Slavery and Evangelical Timmidity, November 17, 2025.

As everyone should know by now, Biblical Slavery is my most favorite of subject in the whole wide world.

I turn to it most every chance I get, and I even recently turned in the manuscript of an

honest commentary on Philemon. This is an epistle that does receive a modest amount of attention

from modern preachers and commentators, with many of them using an exegetical technique that they

learned in the seminaries of our times, a technique best described as hydroplaining. The book is a letter from the Apostle Paul

to a dear friend and slave owner, a man named Philemon, and the letter explains the circumstances

around the reason for the letter, which is the return of a runaway slave named Anesimus.

Anesimus had done some significant wrong to Filamen, had run away, and had somehow encountered the

Apostle Paul who had led him to the Lord. Having done so, he returned Anesimus to his master, along with exhortations to receive him as a brother and the Lord now. We need not go into all the things that the letter is not saying. Why do that? It is quite true that it is not saying those things, and many other things for that matter, but the hydroplainers are generally quite good at delving into all of that. And even where I might

agree with such coquettish expositions, we must not allow ourselves to go into it. This is November

after all, and I cannot allow myself to come across as being too reasonable. Leave that for the

rest of the year. So we must content ourselves with what the letter is

saying, which is, I am returning your runaway slave now. That was then, this is now. I remember pretty

clearly when the penny dropped on this issue for me. It was back in the days of the moral majority,

and I was watching Jerry Falwell Sr. debating with the liberal on television. I'm not sure about

this, but I think that the liberal

was Bishop Spong. He was the Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Newark, which kind of figures.

As an indication of just how deep our national apostasy goes, the original name of Newark was

Newark of the Covenant. Get it? Newark? Falwell was doing good Christian work and rejecting

homosexuality, as he most

certainly should have been doing, and bless him. But then the question, why, and how come, arose?

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