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SLAVE AUCTIONS IN EPHESUS

Is it possible to read the Bible, the Word of God, and read just the WORDS . . . and skid tragically off course? Can you by reading the Bible end up joining a cult? Or condemning and abusing your neighbor? Or adopting an erroneous view of God? It happens all the time, doesn’t it? The Bible may be successfully read by children, but it certainly is a Book for grownups — and the more grown-up we are in our attitudes when we come to its deep and sacred pages, the better.

Here in Ephesians 6, that is most certainly the case. “Children, obey your parents” is not complicated. “Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath” is relatively simple to comprehend as well. But when we get to verses 5-9, a painful chapter from the history of the Church rears its ugly head. Here’s what Paul has to say:

“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.”

And we say: “What in the world is this? Slaves?!” Does the Bible support slavery? In their 1987 book, Kingdoms in Conflict, Chuck Colson and Ellen Santilli Vaughn have a chapter entitled “For the Good of the Nation.” It tells the thrilling saga of a young British politician named Wilbur Wilberforce; at the tender age of 21 he had run as a conservative for a seat in Parliament from his safe district in Kent. Four years later, when his college friend William Pitt, just 24 years old, was elected Prime Minister, Wilberforce gambled by running in the more influential Yorkshire district. In a driving rain, the five-foot-tall statesman made an unforgettable speech and won the election. Soon after that, he went on an extended tour of the British empire with an Isaac Milner, who was a fervent born-again Christian. With many religious questions in his mind, the young politician then had an encounter with Rev. John Newton, a clergyman in the Church of England. Newton had been the captain of a slave ship, but had abandoned the trade when he was converted to Christ. Soon after that, Wilberforce made the same decision, but opted to stay in politics when the minister advised him: “The Lord has raised you up to the good of His church and for the good of the nation.”

Then these two writers backtrack and describe the horrors of the British slave trade as it was practiced in the 1700s in England. Ships packed with 500 or more kidnapped slaves would make the killing voyage from the African coast to the Caribbean. The human cargo would be packed so tightly in the hold that as many as a third to half of them would die. Every day, dead and near-dead bodies were thrown overboard. For the women on board, there was an additional hell to endure, as the diseased crew helped themselves to any female they chose. The ship was “half bedlam, half brothel,” as Colson puts it.

Back home in England, people were simply not in a frame of mind to address the scandal. The rich lived in an alcoholic fog. London was “one vast casino,” and the well-to-do enjoyed nonstop games of chance and adulterous affairs; the poor were “crammed together in shabby dwellings, . . . cogs grinding out a living in the Empire’s emerging industrial machines.” Slavery was such an entrenched part of the economy of the realm that politicians referred to it casually as “the institution” and “the pillar and support of British plantation industry in the West Indies.” Slave interests could openly pay three to five thousand pounds and “buy” a seat in the House of Commons. And of course, whenever a minister or a member of Parliament would point to the evil blight of slavery, someone was quick to bring out the book of Ephesians and cry: “Even the Word of God permits it!” One political hack confessed in floor debate that the slave trade” was not an amiable trade,” but quickly pointed out that “neither was the trade of a butcher . . . and yet a mutton chop was, nevertheless, a very good thing.”

Well, friend, let me mercifully cut the story short. This Wilbur Wilberforce labored in Parliament, persuading, praying, making speeches, quietly moving to prick men’s consciences — and he kept at it through one defeat after another, working for 20 agonizing years. Finally, on February 22, 1807, on a snowy night, the House of Commons voted 286 to 16 to abolish the slave TRADE in the British empire. It took until 1833 before the outlawing of slavery itself was accomplished, taking place exactly three days before Wilberforce, this great Christian giant, passed to his rest in the Lord. And of course, we all know that in America the evil practice continued three more decades and cost our nation a painful civil war.

Well, friend, if you can find a copy of Kingdoms in Conflict, by all means get it. You’ll enjoy the entire book, and especially this section. But how do we address the reality that here in Ephesians is a passage that doesn’t seem to contain even a hint of condemnation for a practice that the entire religious world — Christian and otherwise — now plainly sees as evil? What went wrong?

One answer is that the Bible addresses world conditions as they are. In the empire of Rome, there was slavery. It was a part of the fabric of society, and men like Wilber Wilberforce were 18 centuries off in the distant future. There were levels of evil, too; some slaves suffered under conditions as bad as we’ve just considered, while others had a much better life, and were treated more as servants. Even Christians sometimes had slaves or WERE slaves.

Let me share insights from two good study sources. First of all, the commentary from my own Adventist denomination. Here’s what they write:

“Nowhere in the Scriptures is this unnatural practice [slavery] specifically condemned, but in both the Old Testament and the New Testament principles are enunciated that would tend in time to eradicate it.”

That helps a little bit, but the outraged reader of 2004 still might wonder: Why didn’t the Holy Spirit convict people’s heart and minds and open their eyes to the wickedness of this? Why did the Old Testament permit it and even give codes and rules about slavery? These are hard questions, not for the faint of heart or shallow of conscience.

There’s a powerful essay about this in a book called Commentary on the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, written by two excellent scholars: E. K. Simpson and F. F. Bruce. We’ve quoted from Dr. Bruce before, and I appreciate what these two Christians say in commenting about Ephesians 6 and these hard verses:

“Many a superficial thinker,” they write, “has blamed Christianity for lending any sanction whatsoever to the rank injustice of slavery. But its mission was spiritual in essence and only collaterally social. Had it assailed the established system of serfdom point-blank, it would have ruined that primary object [spiritual victory] by inflaming political antagonisms to an incandescent furnace-heat. Servile wars had already shaken Roman society to its base and helped to precipitate imperial dictatorship as the sole effectual preservative against social insecurity. The institution of slavery was in fact bound up inextricably with the legislation of the ancient world and could only be dissolved with its dissolution. By attacking that deep-rooted curse directly the new faith would have come into deadly conflict with ‘the powers that be,’ and merged itself in a gigantic EXtrinsic upheaval fatal to its INtrinsic purpose. Divine wisdom is not so shortsighted as to be thus side-tracked.”

So friend, the hard reality is that God patiently takes us where He finds us, and human societies where He finds them. But we need to be assured of two things: He then wants and expects that we will grow up. As society grows, and as reforms slowly occur, Christians will always be in the forefront of pressing for holy living and righteous governments. We will always be “ahead of the curve,” as they say.

The second thing we can know is that God always leads us back to the Eden ideal. Do you remember how the Pharisees and scholars asked Jesus about the issue of divorce? And He sadly nodded and admitted that “because of the hardness of your hearts,” Moses did in fact permit this wrenching solution. But “from the beginning,” Jesus asserted, “it was not so.” And in this excellent commentary by Simpson and Bruce, they hasten to add:

“In the unsullied cosmos of God’s creation slavery could have found no place. That inhuman abuse sprang from the infraction of the moral order.”

And even in the thick of the storm, right there in Ephesus where slavery was rampant and Christians were sometimes in the chains of servitude, Paul could preach freedom.

“Human slavery may imprison the body,” points out the Adventist commentary, “but it can never subjugate the spirit.”

Friend, it’s an incredible thing when the gospel both sets a person free spiritually, and when it reforms him politically. The grace of Jesus Christ takes a wretched man like a slave ship captain and makes him into a champion of freedom, a person transformed and made whole. He once was lost, but now is found. If that sounds familiar, and if you thought you’d heard of that slave ship captain-turned-minister before, John Newton, check out your Christian hymnal. In my denomination, it’s #108. Amazing Grace, 1779, by John Newton. “Was blind, but now I see.”