7: “REDEMPTIVE MOVEMENT” TRUMPS SCRIPTURE 77or encourage or endorse slavery, but rather tells Christians who were
slaves how they should conduct themselves, and also gives principles
that would modify and ultimately lead to the abolition of slavery (1 Cor.
7:21-22; Gal. 3:28; Philem. 16, 21; and note the condemnation of
“enslavers” at 1 Tim. 1:10, ESV, a verse that was previously overlooked
in this regard because it was often translated “kidnappers”). By contrast,
Webb believes that the Bible actually endorses slavery, even though it is
a kind of slavery with “better conditions and fewer abuses” than the
kind of slavery practiced in the surrounding culture.^26
In claiming that the Bible endorses slavery, Webb shows no aware-
ness of biblical anti-slavery arguments such as those of Theodore Weld
in The Bible Against Slavery,^27 a book that was widely distributed and
frequently reprinted by anti-slavery abolitionists in nineteenth-century
America. Weld argued strongly against American slavery from Exodus
21:16, “he that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his
hand, he shall surely be put to death” (KJV) (13-15), as well as from the
fact that people are in the image of God and therefore it is morally
wrong to treat any human being as property (8-9, 15-17). He argued
that ownership of another person breaks the eighth commandment,
“Thou shalt not steal,” as follows:
The eighth commandment forbids the taking of any part of that
which belongs to another. Slavery takes the whole. Does the same
Bible which prohibits the taking of any thing from him, sanction the
taking of every thing? Does it thunder wrath against the man who
robs his neighbor of a cent, yet commission him to rob his neighbor
of himself? Slaveholding is the highest possible violation of the eighth
commandment” (10-11).In the rest of the book Weld answered detailed objections about var-
ious verses used by slavery proponents. The whole basis of Weld’s anti-
slavery book is that the moral standards taught in the Bible are right,
(^26) Webb, Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals, 37.
(^27) Theodore Weld, The Bible Against Slavery (4th ed., New York: American Anti-Slavery
Society, 1838). The book was first published in Boston in 1837; my citations are from the 1838
edition. See also several essays in Mason Lowance, ed., Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader
(New York: Penguin, 2000).