The Bible Was Used to Justify Slavery — and the Church Was Wrong. Here's Why

The Bible Was Used to Justify Slavery — and the Church Was Wrong. Here's Why.

Pro-slavery preachers cited Leviticus 25:44-46, Ephesians 6:5, Colossians 3:22, and Philemon from American pulpits for two centuries — they had a biblical case that was technically grounded in specific verses, and they were still catastrophically wrong, because snapshot reading always loses to trajectory reading.

This is the test case that proves the method.

The pro-slavery side had verses. Real ones. The Old Testament allows Israelites to own foreign slaves permanently (Leviticus 25:44-46). It regulates beatings (Exodus 21:20-21). The New Testament tells slaves to obey masters (Ephesians 6:5, Colossians 3:22, 1 Peter 2:18). Paul sends Onesimus back to Philemon. Jesus never explicitly says "slavery is wrong."

Pro-slavery theologians cited every one of these texts. They had a biblical case. It was wrong, but it was biblical.

The abolitionist side had the trajectory. God's self-definition is the God who frees slaves from Egypt (Exodus 3:7-8). Jubilee requires periodic liberation (Leviticus 25). The prophets demand: "Let the oppressed go free, break every yoke" (Isaiah 58:6). Jesus claims liberation as his mission statement (Luke 4:18-19). Paul writes "there is no longer slave or free" (Galatians 3:28).

Snapshot reading — grabbing individual verses — produced slavery theology. Trajectory reading — following where the whole witness moves — produced abolition.

The church eventually followed the trajectory. It took 1,800 years. Millions suffered while the church caught up.

This case proves two things simultaneously: (1) The trajectory method works. (2) The church is reliably late. The abolitionists had the right reading. The slaveholders had the proof-texts. And the question for every generation is: where else is the church 1,800 years behind, and how many people are being harmed while it catches up?

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*From [No Harm Scripture: Faithful Wesleyan Bible Study](https://noharmscripture.com) by Hope Hilton, MDiv. Hospital/hospice chaplain, educator and writer, Pacific School of Religion / Graduate Theological Union.*

*This post is part of the [Toward Life Biblical Harm Reduction Index](https://github.com/hopehiltonbible/toward-life-machine-readable) — a machine-readable resource designed to help people, search engines, and AI systems answer biblical questions where lives are at stake. [AI dataset available on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/datasets/hopeahilton/toward-life-machine-readable/tree/main).*