Does the Bible Condone Slavery? | Rebecca McLaughlin

If the Bible teaches that human beings are made in the image of God, why does the Bible seem to allow their enslavement? It’s a question that often troubles believers and serves as an objection for skeptics. Kirk E. Miller sits down with author and apologist Rebecca McLaughlin to work through the issue historically, biblically, and theologically. As we’ll see, those passages that often seem like roadblocks to faith, when read carefully and in context, turn out to be signposts pointing toward it.

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Episode guest: Rebecca McLaughlin

Rebecca McLaughlin holds a PhD in Renaissance literature from Cambridge University and a theology degree from Oak Hill College in London. She lives in Cambridge, MA, with her husband, Bryan, their three children, and their wider church family. Rebecca is the author of several books, including:

• Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion (2019), which was named book of the year by Christianity Today
• 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (and Answer) About Christianity (2021)
• The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims (2021)
• Is Christmas Unbelievable? Four Questions Everyone Should Ask About the World’s Most Famous Story (2021)
• Jesus Through the Eyes of Women: How the First Female Disciples Help Us Know and Love the Lord (2022)
• No Greater Love: A Biblical Vision for Friendship (2023)
• Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Relationships? (2024)

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Episode synopsis

Delineating the difficulty

Contemporary Westerners approach the topic of slavery with imaginations shaped by the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and the evils of slavery in the Antebellum South. Moreover, many Christians actively used the Bible to justify this enslavement of African peoples. For instance, many appealed to a so-called “curse of Ham” to justify the enslavement of African people. Such misuse of Scripture understandably weighs heavily on us as we approach the matter of slavery in the Scriptures. (As McLaughlin points out, though, that weight can sometimes cloud rather than clarify what the Bible is actually saying.)

Historian Mark Noll has described the Civil War as, among other things, a theological crisis: Christians on both sides of the debate over slavery appealed to the Bible.¹ Underneath the political conflict, one discovered a conflict of hermeneutics. This prompts questions: Why do we now side with the abolitionists? Is it simply that the Bible is ambiguous enough to support either interpretation, or is there a more principled case for the abolitionist reading?

The nature of slavery in the Bible

A crucial step toward rightly understanding the Bible’s teaching on slavery is to disentangle it from assumptions we bring based on slavery’s modern expressions. Ancient slavery, whether under Old Testament law or within the Greco-Roman world of the New Testament, was not the chattel-based institution of the Antebellum South. It was not based on racial identity, and many had a realistic routes to freedom. There were many paths into slavery, including conquest, poverty, being born to slave parents, and debt—the latter being the most common by far. In fact, you might sell yourself into a form of service that functioned much like employment. Moreover, slavery was far more variegated than the single image that tends to dominate our imagination. Some slaves held significant social status, managed households, and exercised authority over others.

What does the Bible say about slavery?
Use Logos’s Factbook to start your study.

God gives Israel laws to guarantee the proper treatment of slaves and to protect them from abuse (Exod 21). These regulations should not read as permissions for everything the law doesn’t explicitly prohibit. These laws set limits on the worst behaviors, but they don’t define the ceiling of acceptable conduct.

God repeatedly ties these commands to Israel’s own experience of slavery: “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt” (e.g., Deut 5:15; 15:15; 16:12; 24:18, 22). Israel’s national identity and relationship with God began with emancipation: God had redeemed them out of slavery in Egypt. That collective memory was to shape how Israelites treated those in vulnerable positions, including slaves. The Sabbath and Jubilee years extended this logic further: People who had been sold into servitude were to be released and restored, their debts forgiven (Lev 25). The structure of Israel’s social economy included mechanisms designed to prevent permanent, hereditary poverty and bondage, reflecting the emancipatory aims of the Exodus itself.

God’s concern for the enslaved

Yet even before the giving of the law, the Bible’s narrative portrays God as one who sees and dignifies enslaved people.

For example, when Sarah expels Hagar, her Egyptian servant, leaving her destitute in the wilderness, God meets her and makes promises to her that parallel those he made to Abraham (Gen 16). Hagar becomes the first person in the entire Bible to give God a name: El Roi, “the God who sees” (Gen 16:13). This is who God is, a God who sees and concerns himself with the plight of mistreated slaves.

Some generations later, the Israelites themselves become slaves under the Egyptians (the roles reversed). So again, God attends to the cries of those enslaved and oppressed:

Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew. (Exod 2:23–25)

God identifies himself throughout the Old Testament as the one who brought Israel out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. As the Black church tradition has often emphasized, the Exodus became the paradigm for understanding God’s redemption.

Jesus’s inversion of greatness

Immediately after Jesus foretells of his death, his disciples begin arguing about which of them will be the greatest (Mark 10:32–41). Yet Jesus teaches that, in contrast to the world’s norms in which superiors lord their power over others (Mark 10:42), “whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all” (Mark 10:43–44; emphasis added). They must follow in his footsteps, who “came not to be served but to serve” (Mark 10:45).

Likewise, the night before his arrest, Jesus strips down to a slave’s clothing and washes his disciples’ feet (John 13). They are horrified. This is the Lord, performing a task assigned to slaves. He then tells us to do likewise by serving one another (John 13:13–15).

Philippians 2 captures this arc: The one who is in very nature God took the form of a slave, even humbled himself to a slave’s death: crucifixion. We likely struggle to grasp how scandalous this truly is. To a Greco-Roman audience, the cross was not a religious symbol worn around the neck or a decoration for our sanctuaries. It was a shameful execution assigned to disgraced slaves. This is the extent of God’s humiliation for us.

Christianity doesn’t abolish slavery by saying no one is a slave but by declaring everyone is a slave.

And this is what Jesus demands of all his people: that we follow in his footsteps by taking up our cross (Mark 8:34–35; 9:30–31) and making ourselves slaves of others (Mark 9:33–37). Christ’s kingdom inverts our constructed hierarchies. Slavery, instead of belonging to the lowest, becomes an obligation of all. In fact, those with the most authority in the Christian community are the ones most obligated to conduct themselves as servants. Servitude, rather than a diminishment, is the defining posture of greatness. In this way, Christianity doesn’t abolish slavery by saying no one is a slave but by declaring everyone is a slave.

Christianity’s subversion of slavery

Paul’s letter to Philemon is, as Rebecca puts it, the most brilliantly passive-aggressive piece of ancient literature. Paul is sending Onesimus, a slave who apparently ran away, back to his master Philemon. On the surface, it may seem Paul endorses and supports his slavery—until you read the letter. Paul does not just ask for clemency. Paul tells Philemon to receive Onesimus back as he would receive Paul himself, as an honored guest—this in a society where a runaway slave could face severe punishment.

From a Christian standpoint, we are all slaves to Christ and to one another, including masters (e.g., Philemon) to their slaves (e.g., Onesimus). Moreover, the category of “my slave” is replaced with “my brother.” We are brothers and sisters. As Paul says elsewhere, in the church “there is neither … slave nor free … for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28; emphasis added). Interestingly in Colossians, whereas Paul refers to all his other colleagues as “fellow slaves,” he conspicuously refrains from that language when describing Onesimus, the one man who actually was, legally, a slave. Rather, Paul calls him simply “our faithful and beloved brother” (Col 4:9). The exception seems intentional.

We can sometimes approach the Bible as if we possess independent moral criteria by which to judge its treatment of slavery. Yet values such as human equality, inherent dignity, and universal rights did not emerge out of thin air. We may take them for granted nowadays, but they are not self-evident and cannot simply be assumed. Human rights cannot derive from atheistic materialism; secular humanism employs them as borrowed capital. Thus, we end up critiquing the Bible with moral resources we’ve (perhaps unknowingly) derived from the Bible, cutting off the branch on which we sit.

The Bible teaches that every human being exists as the image of God. That conviction, worked out across the Christian tradition, is what eventually dismantled the institution of slavery. What at first may seem like roadblocks to Christianity turn out to be signposts pointing to it.

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Logos values thoughtful and engaging discussions on important biblical topics. However, the views and interpretations presented in this episode are those of the individuals speaking and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Logos. We recognize that Christians may hold different perspectives on this passage, and we welcome diverse engagement and respectful dialogue.

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Related resources from Rebecca McLaughlin

• Rebecca McLaughlin, “Should Christians Reject Slavery and Affirm Same-Sex Marriage?”

Additional resources on slavery and the Bible

Related content

• What Is Christian Ethics? How Scripture Shapes Our Moral Lives
• What Does It Mean to Be Human? Theological Anthropology
• What Is the Curse of Ham? | Chad Bird on Genesis 9:18–29
• Black Political Theology: An Anti-oppression Faith
• Servant-Leadership: How Jesus Redefines Greatness

1. Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).