"Slavery"
Philemon
October 26, 1997

Historically, Philemon belongs not with Paul's pastoral letters, next to which we find it in the NT, but with Paul's letter to the Colossians. Philemon belonged to the church in Colossians and the letter to that church was sent at the same time and by the same hand as was this personal letter to Philemon. In Colossians 4:-9 we read: "Tychicus will tell you all the news about me.... He is coming with Onesimus, our faithful and dear brother, who is one of you." The return of Onesimus, you will see, is the subject of this letter to Philemon.

v.2 We don't know the history of Paul's previous relations with Philemon or in what way, when, or where Philemon had assisted him in his ministry. Verse 19 suggests that Paul may have been instrumental in Philemon's conversion and this may well have occurred during Paul's three years in Ephesus. It cannot be said for sure, but it seems that Paul had not himself ever visited the church in Colosse (2:2), but had seen to its establishment by his assistant Epaphras whom he had sent out from Ephesus (Colossians 1). Acts 19:10 indicates that Paul's ministry had spread out from Ephesus through the entire province of Asia. Colosse was located in that same province.

v.9 It is hard to know for sure, but perhaps Paul is now in his late 50s or early 60s. But other things determine how old one feels and Paul had packed an extraordinary amount of living and suffering into his years as a Christian. Read 2 Corinthians 11 to remind yourself of how much! Paul was a prisoner in Rome for the sake of the Gospel, a fact that will underscore the force of his appeal to Philemon. The sacrifice he is asking of Philemon is trifling compared to the suffering Paul himself is enduring.

v.16 "both as a man and as a brother" i.e. both with regard to the affairs of the world and to the issues of the Christian life. Or both with the general obligations of manhood and the still greater obligations of Christian brotherhood.

Apparently, this is what happened. Philemon's slave, Onesimus, had run away, perhaps, as v. 18 may suggest, taking some of Philemon's money with him. Somehow he had found Paul who was then under house arrest in Rome. It is perhaps likely that this was not a complete coincidence. It is not unlikely that, insofar as Philemon had met Paul before and had perhaps even become a Christian under his ministry, Onesimus his slave had met and heard the great Apostle as well. So perhaps Onesimus went looking for Paul as someone who might help him in his need. In any case, he was led by Paul to embrace Jesus Christ as his master had done before him. Now Onesimus is being sent back to his master with this letter from the Apostle, carried by Tychicus, Paul's assistant, as we read in Colossians 4:7.

The Christian view of honesty and of right relationships between persons required that the breach between master and slave that had been caused by Onesimus' running away had to be repaired. The young Christian had to repent, return to his master, and seek forgiveness. But Paul does not send him back without help. He sends a letter, a letter that Rabbi Duncan calls "the most gentlemanly letter ever written by the most perfect gentleman" [Brown, Life, p. 405], a letter that carries tremendous hope for Onesimus because of the character of Paul's relationship with Philemon and the debt the latter owed to the former.

Now I intend to address what I think is the burden of this letter to Philemon so far as our own lives are concerned in a subsequent sermon. But, before doing so I felt it was necessary to say something about slavery and about a Christian attitude about slavery. It is an important subject and draws us near to the center of the Bible's ethics, the Christian's treatment of others. It is worth a sermon. Perhaps I wouldn't have thought to do this a few years ago, but there is abroad nowadays, among some conservative evangelicals of the Reformed stripe, a renewed combativeness about slavery in the southern states and the righteousness of the southern cause in the American Civil War. Some of this stems, I gather from my observation of this circle, from a penchant to identify with the most politically incorrect causes as somehow a demonstration of one's loyalty to Christianity. A great deal of that, I judge, to be largely a matter of the bent of personalities, a tendency toward cultural defiance, a prejudice against consensus, which it is not hard to see prevails more in some folks than in others.

In any case, listen carefully to me: I am not speaking about one's politics. If one believes that the Constitution favors states' rights over those of the federal government and that, in this respect, the Confederacy had constitutional right on its side, well and good. Let them argue that case. I am not even speaking about the theoretical question of whether slavery can be absolutely forbidden on biblical grounds. Even Charles Hodge, the northerner, felt that such a case could not be made. After all, there are certain relationships between employers and employees, even in the most modern economies, that bear some resemblance to certain features of chattel slavery as it was practiced in the United States before the Civil War. Tennessee Ernie Ford sung of miners who "owed their soul to the company store" and of many others a similar thing could be said. A relatively few rule in our modern economies and most work for them and only a few of those workers feel secure in thinking that if they wished they could take their labor elsewhere. In fact, not a few thinkers, from Tolstoy to the present day, think that western society has only succeeded in replacing an obsolete form of slavery that was no longer economically justifiable with new forms. Human life in sin produces slaveries of all kinds and always will. I know that. That is not what I am concerned to address. Nor am I concerned to deny that these were real Christians, devout Presbyterian Christians.

What concerns me in what I have read and heard are not such things. What concerns me is the lack of emphasis placed by these men on issues that absolutely must be uppermost in the thinking of any Christian who is considering the treatment of other human beings.

In other words, I want to address what seems to me to be a lack of the spirit of Paul's letter to Philemon rising in some circles familiar to us. I am of course not saying that that spirit is not lacking in all of us in regard to many things, many ways in which we think about other human beings and deal with them. Surely it is. That is exactly my point. I want you to love Paul's spirit in this letter, I want for you to long for more and more of it in your own heart. I want you to see Paul's mind as the genuine, the authentic mind of Jesus Christ and hunger and thirst to have that mind yourself. And, for that reason, I want to warn you against another way of thinking abroad in our circles that works, it seems to me, strongly works against that way of thinking and feeling that Paul represents in this letter to a Christian slaveholder about his runaway slave who has become a Christian and whom Paul is returning to his master as now a brother in Christ. Some want today to defend the South and, to do that, they must represent slavery as a more benign, less objectionable institution than it has been thought to be.

You know that even in the OT, where the Law of Moses not only permitted slavery but actually seems to have encouraged it in certain narrow respects -- and certainly regulated it as a common practice among the people of God -- there was also a powerful counter emphasis on the necessity of Israelites, of all people, treating their slaves with dignity, justice, and mercy, for, as the law says over and over again, "Remember, that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there." In other words, no one should have a greater sympathy with a slave than a Christian, no one is under a more solemn obligation to treat his slave as he would wish to be treated himself than a Christian, no one, for that reason, more likely to find that, at the last, he cannot keep slaves because he cannot believe that he would ever wish to be kept a slave himself. It is interesting that when God punished his people, he did so by making them slaves! Don't tell me that it was no terrible thing to be a slave. No one can say that who remembers that he too was a slave and Christ has set him free.

Indeed, in the Law of Moses, thousands of years before Dred Scott we read (Deuteronomy 23:15-16): "If a slave has taken refuge with you, do not hand him over to his master. Let him live among you wherever he likes and in whatever town he chooses. Do not oppress him." In the Code of Hammurabi, the death penalty was imposed on anyone who aided a slave in his escape. The Law of Moses, however, required God's people to aid and abet the runaway slave. The notion that the slave was someone else's property did not figure in God's law, which ordinarily was very concerned to protect the right of private property. What is more, the OT Law was remorseless in regard to those who kidnapped in order to sell their victims into slavery. "Anyone who kidnaps another and either sells him or still has him when he is caught must be put to death (Exodus 21:16). Such kidnapping lay at the root of the institution of slavery in North America although there were other ways some people, mostly white, became slaves. Still more, cruelty to slaves, God's Law required, must result in the immediate emancipation of the slave. If the Master struck the slave and knocked his tooth out, he had to let the slave go free (Exodus 21:27). If a man married a slave, he had to treat her as a wife, she could no longer be a slave. All of this was utterly destructive of slavery as it was practiced in the ancient world. The Scripture knew that slavery was oppression and generally it wished the condition on no one. The Scripture loves freedom and that is what God grants to his people when they otherwise would have lived their lives in slavery to sin and the Devil if not, in fact, to other men.

It is precisely this message of deliverance from bondage that lies at the heart of our faith that made it so attractive to slaves in the days of the Roman empire and of the American south, and should make it attractive to anyone today who knows himself to be a slave to sin and in bondage to its effects. In that sense we are all slaves together and no one should have a greater sympathy for a man in slavery than a Christian. As Simone Weil the French Jewess philosopher and convert to Christianity wrote: "Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves; slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among them."

What I find so objectionable about this new rhetoric I hear in some of our circles is what seems to be a virtually complete absence of concern for the disgrace that Christian America brought upon itself for the cruel, the inhuman, and the utterly unchristian way in which so many of those people were treated, at least the ones who made it alive to the new world and did not die in the floating Auschwitzes that brought the slaves to North America to be purchased by Christian businessmen. Never could Christians justify an institution that had anywhere in its system such appalling cruelty and hatred of human beings as was demonstrated on those slave ships that plied their trade from Africa to North America: with human beings made in the image of God, shackled to one another for 16 hours a day and for 24 in some cases, unable to move in "tween" decks no more than three feet high, with little or, in stormy weather, no ventilation, dying in droves of dysentery, smallpox, and other diseases, and, should they somehow survive the trip, then to be sold to many who, even in those days, argued that slavery was an indispensable means of leading the heathen to Christ. The wonder is that any of them became Christians. Such is the grace of God that it can overcome even the betrayal of those who profess to have received that grace themselves. No wonder that Paul, in 1 Timothy 1:9-10, should include "slave traders" in the same breath with murderers, perverts, and adulterers in that list of the wicked who are condemned by God's law.

Exactly as in South Africa, a supposedly Christian even predominantly Calvinist society had an opportunity to demonstrate to the world a completely different approach to human dignity and human relations and, instead, it bankrupted its witness by seeking its own wealth and prosperity at the expense of the dignity and happiness of other human beings. Thankfully, there were Christians in both places who knew the evil that was being done and protested against it in Jesus' name.

Sure the North was just as wicked in that and in other ways -- in its treatment of the American Indians and so on. But, surely, it cannot have come to this in our part of Christianity -- that we are defending great evils that Christians committed with the argument that other so-called Christians were just as evil? I discovered that there was abroad in this circle -- I cannot say that all who defend these positions condone it or wink at it -- an attitude that I could have nothing to do with. I discovered this attitude, to my dismay, when I read one of the representatives of this new thinking -- at least new in our Reformed circles -- dispense with Bartolome de las Casas as simply a troublemaker who went around whining about Spanish conquest in the new world. de las Casas was a supremely great man, the one powerful voice raised on behalf of the Indians whom the Spanish conquerors and colonists began almost immediately to possess, to abuse, and to murder in their mad frenzy to take wealth from the new world. So de las Casas is the first abolitionist in the New World and thus, must be trivialized by those wishing to defend the South and its later practice of slave-holding from the later charges of American abolitionists.

The atrocities committed against the Indians in pursuit of wealth by what was ostensibly a Christian nation and, at the same time, was publicly expressing its commitment to winning those same Indians to Christ, are, a most powerful warning as to how far from the spirit and letter of the gospel people who call themselves Christians can fall. Women taken for the use of Spanish soldiers, men worked to death in the mines, children left to starve, whole populations reduced to slavery, and, when Indians had the temerity to protest this treatment, whole villages murdered at once.

De las Casas' great book, The Only Way to Draw all People to a Living Faith, written in 1534, in which he argued that the only way to win the Indians to Christ was to treat them with the dignity, the respect, the love and mercy with which Christ had treated his people, to embody the gospel message in the dealings Christians had with all non-Christians, largely fell on deaf ears. But it remains one of the greatest works of Christian ethics and missiology ever published and it was written at some risk to its author. The Spanish didn't want to hear that message and they were incensed at de las Casas for bringing it. de las Casas, for his interference in the plans of Spanish settlers to get rich in the new world, was referred to as "the most hated man in the Indies." He was hated for loving men!

I tell you my people as your pastor and in the Lord's name, you do not want to smile on the thinking of anyone who calls Bartolome de las Casas a "troublemaker." That is a spirit you should fear and shun if you love your soul and the reputation of Jesus Christ. And those things are of much greater value than "states rights" or the reputation of Stonewall Jackson.

The early church was in no position to effect the eradication of slavery in the empire. It had no such influence and slavery was deeply embedded in Graeco-Roman culture. It is not surprising that a culture that considered foreigners as barbarians and thought labor was beneath the dignity of a free man would welcome slavery! But everywhere and in many ways, Christianity laid the axe to the root of that institution, even in that hostile culture. Christian slaves died as martyrs and were honored as such; some rose to positions of prominence in the church, one former slave was bishop of Rome from 218-223. When the owners of slaves became Christians, the old relationship virtually ceased, as Paul suggests it should here in his letter to Philemon. What the Apostle wrote, the church actually practiced to a very great degree. They came together at the table of the Lord to eat the same food and drink the same drink.

Lactantius, who lived in the 3rd and 4th century wrote in his learned defense of Christianity, "Should any say: Are there not also among you poor and rich, servants and masters, distinctions among individuals? No; we call ourselves brethren for no other reason than that we hold ourselves all equal. For since we measure everything human not by its outward appearance, but by it intrinsic value, we have, notwithstanding the difference of outward relations, no slaves, but we call them and consider them brethren in the Spirit and fellow-servants in religion." [In Schaff, vol. 2, p. 352.] Don't you think, my brothers and sisters, that that statement and that way of thinking is extraordinarily powerful and beautiful? Aren't you proud of your faith and your Savior that he should teach his followers such a way of life? And don't you want more and more of that spirit to dominate our life together and everywhere in the Christian church? Wouldn't such a spirit be an almost unconquerable witness to the truth of the gospel in such an alienated and divided world as ours?!

One of the most striking evidences of the difference the gospel made in a culture where slavery was a way of life appears in the catacombs. In a typical Roman cemetery one will find everywhere references to the deceased there buried as a slave or as a freeman. But not in the Christian tombs. There you find just the name along with some ascription of Christian hope; no reference to whether he was a slave or free. And, of course, these principles couldn't help to lead to the manumission, the release, of multitudes of slaves by their Christian masters. One Roman prefect, Hermas, became a Christian and was baptized at Easter with his wife and children and 1,250 slaves. At their baptism, he gave them all their freedom and gifts beside. Such are the implications of the gospel of freedom in Jesus Christ and of the exchange of our slavery to sin, death, and the Devil for our slavery to Jesus Christ our new Master.

By the time of Constantine in the 4th century there was already developed a Christian service of emancipation for slaves which took place in the presence of ministers and the congregation.

In other words, the Christian faith holds within itself, both in the teaching of Holy Scripture and in the practice of its history, a principle of love and mercy, of equality before God and humility before man, that, once allowed to flower, could not but eventually lead to the abolition of the institution of slavery itself. This is, in fact, what has happened on many separate occasions in Christian history. And Christians should love this -- that their faith alone has reasons sufficient to ensure a just and kindly treatment of all human beings, a principle of self-denial for the sake of others that is rooted in nothing less than the example of Jesus Christ himself, who became a slave to free us from our slavery.

What Paul is urging upon Philemon is that he think about his runaway slave and then treat him in accordance with his Christian faith. Paul knows that if only that is done, Onesimus will not only not suffer any loss or punishment for his flight but will find that, being a Christian, he is no longer a slave. For, as Paul said in Galatians 3:28, in Christ there is neither slave nor freeman.

And, there is a spectacular sequel to this letter. It cannot be proved as a certainty, but there seems to be no reason to doubt the account of early Christian documents that report this. Years later, Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, while being escorted to Rome as a prisoner to face martyrdom, wrote a letter to the Church in Ephesus. In the opening few lines of that letter he mentions having been visited on his journey by their bishop, one Onesimus, "whose love," Ignatius says, "is beyond words." [Ephesians 1:3]

What a wonderful thing to think: that Philemon welcomed his runaway slave back as a brother, granted him his freedom, saw him established in the church, and then whether before or after Philemon's death, Onesimus rose to the Christian ministry, proved himself to have been, perhaps even beyond Paul's own imagining, a true co-laborer in the gospel with the great Apostle. Is that not what you hoped would have happened after reading this letter? Is that not the result that you think the gospel of eternal grace should have produced in the minds and hearts of these men? And can you not imagine Onesimus, in his old age, thinking back to those long ago days, and loving and praising his old master, for having been such a Christian gentleman, such a follower of Christ, to an unworthy runaway slave?

Show me another faith, another philosophy in all the world that lifts the lowly up so high for reasons so pure! And among those lowly that are lifted up are you and I, once slaves, now sons!