“Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis” by William J Webb, the second half

[joannebethel]

Here's the second half of the book review I read earlier this week that got me to thinking.  Thanks for weighing on yesterday's post.

What I realized is that I do contextualize scripture when I read it and study it, seeking to understand the full meaning of God's word for the original hearers (and readers) and for me today.  But how can I tell what'

Comments

[underlankers]

My question is that support of slavery from a Biblical standpoint can far more easily be argued than an egalitarian approach to gender relations or opposition to homosexuality, and thus: if slavery can be considered to be culturally limited despite being emphatically not so either Biblically or for most of Christian history.....why is the question of gender in general taken to be either cultural or transcultural

[rest_in_thee]

If you wouldn't mind, make a strong and lucid argument in support of slavery using Scripture.

[napoleonofnerds]

St. Thomas thought it was socially justifiable.

St. Thomas is right, just like scripture.

Therefore, slavery is a-okay.

No, just kidding, his thought on slavery is actually culturally bounded and really nuanced.

[rest_in_thee]

Yeah, I always here people say it's biblically justified, but I think that's a stretch. It's certainly in Scripture, but it's really difficult to make an argument for Scripture that makes a positive moral case for the institution of slavery.

[underlankers]

"A slave is not greater than his master," the Epistle to Philemon, "Slaves obey your masters in everything," the various OT Laws that justify beating slaves nearly to death, the law that a male Israelite slave may leave bondage but a female may not....don't justify slavery?

By the standard given to homosexuality, slavery is far better justified. And if one is now Biblically meaningless due to military force in outlawing the trade and due to the 1861-1865 war here, then so is the other.

[napoleonofnerds]

This just tells us how to deal with the institution, not whether it should exist.

[underlankers]

And never raises the possibility that it can be erased, which is the more significant factor. A world without slavery is not raised as a possibility Biblically.

[martiancyclist]

Seeing as such a world has never existed since the first slave was enslaved, so what?

[chaeri]

there has never been a time when everyone loved their neighbor as themselves, but that didn't stop Christ from telling people that this is the ideal.

[napoleonofnerds]

It doesn't raise the possibility of Democracy, the New World, nation states, or the internet either.

[underlankers]

First: Paul tells Philemon to take Onesmius back. He does not say that slavery is wrong, or that Onesmius being a slave was immoral. Nor does he condemn the idea that some are born to be servants, others to be the served, a contemporary pagan idea. Second, in Ephesians, Paul tells the slave to obey his master in everything. Everything presumably included things like Emperor Hadrian, I believe it was, gouging out his slave's eye with a writing stylus. Third, Jesus stated that a slave will never be above his master. Now, that especially seems to indicate Messiah Himself saw little problem with the institution, and again, the implication is that some are born to servitude, others to be the beneficiaries of service

[napoleonofnerds]

Onesimus is the best argument, I think

[underlankers]

1) The major problem with the difference argument is that the latifundia was precious little different from the plantation, and can be said to be a precursor as an idea. In the time of early Christianity, the Latifundia was the primary seat of slavery, and seldom were Latifundia slaves anything approximating non-chattel. While slavery was not racial in Roman culture, the fact that approximately the same percentage of Romans were enslaved as were Southerners and the plantation and the latifundia met the same basic requirement, which in all likelihood meant that to the slave, the lot of the Latifundia colonus was precious little different to that of the American black slave.

2) Perhaps because slavery itself was not entirely without criticism in all those cultures? Traditionally, freeing slaves was an act of charity in Christianity, and the concept of the urban liberti rising Horatio Alger style was not unknown to the pagans either, to judge by their poets. All the same, those protections likely were as significant as the 14th and