Paul’s Admonition To Timothy On Slavery

I Tim. 6 Let as many bondservants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and His doctrine may not be blasphemed. ² And those who have believing masters, let them not despise them because they are brethren, but rather serve them because those who are benefited are believers and beloved. Teach and exhort these things.

The Fact of Slavery in Ephesus

In 1st century Rome, slavery was a deeply ingrained part of society, where slaves were considered property with virtually no legal rights, often subjected to harsh labor conditions, and could be punished severely by their masters, although some skilled slaves could enjoy better treatment and even eventually gain freedom through a process called “manumission.”.

Key points about 1st century slavery in the Roman world
Legal status:

Slaves were considered property under Roman law, meaning their owners had absolute power over them, including the ability to sell, punish, or even kill them without legal repercussions.
Sources of slaves:

Most slaves were captured during military conquests, with prisoners of war often being enslaved. Other sources included debt bondage, abandoned children, or people sold by their families.

Slavery was very important in the ancient city of Ephesus during the Roman period. Whether in the countryside or the city, slaves bore the economic burden of society. In Ephesus, as in the whole Roman Empire, slaves were acquired primarily by selling prisoners of war. The slave trade became a very large volume of trade, especially in the 1st and 2nd centuries BC. The Cilician pirates were the ones who were engaged in stealing and selling people in the broadest sense.

It has also been seen that those who could not pay their debts in the city or the countryside sold their wives and children as slaves in return for debt.

Work roles:

Slaves were employed in a wide range of jobs, including agriculture (fields, vineyards), mining, construction, domestic service, manufacturing, transportation, and even skilled professions like medicine or accounting depending on their abilities.

Treatment variations:

While many slaves experienced harsh conditions, including poor food, inadequate housing, and brutal punishments, skilled slaves could sometimes live relatively comfortable lives and even gain some autonomy.

Manumission:

Slaves could be freed by their masters through a process called manumission, which could happen through a formal legal act or informally. Freed slaves (freedmen) often maintained ties with their former masters.

Social impact:

Slavery was so prevalent in Roman society that it significantly impacted the economy and social structure, with a large portion of the population being enslaved

Slaves always paid for their master’s displeasure with punishment. The forms and methods of punishment were very different. The greatest danger to the master was that the slave thought of running away and taking revenge on his master. But the law made escape virtually impossible. Anyone who helped the slave escape or hid the slave was punished.

If the slave managed to escape and was later captured, he was often driven into the arena in front of wild animals. If the slave tried to take revenge on his master, the penalty was death with his entire family. The customary death penalty was executed by crucifixion.

The Fact of Slavery in the Bible

Slavery is regulated in the Bible and so can be Biblical. Biblical slavery is Biblical.

God gave Abraham slaves.
God gave Job slaves.

God’s 10 Commandments prohibit coveting a neighbor’s male or female bondservant.

Onesimus was owned by Philemon and Paul returned Onesimus to Philemon begging for clemency for the slave. Paul never tells Philemon that slavery is sin.

Here are just a few Scriptures on slavery besides the one we have before us this morning;

Exodus 21:16 And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.

Here we see that man stealing or slave trading is a crime punishable by death. However, having slaves was not punishable by death. That slave trading remained a sin in the NT is seen by Paul’s condemnation in I Tim. 1:9-10

9 knowing this: that the law is not made for a righteous person, but for the lawless … for slave traders

That the Scripture does not teach that all slavery is sin is seen from;

Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property.” – Leviticus 25:44

“Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.” – Colossians 3:22

“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not people.” – Ephesians 6:5-7

“Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them.” – Titus 2:9

“Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.” – 1 Peter 2:18

“Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.” – Colossians 4:1

There are at least seven passages in the Bible where God is depicted as directly permitting or endorsing slavery. Two of these are in the Law of Moses: God permitted the Israelites to take slaves from conquered peoples permanently, and the Israelites could sell themselves into slavery temporarily to pay off debts (Exod 21:2-11; Lev 25:44-46).

The other five passages are in the New Testament, where slavery as a social institution is endorsed and slaves are called to obey their masters “in everything” (Eph 6:5-9; Col 3:22-4:1; 1 Tim 6:1-2; Tit 2:9-10; 1 Pet 2:18-20).

But slavery is viewed positively in Scripture well beyond these commands. Owning slaves was seen as a sign of God’s blessing (Gen 12:16; 24:35; Isa 14:1-2), and there are literally dozens of passages in the Bible that speak of slavery in passing, without comment. Slavery was simply part of life, and most people saw it as just the way things always were, even the divinely ordained order of things.

And yes, in case there is any doubt, this was real slavery: “the slave is the owner’s property” (Exod 21:21). Both Old and New Testaments called for better treatment of slaves than many of the peoples around them, and the Law of Moses in particular called for better treatment of fellow Israelites as slaves.

These passages are all pretty straightforward. One could even say that the Bible is clear on this: the institution of slavery is permitted by God, endorsed by God, and owning slaves can even be a sign of God’s blessing. This has in fact been the Christian view through history: it’s only in the last 150-200 years that the tide of Christian opinion has shifted on slavery.

So why do Christians today believe slavery is wrong? Why don’t most Christians today believe that “slavery is permitted by God, endorsed by God, and owning slaves can even be a sign of God’s blessing,” even though the Bible is pretty clear on this?

This points to the second main reason Christians today believe slavery is wrong in spite of the clear biblical passages that permit or endorse slavery: we have developed a different hermeneutic, a different way of reading the biblical texts on slavery.

The early Christian abolitionists paved the way. Rather than emphasizing the specific Bible passages that directly approve of slavery, they looked at other biblical texts and themes that they saw as more big-picture, more transcultural and timeless: the creation of humanity in the “image of God,” the “liberation” and “redemption” themes of the Exodus, the love teachings of Jesus, and the salvation vision of Paul. That is, they set the stage for a way of reading the Bible that was not grounded in specific texts of Scripture, but in a trajectory of “Exodus to New Exodus centred on Christ,” or “Creation to New Creation centred on Christ”—a larger biblical narrative with Jesus at its heart.

And so when some “Christians” today read the slavery passages in the Bible, this is what they say;

“Sure,  the Bible says this here—but we know from Genesis 1 that all people are created in God’s image, and we know from Galatians 3 that there is no longer slave or free in Christ, and don’t forget about God redeeming Israel from slavery and Jesus’ teaching to love our neighbour as ourselves.”

In other words, we no longer take the slavery-approval passages as direct and straightforward teaching for all times and places. Rather we take these as instances of the way things were done in the past but not the way God really wants things to be. They are descriptive of what once was; they are not prescriptive of what is to be.

So, this type of reasoning goes, “the next time we hear someone talk about the ‘clear teaching of Scripture’ on women’s roles, or saying that ‘the Bible is clear’ on homosexuality, or whatever the topic might be, think about this: the Bible is at least as clear on slavery, yet thank God we no longer believe that slavery is God’s will. We’ve read the Bible, and we’re following Jesus.”

The fact that people really do dismiss Scripture like this on slavery is seen in a quote from the 19th century liberal Theologian Albert Barnes;

“There are great principles in our nature, as God has made us, which can never be set aside by any authority of a professed revelation. If a book claiming to be a revelation from God, by any fair interpretation defended slavery, or placed it on the same basis as the relation of husband and wife, parent and child, guardian and ward, such a book would not and could not be received by the mass of mankind as a Divine Revelation.”

Rev. Albert Barnes
Presbyterian Minister

As long as we will not admit that slavery was Biblical and rightly ordered by God we will never win out on the debates on perverse sexuality. Slavery is the lynch pin. If Scripture can speak so plainly on slavery and still be repudiated as sin then whatever Scripture speaks clearly on in terms of perverse sexuality can likewise easily be repudiated and is being repudiated.

In the words of Dr. Leonard Bacon, a Congregationalist from Connecticut writing in 1864,

“The evidence that there were both slaves and Masters of slaves in the Churches founded by the apostles, cannot be got rid of without resorting to methods of interpretation which will get rid of everything.”

This was made even more clearly evident by R. L. Dabney;

If you will not embrace the perspicuity of Scripture on slavery you will not embrace perspicuity of Scripture on any other subject when it is convenient to disregard it.

The logic is thus… “We know God was wrong on slavery therefore we can come to the point where we see that God was wrong on sodomy, trannie-ism, abortion, and just about anything else. We treated the issue of slavery, as taught in the Scriptures, like a wax nose, and now we are surprised to find that other issues in Scripture are likewise being treated as if we can appeal to some higher or better insight.”

That this is happening is seen in the fact that recently 33 pastors from the Christian Reformed Church bolted the CRC to join another Church because the CRC would not allow them to treat the prohibitions against sexual perversion in Scripture as not being prohibitions. Like the abolitionists long ago, these 33 ministers have putatively found a higher and better way to read Scripture.

So, while we don’t long for a return of slavery, and we ourselves would never want to be enslaved nor enslave others, we do recognize that slavery is not automatically sin if it were to be practiced under God’s regulations.

The Fact Of Slavery As Experienced By All Peoples

Another thing we should be clear about on the subject of slavery is that slavery as well as enslaving has been the lot of every people group you can name. Nobody has the corner on the misery of slavery or of being the victims of slavery. Slavery was not only present in Ephesus but it has been present throughout world history and is still occurring today as seen in the grooming of numerous young white British girls to be sex slaves by foreign interests living in Britain. This kind of slavery is forbidden in the Scripture because if falls under “man-stealing” but it still makes the point that we have slavery today.

Proof of the ubiquitous nature of slavery in nature touching different peoples is observed by from Jordan and Walsh from their book, “White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America”

White slaves in the colonies suffered all the horrors, if not more, than the subsequent black slaves suffered, but their story is not part of the educational curriculum. Blacks and their white advocates would never stand for it because white slavery detracts from the racist image that black studies have created, an image that conveys special victim status to blacks just as the Jews have acquired by the holocaust. But the facts are, report Jordan and Walsh, that black slavery emerged out of white slavery and was based upon it. They quote the African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr:

“When someone removes the cataracts of whiteness from our eyes, and when we look with unclouded vision on the bloody shadows of the American past, we will recognize for the first time that the Afro-American, who was so often second in freedom, was also second in slavery.”

Likewise we have Robert C. Davis, a professor of history at Ohio State University, in his book “Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800″, put the number of white slave at between 1 and 1.25 million Europeans from 1500-1800

Davis said the vast scope of slavery in North Africa has been ignored and minimized, in large part because it is on no one’s agenda to discuss what happened.

The enslavement of Europeans doesn’t fit the general theme of European world conquest and colonialism that is central to scholarship on the early modern era, he said. Many of the countries that were victims of slavery, such as France and Spain, would later conquer and colonize the areas of North Africa where their citizens were once held as slaves.

Maybe because of this history, Western scholars have thought of the Europeans primarily as “evil colonialists” and not as the victims they sometimes were, Davis said.

Davis said his research into the treatment of these slaves suggests that, for most of them, their lives were every bit as difficult as that of slaves in America.

“As far as daily living conditions, the Mediterranean slaves certainly didn’t have it better,” he said.

While African slaves did grueling labor on sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas, European Christian slaves were often worked just as hard and as lethally – in quarries, in heavy construction, and above all rowing the corsair galleys themselves.

So, the Bible talks frankly about slavery. The text this morning speaks frankly about slavery and we see that slavery is not unique to the ancient world nor to any particular people group throughout history.

Now, what Christianity did as it entered the ancient world is that it provided a new ethos for both slave and master as we see in the text this morning;

 Let as many bondservants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and His doctrine may not be blasphemed. 2 And those who have believing masters, let them not despise them because they are brethren, but rather serve them because those who are benefited are believers and beloved. Teach and exhort these things.

The issue of honor ties much of what Paul has been writing to Timothy in chapter 5 and here. In chapter 5 widows who are widows are to be honored. Next Elders in the Church are to be counted worthy of double-honor. And now finally when dealing with the Master slave relationship Masters are worthy of all honor.

τιμῆς (timēs)
Noun – Genitive Feminine Singular
Strong’s 5092: A price, honor. From tino; a value, i.e. Money paid, or valuables; by analogy, esteem, or the dignity itself.

It may be the case that the Gnosticism that was present in Ephesus was of a nature as to level or flatten all relationships so that everyone is seen as being equal or the same. Paul does not desire the Christian faith to be tainted with that flavor and so he tells the slaves to do what might be a difficult at times and that is to esteem their Masters and this so God’s name might not and His doctrine may not be derided – blasphemed. This was Paul’s governing passion – that God’s name might not be seen as being anything but lofty and glorious and so he tells the Christian slaves

Q. 127. What is the honour that inferiors owe to their superiors?

A. The honour which inferiors owe to their superiors is, all due reverence in heart,658 word, 659 and behaviour;660 prayer and thanksgiving for them;661 imitation of their virtues and graces;662 willing obedience to their lawful commands and counsels;663 due submission to their corrections;664 fidelity to,665 defence,666 and maintenance of their persons and authority, according to their several ranks, and the nature of their places;667 bearing with their infirmities, and covering them in love,668 that so they may be an honour to them and to their government.669

Q. 128. What are the sins of inferiors against their superiors?

A. The sins of inferiors against their superiors are, all neglect of the duties required toward them;670 envying at,671 contempt of,672 and rebellion673 against, their persons674 and places,675 in their lawful counsels,676 commands, and corrections;677 cursing, mocking678 and all such refractory and scandalous carriage, as proves a shame and dishonour to them and their government.679