Welcome to the podcast. My name is Douglas Wilson. This is episode 362. 362. Thank you for joining us. Welcome aboard. So I want to talk a little bit about the issue of slavery and the New Testament. And this is something that has sort of baffled me for a number of years.

The Bible gives us a great deal of material when it comes to masters and slaves, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament.

And because we live in an egalitarian era and Christians have bought into a lot of the

egalitarian dogma, there is a collision or a tension between what they think about slavery

in the public sphere in our public discussion and what they think about it in the New Testament.

And oftentimes what they think about it in the New Testament is simply to skate lightly

over the passages to talk about it. So when you have instructions to masters in Colossians

four, where Paul says that masters are to treat their slaves with equity.

I'll come back in a second. What we do is we read that and we interpret it as the shift manager at

Arby's should be fair to his employees. And the words that are given to slaves, we think the French fry guy at Arby's should work industriously and not as a man pleaser and stuff.

In other words, we just naturally translate the whole thing into modern circumstances without ever asking seriously what it was like back then. Now, I know that

some people are going to start hyperventilating. Like what I'm arguing for here is that I want to do

over of the Battle of Gettysburg. But that's not what I'm talking about at all. You can't be honest

with God unless you're honest with his text. You can't ultimately be honest in the world

without being honest with the text. I'm currently working on finishing up a commentary on the book

of Philemon, which is a New Testament book in which

the Apostle Paul returns a runaway slave, Onesimus, to his master, Philemon.

Philemon is a beloved friend of Paul's, and Onesimus has become a beloved son to Paul, and Paul returns Anesimus. There was some falling out

between them. Anesimus wronged Philemon in some way, and hooked up with Paul, who was imprisoned,

which means that Anesimus had to have looked him up, sought him out. Paul led him to the Lord and then sent this slave back to

Philema. That's what the whole book is about. Now, when we talk about ancient slavery, when we talk

about Hebrew slavery in the Old Testament, when we talk about Greco-Roman slavery, that was a pagan

...