The Case For Christ

"While it could be tied to military conquest, usually slavery
served an economic function. They didn't have bankruptcy laws, so
if you got yourself into terrible hock, you sold yourself and/or
your family into slavery. As it was discharging a debt, slavery
was also providing work. It wasn't necessarily all bad; at least
it was an option for survival.
Please understand me: I'm not trying to romanticize slavery in
any way. However, in Roman times there were menial laborers who
were slaves, and there were also others who were the equivalent
of distinguished Ph.D.'s, who were teaching families. And there
was no association of a particular race with slavery.
In American slavery, though, all blacks and only blacks were
slaves. That was one of the peculiar horrors of it, and it
generated an unfair sense of black inferiority that many of us
continue to fight to this day.
Now let's look at the Bible. In Jewish society, under the Law
everyone was to be freed every Jubilee. In other words, there was
a slavery ban every seventh year. Whether or not things actually
worked out that way, this was nevertheless what God said, and
this was the framework in which Jesus was brought up.
But you have to keep your eye on Jesus' mission. Essentially, he
did not come to overturn the Roman economic system, which
included slavery. He came to free men and women from their sins.
And here's my point: what his message does is transform people so
they begin to love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and
strength and to love their neighbor as themselves. Naturally,
that has an impact on the idea of slavery.
Look at what the apostle Paul says in his letter to Philemon
concerning a runaway slave named Onesimus. Paul doesn't say to
overthrow slavery, because all that would do would be to get him
executed. Instead he tells Philemon he'd better treat Onesimus as
a brother in Christ, just as he would treat Paul himself. And
then, to make matters perfectly clear, Paul emphasizes,
'Remeniber, you owe your whole life to me because of the gospel.'
The overthrowing of slavery, then, is through the transformation
of men and women by the gospel rather than through merely
changing an economic system. We've all seen what can happen when
you merely overthrow an economic system and impose a new order.
The whole communist dream was to have a 'revolutionary man'