Comment by Refreeze5224
16 hours ago
Trying to use the New Testament as a paragon of enlightened thinking, especially regarding slavery, is going to be a tough sell.
16 hours ago
Trying to use the New Testament as a paragon of enlightened thinking, especially regarding slavery, is going to be a tough sell.
Compare it to the rest of the world in the first century, and it’s extremely enlightened. Compared to most of the world today, even many self-professed “Christians”, the teachings on rich vs poor, pacifism, and forgiveness are downright radical.
In addition the New Testament doesn’t endorse slavery as something that people should do or something that is morally correct.
It instructs people who happen to be slaves to obey their masters in the same way it instructs non slaves to obey their authorities. The principle is the same as when Jesus refuses to fight back against the Roman soldiers arresting him. Jesus isn’t endorsing the Roman soldiers’ behavior. He’s saying that the Christian response is not supposed to be rebellion (in most cases at least).
> Compare it to the rest of the world in the first century, and it’s extremely enlightened
This reads like somebody who doesn't have a lot of knowledge/experience with other religious texts.
A core principle in Theravada Buddhism, one of the oldest schools of Buddhist philosophy, is the practice of ahimsa [1] - avoiding actions which cause undue suffering to any living being and that even includes animals. You can find this concept in Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.
Abrahamic religions don't crack the top 10 of most empathetic and compassionate world views IMHO.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa
>It instructs people who happen to be slaves to obey their masters in the same way it instructs non slaves to obey their authorities.
First, no one "happens to be" a slave.
Second, this is an implicit endorsement of slavery. Especially where slaves obeying their masters is made analagous to Christians obeying God. This is an argument made by the New Testament that slavery is a reflection of the natural hierarchy of God's design - that slaves are to their masters as all men are to God.
Or read Luke:
How deeply between the lines do we have to read to get to the part where slavery is seen as the problem, rather than slaves refusing to accept their lot? When you're using slaves as an object lesson for how Christians should view their relationship to God, you're endorsing slavery.
>He’s saying that the Christian response is not supposed to be rebellion (in most cases at least).
So if Christians aren't supposed to rebel against slavery, what should they rebel against? Were the abolitionist Christians who did rebel against slavery sinning against God in doing so?
Passive acceptance of the status quo in this regard is not what many would consider "extremely enlightened."
In a modern democracy slavery is detestible because non slaves are not the property of anyone and are (ostensibly) subject only to the rule of law. In such a system to take away someone's freedom, remove them from the rule of law, and place them under the rule of mere human is abhorrent.
But we're talking about a time period where everyone was a slave to someone else. Palestine was under Roman occupation and everyone owed absolute fealty to the Roman Emperor. Everyone was a slave to the emperor.
In this period there was no hope of creating a system that recognized the equality of all people through rebellion. If Jesus had urged rebellion against authority, the Roman Empire would have crushed the rebellion (as it did a few years later with the destruction of the Temple). If Jesus had urged slaves to rebel against their masters, all that would have happened was that slaves would have been killed.
The average Roman considered slaves and the people of Palestine in general to be morally beneath them. They didn't see them as equals. They had no problems slaughtering everyone in the entire province.
I think a major purpose of the Jesus' message was focused on spreading the message that we should "Love our neighbor as ourselves" which includes loving our enemies. Only once that message spread was it possible to begin to organize our societies in a more egalitarian fashion.
One way to spread that message is to demonstrate that love to everyone, even your cruel master. In that way it's not passive acceptance, but acknowledgment that long term change is your only option.
>Were the abolitionist Christians who did rebel against slavery sinning against God in doing so?
It's hard to answer that absolutely because we live in a very different world (as did the abolitionists of the 19th century). I don't think Jesus would have condoned political violence to overturn slavery. I don't know in what case Jesus would condoned political violence. But then again 19th century slavery was very different from 1st century Palestinian slavery, and it's hard to know how far pacifism extends. Jesus did chase the money lenders from the temple after all, but he also said turn the other cheek. And then yet again that isn't really "passive acceptance", it's deliberately provoking someone to unjustly hit you a second time, which is potentially a powerful weapon.
I do believe the abolitionists who advocated for change through political means and non-violence were doing God's work. And this was something completely impossible in first century Palestine. It was only made possible by centuries of advancement directly springing from the radical egalitarian teachings of the New Testament.
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