Slavery

Once, there was a form of debt servitude allowed by God among Israel, and a form of slave-keeping of gentiles. Confederate (Southern States) slavery was different, but not, I used to think, wholly evil. In particular, I was convinced by Robert L. Dabney's movingly written A Defence of Virginia and the South that one could not appeal to Paul in order to justify abolitionist arguments. What made Dabney's arguments even more compelling was the prescience of his collateral attacks: when he wrote in the 1860s, he saw and warned against consequences of the abolitionist movement that I saw around me in the mid 1990s - in the State school system, in feminism, and in the homosexual rights lobby.

Certainly, the common argument that Paul did not want to set a disruptive torch to the social order is nonsense. Both Dabney and Greg Bahnsen in Theonomy in Christian Ethics point out that Paul was not at all afraid to preach that Jesus and not Caesar is Lord; one could hardly ask for a more disruptive attack on the social order in any Roman society.

Yet there remain a massive percentage of Christians who think Confederate slavery was wrong. Granted, many of them have never thought about it in depth, simply picking up the modern social milieu. Thus, I was able to dismiss their view as par for the course in such an egalitarian society as ours. But their numbers and the conviction of a few have weighed on me, and in recent years I've begun to doubt my initial acceptance of Dabney's central claim. This claim was very strong: that Paul positively sanctioned slavery, following old covenant precedent. So, left in doubt, I've been wondering: what did Paul really mean to do?

Tim Gallant writes on the subject and has singlehandedly shifted me a considerable way to the 'Dabney was wrong' conclusion. Far from finding excuses for Paul, and without being facile, he shows that the apostle did actually set a torch to that social institution. This comes in the course of an argument defending Paul against relativisation to cultural norms, and crescendos in railing bitterness at the empty 'liberations' of feminism, champion of the relativist critique.