Slavery and Christ

If one asks a college student about slavery today, he will speak of the United States and her shameful enslavement of Negroes brought in chains from Africa before the Civil War. Yet slavery has a history far broader than that. For from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, well over a million European Caucasians were enslaved in Africa by the Barbary Coast Africans.

It was Europeans, primarily in England, and later Americans, who first worked to end slavery. And they used the Bible as their authority to do so. It is actually the New Testament book of Philemon that laid an ax to the roots of this inhuman institution. Slavery, however, is not yet ended even today. Sadly, it is rampant in parts of Africa.

Why not take the time to study the book of Philemon. Philemon was a wealthy citizen of what is today western Turkey. His servant Onesimus is a man whose name means useful.  But he proved useless by robbing his master and fleeing to Rome. It was there he fell on hard times, ran into the apostle Paul, and their whole story came out. In that crisis Onesimus became a Christian. Paul sent the slave home. He knew Philemon could kill the slave, or at least brand him with the letter F for fugitive on his forehead.

The Romans were frightened by unruly slaves. A few years earlier Spartacus had begun a slave uprising that took several years to defeat. So they gave no quarter. Yet Paul sent Onesimus home. He told Philemon he was now more than a brother. Paul said that if Onesimus owed Philemon anything Paul would personally repay it. He said Onesimus would now live up to his name “Useful.”  And to hold Philemon accountable, he said he’d visit soon and check on matters in person.

Since the books that now compose the New Testament were first collected in Ephesus, Philemon’s Turkey, one can easily see how the book of Philemon, the New Testament’s only personal letter, was included. The master and the slave, now brothers, slipped in as evidence of Christ’s ability to transform the heinous institution of slavery into brotherhood—red and yellow, black and white.

The Reverend Stephen Crotts is pastor of Village Presbyterian Church in Charlotte Court House, VA. He is also the director of the Carolina Study Center, Inc., a campus ministry, located in Chapel Hill, NC. Pastor Crotts may be reached at carolinastudycenter@msn.com.