Healthy plants have deep roots and strong pillars have solid foundations. If we are to be Christians who are deeply rooted in Christ and built on the solid Rock, then we need more than mere sound bites. One means that the Lord has used throughout church history to strengthen His people’s faith and witness is reading good books. This book review series is identifying books that can serve as shovels that help you dig deeper in your Christian life.
Book: Surviving Religion 101 – Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College - Michael J. Kruger
The most common attacked aimed at Scripture these days may not be a historical one but a moral one. We need to let the irony of that sink in – we are told to reject the Bible and the God of the Bible because they are morally deficient. In the past, our culture used to say to Christians, “Don’t push your morality on me.” Now, there is a deep “moral outrage” in our culture, but it is often directed against Scripture and Christianity. In chapter 14 of Surviving Religion 101, Michael Kruger addresses the three main moral complaints against the Bible: slavery, treatment of women, and genocide.
1) Is the Bible Proslavery?
The trans-Atlantic slave trade, the American Civil War, and the era of Jim Crow continue to haunt Western culture. With the scars of that history in mind, we read “slaves, obey your earthly masters” (Eph. 6:5) and we wonder, “Does God approve of this awful institution?” As is often the case, the first glance doesn’t tell us the whole story. Here are a few things we need to consider.
First, slavery in the first-century Roman world was very different from the type of slavery that modern people have in mind. When we hear the word “slave” today, we think of people acquired through kidnapping, who had no financial resources, and were often cruelly abused. But the chattel slavery of the nineteenth century should not be read back into texts written in the first century. Slaves in Paul’s time were often paid a wage, and some were highly educated. Further, how and why people became slaves in the Roman world was very different. It was not due to skin colour or ethnicity. Often people volunteered to become slaves to achieve a level of financial security, and this was usually for a limited time. This is why many English translations use the word “bondservant” instead of slave. Of course, this doesn’t mean Paul is commending first-century slavery, for it could be cruel and oppressive (1 Cor. 7:21; Eph. 6:9). Instead, Paul is giving instructions on how to navigate in the fallen world where the Christians find themselves.
Second, the New Testament affirms a radical level of equality between slaves and non-slaves in the body of Christ. The first-century listener would have been shocked to hear Paul say, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Paul put this into practice when he viewed the runaway slave Onesimus as a dear brother in Christ rather than as a piece of property (Philem. 1:6). Paul instructs Philemon to receive Onesimus back as if he were receiving Paul himself (Philem. 1:17). This means Christianity demands that a slave be treated with the same dignity as an apostle!
Third, Christians led the way towards the abolition of modern chattel slavery. Tragically, many Christians defended the 19th century practice. But when they did, they did so in opposition to clear biblical commands which forbid kidnapping people and forcing them into lifelong servitude (Ex. 21:16; 1 Tim. 1:10). The teachings of Christianity (i.e. ‘image of God,’ ‘love your neighbour as yourself,’), rightly understood, were the foundation for the defeat of the African slave trade. This is why Puritans like Richard Baxter spoke vehemently against it, laying the foundation for others like pastor John Newton to motivate William Wilberforce and others to carry the torch for abolition.
Here’s the point: The Bible needs to be read carefully within its original cultural context, rather than through the lens of modern categories and concerns. When read contextually, we see that the Bible is anything but proslavery.
2) Does the Bible Oppress Woman?
The biblical teaching on men and women is countercultural today, but it would have been even more so in the context of the ancient world. In the Roman world, women were seen as less valuable than men. So much so, that female infanticide, where baby girls were left to die, created a significant shortage in the female population. In pagan circles only about one-third of the population was female. Another place this inequality appeared was in marriage. Men were granted a great deal of sexual freedom, whereas women were expected to remain sexually faithful to their husband.
Standing in radical contrast to this is the biblical vision for women. Before God addresses what makes men and women different, He declares what makes them the same: “So God created man in his own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Gen. 1:27). Because both men and women are made in the image of God, they are equal in value, worth and dignity.
This equality shines through in the New Testament. Jesus transcended the cultural taboos of His day in how He talked to women one-on-one (Jn. 4:7), befriended women (Jn. 11:5), traveled with women (Lk. 8:1-3), and taught women (Lk. 10:39). Women were also instrumental in financially supporting Christ’s ministry (Lk. 8:1-3). The Apostle Paul equally affirms the value of women, as demonstrated in Romans 16, where nearly half the list of his helpers was made up of women. Elsewhere, Paul did the culturally unthinkable thing of insisting that sexual fidelity in marriage applies to both men and women because they are equal in terms of dignity (1 Cor. 6:12-20; 1 Thess. 4:1-7).
This positive vision for women explains why they were so attracted to Christianity in the earliest centuries of the church. Roman women flocked to the church and made up nearly two-thirds of early Christian communities – basically the opposite of that found in the Greco-Roman world! They found the church to be a place where they could find honour, dignity, fair treatment and healthy marriages.
But speaking of marriage, doesn’t the idea of “submitting” reveal a form of biblical oppression? Not at all. First, a difference in role does not equate to a difference in value. Christ submitted Himself to the Father in His earthy ministry, yet this submission did not diminish His value (Jn. 4:34; 8:28; Heb. 10:7). This reminds us Christian submission is a Christlike quality that every Christian is called to in various contexts (Eph. 5:21-6:9).
Second, biblical headship and submission leaves no room for a domineering husband. Ephesians 5:25 calls husbands to display their leadership through love and self-sacrifice. Christian husbands are called to value their wives more than their own lives, even willing to die for them as Christ died for the church!
Third, the ultimate reason why God has structured marriage this way is because marriage is a reflection of the intimacy between Christ and the church. The roles in the Christ-church relationship are not reversable. Christ is the Head and the church is called to follow. Since marriage is a living metaphor of this divine marriage, we can see it is not oppressive but liberating. It is a picture of the gospel!
3) Does God Commit Genocide?
When Israel entered the land of Canaan, God commanded them to wipe out the Canaanites (Deut. 20:17). Many Christians try to explain this away to get God “off the hook.” However, as painful as this issue is, it highlights what we, and our culture, need to hear more than ever: God is holy, people are sinful, the world is broken, and His judgment is just.
When considering the destruction of the Canaanites, we must remember several principles. First, every human being on the planet deserves God’s judgment, not just the Canaanites. We are all born deeply sinful and we are guilty not only of all our past sins, but the sin of Adam (Rom. 5:12). The wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23). This means that God is justified to take the life of any human as judgment for his or her sins. He owes salvation to no one. Rather than being surprised that God would judge the Canaanites for their sins, we should be shocked with how patient He was with them (Gen. 15:13-16).
Second, the timing of God’s judgment doesn’t always match human expectations. Jesus teaches us that people don’t have to be the worst of sinners to receive God’s judgment first (Lk. 13:4-5). He is free to extent patience and free to judge.
Third, God uses a variety of instruments to accomplish His judgment. Throughout Scripture He uses natural disasters, disease, drought, economic collapse, and even, human armies. In the Canaanite conquest, God used the nation of Israel as His instrument of judgment. This is the key difference between the Canaanite conquest and modern-day genocide. The former is done as an instrument of God’s righteous judgment, whereas the latter is humans murdering others for their own purposes.
Imagine a scenario where one person injects another person with a deadly poison, causing that person to die. Is that murder? It depends. If done by a criminal who wanted to knock off a rival, then yes. But if this is an official at a federal prison who was authorized by the state to administer lethal injection, then the answer is no. Everything comes down to whether the taking of the life is properly authorized. The issue is not whether a life is taken but how and why it is taken.
Since every human deserves judgment, and since God is justified in taking a life whenever He decides to execute that judgment, and since God uses various instruments for that judgment (including human armies), then there is nothing immoral about the Canaanite conquest. To object to the conquest would require us to object to all God’s acts of judgment.
4) “Don’t Push Your Morals on Me”?
Skeptics who make the objections listed above have a major problem. If they think the Bible is morally problematic, then it must be violating some moral norm in the universe. It must fail to live up to the way things ought to be. But by what standard are they declaring that the women ought to be treated a certain way or that slavery ought to be eliminated? As we have seen in previous posts, the only cogent foundation for morality is the God of the Bible Himself. This means that the people who have the real moral problem with slavery, the mistreatment of women, and genocide are not Christians but non-Christians. They may not like these things, but without Christianity, they have no basis to object to them.
Surviving Religion 101 – Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College by Michael J. Kruger. Published by Crossway, Wheaton, Illinois, 2021. Softcover, 262 pages.