anti-slavery can the New Testament be when Paul uses the idea in a positive way when he calls himself a “slave of Christ Jesus” (Romans 1:1)?

Concluding thoughts

Seeing Jesus as a failed Apocalypticist doesn’t help Gilson. Jesus as a failed anything won’t do, and Gilson is left handwaving why Jesus was the Great Emancipator but the Not-So-Great Communicator. And we come back to the fact that if Jesus wanted no slavery, he would have said so or poofed it out of existence. The simplest explanation is that Jesus didn’t care.

Compare that with something that Jesus very much did care about—compassion for the disadvantaged, to take one example. Here is what that looks like in the Bible.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world (James 1:27).

If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? (1 John 3:17).

We see Jesus’s compassion for the disadvantaged in:

• the story of the widow’s mite: “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all the others.”
• the story about the rich young ruler: “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor.”
• the parable of the sheep and the goats: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
• the Beatitudes: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”

You want to know what Jesus would say about something he cared for deeply? Like that. And that’s what you don’t see for slavery.

Tom Gilson has replied to these posts. I respond here.

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Image from muammerokumus (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
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