Right on the front end today, I want to say thanks to everybody who supports this program.

This thing happens because of you, and I'm ridiculously grateful.

I just think it's absolutely fascinating that slavery is such a prominent motif throughout the New Testament.

I mean, we highlighted a bunch of places yesterday where that comes up around the New Testament, but I mean, we barely scratched the surface.

And it's not just that it's a motif. It's not just that it's a topic that appears in the New Testament.

It's that it is also a metaphor, a powerful metaphor that gets used throughout the New Testament to illustrate stuff about our relationship with Jesus.

That's wild. What's worse than slavery on

the hierarchy of things that are terrible? There's maybe like two or three other things that

would be so widely agreed upon as being heinous and horrible that they might even rival

slavery. I mean, look, we rightly don't like slavery

and the concept of slavery, especially against the backdrop of the post-industrial revolution

world, the only world you or our parents or grandparents, their grandparents have ever known.

I mean, slavery just makes no sense. So I totally get why anybody

would pick up the New Testament and just recoil at the use of the word slave and slavery. And it comes

up a lot because, of course, we think first of our own context when we evaluate things and when we

consider history. It takes a lot of

work to put ourselves in the shoes of people in any other time in history. So of course we're

going to read slavery as we would imagine it against the backdrop of our moment. Well, you and I did a

little exercise here over the last week or so to try and get past that a little bit. Not to get

past saying slavery is bad, but to try to get past that a little bit, not to get past saying slavery is bad,

but to try to get past inflicting our biases on how we might imagine it to have been on what

it actually was. And in light of that, I go through the New Testament and I see all this stuff

...