Slavery and the Trajectory

Definition

A framework for reading the New Testament’s slave-codes (Eph 6:5-9; Col 3:22-4:1; 1 Tim 6:1-2; Titus 2:9-10; 1 Pet 2:18-25) and Paul’s letter to Philemon as texts written inside an empire-wide institution of chattel slavery that the gospel did not, in its own century, abolish, but did set on a trajectory the canon itself walked toward. The framework refuses two flat readings the modern church has each at times produced. The first is the flat-literalist reading that takes the slave-codes as a divinely warranted endorsement of the institution and therefore as a permanent template for Christian social ethics. The second is the flat-dismissive reading that takes the codes as evidence the New Testament is morally compromised and to be discarded. Both readings miss what the codes are actually doing. In their Greco-Roman setting they humanize slavery (slaves addressed as moral agents in their own right; masters given costly cruciform counter-commands; both placed under one heavenly Master “who shows no partiality”); they do not abolish the institution; they do embed seeds (Gal 3:28, “neither slave nor free”; Philemon’s “no longer as a slave, but a beloved brother”; Acts 4:34 and the early Christian property-sharing) that the church was meant to grow into emancipation. The framework names the actual institution Paul’s churches lived inside, names the codes’ real and limited humanizing work, names honestly what they failed to do, and names the historical betrayal in which large portions of the Christian church defended chattel slavery into the nineteenth century by reading the very texts that, faithfully read, refused it. The Black church tradition’s witness, recovered for the wider church by Esau McCaulley and others, is one of the lane’s anchors here. The framework is reused by every New Testament slavery passage and by Philemon.

Key proponents

Modern

Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope (IVP, 2020). The lane’s anchor for the framework. McCaulley reads the New Testament’s slave passages from inside the Black church’s long tradition of resisting the antebellum readings even while the texts were being read at them by their owners. His core argument: the slaves who heard Eph 6:5 knew exactly what the chapter also contained (“there is no partiality with him,” 6:9; the dividing wall demolished, 2:14; “no longer as a slave, but a brother,” Phlm 16); they refused the master’s truncated reading and held the whole canon together as a liberation document. The Black church tradition is the standing rebuke to the white American hermeneutic that defended chattel slavery, and it is also a model of how to read the slave codes responsibly. McCaulley refuses both the literalist endorsement and the modern progressive’s wholesale dismissal of the texts.
William J. Webb, Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (IVP, 2001). The classic articulation of the redemptive-movement hermeneutic. Webb’s argument: when a New Testament text moves against the cultural current of its world (the slave-codes do; the women-in-leadership texts do), we should ask whether the move is the whole trajectory or only the first costly step in the direction of new creation. The faithful reading discerns the direction and continues to walk it. Reading the slave-codes as if they were the trajectory’s destination freezes a movement the canon was already walking past. (Webb’s hermeneutic is rightly criticized when extended to questions where the NT moves with the cultural current; on slavery and on women’s voice in the early church, where it moves against, it tracks the actual hermeneutical practice of the post-NT church.)
Scot McKnight, The Letter to Philemon (NICNT, Eerdmans, 2017). McKnight reads Philemon explicitly as a manumission appeal: Paul is not just asking Philemon to forgive Onesimus’s escape; Paul is asking Philemon to free him and to send him back to Paul as a coworker. McKnight’s detailed reconstruction of the Roman manumission process (manumissio vindicta, manumissio testamento, manumissio inter amicos) is the lane’s anchor for the historical concreteness of the letter. Paul writes from inside a working knowledge of Roman slave law and uses it to extract Onesimus from it.
N.T. Wright, Colossians and Philemon (TNTC, IVP, 1986); Paul: A Biography (HarperOne, 2018); the Philemon material in Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters. Wright reads Philemon as a test case of the gospel’s social-ethical claim: if Onesimus is now a fellow heir (Eph 3:6) and one new humanity (Eph 2:15) with Philemon, then the master-slave relation cannot remain what it was. The letter is the gospel’s grammar applied to a single concrete household, with the legal categories of Roman slavery quietly emptied.
Markus Barth and Helmut Blanke, The Letter to Philemon (Eerdmans Critical Commentary, Eerdmans, 2000). Barth’s last major Pauline work (he died before finishing it; Blanke completed it). Magisterial historical and theological treatment. Especially valuable for its detailed reconstruction of first-century slavery in the eastern empire and its careful theological reading of koinonos (partner, fellow, v 17) as the relational category Paul applies across the master-slave line.
Michael F. Bird, Colossians and Philemon (New Covenant Commentary, Cascade, 2009). Reads Phlm and Col 3:22-4:1 together. Strong on the literary and rhetorical strategy by which Paul leverages Philemon’s apostolic relationship to bend his household toward release.
Lynn H. Cohick, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians (Baker, 2009); The Letter to the Ephesians (NICNT, Eerdmans, 2020). Cohick documents the actual social conditions of Greco-Roman slavery, including the rough majorities and ratios (perhaps 30 to 40 percent of the empire’s population was enslaved, with higher concentrations in urban areas and Italy), the various types of slavery (household, agricultural, mining, sex), and the legal status of slaves as res (things) without personhood under Roman law. Cohick’s work is essential for understanding what the codes were actually addressing.
Cyrene Caitlin Joubert and Allen Dwight Callahan, Embassy of Onesimus: The Letter of Paul to Philemon (Trinity Press, 1997). A more provocative reading: Onesimus may not have been a runaway but a delegate sent by Philemon to Paul, with the letter as Paul’s reply. The reading is contested but worth engaging.
John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Eerdmans, 1972). Yoder reads the New Testament slave codes inside the larger pattern of “revolutionary subordination”: the codes’ addressing of slaves as moral agents is itself an inversion of Greco-Roman ethics, and the cruciform pattern that organizes them is the seed of a non-violent revolution from below. Yoder’s later legacy must be named honestly (his abuse of women remains a real moral wound on his legacy); the structural reading remains methodologically important.

Premodern witnesses

John Chrysostom, Homilies on Philemon (3 homilies, c. 392-398). Chrysostom’s reading of Philemon is strikingly progressive for the fourth century. He reads the letter as evidence that the gospel makes the slave-master relation theologically untenable: if Onesimus is now Philemon’s brother, he is no longer to be treated as property. Chrysostom does not call for the abolition of slavery as an institution (no fourth-century Christian writer does), but he insists, repeatedly, on the spiritual equality of slaves and free persons in Christ, on the slave’s full standing as a Christian, and on the master’s obligation to treat his slaves with cruciform gentleness. His homilies on the slave-codes elsewhere (in Ephesians and Colossians) are in the same register.
John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians, esp. on 1 Cor 7:21-23 (“if you can gain your freedom, do so”). Chrysostom reads the Pauline preference for freedom as the trajectory underneath the codes. In his hands, Paul is not endorsing slavery; Paul is coaching slaves to take freedom when offered.
Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes (esp. Homily 4 on Eccl 2:7). Gregory’s astonishing fourth-century direct attack on the institution of slavery itself. Reading “I bought male and female slaves,” Gregory says: “I bought my own kind.” He calls slave-owning an act of arrogance against God who made all human beings free and equal. Gregory is, in modern terms, an abolitionist a millennium and a half before the abolition movement. His witness is the patristic anchor for the framework.
Augustine, City of God XIX.15. Augustine’s treatment of slavery is more equivocal than Chrysostom’s or Gregory’s. He reads slavery as a consequence of the fall, not part of God’s good creation; in this his theology is correctly directed against the institution. But he treats existing slavery as something the Christian community must endure rather than abolish. His position is honest about slavery’s evil while too patient about its persistence.
The patristic tradition broadly, Didache, Apostolic Constitutions, Letter of Barnabas. The post-apostolic church manumitted slaves in significant numbers; church funds were used to purchase slaves’ freedom; the catechumenate included slaves; slaves served as bishops in the early centuries. The institutional record is mixed but less accommodated to slavery than the later medieval and especially early modern church.

See How We Read for the longer lineage of this and the other frameworks on this site.

Core insights

The actual institution Paul’s churches lived inside. Roman slavery in the first century AD was a totalizing legal-economic institution. Estimates vary; perhaps a third of the empire’s population was enslaved, with higher concentrations in Italian cities (urban slaves were often closer to free persons in daily life than rural plantation slaves). Slaves were res under Roman law: things, not persons. They had no legal personhood, no family rights (a slave’s children belonged to the master), no property of their own beyond what the master allowed (peculium). They could be sold, separated from spouses or children, subjected to corporal punishment, sexually used by masters, and killed without recourse. Manumission was legally regulated (the Lex Aelia Sentia, AD 4; the Lex Fufia Caninia, 2 BC), and a manumitted slave (libertus) entered a graded freed status that retained obligations to the former master (patronus). This is the institution Paul’s churches existed inside. They did not invent it; they did not have political power to abolish it; they preached the gospel inside it.

The New Testament slave codes do, and do not, in the same codes. Reading the five passages as a corpus (Eph 6:5-9; Col 3:22-4:1; 1 Tim 6:1-2; Titus 2:9-10; 1 Pet 2:18-25) shows a consistent pattern. Slaves are addressed as moral agents in their own right. This is structurally extraordinary in the Greco-Roman world, where the standard household code (Aristotle, the Stoics, the Neo-Pythagoreans) addresses only the paterfamilias and speaks about slaves as property categories. Masters are given costly counter-commands (Eph 6:9, “give up threatening, knowing he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven”; Col 4:1, “you also have a Master in heaven”). Both are placed under one heavenly Master who shows no partiality (Eph 6:9). The codes do this work without calling for the institution’s abolition. The framework’s honest reading: the codes do what the codes do, including their limits.

Philemon is the practical case study. Paul’s letter to Philemon is the New Testament’s exhibit of what the slave-codes’ grammar actually entails when applied to a single household. The legal situation is concrete. Onesimus is Philemon’s slave (Phlm 16); he has, on most readings, escaped from Philemon’s house and met Paul in prison; Paul has led him to Christ; Paul now sends him back to Philemon with a letter that is both an apology for the escape and an apostolic appeal that Philemon receive Onesimus no longer as a slave, but as a beloved brother (16). The Greek ouketi (“no longer”) is decisive. The relationship cannot be what it was. Whether or not Philemon manumits Onesimus formally (most modern readers, including McKnight and Wright, read the letter as an effective manumission appeal), the social-relational reality is changed at its root. And the letter does not declare slavery abolished in principle. It does what the codes do: it humanizes inside the institution, with the seed of the institution’s eventual undoing.

The trajectory hermeneutic, applied. William Webb’s redemptive-movement hermeneutic is the lane’s reading-protocol for the slave-codes. The protocol: when an Old or New Testament text moves with the cultural current of its world (e.g., the patriarchal default of polygamy in the Ancestral Narratives), the cultural current is the limiting factor and the text should be read carefully. When a text moves against the current (the New Testament slave-codes do; they address slaves as moral agents; they constrain masters; they place both under one heavenly judge), the text is in motion in a particular direction. The faithful reading of the text discerns the direction of the motion and continues to walk it. The unfaithful reading freezes the motion at the page and calls the freeze “biblical fidelity.” Webb’s hermeneutic is the post-NT church’s actual practice: the abolition of chattel slavery was continuous with the New Testament slave-codes’ direction, not a violation of them.

The antebellum American reading and its critique. The history is unsparing. Antebellum American slaveholders, especially in the South, defended chattel slavery by reading the New Testament slave-codes as endorsing the institution. Eph 6:5, “slaves, obey your masters,” became a stock pulpit text. The complete canon was truncated to make the defense work. Deut 23:15-16 (do not return a fugitive slave) had to be ignored or explained away. Gal 3:28 (neither slave nor free) was spiritualized to apply only to “souls before God,” not to actual social relations. Phlm 16 (no longer as a slave, but a brother) was either ignored or read as referring only to spiritual standing. The Black church tradition, by contrast (McCaulley), held the whole canon together and read the codes inside their own gospel-emancipatory frame. That was the faithful reading. The white Southern reading was a politically captured, self-serving truncation of the canon, and the modern American church has not yet adequately repented of having produced it. The framework’s pastoral and theological responsibility is to name this history honestly. McCaulley’s Reading While Black is the contemporary canonical text for the work.

The post-Pauline church’s record, mixed but real. The framework refuses to make the post-NT church’s track record on slavery either all-good or all-bad. Patristic-era manumissions were common; church funds were spent purchasing freedom for enslaved Christians; Gregory of Nyssa wrote what is essentially an abolitionist sermon in the late fourth century. And slavery persisted as an institution; the medieval church accommodated it; the early modern church endorsed Atlantic chattel slavery on an industrial scale. The lane reads this honestly: there is a real patristic precedent for abolition (the framework’s premodern anchor is Gregory’s homily); the institutional church did not consistently walk the trajectory the apostolic seeds laid; abolition came late, often led by minority Christian voices (Quakers, Methodists, the Black church) and over the institutional church’s resistance. The framework does not let either nostalgia or cynicism dominate; it names the record.

The slave-codes’ theological logic is cruciform. The codes’ Christological grounding (Eph 6:5, “as to Christ”; 6:7, “as to the Lord and not to men”; Col 3:22-24, “as serving the Lord Christ”; 1 Pet 2:21-25, the New Testament’s most extensive Christological grounding of slave ethics in the suffering of the Servant) reframes the slave’s submission as participation in the cruciform Lord. This is not an endorsement of slavery’s violence; it is a reframing of the slave’s interior life under unjust conditions she cannot change. The Christological reframing has been both consoling (the slave Christian knew her sufferings were not unwitnessed by her Lord; this is the long testimony of the Black church tradition) and manipulable (slaveholders used the same texts to spiritualize away the slave’s claim to material liberation). The framework reads the texts in both registers: their consolation is real; their potential for misuse is also real; the canon as a whole holds both. Gal 3:28’s “neither slave nor free” and Phlm 16’s “no longer as a slave” name the eschatological horizon under which the cruciform reframing operates. The slave codes are not the last word; they are coaching for the period before the last word arrives.

Modern application: the framework still does work. Chattel slavery in its Roman or antebellum forms is, in most of the world, formally abolished. But forms of unfree labor persist: human trafficking (sexual and labor), debt bondage, prison labor, sweatshop and supply-chain coercion, the structural racism downstream of the Atlantic slave trade in American economic and criminal-justice systems. The framework’s contemporary relevance is precisely the trajectory work: the New Testament codes’ direction is toward the abolition of every human enslavement, every “owning” of persons, every treatment of fellow image-bearers as res. The church’s vocation is to walk the trajectory, not to declare it complete. The Christian who learned the slave-codes’ grammar in this framework should be the Christian most alert to the modern forms.

Where it shows up in Scripture

Philemon (the whole letter), Paul’s appeal that Onesimus be received “no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother” (v 16)
Ephesians 6:5-9, slaves and masters under the same heavenly Master who shows no partiality
Colossians 3:22-4:1, slaves and masters; the cruciform reframing of slave service and the master-has-a-Master-in-heaven constraint
1 Timothy 6:1-2, slaves of believing masters
Titus 2:9-10, slaves’ conduct as adornment to the gospel
1 Peter 2:18-25, slaves and the cruciform Servant pattern, the New Testament’s most extensive Christological treatment
Galatians 3:28, “neither slave nor free… you are all one in Christ Jesus”
1 Corinthians 7:21-24, “if you can gain your freedom, do so”; “you were bought with a price; do not become slaves of human beings”
1 Corinthians 12:13, “we were all baptized into one body, Jews or Greeks, slaves or free”
Acts 16:11-15, Lydia the household-head who hosts the Philippian church
Acts 4:32-35, the property-sharing of the Jerusalem church
Deuteronomy 15:12-18, the Hebrew slave manumission law with mandatory provisioning at release
Deuteronomy 23:15-16, the prohibition against returning a fugitive slave (the antebellum readers had to ignore this verse)
Leviticus 25, the Jubilee year and the freedom-from-slavery rhythm
Exodus 21, the slave laws of the Covenant Code
Isaiah 58:6-7, “to undo the bonds of wickedness, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke”
Luke 4:18-19, Jesus’s Nazareth sermon, citing Isa 61, “to proclaim liberty to the captives”

Common misreadings to avoid

“The New Testament endorses slavery.” No. The codes regulate an empire-wide institution they have no political power to abolish, while consistently humanizing inside it (addressing slaves as moral agents; constraining masters; placing both under one heavenly Master) and embedding seeds (Gal 3:28; Phlm 16) the canon meant to grow into emancipation. Treating the codes as endorsement requires deleting the cross-references inside the same canon.
“The New Testament abolishes slavery in principle.” Anachronistic. The codes regulate; they do not abolish. The abolition is in the trajectory, not the page. To pretend the New Testament is already fully abolitionist is to flatten the texts’ actual historical setting and to skip the trajectory work the post-NT church is meant to do.
“Paul should have just said ‘free your slaves’.” This is the modern reader’s frustration; it is not the apostle’s situation. Paul writes inside an empire-wide legal institution with no political mechanism for abolition. He does what he can: he humanizes, he embeds the seeds, he writes Philemon as the practical exhibit, he says “if you can gain your freedom, do so” (1 Cor 7:21). To demand the apostle do twenty-first-century abolition in the first century is to misread the situation.
“Eph 6:5 is a culture-bound text that doesn’t bind us.” Half-right and half-wrong. The passage’s specific instructions are bound to a specific institution that no longer exists in most of the world. The passage’s cruciform grammar (the suffering Servant pattern, the heavenly Master who shows no partiality, the constraint on the powerful party) is permanently theological. The trajectory hermeneutic is exactly how to honor both.
“The Black church tradition’s reading is just sentimental.” It is the most exegetically rigorous reading the American church has produced on these texts. The Black church held the whole canon together (Deut 23:15-16; Lev 25; Isa 58:6; Luke 4:18; Gal 3:28; Phlm 16) when the white Southern church was truncating the canon to defend its economic interest. McCaulley’s argument is that the Black church’s reading was, and is, the more responsible reading.
“The codes can be applied to modern employer-employee relations directly.” Not cleanly. The Roman slave-master relation is not the same as the modern boss-worker relation. Modern employment is contracted, terminable, legally bounded in ways Roman slavery was not. The codes’ cruciform principles (work as to the Lord; bosses remember they have a Master) can inform modern work ethics, but the legal scaffolding of Roman slavery is not the same as modern employment law. Mapping the codes directly onto modern employment minimizes the actual horror of Roman slavery and the actual freedom of modern workers.
“The patristic church did nothing about slavery.” Half-wrong. The patristic record includes the abolitionist sermon of Gregory of Nyssa (a millennium and a half ahead of the modern abolition movement), Chrysostom’s insistence on slaves’ full spiritual equality, common manumissions through church funds, slaves as catechumens and bishops. The patristic church did not abolish the institution, but it did not simply endorse it either.

Definition

Key proponents

Core insights

Where it shows up in Scripture

Common misreadings to avoid

Further reading