The Oberlin Review
<< Front page News February 23, 2007

Haskell Series' 99th Year Explores the History of Slavery in the Bible
 
Bernadette J. Brooten: The Brandeis professor discusses the complexities of gender, race and religion.
 

“I belong to the archdeacon… Hold me so that I can not be free.” These words adorned a bronze slave collar, meant to clasp the neck of a person in the fourth or fifth century. That person was the human property of a Christian church leader.

Slavery’s relationship with Christianity and the Bible was the subject of Oberlin’s 99th Haskell Lecture Series this week. The program, which was established in 1899 after receiving funds from the trust of Caroline E. Haskell, had its first lecture series in the spring of 1908.

The 2007 lecturer was Bernadette J. Brooten, director of the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project and professor of Christian Studies and Women’s Studies at Brandeis University. She gave three lectures: one each on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday on the topics of “The Bible and Biblical Authority,” “Slavery Legislated: Early Christian Canon Law” and “Enslaved Women as Surrogate Bodies in Early Christianity.”

Referring to the slave collar, Brooten said, “We might be shocked to find a Christian church leader unself-consciously asserting his rights over his human property, but Christian leaders have been heavily implicated at various points in history. Elders, bishops and even popes have been slaveholders.”

In fact, added Brooten, the most important thing for students to understand after the lectures is that “tragically, Christians, throughout most of Christian history, tolerated slavery. And that goes back to the Bible itself.” According to Brooten, both the New Testament and the Old Testament have passages relating to slavery.

In the first lecture, she cited one New Testament code that read, “Wives, be subject to your husbands… Husbands, obey your wives and never treat them harshly. Children, obey your parents in everything… Slaves, obey your masters in everything, not only while they watch… but wholeheartedly. Whatever your task, put yourself into it as done for the Lord and not for the master, for you know that from the Lord you will receive your inheritance.”

This rigid social order became complicated in Antebellum America when slaveholders hired private preachers to teach Christianity to their slaves. “If Christian slave children and their parents took this [code] as directly applicable, they might not have been able to follow it because the master or mistress always took precedence over the parent,” Brooten explained.

“A master or mistress might order a child to disobey a biological parent and even to commit acts that the Christian parents might consider contrary to their Christian faith. Furthermore, some slave holders earned income from prostituting their slave girls,” she continued. Thus, religious acceptance of slavery cast a shadow of confusion over Christian moral teachings.

The second lecture focused on medieval Christian rules.  Brooten pointed out that despite strict rules governing sex in religion, early Christian canons that governed slavery acknowledged that many masters sexually abused their slaves. One law even prescribes the punishment for a woman who, “overcome with jealous rage… flogs her slave woman so that she dies within three days in a state of severe physical pain.” She explained that the main reason for a woman’s jealousy toward her slave would be that the slave was sexually assaulted by the woman’s husband. The punishment prescribed was light and difficult to enforce. It is evident that medieval Christianity acknowledged that a master might sexually abuse slaves but did little to try to stop it.

Brooten said that the contradictions in moral teachings continue to influence the world today, even though “most churches today do not condone slavery” and Pope John Paul II condemned slavery as “wrong under all circumstances and in all times.”

According to Brooten, this influence is because “a shift of this magnitude without acknowledgement of the church’s past moral failures and investigation of what went wrong for so long leaves intact vestiges of slavery in moral theology.”

Brooten expounded on the ideas of sexuality in the third lecture, and it was clear throughout the series that she believes the modern Christian church needs to address the issue of slavery in sexuality with regards to moral teachings.

She noted that even “mainstream conservative Christians have in their thinkings about the Church… codes including wifely submission and the spanking of children.” These are the same codes that once regulated slavery.

Brooten said: “Churches have yet to come to terms with the moral problems [slavery] poses to biblical authority. Until the churches do so, sexual ethics are tainted by the slaveholder values of ownership, domination and subjugation, which will continue to exert their influence, especially in Christian teachings on marriage.”


 
 
   

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