Slavery in the Bible | Courageous Conversations '21

what's up everybody this is lisa fields the founder and president of the g-3 project and you're about to watch a conversation from courageous conversations 2021 however before we get into that i want to cordially invite you to courageous conversations 2022 the theme this year is the scholar and the skeptic we're back in washington dc at national community church with seven amazing conversations conversations like is there a god should we trust the bible is christianity a white man's religion does christianity oppress women is christianity homophobic and transphobic should we be spiritual or religious is christianity bad

for our mental health we want to give you a blueprint on how to have courageous conversations with gentleness and respect remember we sold out last time so make sure you register early and get your ticket now if you can't join us in person you have the virtual option as well register today at courageousconvo.org our next conversation will be slavery in the bible now this is a crucial conversation because any time i'm discussing christianity especially in our community slavery comes up how do we navigate it what do we do with slave passages in the bible and

i think we have the perfect panel to help us navigate those questions the first would be dr k edward bryant dr cleopha robertson quinniquia day and dr lisa bowens this panel will be moderated by brandon cleaver i hope you enjoy it good afternoon good afternoon uh welcome to the panel on slavery in the bible uh as you saw in the or heard in the video dr lisa barnes was supposed to be here for this panel she was super excited and enthusiastic to be here but at the last minute she was unable to join us but

we're so thankful that at the drop of a dime dr jamal hopkins was able to join us so thank you dr jamal hopkins for joining this esteemed uh panel of scholars here thank you now one quick reminder if you haven't already please sign up for pigeonhole you have a qr code in your in your booklets as well as a link and the code cc21 so we'd love to see what questions you have when we get to that portion of the of this discussion now slavery in the bible is it's a complex issue because of the

nature of its various uh layers you have the exegetical questions people just trying to understand what are these references to slavery uh in the bible you have moral questions how could a good god allow such an institution or some people even would even say how could he seem to condone uh such an institution and then i think for the african americans there's uh for us there's this unique uh uh mix of experiential existential and and cultural uh elements because of antebellum and pre-civil war slavery that sometimes affects how we also uh read those uh read

those passages so i think the question to start off we'll start kind of broad and just ask what does slavery look like in the bible obviously there's variances in the old testament between uh hebrew and non-hebrew slaves and even in the new testament with some of paul's rhetoric and even the book of philemon so for anyone who wants to start off would it what does slavery look like in the bible well i'll start um it looks different than what we have experienced in america um so one of the things that's different is that we there's

this sort of restorative motion that goes with slavery so that slavery is not an indefinite experience there is a there's an end point to slavery and there's of course differences between hebrews and and foreign slaves but there is a an end and also at the end of slavery at the end of your your moment of service you can anticipate some sort of uh financial reward or some sort of uh some sort of gifting it's actually in the book of um i think it's in deuteronomy passage where you have this sort of you get this these

gifts you get this restoration so you leave slavery in in a in a better position than you should have come into it so that's quite different than what we experience in america so i'll start there well yeah i know if i can um just kind of echo echo that and that it's it's really good to be here um slavery in the bible and you you mentioned it it's very vast um we're talking about the old testament the hebrew bible and the different worlds even within that world that context that those writings reflect even the new

testament so there's there's this vast uh just kind of under understanding or take um there were slaves that were captures of war there were those that would even sell themselves into slavery to be able to uh to pay off a debt and so you know in that sense slavery you know you saw an end to that um you know maybe you know notions of jubilees for israelites but but for those who were not um it's so so it was vast and and the thing that i think is important is that slavery is very explicit it's

it's it's a it's social it's a it's a cultural reality that you find within the bible you find within the hebrew bible text you find within those worlds you find it within the new testament world so it is it is there and it and it's nothing that we can really try to explain away as far as you know slavery in the bible is not as bad as slavery in america it was it was growth it was gross it was grotesque and so it was there uh kind of a dehumanizing and so just very vast and

very broad so the way that i like to deal with text that deal with slavery is just on a text by text basis and just really kind of handle it and take it from there i would suspect perhaps a thoughtful way of looking at it from a theological standpoint we'll be looking at the action god takes towards egypt and the action that god takes toward egypt that in that action he makes the israelites his people so they transfer ownership from one slave owner pharaoh to another of course throughout the text and of course my hebrew

scholar friends will be able to share more deeply than i being new testament but the naming convention of slave of god is something that has taken hold of and finds itself in the literature that becomes a way of marking those for which god has deemed for himself so you have this constant conquest of both exile and post-exilic ways of imagining existence and out of that as it leads into my specific area you find in the argument i'll make at some point today that paul moves to a different space and moves from the context of being

a slave of god to a slave of messiah jesus so at the basis god establishes enslavement for those whom he rescues out of egypt and that becomes the basis for which he redefines their identity i think what's fascinating is that when you do look at the idea of slavery clearly it's not the paradigm i think the creation account in genesis 1 and 2 presents humanity as as equals and then you see the advent of sin there in genesis 3 both individually and as well collectively and then you see then the reality of slavery but the

the brilliant engagement of god and his word is that we see built into the the system of slavery limitations in terms of the the process of indenture uh whereby after six or seven years uh somebody can be released from from slavery and then the year of jubilee which really then deals with the cause of of debt slavery and that is inequities and so then the land is then in an ideal scenario given back to the owners uh the people of god who are stewards and then even the fascinating way in which god reveals himself via

liberation the god of liberation and then even as a as a man of war who liberates and so it's a brilliant kind of um engagement that god has in the culture and also in the context of revelation in terms of how he reveals himself thank you dr robinson you know one thing i think when we consider our oftentimes our modern discourses or even some objections to uh the god of the bible uh one thing that we often find intrinsic to these conversations is a conflation between uh antebellum or pre-civil war slavery and the slavery that's

described in the bible and we know one key aspect of antebellum slavery was its chattel uh nature so what if any traits do we find in common uh with the the slavery that's described in the bible to uh chattel or the or uh antebellum slavery i would say the the idea of ownership that's clear in the old testament you know that your master is owning you and we can't get away from that um but the but the difference is also that your master cannot abuse you so with chattel slavery there's this intrinsic part of of

abuse that goes on and on as a matter of fact in exodus 21 um if you're if the woman is is sort of taken um and if the i think the master gives his gives the woman to another gives them to her son his son he can't then um that son then can't deny that woman just rights sexual rights food housing so there's this level of protection that you see there um that's different than chattel but the idea of ownership which is we we just can't get a get away from that that is that is

clearly there in the old testament that your master has some level of ownership over you and your your children yeah you know i find it interesting when i when i look at um the attitude of slavery in in the antebellum period uh some of the research that i've i've done is that it's unique the way and charles colford talks about this in that there was a time during the antebellum period that rabbinic writings rabbinic literature missionaries writings talmudic writings their interpretations of the genesis 9 tradition of how this notion of jewish spinning writings are attempting

to fill in the gaps and some would suggest even rabbinic scholars would suggest this kind of an imaginative exegesis i call it i kind of maybe an ethnoc ethnocentric exegesis or kind of racialized hermeneutic potentially but the idea that kofi raises that how this during the antebellum period these readings these interpretations to try to fill in the gaps whether you find the curse of ham and the curse of blackness and the kind of grotesque descriptions that the rabbinic literatures is putting forth now talk about what some of that literature says the attitude that that tends

to supersede that tends to have more of an authoritative voice or more of an authoritative emphasis um and held on to by those um advocating for slavery slaveocracy uh as a way of validating uh their attitudes um and so i ask questions of whether or not you know these rabbinic writings these are reinterpretations if you will um are attempting to um um well you know what are they really trying to do because you know i think the earlier panel talked about you know you talk about racism that's more of a kind of a modern notion

kind of so i you know i use the term ethnocentrism in a sense that um one privileging themselves one privileging what they know one privileging what they understand but those that stand outside of that is kind of looked upon with kind of a suspicion and so some of the work that i do is i'm looking at inner testament writings and seeing how these writings writings from pseudo-picker for there's a book of jubilees that comes out of dead sea scrolls and qumran literature that talks about ham's response to the curse noah's curse not of ham but

of ham's son and so it's interesting that even the remaining writings they they don't look at um [Music] they kind of they kind of suggest that well if the sun is cursed then that means so if the grand sun is cursed that means the sun's curves and so they kind of run away with that and it's even interesting because i was looking at some some of the qumran writings even today there was a modern fragment that was found back in 2013. some qumran scholars even suggest today they still promote that kind of notion of a

hemantic curse which is amazing but but the attitudes that's interesting that kofer's raised with regard to the authority that's given to these rabbinic writings over and against the biblical texts that's it's still stunning and i think that's a story that needs to really be told um i don't want to take too much time but i'm in the in a text mark knowles civil war as a theological crisis he talks about a rabbi a rabbi rafal who in new york was going around uh the north and the south advocating for the the um the the the

legitimacy of slavery and the benign subjectivity of black people because of the uh rabbinic interpretations of the genesis 9 tradition and it's really stunning um but these kinds of interpretations and these kinds of literature was used during the antebellum period to promote and push slavery and to kind of reinterpret the genesis 9 tradition with the genesis 4 tradition it's fascinating how the color scheme that most of us grow up with is black white and white is good and and black is bad whereas if you look at the color scheme of the bible it's really it's

white it's white red where evil is is con is is connected with sins being scarlet and so what slavery and and the messages or the improper exegesis of some of the texts um has to make blackness bad and when they do that then um when blackness is viewed as bad then it allows them for the the pathological mistreatment of people of color and my wife likes to say it like this she says maybe our interpretations of the text say more about us and where we want to go than what the texts actually say and so

it's almost as if okay this is where i want to go and so this is what i have to make the text say and then we kind of run with that faulty interpretation yeah i think it's uh useful uh to think through uh the correlations between both antebellum slavery and how slavery looked in the context of the ancient world of course my european-american counterparts would argue that classical athens in greece hold the best context for which to understand slavery in the ancient world however i would argue to say that rome provides probably the better ideal

context in that it allows us to see the pure domination of the institution of slavery and as a result we're able to follow that and then be able to extract what the meaning is for us now consider this perhaps for a moment that the context of slavery and when you tie perhaps the ancient world to the antebellum south of course you have to be very careful because there are only five unique true slave societies of course uh you have brazil before 19 1830 and of course you have haiti or the caribbean you have classical athens

rome and of course the antebellum south it's important that even though you see the same type of violent behavior that while there are correlations but i think it's important to understand the basis for which those things come now they will say that there is no direct correlation between how slavery is constructed in the ancient world and actually how it shows up in antebellum south but i would argue otherwise and this is why if you look at opium in the digest uh what opian argues is that you have at the base point of the definition for

slavery uh comes from the context of it being a literal death consider this that when the general was on the battlefield and when they conquered as rome did beginning in two bc and they began to conquer everything when someone was left on the battlefield and perhaps the general chose not to kill them they became what the latin word calls is the survey the survey is where we get our word from servile or servitude in that moment what opian argues is that at that stage that person that individual cease to be an individual because they have

experienced a literal death if you follow albion's argument in the digest 12th book there you'll find this is that opinion argues in in the context that slaves are left in what we would call a suspended state of death a suspended state of death means that they neither have life or death and more importantly that the master the dominus has the ability to not just inflict violence but also to choose life or death it goes beyond just saying they're not property it goes to saying that they're in a suspended state of life so when you follow

that from that understanding in the ancient world to antebellum south then becomes clear that the way in which you see the violence being dominated antebellum south is in same way as you see it in the ancient world but i would say this is that what paul argues and i hope that we'll get to this is that slave in the way it dominated should not in any way be the basis point for how we approach the text that there is a way out of it and the new testament shows us that i hope we get to

it soon can i just add a point to this the biggest argument we have against the slavery that we have experienced in africa and as an african-american american here in this in this united states is genesis chapter one when it says that we are created in the image of god that right there if if we would just have our seminary professors and our preachers just stop right there and just take just take a moment to say this means that we are all image bearers of god so that even if you are born into some low

estate as some would argue especially in the old testament that does not mean that you're less valuable you're not two-thirds whatever human when it comes to voting or something so you don't lose value when you're created by god and in his image and that is one of the things that comes across in the united states is that there's this worthlessness this is loss of value you're always trying to be more human no you're human already your humanity comes from god and genesis 1 sets that in order automatically and in the larger context of genesis 1

2 and 3 there are other older creation accounts and in those creation accounts there's a hierarchy and what when we say that humanity is created in the image of god it's also saying that the kings are not up here and the commoners are down here so it's a democratization of humanity that everybody rank and file no matter whatever social station that you're born into are are image bearers of god so that uh it's arguing against those world views that want to put somebody on top and somebody on bottom yes thank you uh earlier dr brian

a couple of times mentioned paul and we know paul is one character of the bible that seems to not be able to get away from controversy and with uh slavery in the bible it's no different some people would would ask why didn't paul encourage rebellion of slavery what would you have to say about that why didn't paul explicitly encourage the rebellion of slavery you know i want to i want to say something about about biblical narratives and the way that we read the bible and not i don't i'll deal with paul after y'all do what

paul first but but the way that you know when the slave um when there's presence when slavery is present within the biblical narratives and and i often tell my students that we read biblical narratives first of all i think we should read them as documenting historical accounts or documenting accounts and it's important that we might be get angry we might get upset we might you know all kinds of things about about about these historical accounts but but biblical narratives are biblical narratives they're documenting chronicling historical accounts almost like if you were in a jacked up

situation we can historically document that account we're not necessarily saying that god is condoning your jacked up situation that's just life and you know you talk about you know just genesis you know three there was a world in reality in the way things should look before the fall and there was things that looked after the fall the manifestations of those fall that's when we begin to see slavery so just to kind of set that context of how we read the biblical text how we read biblical narratives they're chronicling historical accounts and then i think we

can do other kinds of interpretive things but i think that may be a ground level of how to first start with them uh so y'all get to pause narrative narratives get abused because they're they're really descriptive of what's happening but it's not prescribing what's supposed to be normative right right so if there's some miracle in the text and new testament text that's not then saying that if you name it and claim it as people of god then you have that right and privilege no like handling snakes it's just describing what actually happens and it's not

prescribing how god normatively acts for every child of god you know i think when it comes to paul i mean i'm not new testament but i'll say a few things on this when it comes to paul and the slaves obey your masters and we have to also remember who's teaching this right the you know the the slave masters are teaching this and how it's coming across but paul has something else also interesting to say that you know the masters need to remember that you also have a master right and so there's this sort of this

idea of and so paul actually does something that happens in the old testament which is jesus i mean god reminds us that we are to uh remember that we were once slaves that's what guides us and exodus he tells the israelites you remember you were once slaves and so the idea that you were slaves so you treat others um you know you restore them you the slave comes to your area you you um you don't send them back you don't do those sorts of things so paul says listen you you there's no favoritism with god

and i think that when we we talk about paul and the passages are very controversial we have to also remember who's communicating it because you know people have their own agendas and the agenda is to oppress the slave and have them think there's no hope have her think there's no hope at all but we cannot get away from the fact that the gospel changes lives and even if you're hearing something oppressive that you're you're gonna say wait a minute i get i feel in my heart that god is saying something different you we can't act

like the holy spirit wasn't still present with the slaves and saying wait a minute that something ain't right you know something something they write the master's saying there's something there's more to the text and there were slaves who didn't just have the slave bible but there were slaves who got a hold of the bible and so they they understood that there's more to this and so i think when it comes to paul there's you have to think about who is saying it and also remember that paul said okay there's no when it comes to eternity

there's there's no difference there yeah i guess i would say um and i'll take a stab and go straight at paul uh and i would say that paul indeed does resist the institution of slavery i think most people misread paul in that they have followed without redacting or correcting uh martin luther's mistranslation of the word beruf which means vocational calling as a result of it there's a misunderstanding misappropriation of what the word calling means as a result you think in the reading paul is saying remain as you are but indeed no that's not what paul

was saying what paul is saying is quite more radical than that what paul is saying do not remain where you are resist sins domination over you because sin is the ultimate slave master and as a result contested i think another way that allows us not to be able to read paul the correct way is that we don't take a thorough going assessment of the language as well as the genre of the writing take for instance romans chapter 2 and 3. most new testament scholars will kind of casually interpret that passage at a very high level

because if most times don't want to deal with the deep exegetical thoughts that are hard to explain most times they're difficult to explain because of how they're approaching the text most have read paul as being anti-semitic and paul indeed is not and they take romans 2 to be that and it's not the case if you go back and look at the language paul is being interpreted through the eyes of augustine as well as through the eyes of martin luther who write after paul so you have to give credence to paul's original context the original context

is the roman empire as a result you had to go back then and ask a critical question when paul begins looking at romans 2 and unpacking this assault against these and i would argue jewish christian teacher and this gentile convert who rise up in his roman context and they're arguing with themselves about who has right or who has priority in essence what paul is arguing in chapter 2 and stay with me trust me i'm going somewhere what paul argues is that the argument in romans 2 is not about an anti-semitic framing of a context it's

much deeper and it's this is that paul's arguing in romans 2 and 3 collectively that when god approaches the gentile he creates a space for them to be in christ without having to go through the context of circumcision here's my final point the whole context of it says this is that paul is after how identity is constructed if paul can implode and that's what he does if he can implode how identity is constructed then he can also implode the way in which slavery exists in the ancient world but it takes a re-reading of the text

and to do that you've got to approach it by genre not necessarily through the eyes of martin luper luther or augustine because paul's writing and he's following an ancient literary style called the diatribe and if you look at that it's a way of teaching you'll find that paul is setting himself up that by the time he gets to romans chapter six he launches an all-out assault that says do not let them dominate you the way you are stand up rise and do something and i think one of the major things again when we're dealing with

slavery in the new testament is it doesn't look like the chattel slavery of the united states it's not the kind of by and large the large plantations of workers and you can somewhat get a nuance of that just by the household codes where slaves are mentioned in the context of duties with with husbands wives and and children and so i think that's a major a major point that needs to be made and then i uh and dr hopkins and i were talking earlier about just the role of the book of philemon which i think also

in the book paul is arguing for uh the abolition of what i would suggest a runaway a slave and there's a majority view on that and a minority view and if that if that's the case then i think if we look at the larger witness of paul i think he tries to deal with some of the the potential harm that slave owners can inflict against slaves but also i think the book of philemon is a major book that points toward ultimately the abolition of that and again a shout out to dr issa mccauley in his

book reading while black has an excellent excellent section on it thank you now the previous question dealt more with the purview of the enslaved individual why didn't they or why didn't paul encourage for them to rebel against slavery this question i want to focus more on paul's attitude maybe towards other christians or believers or or non-enslaved individuals so why didn't paul advocate for the abolition of slavery well i'll take a stand fred danker uh in the greek dictionary that most of us who study new testament you know reference a lot um translates paul's vocation as

tent maker but if you go to little scott or lyle scott you'll find that it's not necessarily tint maker it's stage prop builder okay so what context would that have in the roman world the place where stages and props were used were the mime the mime is when they had daily presentations by actors that gave and here's the point a bird's eye view of the domination and consciousness of the slave paul knew he could not get rid of the institution it was woven into the fabric of society there is no way paul could even advocate

or push someone to get rid of the institution it was impossible tell you why that the legal records said that they only could monument 100 slaves at death well when you have a slave society requires demographically at least have 30 percent of the population that are slaves well as a result of that that means that if they're trying to preserve the institution of slavery that means paul clearly understands he can't get rid of it but what he does know he can do is alter it and that's what he seeks to do the word for slavery

in particular the master's complete domination and to bring about literal death for the slave is dominium what paul looks to do is implode dominium ideology as a result what paul's attempting to do is tell them listen and in fact perhaps uh a italian philosopher by the name of georgia again in his book the church and the kingdom perhaps says it best he says we should be soul joiners passing through without being able to access the fringe benefits of privilege so what paul advocates simply the what georgia government leads to is this while they went through

the institution of slavery the call to action was to implode it from the inside out well i'ma try to stop uh for a moment and pause parenthetically and be a preacher because i'm that too that i imagine that what paul is saying to us today is that you might not be able to change the overall structure systemically of how things are but you can blow it up from the inside out and that's what paul does in the book of romans he sets the charges so that as you go through this world as you experience power

and domination in the ways in which people look to impose identity upon you paul says no you can't get rid of it it's here to stay but what you can do is implode it blow it up from the inside out i would i would like to add that um i'm i'm not as nice you know i don't because i think the bible the bible has moments where it gets messy where we want people to speak about things and they're not speaking and if we sort of look at today we have people who are in a

place of privilege and who do not forcibly speak on areas that they could forcibly speak on now that being said i can accept what i have from paul is sufficient for me to know that paul does not agree with slavery as a as a practice i can accept that what i have there is sufficient for me however i do think that you know he he he could have done more i i wish he had done more i mean just like i wish aaron hadn't acted goofy and you know and decided to make a you know

a calf with gold just like i wish that miriam wasn't we don't just have the account of miriam getting leprosy or you know and and nothing happened to aaron when they were bail so i wish the bible would just give us these clear moments but it doesn't and i'm not afraid to say that it doesn't and i'm not afraid to say that that bothers me however i am i think that paul gives us enough to tell us that it's not right and i think that the issue at hand is that it has been misused as

a lot of the bible has been to keep black people from recognizing that they are truly kings and queens in this land yeah i would just come back and say one thing is that the language is what will reveal it that if these translators of the bible would just go ahead and say with the words being it gets at the heart of what's at stake that if you look in romans and you look particularly in romans 6 when you see paul unpacking the argument about slavery what you find is that paul forcefully goes after the

deconstruction of slavery this so-called jewish christian teacher he is making fun of paul mockingham in that he says how can you save and you might know it like this what shall we say then shall we continue to sin that grace may abound what the jewish christian teacher was attempting to do was to mock paul but what he didn't understand was paul was setting him up for a massive argument because what paul was helping to understand was this that whenever someone has been in complete literal death suspended state of death to participate in messiah jesus through

the process of dying and rising with christ the old man perhaps the old man if you had time to research it you'll find that the old man is the old slave in the roman world the old slave doesn't have any power he has no ability for profit he can't bring prosperity so he's not useful so what paul says get rid of the old man and the only way to do that you got to share a grave with christ so perhaps let me offer this the way in which we look at contesting slavery and slavery exists

in many forms particularly today is that we have to be willing to share a grave with christ a lot of us want to change the institutions around us but we don't want to die to do it we want to change what's happening in the world but we don't want to share in that rebirth we don't want to let go of how we've been dominated and perhaps the german word have a debate shaft an awakening that leads us to say and look around and say i'm being dominated and misused paul does it he does it explicitly

what's interesting is to even see how then some of the language of slavery is used in the new testament as devotion for christ where we're called and and that word do loss and do loy to call it servant really i think does a disservice to it where we're slaves of christ and then how god uh in his word contextually takes that that shortcoming of humanity and then uses it as a means of revelation for himself and so it's amazing how again uh the awesome nature of scripture whereby even the shortcomings of our human experience both

individually and collectively god takes those and uses them for for his glory you know and i think in this in in addition to what what you're saying um and i agree i think there's this subtle uh uh abolition uh approach that paul is taking i mean i mean you look at uh first corinthians seven um you know where he ends where uh in the passenger you you're you were bought with the price but he says that i mean he and he makes uh he makes i think he makes it clear that um you know if

you if if you were not a slave um but you were in bondage and this notion of um this idea of what if you are free but you don't know christ um how would you compare that to if you were a slave and you do know christ and this kind of turning this notion the social cultural idea this the slave ideology up on its head and suggests and you're using the metaphors you know i'm a slave of christ um and that you know i mean when you think about it and it may not kind of

be a co-equal but many of us are slaves to our jobs many of our slaves to certain relationships um mercy and it if it's it's i think paul is attempting to turn things upside down um this kind of um radical love or this kind of radical um um you know you know this idea you know and i think you even find this kind of metaphorical language even uh with jesus in the parables when he talks about um the slave and the loyalty of slaves um to their you know the wicked servant but but but almost

kind of a metaphor of you know this is the way that we need to have loyalty to god and and i think there's this kind of this theological um kind of turning this or tipping this notion of yes we can we can identify slavery as a social system but there's a there's a greater understanding and we have a theological and a spiritual idea that god is god is really in charge and we're just here we're just passing by we're sir joiners um but you know there's a you know this is a temporary state but there's

an eternal state and i think that's what paul is trying to get at with dealing with this idea of a kind of broken um ugly social system of slavery thank you dr hopkins what's up everyone lisa fields here and i'm so excited about our new curriculum courageous conversations you heard about our popular conference courageous conversations where we invite the leading pastors thought leaders and scholars from conservative and progressive backgrounds for conversations but we not only want to have those conversations on stage at the conference but we want you to have them in your everyday life

so we developed a curriculum for you to do just that courageous conversations curriculum the tools you need for the conversations and culture you can get that today on amazon or on our website at g3project.org [Music] we have a little bit less than six minutes to go before we get to your your questions i do have two quick questions that i want to get to because i think that both of them are really important the first here is that you know one of the richest most under appreciated underread aspects of north american literature are the narratives

of enslaved africans and african americans and in those narratives we we really get a sense of who they are what they went through their the the strength of their faith and so many other things and another another aspect of those narratives is that they talk about the the preachers that will come and and uh give these pervert these uh bible verses or or other things uh associated with the bible so one thing that i'd like to ask you is how do enslaved africans and african americans interpret slave passages uh in the bible and oftentimes again

we see those talked about in the narratives so how did enslaved africans and african-americans interpret slave passages in the bible well there are several ways i'll i'll do maybe two of them so there's there's one way of uh just rebelling just you know they they were like they just outright dismiss the passages they're they're just totally ignoring it and then you have the other way of really seeing it's it's really i think our psychologists and our social work folks will really appreciate this it's sort of just really buying into the rhetoric of the master and

because god is saying this and you don't want to disappoint god then okay um to rebel against the master is to rebel against god that's that's another way of looking at is the idea that so i i sort of have to accept this state those are two different trajectories where i'm going to just outright rebel and dismiss the scripture and it's which is that's not a good thing to do and then the other thing is just okay well my my master is my master and and i don't want to disappoint god that's that's i think

that's that shows the deepness of just being brainwashed where you feel like your level of suffering is that something god would want and i think we can't get we have to talk about this with slavery that the level of suffering that that they went through and to equate that with god is you just can't have a relationship i think that is that's loving when you think your god is going to just beat you and allow that to you allow to suffer yeah what's fascinating is that the exodus motif is littered all through scripture you find

it in the re-utilizing the old testament and then even in the coming of jesus um john chapter 1 verses 1 through 18 the coming of of christ you have that exodus kabob imagery and for african slaves reading the scriptures they saw them they looked at the exodus motifs and they saw that if god delivered israel he could also deliver us and when you read lisa bones has it in her book um the dissertation of dr cheryl sanders at howard also just show that that's how then the uh slaves look at the bible they look at

it from their vantage point and their social location and i think because of their social location they're able to see a a width and a broadness of the text that usually sometimes those on top and those on privilege just can't see you know and then i think that speaks to the methodology i mean cyric lincoln talks about the theological sophistication that those enslaved had um were you know the question is is how can those who are enslaved by a christianity or a brand of christianity a bad brand of christianity is used to enslave them and

so the theological sophistication is that they had the ability to read kind of a kind of a broad literary canonical if you would if you will um perspective as opposed to a kind of a you know snippet a kind of a deconstructive snippet that advocates for a particular position and so i think that was the uniqueness that that was and maybe even the exposure of of those that were um um privy to this kind of the monotheist monotheistic um you know religion whether it be islam or christianity or you know that came over um during

the slave uh the translating slave trade so i think there was a there was a familiarity with the story with the narrative but i think they were able to read broadly and kind of you know not to use anachronism but a kind of a canonical or broad literary approach um you know which was very different um um which is you know unfortunately that's kind of what we're dealing with today yeah i align with um the whole exodus motif i think you get it right uh that that's what they use they interpret their story in the

story of the bible and find those stories as being a sense of hope but then also to build on the panel prior to us that we cannot forget the intelligence of our people to think that they did not have the power to um unravel a propagandistic type of way of using the bible to enforce a particular way of being and acting and becoming and belonging i think we do ourselves a discredit to not think that our ancestors did not have the intelligence to know when they were being hoodwinked i think there's also something to be

said by the fact of and of course i often times live in the ancient world being the new testament scholar is that there's a non-christian text uh contemporary paul that i think kind of underscores this whole moment as real quick as this the life of asap are you familiar with that the life of asap basically is a slave who is extremely intelligent he defies all the different types of social conventions he's smarter than his master his master's wife desires him sexually more than the master everyone in the house looks up to him asap has if

you will had a trans valuation of values he turns the system on his head i believe that's what happens on the plantations in the south not just the preacher but the whole plantation those who practice faith it's a trans valuation of value yes they gave them a bible indeed they gave them something from the colonial standpoint yes that happened but do not discredit their genius in being able to extract the propaganda out of the story and find connection to the story to reframe their own story and that's what happens there in that text they turn

it's on on its head thank you um if we can do a real like uh lightning round on this last question um how should the topics that we've discussed so far today inform the way contemporary black christians look at slavery passages in the bible and then we'll move to the q a so real quick maybe like a minute or so each minute minute and a half how much of the topics we've discussed today inform the way contemporary black christians i think it should inform how we teach it how we preach it and going starting with

the little kids how we when we when we use the word slave in our church or when we're teaching in the seminary we need to stop and explain what that means and from what we talked about today i think we have at least something that you can take with you to explain what that means so that we can move in a different direction with that you know i think understanding you know the way that we read the text um understanding that you know although they're you know this is very complex very you know a lot

of you know getting into the weeds but that there there's a way to understand the the conditions that we're in knowing that um knowing that there is a especially the way paul does it turning turning the systems upside down and reminding those that are in power that they are subject to even a greater authority and i think that's a good way of reminding reminding us two things one that god is a god of liberation and so that and well maybe three god is a god of liberation and he meets us he meets us in our

context now and as such that god who is sovereign is sovereign over our context and then even can take symbols of oppression and use it for his glory the staff in egypt was a stat was an issue of was a was a token of dominance at some other the kings in the iconography hell and so it was people of of status in uh egypt and egyptian imagery and stories maintained and so then god takes the image of a staff puts it in the hands of shepherds and then these shepherds then take this staff and then

use it as a a a means of liberation then you turn to the new testament the cross at calvary crucifixion something of degradation slavery and then god takes those things that are of low value and turns it on his head as the ultimate means of love and revelation of his interaction with humanity i'll build on that last thought um when jesus is placed on calvary on the cross crucifixion is known as in the ancient world a slave's death the fact that jesus has a slave's death and the fact that he's wounded indicates that the moment

that jesus is wounded he takes upon a polemic and that polemic is this is that by the fact that god has been wounded and the fact that his so-called oppressors have if you will got in the upper hand jesus says i will take justice and make it in a way that it doesn't look like the roman emperor and indeed what he does is this through his wounds he demonstrates i'm on the side of the oppressed i'm the on the side of those who are being misused i'm on the side of those and this is not

liberation theology this is bible i'm on the side of those who are have the courage to participate in a death like mine so what's my point as people of faith african americans or otherwise it's our responsibility if we're going to change this world if we're going to pull anything from slavery in the bible and have some kind of meaning in our churches and our schools we teach the jobs we have we have to have the courage to not be afraid for slavery to have a positive connotation because that's what paul does he uses the word

slave and becomes a positive meaning in a negative system because jesus is tied to it if you tie jesus to it i guarantee you'll implode any system from the inside out all right thank you so now we'll move to the uh the q a time and uh okay so the first one we have here so god brings us on earth to be a slave to either man god and greater jesus how do you make that sit right with the black american while trying to encourage their faith you know i mean i think the question begs

a deeper question of entitlement what are we entitled what are we owed um you know when you think of the christian faith you think of christian theology we are here because god chose us to be here for god's purpose for god's will for god's plan and what is that and although because you know we all have different stations in life but i think that's the heart of the question that we all have to wrestle with what are we here for and then we ask questions of is there something that we're owed is there something that's

due us or is there is there something that we are entitled to and i think that's something to wrestle with as we're you know we all have to wrestle with um and i i think that may be something deeper so that's kind of maybe them to to deepen the question if you will you repeat that question again sure uh so god brings us on earth to be a slave to either man god and greater jesus how do you make that sit right with the black american while trying to encourage their faith i i think we

have to re remind people that god is the liberator of us we're at whatever station you're at but people are evil too so we can't you we have to be we have to be honest about this like this how slavery was in the old testament how slavery the savior is and was in the new testament even today and how people are dealing with it people are evil so even though god says okay the slave needs to come out and the old testament have some resources and all that you have israelites still trying to enslave other

israelites you have people kidnapping and enslaving people so people are intrinsically evil and so everyone needs god so i would say that we are we are servants of god we are slaves of god but to understand what that means is that we can't let that come from how people have treated us we have to look at what the scripture says concerning us because the scripture gives us a different picture but we can't dismiss the fact that slavery is evil people are evil and they will try to impose a status or a way of life on

us that god never intended so we have to make sure that we are not mixing those up yeah i think perhaps the conversation uh the first segment about trauma is at play uh there are some things we just won't be able to extract uh there are some things that we will have to contend with but i think galatians 3 28 perhaps gives us a way out for there's no more slaver-free jew agreed right male or female the whole point of it paul argues is and i take this from a german philosopher is that it seeks

for us to be at the zero degree of belonging it's possible for all of us to be in this room to be enslaved to god but yet at the same time have difference i think the challenge becomes when we want to be in the room with an erasure of difference we have to be able to practice diversity without erasing who we are and i think that in and of itself allows us to maintain our connections to africa it allows others to connect to their connections to asia or europe i think slavery as a whole we

are enslaved to god and we cannot disrupt that that's just what it is that's how he starts the narrative that's how the motif begins god goes into egypt he rescues and they are in complete servitude to him i think that's the challenge there's so much now that we are in servitude too that it's difficult to see the power and the positive evaluation of being in service to god i think of almost genesis chapter 1 and combined westminster confession what's the chief end of man and that's to to worship god and serve him forever and i

think sometimes with all of the stuff of western culture in terms of our values and by stuff the pathology that's put on us sometimes that gets that gets askew particularly when we're dealing with dealing with trauma there's another question from the audience um what's your exegetical treatment of hagar of the hagar narrative as slave another softball you know i deal with this and i i get in all kinds of trouble i get lots and lots and lots of trouble you know you know i i look at that um yeah i look at the the sarai

abram hagar triangle love triangle um and when when hagar is just seriously mistreated i mean she is of no fault of her own i think the way that we read the text is we vilify her why i think that we have to question that what makes her a villain i don't think the text would suggest that she's a villain um but i do think that what can be troubling is when the angel lord comes to her after she's dealt harshly why sarah is to return and submit to your mistress now this is probably very not

not very popular but and maybe it may be a little i don't know if it's a i don't know if it's conjecture in a sense but you have this woman of color who is in the desert with no provisions um she's gonna die but she's with child so to what degree is the instruction of the angel of the lord to tell her to submit and return a kind of broadly looking out for her her life for provisions for her for um you know this this single black mother who is no provisions and and so so

there's there's that but she's going to be submitting to a bad situation so it's it's kind of six in one one you know five you know what six and 12 something like that um so which is which is similar to kind of our lives right the jobs that we work as bad as we are treated in certain situations but as yet providing for us paying for our bills helping us to take care of our children so it's kind of uh the an and and that you know it's it's so it's it's it's sticky but that's

i get into lots of trouble but you know we have lots of fun getting in trouble i'm trying to figure it out i add something um i say keep reading the hagar story because you keep reading hagar's story and there will be a time where she will she'll have to go they send her out and god knows i'm not a fan of abraham at that moment because he sends her out without provisions he sends her out to die because there's no way she can make it but the lord hears the cry of the child sayak

the child cries out and god is merciful to people who are not a part of the covenant because he envisions his covenant as greater than what we see at that moment and so i say keep reading hagar's story because it doesn't stop there it's a harsh moment right but so there was a harsh moment with joseph's story and there's harsh moments in our story but if we stop reading the story at the moment a harsh moment we won't get to the end where god brings us out on the other side so i say keep reading

the story and blesses and blesses her offspring and they become a large number as well so it's sustaining but also fruitfulness in the midst of that thank you okay here's a question uh that looks at uh not just uh slavery in the bible but but takes this idea of slavery and then brings it to some of our modern discussions uh can you address why modern discussions of slavery and justice have become associated with socialism marxism and leftism well i'll take i'll do just one piece and y'all do hear people clamoring please up there so every

time when i when i every any class i teach i always at some point say that i am a direct descendant of isaac garner my great great great grandfather who was sold for 300 to a family to the john garner family in south carolina and then i begin to teach whatever i'm teaching um people would like to dismiss our history and and make us feel bad about talking about things so they label them in order to get us to stop talking about them and i would say on a very short note that you have to

keep talking about them even if they mislabel them you have to put your own label on it speak it and they can say whatever they want the word is the word we have been through what we've been through and you can't try to mislead it to make me afraid to talk about you call it marxist all you want slavery is evil and i'm going to talk about it and i'm going to talk about reparations and justification and all of that that comes up when we talk about uh if you're in an evangelical space critical race

theory and so they'll call it they'll call it marxist communists and never deal with the merits of what the issue are put it aside then let's talk about injustice let's talk about uh sin let's talk about the pathology of systemic racism let's talk about the mass incarceration of people of color okay if you if you don't if you don't like crt we can put that aside but let's not throw out the baby with the bath water because evangelicals normally with their individualistic perception and interpretation of scripture don't deal with i think what's a major part

of the old and new testament and that's the impact of groups and how groups impact one another even when you immediately go to the genesis story the word in hebrew adam is singular for adam but also it's collective for humanity so i think just built into the language is a larger worldview that talks about the importance not only of the individual but the importance of the collective i think there's one thing that this kind of context and you know the kind of world in which we're living in it's kind of hyper racial everything like that

is that i'm to the point now and maybe i've just gotten older i'm not interested or you know want to even entertain somebody else wants to define me that's on you i'm not interested in that so as long as i know i belong to god and as long as my family know that as long as i know who i am it doesn't matter who you think i am okay here's another question uh from the audience even though shadow slavery is different from slavery mentioned in the bible how can we reconcile that an all-knowing god would

not have been aware that it would be that it would have evolved into a more barbaric practice i think it's the issue of theodicy and how can you have evil in the presence of a god that's good but maybe what the beauty of the biblical story and the narrative is it really it shows to us the god who engages brokenness and turns it around for his glory and that ultimately every knee shall bow and every tongue confess so that we walk around and we can walk around with our scars but also there's a note of

hope and triumph because ultimately ultimately god has the last word and maybe one of the experiences that many of us experience is that a lot of times god does things in our lives in the storm that he doesn't do when the weather is fair i don't like it like that i don't want to hang out in the storm all the time but i can look back at the storms of my life and see how god has done something matchless he's drawn me closer he's created a sense of humility and he's he's made me trust him

even that much more that if he could bring me out of this then surely he can keep me when times are good i think the cross becomes our ethic uh what we see jesus christ do and what happens to him on the cross becomes what we live by i might get in trouble but i'll say it anyway that the trauma that happens on calvary is something that's representative of the christian life we want to we want to sanitize experience to engage god without having to worry about all the complexities of what that faith message brings

i must say a little different we want to shout praise receive be blessed but we don't want to deal with the difficulty that comes with experiencing and understanding what those things really mean i think the challenge is that yeah i suspect i'll get in trouble that the ethic that i see happening from calvary is this that trauma is what helps to transition us to understanding what transformation looks like it's through trauma if christ is our ethic if calvary is something that we look at without in an atonement theology of course we're not doing that you

know of course pentecost is important without question but if we look at christ on the cross then we have to say that perhaps maybe as a leader in the room i'll say this i'll let it go that a leader or a follower of christ that is not bleeding is a leader follow christ that's not leading it's through that sacrifice and pain that brings us into an understanding of who god is regardless of what social systems exist regardless of the pain of oppression and imposition of identity it really comes down to the fact are you willing

to accept that through your trauma it helps to turn you to a moment to recycle pain in order to see what god wants you to imagine is your sense of promise can i can i just say something because you brought up trauma quite a bit and i want to just say this i want to just recommend this this great book i it has impacted my life it's not theological to the to the to the setting it's not theological but it's a great book it's a book called post-traumatic slave syndrome by joy i think it's joy

or joyce de gr degree right joy joy i love the book i've heard her speak i'm a part of her little fan club basically but she talks about how the just the history of trauma and you know and how the impact of slavery and how it really has shaped african americans and i don't and yes i have great hope through trauma but i i do want to just take a moment because we had a trauma thing earlier did you say listen we have as a community suffered trauma and we don't want to keep reproducing trauma

we you know some of us get victory and we all write but some of us we have a high rate of suicide high rated depression high rate of mental illness and we need to really sort of deal with that some of some people are not recovering well in in the midst of trauma you know um to kind of piggyback and i think there's a biblical illustration of this notion if you don't bleed you can't lead the good samaritan where it talks about the man who was on the road going down down the jericho road and

it talks about that he was beaten left half dead but then the good samaritan after the levi and the priests walked on the other side those who were called to protect and serve walked on the other side um the the god the the good samaritan he the text says he he bandages his wound and the greek word for wound is traumata he bandaged his trauma he put the man on his own mode of transportation he took him down to an end he stopped what he was doing to deal with the man's trauma which took time

which took resources and he paid he he paid the in keeper to keep the man and says whatever is left over i will pay so trauma is if you don't bleed you can't lead but the idea that it takes time to deal with and that's a ministry and i think that's a beautiful illustration that the good samaritan offers us this notion of trauma dealing with others wounds that that's good i'm i just got real quick it's your fault cause you brought it to me is before he gets to that point to help the word in

that passage you note is splunk neetsumai what that means is there was a gut reaction that when he saw him he could not help but help and at some stage there must be a splunk need to my in us a gut reaction that says i gotta do something all right we have about seven minutes left i'm gonna try to squeeze in uh two questions try try to squeeze into this question uh it seems like people nowadays are more harsh excuse me let me actually go to this one why do you think god liberated israel and

emphasized the importance of not treating egyptians the way they were treated yet allows them to enslave foreigners the lord wants to remind first the lord wants to remind israel that their very existence is dependent upon him that they were they were slaves and they only come out of it because of christ because of god's work right the other part is during war there will be people you will have people who will be captured so what do you do with those people do you just send them back to their own land so they can rebuild and

come back after you that sort of idea so some some part of this is has to do with warfare and capturing the land that god wants the israelites to capture but not to expand beyond that so the so part of this is that we have to understand that the israelites have a set amount of land that they can that they are due and they can't and david gets in trouble for this they can't go beyond that and so it it's it's not so much of oh god wants to uh sort of enslave other people and

you know he has this bad view of other people because he tells them how he they must treat that foreigner as well so there's this this way you treat the one that you're you're permitted to enslave so you cannot treat them as chattel slavery but i think part of that has to do with warfare and that there will be times where they will have other people and how do you deal with them do do you kill them all do do you do is do you enslave them how do you handle that situation so i think

part of it deals with that okay here's uh it's a very very unique one um in the ancient near east how does slavery in a patriarchal society affect abuse of women [Music] because men are abused as well right so so do you want me to touch it yeah yeah okay yes so read the question again sure uh in the ancient near east how does slavery in a patriarchal society affect the abuse of women yeah so there are there are also rules about how you treat women you know one of the one of the best i

love the passage in exodus 21. i love that passage because if that husband doesn't treat her well she can go and that's like so exciting to me this i'm sorry but you know there there is and i mean that's old testament that you that's not new that's old testament that there is this so i think when it comes to um slavery and i think when it comes to we have to remember concerning the bible god does not want his people to be beaten up other people and he don't want his people to be beaten up

that's not him that's not his plan so when we deal with people dealing with domestic abuse i think churches have to take a very measured approach do i want to say oh you know i used to work as a social worker so you you develop a safety plan that's one of the things you do because the woman might want to stay you develop a safety plan but she wants to go to you help her towards going but i do think the bible does provide guidance to us that you are not to be beaten up and

abused god has something better for you you are made in the image of god and so you should be treated fairly you know and and this kind of go back to the hagar story when i look at that the narrative genesis 16 and genesis 21 around hagar abram does everything the women tell them to do but the angel of the lord only speaks to hagar i think that's powerful and i could be wrong and of course my old testament professors here will help guide me after this segment um but i'm what comes to my mind

is the moment that haggar sees ishmael and isaac playing together our brother sarah sees ishmael and isaac playing together and forces hagar out and i could be just getting a shameless plug to preach here i guess but there's always a danger when impatience is playing with promise when ishmael and isaac are before sarah i imagine if i can use my spiritual imagination in this context that she is wondering what in the world have i done so i see perhaps even the role of women in which i may not have heard expressed perhaps it does exist

is the conflict between women in that patriarchal context and her courage to tell her to get out even though that was that man's son there's a danger when patience impatience plays with the promise i appreciate these preaching nuggets because sunday's coming up carol myers has an article is the ancient is ancient israel patriarchal and she makes an argument that it's it's a heteroarchy in that there's too much engagement with the larger culture you have three and four generations together living like a beethoven and she's she argues that most of the complex day-to-day work is done

by women so the man is clearly doing the work but clearly as well there is a predominant and importance of women all throughout scripture so she makes the argument that just to call ancient nerius patriarchal is a is a is a mis-examination it's not a close enough reading of the complexity of the ancient engineers thank you so we have about 30 seconds left and if you all could just name maybe a resource or two that has helped you to think through this subject that'd be very helpful to the audience i'll go back to because you

many people name commentaries i pushed towards um getting that post-traumatic slave syndrome book i think that brings the discussion to another level and um so that's that's by uh joy degree i think or i might be missing the name but um i will suggest that you know i think what's been informative to me and it's it's interesting mark knoll civil war as a theological crisis his essential thesis is that as much as the civil war and slavery was about economics and a whole host of other things at issue was who controlled the meaning of the

bible in pulpits across america that's this thesis civil wars of theological crisis and the issue of slavery and who controls the meaning of the bible and pulpits across america there's an interesting read that gives the positive identity for a life of a slave in ancient world name of the book is paul and the rise of the slave the resurrection of the death in the press and the ancient world author k edwin bryant i would think of of two um uh esoma colleagues uh reading while black many of us have it already and it's a it's

a classic but also who couldn't be here lisa lisa bowen's um you know african-american readings of paul i think is insightful in terms of just we see how the text has been misappropriated but also appropriated thank you so much please give it up for our steam panel [Music] what's up everybody this is lisa fields the founder and president of the g3 project and i'm so excited to come to you to talk about courageous conversations 2022 that's right we're at it again for another year the theme this year is the scholar and the skeptic we're back

in washington dc at national community church with seven amazing conversations conversations like is there a god should we trust the bible is christianity a white man's religion does christianity oppress women is christianity homophobic and transphobic should we be spiritual or religious is christianity bad for our mental health we want to give you a blueprint on how to have courageous conversations with gentleness and respect remember we sold out last time so make sure you register early and get your ticket now if you can't join us in person you have the virtual option as well but don't

miss this year register today at courageouscombos.org [Music] you