The church changed its mind on slavery. Why not on sex?

Jul 24, 2017 by

by Will Jones, courtesy of Ian Paul, Psephizo:

It rarely takes long in any discussion about a controversial ethical issue amongst Christians for someone to bring up slavery. Slavery is the great exemple of how Christian thinking has changed on a key ethical issue. Christians in the past permitted slavery, practised slavery, defended slavery. Scripture clearly permits slavery in certain circumstances, and does not call for its outright abolition—and this has frequently allowed it to be used to defend the awful institution. Yet now we know slavery to be always and everywhere wrong and contrary to the will of God. What does that mean for how we understand the moral teaching of scripture and how we are to interpret it? If Christians for 1800 years failed to appreciate this key aspect of the moral law, does that mean that scripture can be unclear on critical moral issues? Should we therefore doubt its plain meaning and look more deeply for principles which, while apparently contradicting some specific verses, express deeper truths of God’s will for his creation?

It is not hard to see where this is going. The shift in thinking on slavery provides a model for many people of how the church might make a similar shift on sexual ethics. If the Bible seems to allow slavery, and Christians always used it to support slavery, yet now we all know this to be wrong, who’s to say that even though the Bible seems to disallow same-sex relationships, and Christians have always used it to oppose them, we shouldn’t now come to see things differently? What’s to stop the same revolution happening here, and indeed, shouldn’t it?

In a word, no. The issues are quite different in their relationship to scripture, theology and Christian history, and it doesn’t require an in depth knowledge to understand why.

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