The pro-slavery folks that used the Bible in history are guilty of eisegesis. You take a narrow view of something described that is a part of a larger concept and you ignore the larger concept and instead insert your own ideas. For example, the epistles talk about slaves obeying their masters. The context is missing: slavery is not kidnapping someone of another race and putting them in the cotton fields. Slavery in the Bible is the result of debt and it is not forever. Anyway, I digress.

The big picture from all of scripture is that Jesus will redeem his people by dying on the cross, paying for their sins and breaking the bonds of slavery. But there is a twist. Jesus has sheep that are not of this fold. Throughout the Bible, Old and New Testaments we find the declaration, “The Gentiles also!” Hence David sings about God’s glory among the nations. Hence Paul rejects circumcision. Hence in Revelation every tribe has people in Heaven.

In order to use the Bible to justify slavery, you have to ignore this colossal storyline of the Bible in order to veil your idolatry over love of money.

The difficulty here is the the entire video is essential two white males talking around the topic without ever actually impacting the topic. Out of the entire video only about 30 seconds actually develop any kind of usable theological thesis. It comes to a head with this: “The questions are still open.”

This is truly the point. Now I disagree with Pastor McLaren’s point that the Bible is a constitution. I do agree that we can view it as a library. Yet his point shows how he hasn’t really thought this all out. In a library you still have to categorize texts and use a documentation system to find appropriate resources. The Dewey Decimal system has going to area, shelf, group, book…how is this different than a “constitution.”

What Pastor McLaren needs to talk about here is the idea of developing a new hermeneutic. Yet I don’t think he’s got the theological stones to do it. Essentially this video is talking around the idea of what a new hermeneutic for a post-foundationalist era might look like. Yet he, like all the other Emergents, have yet to offer an innovative reply to their underlying question. The default here is running back to the modernism of the first part of the 20th century.

Now he does this by saying that we are fallible interpreters. I’m fine with that if we ask him to seriously consider the role of the Holy Spirit in illumining the Scriptures. Yet this isn’t developed.

Finally, where does the “slavery” argument come in. This is just a default criticism angled against some biblicists on the basis of poor hermeneutics in the past. Nellie Norton is a terrible text that uses extraordinarily bad hermeneutics to arrive at its sad point. How can we use this argument reasonably? How about developing some other ways to consider how we misunderstand the text contemporarily?

Until then we just witnessed one of the most vapid conversations I’ve seen about an important topic in quite awhile.

PJ

We don’t use the Bible for our Authority. It’s more like the recommended reading of the Authority.