[Vision2020] slavery, Bible, 10 commandments

[Joe Campbell]

Keely,

With all due respect, I don't think the move to justify slavery is the  
right way to save Christianity. Slaves in Greece were property and  
could be beaten. Not good.

A better way would be to say that the moral lessons of the Bible are  
best understood within a virtue ethic than a deontological ethic. It  
does not give a list of rules but a way of life, a way toward virtue.

Slavery is wrong but even the slave owner has some virtues; he is not  
virtuous since he also has some vices. Maybe that is the message.

But slavery is and always was wrong.I agree with Ralph that IF the  
Bible says otherwise, it is wrong. My view is that it doesn't always  
mean what it literally says.

Joe Campbell

On Apr 16, 2009, at 10:20 AM, keely emerinemix <kjajmix1 at msn.com> wrote:

> I'll try not to get us further off topic, but a few points I'd make:
>
> 1.  Ralph is correct.  The Old Testament does condone and regulate  
> slavery, and the New Testament, while presenting a Gospel that is  
> incompatible with slavery or any other form of social hierarchy or  
> oppression, does not explicitly condemn the practice.  It is  
> important to realize, however, that Hebrew slavery was not only more  
> beneficient than that of the pagan cultures around the Jewish  
> people, but that it was radically different than the race-based,  
> permanent, violence-controlled, man-stealing, hate-based slavery of  
> the antebellum south, which could not be justified, period, under  
> any circumstance for these very reasons.  Hebrew slavery was not  
> race-based, not permanent, and more correctly what we would likely  
> call, even as we properly find it abhorrent, an indentured  
> servitude.  The New Testament slavery discussed by Paul was  
> basically of the same sort and, again, an improvement over slavery  
> practices of other non-Yahweh-worshipping cultures (this is how I'm  
> using the term "pagan").  The Gospel of Jesus Christ had as one of  
> its inevitable outcomes the eventual end to the slave practices of  
> the day among Christians -- again, a slavery entirely different from  
> the inexcusable slavery of the antebellum south.  The movement of  
> the Spirit in Christiandom, and, later, the work of thousands of  
> Christ-worshipping abolitionists (including my great-great-great  
> grandparents, both ordained ministers) brought about the end of  
> slavery in "Christian" America and the understanding, finally and  
> comprehensively, that the "owning" of another person's labor and  
> security, not to mention the attempt to rob them of body, soul and  
> spirit, is wrong.  Why God moved incrementally in abolishing any  
> form of slavery, I don't know.  But it's foolish to pretend that the  
> OT doesn't lay out strict regulations of an accepted practice, and  
> equally so to pretend that the NT either encouraged slavery or  
> specifically condemned it.  The NT church, instead, affected society  
> by adopting in itself the egalitarian spirit of the Holy Spirit.   
> The Apostles weren't social reformers, and we might wish they were,  
> but they preached a message that believers came to understand, and  
> not as rapidly as we wish they had, was incompatible with the  
> Kingdom of God among them.
>
> 2.  Nowhere in either OT account of the Ten Commandments does it say  
> to love your neighbor as yourself.  It shouldn't need to, and  
> nothing in the Decalogue makes it possible to legitimately not love  
> your neighbor.  Rather, the Ten describe how to love God and how to  
> live lovingly amongst humanity.  It's nonsensical to claim that  
> "love your neighbor as yourself" is part of the Decalogue -- it  
> isn't -- and it's absurd to claim that the idea of loving one's  
> neighbor isn't the whole point of the Ten.
>
> 3.  Yeah, I said Christ-worshipping abolitionists, and to claim that  
> the slavery of the antebellum south was somehow in any way Godly is  
> only a bit more offensive, and wrong, than claims by Wilsonites that  
> those who worked to abolish it were motivated by hatred of God  
> (Southern Slavery As It Was/Black and Tan, Wilson and Wilkins).   
> And, further, the Gospel message is an egalitarian one, and Federal  
> Vision, patriarchy, "complementarianism" and any other male-favoring  
> message is at odds with it.
>
> Period.
>
> Keely
> http://keely-prevailingwinds.blogspot.com/
>
>
>
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