What Are Biblical Values? by John Collins

Author:John Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300231939
Publisher: Yale University Press

THE BIBLE AND DEBATE ABOUT ABOLITION

Both sides in the debate on abolition in nineteenth-century America drew on the Bible. The anti-abolitionists could point out, quite validly, that slavery is never proscribed in either Testament. One pro-slavery minister wrote that Jesus must have presumed mightily on the intensity of intellect of his followers if he expected them to infer from the command to love your neighbor that slavery should be abolished. God himself, he wrote, had failed to draw that inference in the Hebrew Bible.48 That argument was undercut to a degree by the observation of Moses Stuart, the leading American biblical scholar of his day, that those who defended slavery because it is accepted in the Bible should also “insist on the liberty of polygamy and concubinage.”49 Frederick Douglass made an even more telling comment. Insisting that he did not believe that the Bible sanctioned slavery, he added that if someone were to persuade him that it did, he would consign it to the flames.

For of what value to men would a religion be which not only permitted, but enjoined upon men, the enslavement of each other, which would leave them to the sway of physical force and permit the strong to enslave the weak?50

Implicit in that argument is that we must look not to specific laws in the Bible, but to the general principles that inform it, even if they are not well embodied in this particular case.

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