The American Churchman: Christian Apologetics and Modernity

And welcome to the American Churchmen Podcast, where we encourage men to take responsibility, to love the Lord, to pursue the right, the good, the true, the beautiful. I am your host, Jon Harris, my co-host, Matthew Pearson.

And we are gonna talk today about some apologetic stuff, but before we do, how are you doing, Matthew?

I'm doing good, Jon. I'm doing good.

I heard that you have a busy schedule today, so this episode may be a little more succinct, but everything you told me sounds like it's gonna be a good lineup. So if you're enjoying listening to this show, keep an eye out for what Jon has coming too.

Yeah, I'm gonna actually be in Illinois. No, Indiana. Ah, I get those two confused. That's not good. Indiana this coming weekend. So I'd love to see you there. I'll be in Texas next week. JonHarrisMedia .com.

Of course, TruthScript is the one that actually sponsors this podcast. You can go to TruthScript .com, and we're gonna discuss an article I wrote. So it should be pretty easy. I kind of know the author.

But yeah, I wanted to say, Matthew, I'm proud of you. I'm, like, you're doing it right from the beginning, going out tonight to date your wife, even after you're married. So I just wanna commend you for that.

Oh, well, thank you, Jon. Thank you.

Some people don't do it, right? You get married, and then it's like, well, we don't need to date anymore because we're married. But this is something I've tried to do since I got married is like once a week.

There's probably very few weeks I've missed it. We go out on a date. It could be like five guys. It could be something really like low-key, but don't stop dating your wife. An old guy told me that before I got married, and it's worked pretty well for me.

So anyway, I have one last question on a personal level. Where do you guys go? Do you have a place set yet or like a rhythm? Is it a nice place? Is it McDonald's? Probably not McDonald's, but.

No, no, no, like fast. So that doesn't count. That's only on the fly, and she's really crunchy. So she has her limit with what she can tolerate, and even my stomach does too. No, we're just going to this like little, you know, I'm being a multiculturalism enjoyer, taking her to a nice little Mexican restaurant tonight.

So she gets a nice steak burrito with some margs and all that. So looking forward to that. But for us, because we're very, you know, we're just really like financially like, you know, because we're both students.

We try to do date night at least like two or three times, like a month, something like that. So, you know, it's nice, it's fun, it's good. But as of today, I've been married a month, so I'm an expert on marriage now.

So I'm ready to counsel people on how to have good and successful marriages because I know all of what it's about now, so.

You could do, I mean, I don't know. Do you guys like Dunkin' Donuts or like Starbucks or coffee? Like coffee dates, does that count?

She's a coffee fiend. No, coffee does not count as a date because I have gotten so much coffee every day from this woman since I met her.

Okay, yeah. So we, this is like our Dunkin' Donuts summer and I hate the Dunkin', the donuts at Dunkin', but their refreshers are good. So, and now of course she's doing pumpkin spice. So that actually can count in my mind.

In my mind, that's a date. You go to Dunkin'. Oh yeah, yeah. Take a walk.

And the Foyds love pumpkin spice. We've been doing a lot of pumpkin stuff. She made pumpkin sourdough bread. I'm so happy.

So I might as well.

Yeah.

It doesn't really get more white girl than that, to be honest.

No, it's nice. I love, you know, it's wonderful. I'm enjoying the fruits of her labor.

Slavery, Scripture, and the Limits of Apologetics

All right, well, excellent. Now let's transition to slavery. Bob the Baptist is streaming here. He says, what's up guys?

Oh, I've seen a few of his YouTube videos. Hi, Bob. I don't know if we're mutuals on Twitter at all, but I've seen some of your YouTube stuff.

Yeah.

I started watching him maybe, I don't know, two months, three months ago. And now every time I see one of his videos, I look for what's holding his microphone up. And if you've noticed, he's got like something different in every video holding his microphone.

So the last one was a skeleton, I think for Halloween. And so anyway, Bob, good to have you here. We're gonna sort of transition to something more serious here. But I just, I wanted to say like this last week, maybe two weeks now, there's been a lot of talk unexpectedly about slavery and the Bible.

And this topic comes up every now and then, but I think because Allie, and this is why I've made the YouTube thumbnail the way I did. I wasn't picking on those people, but Allie Beth Stuckey was on a show called Jubilee where she's surrounded by all these progressive quote unquote Christians.

And one of the exchanges was between her and this other guy, and he was trying to nail her on slavery and how the Bible endorses this on some level. And then the other one was, I think it was two days ago, Josh Hames, who's a podcaster and I'm friends with him.

I actually had talked to him right after all of this went down, but he did a podcast and he was actually, I think he was examining or talking about what Allie's, her exchange with this guy named Whitaker on Jubilee.

And he says in the process, he says that slavery is not a sin. And he went on to qualify it, but of course there was a leftist media outlet that just took that one quote and without the qualifications, put it out there.

And he had a mob after him. And so I talked to him and he was kind of bummed because, and his big thing that he was bummed about, he goes, I just feel like people are upset at me for believing something I don't actually believe.

Like I'm not for slavery. I'm not saying that slavery is a positive good in a universal sense. I'm just saying the Bible regulated it and it's not a sin in and of itself. And what are we gonna do with biblical ethics?

And this is a challenge. So I think what I wanna do in this podcast and we'll get Matthew's take on it is talk about apologetics, how to defend the Bible. And I don't think slavery is unique here. You have things like equality between men and women and whether or not social equality is something that the Bible endorses or is out of step with.

And you could talk about all kinds of other things. Laws in the Old Testament for civil punishments that seem harsh. The Amalekites or the Canaanites and their quote unquote genocide. That's what the atheists call it, right?

So we could go on and on about the ways that the Bible's ethical teachings as applied in the ancient world, just differ with some of the things that are taken for granted in the modern world. So that's where we're going with the show.

This is the article for people who just wanna get the too long, didn't read version here. Oh, that's not it. Oh, I didn't have it pulled up. Okay, so you can go to truescript .com if you wanna see the article.

Here's what it looks like. And it's called, Slavery, Scripture, and the Limits of Apologetics. Maybe we'll read through it as we go. And then one last thing I'll say is if you like this podcast, check out Truescript, scroll to the bottom.

There's a publish tab if you wanna publish with us. There's also a donate tab. We are 501c3. Okay, so Matthew, that's my intro to this subject. I know you read the article and you're probably familiar with the situations I brought up.

Any thoughts before we get into the paragraphs and reading what I said?

Yeah, absolutely. Many thoughts, which I will try to consolidate in one line of thought. But the thing about approaching these topics is that you do have to do so with both wisdom, prudence, being able to discern, but also with courage and boldness.

And the reason why is because we have to make sure that we check ourselves to see is our minds, is everything that we do and think, is it captive to God's word? Or is it captive to what the culture tells us, to what we hear because of the results of like decades or hundreds of years of prior things, which conform our minds to a certain way of thinking and things like that.

And so you have to make sure that you are in line with scripture, even if it doesn't sound the best, to most modern sensitivities and things like that. And we spoke about something of this degree. I don't know if it was slavery in particular, but it was some topic, like a bunch of episodes back.

And I read this one tweet from Cal Carusas that I do wanna read again. Cal is an excellent podcast. I'd commend your listeners to check them out. But he says about it. He says in his tweet, Christianity is bigoted, misogynistic, weird, incompatible with most modern sentiments from a different age that's primitive.

The woke more correct than Big Eva feminists. The Bible doesn't belong to them. Break off the rusty shackles of respectability. And he did phrase that in like a very, a way to kind of like stir up some people and excite a bit.

But there is a sense in which like that is absolutely true that the Bible sensibilities are going to be different than the sensibilities of the modern world. And you need to know that when you're looking at scriptures and you need to believe God rather than man.

And the thing too is like scripture does have a lot of things that can be said to be hard sayings, but because of faith, we take it and we believe it. That doesn't mean that it's illogical. That doesn't mean that you can't approach it with reason.

What it means is, who do I trust more? Myself and my fallible mind or God and his infallible and inerrant word. And this is an issue that is not, I mean, like we talk about, oh, modernity, the things of the modern world, it's all so bad, but this is not like something totally new.

This is something that even many of the church fathers had to deal with. And the reason why allegorical readings, this is not the only reason, of course, like the apostle Paul engages in allegory in Galatians.

Allegory is not like an entirely like antithetical concept to scriptural hermeneutics in so far as I would say, it's scripturally warranted or it's just like absolutely obviously about Christ or if it's used as application and it doesn't erode the literal meaning.

But a lot of the reason why so many people in the early church, like in the patristic age, did engage in some of these allegorical readings apart from spiritual application or Christological purposes was sometimes they did want to explain away the harder parts of scripture.

So if you wanna sort of see like how that works, you can read Hans Boersma. He wrote a book called Scripture as Real Presence, sort of going through patristic exegesis and how they did allegory, but just read a lot of origins sermons on things.

Origin would allegorize away certain things that were a bit more difficult or the Lord would not do this, therefore, this is an allegory for this, or even Gregory of Nyssa and is the life of Moses, he does something similar in order to uphold the justice of God.

So I would say that this is a temptation, which is not new, but it has always existed because it's not as if ethics and things like that, everybody was just like super brutal back then, though there are many cultures that were, we can talk about with that, with the Roman empire and other things.

But the thing is that people have always had a conscience given to them by God, which is it views injustice as wicked, as evil, and for good reason, but sometimes we misjudge based off of our conscience because like I said, we are fallible.

And so ultimately we have to submit ourselves to what God has revealed. We ought not to try to explain away things that bother us. You don't have to allegorize a story. I don't know if anybody has done this, I'm sure maybe someone has, but when God tells Abraham to kill his son, we don't have to allegorize that way and be like, no, God would never do that.

No, you see like the bigger picture in that story as well. When you look at the conquest of Canaan.

And all these things,.

You don't have to allegorize it as way. What you have to do is take scripture for what it is, see God as a righteous judge and that all that he does in his providence and his plans and all the things which he ordains, think to that one hymn, which name I forgot, which says whatever my God ordains is right because the Lord is the judge and he is the standard for right and wrong.

He is the basis for morality because he is himself morality in a sense. So anyways, that's my word vomit on that topic. Hope it's somewhat helpful for framing this conversation.

Allegory, Patristic Exegesis, and Hard Sayings

Yeah, I mean, we could totally go in a different direction. I'm almost tempted a little, but for some of the EO and RC guys, you mean some early church fathers might've gotten things wrong? Yes, actually, some of them did get some things wrong.

And one of the, I don't know who did it first, but the allegorization of Song of Solomon, where like this can't be in the Bible. This is inappropriate. This is too like zesty. So like, let's make this about Christ in the church.

We can have a fun conversation about that because I actually do think it's an allegory for Christ in the church.

Do you think, do you believe there's a double meaning? Like, so it's about Christ in the church, but it's also about an actual romance or song? I mean, sure.

And so I would say like the same principle is like the tortoise and the hare race. Like it's using a real turtle or tortoise and a hare to communicate a broader story. I would say that it's using the imagery and symbolism and the idea of a sexual relation to communicate the mystical union Christ and the church have.

But I haven't read on that in a while, so that may be a topic for another day. But no, I do affirm that. I was just on that as a fun side.

Well, I think in the sense like

Spurgeon does too, by the way.

Charles Spurgeon does.

Charles Spurgeon, yeah. Well, a lot of people did. I think it carried through the ages. So I had a professor, William Varner at masters. This was an undergrad. And he had the view that Solomon, the book of Solomon was actually, Solomon's the bad guy in the book.

So it's actually not about the perfect love. Solomon's trying to pursue this girl and it's the, what is it? The Shulamite or whatever, the shepherd. That that's the actual lover that's... And so he kind of messed me up on the whole thing.

And I've never been able to shake that view. I've read it a few times and people have said, oh, that sounds crazy. And I'm like, I don't know, it's hard for me. Cause he kind of like, he made me read it that way.

And now that's how I look at it. But yeah, but so even if it is about though, let's say the love that a man and a woman have for each other in a perfect sense, like this is how they should, even in a state of innocence, this is how they should love each other.

I suppose I could go with you with like, because the relationship Christ has with the church is also that there's a connection between them. I just, I have a hard time believing though, it was in the old Testament time meant to be an allegory of Christ in the church.

That's a hang up for me. But anyway.

Shadows, shadows, just saying.

Types and shadows. Yeah, you're right.

No, I know.

I'm so hesitant to read into that so much though, cause it gets like weird sometimes. Like I remember Beth Moore, not that I ever watched or did any Beth Moore studies, but some, we'll just say ladies I knew, said we're making the argument cause Beth Moore made the argument that if you look at the temple from a bird's eye view and the movements of the priest, it creates a cross.

So they're like, and it's, you're like, you know, it's like the laminate thing. Like, oh, like in all our DNA, there's a cross. It's a laminate. It's imprint on creation. You're like, I don't know if that's.

So there are rules, I think, obviously in hermeneutics to figure out if it's a type shadow, what is this? But to your point and to get back to, I guess the real topic here that we're talking about, to, for the motivation of trying to sweep something under the rug, like we're not gonna take this scripture literally because if we do that, oh no, it's out of step with our current times.

That just makes you a slave to, no pun intended, the opinions that are popular in your present age. And you can't like, what are you gonna do in a hundred years when the opinions change? Are you just gonna morph the Bible at that point into something new entirely?

So I think that's your point and that makes total sense to me. And on the topic of slavery, which is the topic that we're gonna be talking about a little bit, I think this is particularly difficult because we have had slavery universally in every culture just about until about five minutes ago.

It really, until the Industrial Revolution, there was slavery in some form in just about every country at some point. And whether you even wanna say feudalism, I mean, feudalism effectively is like a type of slavery.

Like, oh, but you could leave. Yeah, well, where are you gonna go? Right, like how are you going to leave exactly? You're dependent on this, the person who owns your land and hopefully that person's benevolent.

But the serfdom, right? These things that even existed in Europe among homogenized societies were effectively not much different than slavery in the sense that we think about it. So how do you take an ancient book that's pre-Industrial Revolution, that's pre-modern, how do you import the morality from that book into our modern age without endorsing all the institutions that it was applied to?

I think that's the question really. And then the other thing, and maybe we can go this direction is also what institutions are we just not aware of because of our presentism? Because we think we're so enlightened in this age, we don't realize the slavery that does exist around us in maybe even crueler forms at times.

And we're just oblivious because we don't call it slavery. We don't categorize it that way. And I think there's a number of things we could probably put as candidates for that. So, all right, I'll just read like a paragraph or a few paragraphs and then we can discuss, I guess, as we go.

This was sort of my own brainstorm, I suppose, when I wrote this, but. So, Allie Stuckey appeared on Jubilee. She was surrounded by 20 liberals. And there was this one exchange that drew particular attention with Tim Whitaker over the Bible and slavery.

Whitaker pressed Allie repeatedly on whether the Bible condoned slavery by regulating the practice instead of opposing the institution outright. His point was that morality evolves beyond the Bible's ancient applications.

Stuckey was put on the defensive and if her understanding of the Bible and slavery came from most of the current apologists, like Tom Holland, why wouldn't she be? And so, I'll ask you this, Matthew, we'll stop there for a second.

This idea that morality evolves. I saw another Christian apologist make a similar point that there's sort of this unfolding of, I don't even know how to phrase it. I'm trying to remember the way that this person phrased it.

There is a, you can see in scripture as you read it, like a general trend towards more and more and more freedom and less and less slavery. And taking verses in the New Testament, like, hey, look, Philemon's a Christian brother now, right?

Look at him that way as reading into it to say, well, that was a total undercut of slavery. That was the seeds of the slavery's destruction as a labor connection between two groups. It was essentially undermining the institution in a subversive way, because you couldn't just come out there and say you're against slavery at that time.

If you did that, the Romans and the Greeks, the Greco-Roman people would have thought you were crazy or something. So you got to do it subversively. I'll pitch it to you, Matthew. What do you think of that argument?

Because I hear that quite a bit.

The argument, the idea that sort of morality like unfolds over time or?

Yeah, I don't know if I want to say progressive revelation, but that's how it comes across to me. Like the Old Testament was these like dark ages and hey, look, as things progress, God gets more and more, like he starts revealing what he really thinks about this.

In fact, I'll give you one example.

I don't know if I have it.

Do I have it pulled?

Oh yeah.

So I don't know if this is a complete example of this, but Michael Carlino. I don't know if you know him, but he said slavery like divorce and polygamy is rightly filed under the category of from the beginning, it was not so that Jesus mentioned in Matthew 19, eight, which I think is an interesting idea to kick around.

But it's sort of like, you know, look at divorce. Like Moses allowed it, but that wasn't the way it was supposed to be. So people will say like, it'll make a parallel and say, look at slavery in the New Testament.

It seems like Paul and Jesus are trying to say things like Jesus says he came to set the captives free, for example, that he's trying to signal to us that that was never his intention really to regulate this.

Slavery, Divorce, and Prudential Reform

Yeah.

For that, I guess I would say that I'm not actually entirely opposed to the notion of not necessarily morality evolving, but maybe our understanding of certain like practices being like, maybe this ought not be so because this is the result of a fallen world.

In principle, I'm not totally opposed to that. I think that you can have certain practices, which is like, because of the circumstances we're in, not because of morality, but maybe because of just various other factors, it would be a wise and prudent thing to slowly get rid of this and in favor of doing this practice, which just may have better utility.

It just may be something different. I'm unsure if Jesus and the apostles had the same thing in mind, however, for something like slavery, especially when you just consider Philemon and that whole letter, like it doesn't seem to be that there's anything which would be calling for the entire abolition of the practice at the time.

I think you could easily make the case that this just isn't a good practice to do because of X, Y, Z but not because this practice is intrinsically sinful by virtue of the notion that you can own somebody's labor, which I don't see that to be the case in the New Testament.

And even when you do have, kind of going back to the patristics, even when you do have some of these church fathers writing about it, I think it's Gregory of Nyssa. He was the only that I can think of off the top of my head, the only church father that was against it because he thought it was intrinsically evil.

But a lot of these other guys, they'll concede that like we have slavery and it's not the best, but it's permissible because X, Y, Z, but they'll even say that it's a result of being in a fallen world.

So I forgot, Theodoret of Cyprus says that. I had to look at my book on the shelf, but his book on Providence, he sort of makes that similar point. But yeah, I mean, I just think that this idea that morality evolves though, it's not like morality is changing, but it's just because due to certain circumstances, situations that you may come to realize this practice shouldn't be good.

And I have no issue saying that God regulated the system of slavery, that slavery as an institution in and of itself is not intrinsically evil. But what I would still say with that is it may not be the best form or the best system to practice.

And therefore, if you have the means to abolish it in place of instituting like something else, which can be better, that we can say that as Christians. The thing is though, is that because of many of the horrors, whether it be propaganda or whether it really is true, because I do think that there were very obvious abuses in American slavery and things like that, because of our education and learning about that, people have this internal repulse to slavery because they associated with the chattel slavery of the Americas and things like that.

And so that sort of is what gets people really riled up about it. When, like I said, we need to be very level-headed, look at what the scriptures say, and then we can make a case against something, not by saying, oh, this institution in and of itself is intrinsically sinful, but this institution, because of certain circumstances or the culture or whatever, oftentimes leads towards abusive practices and therefore it should be abolished.

So, I mean, all of that to say, I think that you can be a good faith, like slavery, abolitionists, or maybe not abolitionists, they were a little crazy, incrementals, maybe, I don't know. However, whatever you wanna do, you can be that in good faith as a Christian insofar as you're not impugning God with evil.

And instead what you're saying is, this leads to wicked practices and all that. But you do have to be careful with that line of thinking and make sure you do it with prudence, because I know I can make the exact same argument against the institution of marriage or the institution of civil government.

How many marriages do we know where a guy marries a girl and she just straight like leaves him out of nowhere for no good reason, he's left destitute? How many civil governments do we know where people were subjected to the worst tortures imaginable, genocided, withheld from food and things like that?

Many things which are in and of themselves like okay or good institutions because of fallen man are abused. And because of that, we as Christians, we as men can discuss what are ways to either improve this system or slowly get rid of it over time.

And obviously, I wouldn't say the institution of slavery is something which would be as necessary to a functioning society as marriage or the civil government or things like that. It's just the principle that I'm trying to demonstrate is that there can be something which isn't intrinsically evil, but which can lead to evil and therefore needs either reform or slowly incrementally do away with.

Biblical Ethics, Prudence, and the Question of Slavery

Yeah, that's like a prudential argument. And I agree with you on everything you said. I think, so you're not making like a universal argument that morality in every time and every context looks like this.

It's a, there is a principle I suppose you could say, and you do see this from Paul to at least I would say to Augustine where early church fathers pretty much all said, at least the ones I know who have written on the topic, that you need to practice moderation.

You need to, you can't treat your slaves like they're animals you have to treat them in a kindness way. I mean, Paul obviously says for masters to be just with their slaves. So I think that is, and that's something that is in the Old Testament as well.

You weren't supposed to be harsh with your slaves in the way that you treated them. But that being said, you just, when you were talking you brought to mind something that might be more of an application, a little closer to home for us.

And it's not slavery per se, but the practice of dating. And I know, cause we talked about this last time I got in trouble for saying go date and stuff. But this was something, it was maybe a little more than that.

But this was something that I think our parents' generation this was just the way that everyone found a wife or found a husband. It was this mechanism or this practice that was in our culture called dating.

And there was a revulsion to that in my generation or I should say, I guess it would be our parents but when they were having kids some of the Christians at least, right. And some of this gets called purity culture but they came up with this mechanism of courtship.

And they said, actually this is an older way of doing it. And we don't have the recreational side of it that makes dating so terrible. There's no quote unquote date rape. There's no infatuation leading to bad arrangements like the parents have involvement.

Some people went so far as to say arranged marriage should come back because as a kickback against dating like this is a bad mechanism for finding a husband and wife. And there were some, I suppose, prudent critiques in this but what I did notice at the time and I notice it now too is there are Christians who wanna say that their view on the mechanism for finding a wife or husband is the biblical one.

I don't know, you probably heard this. Like, it's like, if you don't do it courtship you're not actually biblical. If you don't, and there's other people who will say like courtship is wrong and actually dating is the right way it's the right mechanism to use.

And I suppose like this is a prudential decision I guess is what I'm trying to say. It's about what context are you in? Are you applying biblical principles? And what we have a different economy we don't have an agrarian economy.

It's not like Isaac and Rebecca where it's like no one around you shares your views and you can go and find a relative somewhere back home who is going to have a preset station in life. They've already been trained on how to be the wife of basically a farmer.

And every man is basically a farmer. Like it's just not like that. People have different interests in different regions. It's a little bit more complicated. I think at least, and so the mechanism by which you find a husband or wife is gonna vary depending on your situation.

And I'm just, so I'm not saying that slavery is a one-on-one to dating at all. I'm just saying that when, yeah that's gonna get me in real trouble. I don't believe that. But I do think when you're looking at any ethical mechanism you gotta separate between what's situational and wisdom principle.

And then what's actually universal moral principle. Is that fair?

Yeah, no, I would 100 agree with that. And I think the same thing when I talk about politics with some people as well, where somebody asked me the other day, they were like, what do you think is the ideal form of civil government, monarchy, this or that?

And I'm just like, I don't know, it depends on the people. I think that, I think a constitutional Republic can be permitted. I think if you have a monarchy may work better and then whether it's absolute monarchy or whether it's a more constitutional monarchy, yada, yada.

All these systems are suited for the populations of the people. And I didn't, you get that from reading these reform jurists or these political theorists from the 16th and 17th century but then you go and you read a lot of the paleo conservative guys and they're all saying the same thing.

So, and part of the reason why so many American conservatives why we have such a fierce love for the constitution and that what was established by our forefathers is because it's our government. Like may we argue that it's like the best form of government, sure.

Like how people argue that, yes, but it was suited for the American people. And that's part of why the American people love it. And I just think that's just such an important distinction to be able to make because if you have this notion of, oh, well, I think the American form of civil government is the best.

Then you're going in and you're reading the old Testament law, you're gonna be like, oh, this doesn't allow for this liberty here, this liberty here. And it's just like, yeah, because it's an entirely different context with an entirely different group of people and for a different purpose.

Because there's a sort of, if we wanna use some biblical theology terms with it which I'm not really a big biblical theology guy but that's another rant for another day. But there's like a redemptive historical context to that as well.

And for the record to any chuds listening, I am by no means denying that we can be informed by the old covenant law. And I'm not saying, oh, well, Israel only had that law because they were the covenant people.

Don't worry, I reject radical two kingdoms. But there's different contexts for things and it's important to be able to recognize that so that you can actually not only read the scriptures better but even so you can do politics better.

You can think through politics better. You can do so much of these things that are going to be more suitable. And some people, when you do that, they may love you against you say, oh, well then you're just a relativist or you think morality evolves.

And no, that's not the case because there's a difference between what works best for particular peoples. And it's still in and of itself moral versus what may work best in a different way which may be different in how it's done but in substance is going to be oriented towards the same good.

Slavery, Labor, and the Apologetics Industry

Yeah, and we only had a market economy. The one we're familiar with at least for a very short period of time. So most of human history, there really wasn't an option. Like, so you have dependency created because not everyone owns land.

Land is the literal only thing that can give you sustenance. And if you don't own the land, you have to work the land. You're going to work someone's land. So if you're working that someone's land, you develop some kind of an arrangement with them where it's mutually beneficial.

And there's arrangements wherein you have people who, I mean, this is sort of the typical response today. It's like, why couldn't that have been wage labor? All of that. Why couldn't they just have been paid for their labor?

It's like, well, where are they going to go live when the day's done? On what land? They don't own any, right? It's like, that's the same, the Lord's land. It's the master's land, whatever. It's going to be the same place.