New-Testament Slavery: Fact vs. Fiction with Dr. Paul Copan

I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST

Dr. Frank Turek

Religion & Spirituality, Education, Christianity

4.8 • 5K Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Does the Bible REALLY support slavery, as skeptics often claim? Last week, Dr. Paul Copan joined Frank to unpack the cultural and theological context of Old Testament passages, like Leviticus 25. This week, Paul returns to examine the New Testament’s most controversial passages on slavery, addressing questions about human dignity, morality, and God’s ultimate plan while answering questions like:* What rights and protections did servants actually have under biblical law?* What does the punishment for mistreating servants reveal about their dignity and value?* How did the Bible call out abuses of slavery and work to humanize servants?* What did Paul teach Christians about how to treat slaves in the New Testament?* Were there barriers that made abolishing slavery outright impossible in ancient Rome?* Why does God sometimes take incremental steps to eradicate deeply entrenched evils?* Why were most abolitionists Christians while some famous atheists supported slavery?* How are modern atheists “borrowing” from Christianity when they complain about slavery?You'll learn that slavery in the Bible is far more nuanced than skeptics want you to believe. Tune in to discover how Jesus’ radical model of service, Paul’s letters, and the early church’s example paved the way for the eventual abolition of slavery in both the ancient and modern world.Resources mentioned during the episode:Old-Testament Slavery: Fact vs. Fiction with Dr. Paul Copan - https://youtu.be/9dc5zbm1jtc (https://youtu.be/9dc5zbm1jtc) Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World - https://a.co/d/8Vm25dB (https://a.co/d/8Vm25dB)Paul's website - https://paulcopan.com/ (https://paulcopan.com/)Is God a Moral Monster? - https://a.co/d/6tykn3N (https://a.co/d/6tykn3N)Is God a Vindictive Bully? - https://a.co/d/3RmUoIo (https://a.co/d/3RmUoIo)Christianity Contested - https://a.co/d/eu1eQhe (https://a.co/d/eu1eQhe)Slavery in the Bible: Answering Atheist Critiques - https://youtu.be/ZImmDmr8pxk (https://youtu.be/ZImmDmr8pxk) The BIBLE and SLAVERY Explained! with Dr. Carmen Imes - https://youtu.be/qWvwkHKWAfE (https://youtu.be/qWvwkHKWAfE)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Is God a vindictive bully?
0:05.0	Does the Bible support and condone slavery?
0:10.0	That's a topic that we talked about for almost an hour with my friend Dr. Paul Copan on the last program.
0:18.0	We're going to continue our discussion.
0:20.0	We're not going to review everything we did last time.
0:23.1	That would take too long. So if you haven't heard the first program, find the I Don't Have
0:28.9	Enough Faith to Be an Atheist podcast and look for the program with Dr. Paul Copan, the first one
0:34.9	on, does the Bible support slavery or condone slavery or endorse slavery?
0:42.0	We're going to pick up our conversation right from that point.
0:46.5	And Paul, at the end of our last podcast, we were talking a little bit about abuses of the indentured servitude system, and you wanted to make a point about that.
0:58.4	So let's just pick it up right there.
1:00.3	Yeah.
1:01.0	Yeah, I mentioned, again, the incident of, you know, under with Elisha and in Second Creek Kings chapter four.
1:08.9	I also was trying to talk about Nehemiah where there were
1:12.1	where Jewish people after the exile were charging interest to to other people who were indebted to
1:21.7	them and this really impoverished them so that they had to to you know again parcel out, sell into servitude their own sons and daughters,
1:30.3	when, again, it was not a matter of just being impoverished, but they were being made poor because of the hefty interest payments,
1:36.3	and this is prohibited by the law.
1:38.3	And Nehemiah was infuriated by this abuse of the law.
1:42.3	And as I said earlier, there is the abuse of the law mentioned in Jeremiah chapter 34,
1:47.4	where that six-year term limit was not held to.
1:50.7	And so that people who had servants let them go,
	...

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