Reading the Bible While Black

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. We are gonna talk today about a much-anticipated review of a book by Esau McCulley called Reading While Black. I've told people who have asked me if I'm gonna review this book that I was planning on it, but it's been maybe even a month or two in some scenarios.

And I've said, I'm getting to it. I'll try to get to it. And so I finally did read it. And I wanna share with you some of my thoughts. I am concerned about this book. I do think it is dangerous. I do wanna talk about the why it might be popular because it is, it is popular.

It's gotten into places some of the other social justice books might not go. The more hard left social justice type of books. I believe I saw this at Liberty University when I walked into the bookstore.

I know I saw someone sent me the library at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary was promoting this book. And I can't remember all the places, but it is everywhere. It is a book that's gotten into all kinds of places.

And Esau McCulley, the only thing I knew really about him was he had stirred up some controversy probably a year ago, year and a half ago, something like that. He had talked about it. And I think I actually write about this in my book, Christianity and Social Justice Religions in Conflict.

I write about it in this book here that he had made a post about biblical interpretation and how it needed to be diversified essentially. And this just created all kinds of pushback from people who said, don't you just want people who know Greek and Hebrew and the original languages?

And why do you need a diverse panel to interpret the Bible? And so that was kind of my understanding of Esau McCulley. And I will say his book is consistent with my understanding of him. So we're gonna talk about the book though.

I wanna make this a self-contained podcast. We're not gonna try to bring in other things that he said on social media or other political concerns. I just really wanna focus on the book itself because, and here's the reason, I know many of you are going to churches or you're part of Bible studies or Christian institutions where these kinds of materials are being passed around and there's studies that are using these books.

It's one of the ones that's making the rounds. So there's this one, there's Be the Bridge, there's Color of Compromise. There's like a number of social justice books that are very common for evangelicals to use in small group settings.

And this is one of them. So I want it to be a helpful tool for you. Well, we can call it a useful analytical tool for people trying to understand this book. And for those who aren't gonna read the book, I've done it so you don't have to.

So there you go. You have these resources. And if you're a patron, you'd be able to download this PowerPoint. I'll try to remember to put the link in the info section, but it will be posted on Patreon.

And if you're not a patron, though you can go through the video yourself and screenshot. And I don't mind if people do that.

This resource is for you.

So that's why we're doing this. A few announcements before we get started here. I wanna just let everyone know that if you want to schedule me to come out and present on social justice or other topics as well, but that's the main one I've been presenting on is the topic of my book, Christianity and Social Justice.

You can go to the website. You can go to worldviewconversation .com and go to the top and the tabs, Book of John. You can click that and there's a whole form there. I wanted you to, I don't know if I've updated this.

Let's see if I have. I think I have.

Yes, yeah.

So there's some outstanding dates that are gonna be added to this, but I'm gonna be in Shelbyville, Kentucky for, and I think this is a war room. It's like a men's group, I think, called War Room, but that's January 29th.

And then March 18th through 19th, I'm gonna be in Idaho at a Biblical Worldview Conference. I'll announce more about that. And then June 8th through 11th in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Now, as you can see, not a whole lot in the deep south there.

So going to the Midwest, going to, I guess you can consider Kentucky, right? That's the south. And then to Idaho, the northwest. But I would love to schedule, especially if I'm going to somewhere like Idaho, right?

I'd love to find churches along the way. I'm coming from upstate New York, so I'm probably gonna be driving. I'm not big on flying these days, I'll be honest, with all the restrictions. So let me know.

Put, go to BookJohn on the worldviewconversation .com website. And if you want, if it would be helpful to you, I don't really ask for much. I just say, hey, if you're willing to cover travel expenses, that would be awesome.

You don't even have to do that. I would just love the opportunity to speak and set up my table. And that's usually what I ask, is can I set up my table, have my books there, and sell those, and take up an offering, or cover my travel expenses, whatever those are.

And if they're shared, it's even cheaper. So my main goal is just to get the word out, to help churches, to equip churches against this threat, and to be a real immunization, right? A real inoculation, not the kind we're hearing about today, but a real one against this virus of social justice.

So that's the idea here. Other thing I wanna let you know about, some people I know do know about this already, but discerningchristians .com, people were saying online, because I posted about a certain feature, which I'm about to show you.

They said, well, I can't see it. Well, you have to create an account. So if you log in, I'm gonna log in, and here's my account. And so you can go through, you can make it look however you wanna make it look.

You can put whether you're a layman, a deacon, a pastor, or a pastoral candidate. And if you're a pastoral candidate, that may, I think that's what actually, let's see, if you put searching for employment, that's going to put you in a tab up here, candidates.

I'm gonna click on that. And you can see all the different candidates. You have a number of candidates up here that are looking for churches. They want a church that they can pastor at, whether that's a youth pastor or just a senior pastor, or I don't know, whatever.

I know there's different ministries, but they're looking for ministry opportunities. And you can click on these links and you'll find the email address, you'll find where they live, and you can message them.

And I've told churches looking for candidates, why don't you just get all these email addresses and just send a mass mailing and say, here's what we're looking for. Send resumes if you're interested and just see what you get, because they're already vetted, at least to some extent.

They've signed the statement of faith. They're probably fans of this podcast or else they wouldn't know about this. So just check it out, discerningchristians .com. You have to create an account. And the other thing is your browser has to, it can't be in private browser mode.

It's gotta be a browser where you're allowing the browser to read your location, because that's how the map works here. And that's how the Candidates tab also works. So if you have a map, it's going to show you, let's see, Refresh Church Results.

So you can see where people are, where people live, where there might be a potential church available, all that kind of stuff. So there you go. I hope that's helpful to you. And let's see if, I think that's all I had to say about that.

Critical Race Theory and Liberation Theology in Reading While Black

All right, let's get into the podcast now. We're gonna talk about this book, Reading While Black. And I'm gonna blow this up for everyone so they can see exactly what we're looking at here. Now the obvious question everyone asks, right, today in this period, it might not be that way in a few months, probably will still be that way, but people want to know, is this a critical race theory book?

Is this a CRT book? And so I want to answer that question the best way I possibly can. The answer is yes and no. No in the sense that this wasn't written as, at least it's not self-aware of being pro-critical race theory.

The term, I don't even think, comes up in the book. It's not a book that is self-consciously pushing that. It's not even really about that topic per se, although you can see elements of critical race theory clearly come out.

And there's five elements that I located in the book that are identified as critical race theory by Delgado's critical race theory. And they come out. So I'll just go through this real quick. Racism is normative, is an assumption of critical race theory.

And so you see in the personal story of Issa Macaulay that he calls, it's kind of, in my mind, it was a little dramatic, but he says he was briefly terrorized by police officers who had essentially pulled him over at a gas station where a lot of drugs had been dealt.

And they thought that maybe he was involved in that, but they let him go in like less than 20 minutes. It wasn't a long ordeal, but they were investigating him. Now, look, here's the thing. I've had this happen to me many times.

Like the story he described, I've had it much worse than him many times. So when I was reading this, I thought, you know, this is interesting. I used to drive for a living, so that I've had some incidences with that.

But I also used to go late at night when I was dating my wife to a town in New York that was a college town that had a lot of drugs problems. And I would get pulled over constantly with officers coming up with lame excuses to search me.

Sometimes they would literally search me, search my person, search my vehicle, say that, and come up with excuses like they smelled drugs in the car, I was swerving when I wasn't. I mean, all this kind of stuff has happened.

I don't talk about it, but I just consider the circumstances. I don't think, I mean, I had a Second Amendment bumper sticker at the time. Maybe that's what they saw. You know, I could start to read into it.

They're profiling me or something. But, you know, it's just normal life stuff. And that's, you know, I was in this college town at a certain place at a certain time, and that's what happened. Now, are there racist cops?

Are, you know, cops that do profile, and they're out to get certain people because of some external quality? You know, there are. There's people who are, that do it all in every direction, though. And so the idea that it's normative, that it's something that is against minorities, and this is a common practice is, that's what CRT is about, that this is some systemic problem that is just, it's fundamental to what America is, and living in America, and this experience that black people, and brown people, and women, and LGBTQ people have in the United States.

So he talks about this situation that he was in, and he basically says that, insinuates the police were terrorists, just for investigating him, because he was at a place where a lot of drugs deals had gone down, and they were curious about it.

So you see that assumption. So does he come out and say racism is normative? No, but you see that assumption's already there. White privilege maintains white dominance, another feature of CRT. Well, he says this in the book.

He says,.

Womenist scholars critiqued white feminism for its failure to examine its own privilege, and for its neglect of issues of race. And he talks about how this is a good thing. So you see that there is an assumption here of some form of white privilege, or a lack of self-awareness, that there's issues with white people that they don't possibly see, and that this is good for biblical interpretation, and in the broader context, you can go to that page 180, where he talks about this.

Now, is that full-blown saying, white privilege maintains white dominance? No, he's not full-blown saying that. He's just, but there is, you can see that there's a hint of this thinking, a hint of that there is some kind of problem with white people.

There is some kind of blindness they have to their own oppressive tendencies, and these kinds of things. Then you have colorblindness keeps minorities in subordinate positions, another feature of CRT.

And he says colorblindness is sub-biblical, and falls short of the glory of God. In fact, he talks about Martin Luther King Jr., and how he didn't believe in colorblindness either, and people trying to take his, I have a dream speech out of context are wrong.

And to some extent, he's probably right about that. MLK, I mean, I love that speech in many ways. That's a great speech. But if you read fuller, what more of what MLK thought in his writings, he wasn't totally consistent perhaps with that sentiment that we would appreciate from that speech.

And then of course, voices of color have access to special knowledge. This is the main thing we're gonna be focusing on, because this is really what the book is about. And this predates critical race theory.

This is just an aspect of critical race theory that critical race theory adopted. But the standpoint theory or this subjectivity that social location determines meaning, you find this all throughout the book.

That's the main problem with this book. So here's some quotes, and I'll give you more later. What did I do in a world in which so few black voices are prominent, and the questions of my people were ignored?

I began to look for anybody black. I began to search for theologians who could help me make sense of what it means to be black and Christian. And then he says, the black ecclesial interpretation is, oh, I'm sorry, this is my commentary.

The black ecclesial interpretation is arbitrarily free to reject other interpretations. So he says this, if black biblical interpretation is to be free to chart its own path, it is also free to reject the thoroughgoing skepticism that stands as one legacy of the European dominance of biblical studies.

So there's this idea that voices of color don't have to abide by the same rules. They don't have to take the knowledge stemming from European-dominated biblical studies. That's not something that they have to incorporate into their tradition or their teaching.

They can chart their own path, and it's important to find people who are black and interpret the Bible. And this is what you're gonna see. This is sort of the problem. This is the Achilles heel for this whole book.

And then here's another aspect of CRT I see in this. History should be reinterpreted according to minority experience. Macaulay says, either some Westerners have whitewashed Egyptian history by turning many of its characters into Europeans, or they have not.

And he goes on, and I'll read you the fuller quote where he talks about the truth of history and how Africans, African theology, African history is ancient. And he's really trying to go back to Augustine and Hippo and Alexandria and these kinds of things.

So it doesn't really hold much water though, and I'll show you why, but it's a reinterpretation. It's, some would call it revisionism. I think memory studies is fine. You can use that term. Now, here's the other question.

This might be a lesser question people would have before we really get started into this, but is it a liberation theology book, John? You know, you've shown me it's got some connection to critical race theory, but is it a liberation theology book?

And I would say this is probably closer to what the book is actually, as far as hermeneutics are concerned, this would be very much, I would say, supportive and just in agreement with liberation theology.

The way that liberation theologians read the Bible is very similar to what Esau Macaulay does. Now, Macaulay tries to kind of hold on to an evangelical interpretation while at the same time adopting liberation theology hermeneutics.

It's interesting, but it really ends up being the same thing. It's a liberation theology type of approach.

Black Ecclesial Interpretation and the Search for Hope

So he says,.

What is God's first answer to black suffering and the wider human suffering and the rage that comes alongside it? It is to enter that suffering alongside us as a friend and redeemer. That sounds very nice.

In some ways, this is like the footprints poem, right? But if you understand liberation theology, and if you know that he's also quoting people like Justo Gonzales and James Cone, and he quotes Cone quite a bit, you'll know that the language that you're reading is a little different than the footprints poem.

It's this idea that Jesus came and his mission was, at least the primary emphasis of his mission, one of them, is to suffer and to be a voice of the oppressed and to be relatable to those who are going through oppression.

So it takes the actual purpose of Jesus coming, right? To seek and save the lost, to please his father by saving individuals who repented. It takes that and it kind of de-emphasizes that and instead tries to focus on the fact that he suffered and that that's something that we're supposed to, those who are suffering can relate to.

And there's some, here's the thing though, there's a kernel of truth here, is there not? Hebrews talks about this. I mean, he can relate to our sufferings, yet he was without sin. So there is this kernel of truth there.

The problem is when you make that the primary or the mission of Jesus, that that was why he came, this man-centered mission. And then liberation theology gets mystical on this element, that Jesus is kind of, he's there with you in the suffering.

It's almost, you get the impression, it's almost like the Eucharist, the suffering and communion, the communion table almost become the same kind of thing. So he doesn't go deep into that, but you see that language.

I, when I listened to it, I thought this is a yellow flag to say the least. Now what's a red flag is quoting James Cone and he does this quite a bit. I'm gonna give you the one that stood out to me the most.

He says, Cone rightly argues that all theology is socially located. That's it right there. Cone argues that all theology is socially located. That's gives away the farm. That's the liberation theology right there that comes into the hermeneutic.

So what's the point of this book? Let's get into the book. I'm gonna read for you a longer quote. He says, I loved hip hop, loved when he was younger, I loved hip hop because sometimes it felt as if only the rappers truly understood what it was like to experience the heady mix of danger, drama, and temptation that marked black life in the South.

They spoke of the drugs, the violence, the encounters with the police, and even God. They did not so much offer solutions as much as they reflected on the life forced on them. But I also loved my mother's gospel music because it filled me with hope and it connected me to something old and immovable.

If hip hop tended towards nihilism and utilitarian ethics, the game is the game, so we do what we must to survive, then my mother's music rooted in biblical texts and ideas offered a vision of something bigger and wider.

The struggle I speak of is not merely between two genres of music. I am referring to the struggle between black nihilism and black hope. I am speaking of the ways in which the Christian tradition fights for and makes room for hope in a world that tempts us toward despair.

I contend that a key element in this fight for hope in our community has been the practice of Bible reading and interpretation coming out of the black church, what I am calling black ecclesial interpretation.

This gives you a real window into who Esau McCulley is, why he's writing this. There's a conflict almost going on. There's a, he's attracted to both these things, that there's the dark side, there's the rap music, and then there's his mother's gospel music.

There's this light side. And that both of these things are kind of encapsulated in this black ecclesial interpretation, that it can make sense of the evils of the world, especially the evils of racism and slavery that he feels that he's encountered and that his ancestors have encountered.

And then it makes, so it makes sense of those. It doesn't whitewash those. It doesn't diminish those. But at the same time, it's also gonna be orthodox and rock solid. That's kind of his goal. And so Amash, and my sequence is a little off here, but we'll go over this now.

He talks about, he's very proud of the black church tradition. And so he talks about it's largely orthodox. It's reflected in the statements of faith of the three large black denominations, National Baptist Convention, Church of God and Christ, and African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Now, I looked at these faith statements. I'm not an expert on these denominations and what they believe in total. I didn't, something did jump out at me though. The Church of God and Christ statement of faith seems to indicate that they believe in baptismal regeneration.

It says, we do not believe that water baptism. And then it says the word alone is a means of salvation, which means they do think that it is a means of salvation. It's just not alone. That's a big red flag.

That's not orthodox. So his statement here is not even quite correct, but he wants to try to prove that there is this, this tradition, this tradition that hasn't been written down much. It's not, they didn't do a lot of theological work as far as scholarly work, but they have songs and they have traditions and they have going back years, they have churches and denominations and institutions and preachers.

And so this is what he's trying to say is that, you know, there's been this all along, there's this black church tradition. That's what he calls it. That's orthodox. And it answers this question. It fills this need.

It brings together the understanding of darkness in the world and sin and evil, and then also a rootedness in orthodox theology. Now, I'm just saying he's not quite correct on this. At least his statement here isn't 100 accurate, but I'm willing to grant that there's, there certainly are historic black denominations that have, and churches, that have kept held to an orthodox theology.

I'm sure there are.

God has his people everywhere. So in every tribe, tongue, nation. So that's not like a big wart on the book or anything. The only reason I'm pointing it out is it shows that Macaulay might lack a little discernment here.

And he's also striving for something. He's also trying to prove something. And he might be trying a little too hard that this is where to find it. We're gonna find it in this tradition, in these tradition, these denominations are gonna provide the answer.

And that's not really where the answer, I don't think, is. And I'll talk about that more if I remember at the end. So he locates this problem. Let's talk about the problem more. He believed the liberals in seminary who told him that fundamentalists oppressed black people, yet rejected the way they downplayed the Bible.

That's his issue. He goes to seminary. He knocks, he rubs shoulders with a bunch of liberal professors, and he really appreciates some things about them. He understands that they're right about the fundamentalists.

And yeah, those people are racist, but hey, you're downplaying the Bible. You're saying it's not even true. And he doesn't like that. He identified with evangelicals, but felt left out that they were racist and had an incorrect view of American history.

So he felt alienated like that. Well, they just believe America's, it's the Christian nationalist thing really is what we're talking about here. And then he says, while I appreciated the doctrinal emphasis on scripture within evangelicalism, I needed more, he says, to feel whole and complete as a Christian.

Now, this is interesting to me. This is a very, it illustrates my point earlier that there's a conflict in him. There's a need he's trying to fill. There's something that's missing. And I think this is the appeal of the book.

We all have that. All self-help books are this way. You're missing something. You need something. If you just did this, if you just had this, if you were just part of this group, and we as humans go on an ever never-ending search for whatever that is.

And I'm here to tell you that there's nothing that ultimately fulfills you in this life in an ultimate sense. The best, most satisfied life you can have is if you come to terms with that and you realize that true satisfaction comes in the next life.

And there's so many great blessings God has given us in this life that we don't deserve and we enjoy them. And so anyway, he wants, he's looking on this, he's on this quest to feel complete. And he doesn't find an evangelicalism.

And he says, enslaved black people, even those who remained illiterate, in effect questioned white exegesis. That there's this problem that white people, evangelicals, white people, they know their interpretation of the scripture isn't correct.

That might be what it is. That might be what he's lacking. And he needs to search. So the quest is, he begins to search for theologians who could help make sense of what it means to be black and Christian.

He says, I was asked where one could go that shares their social concerns and takes seriously their belief that scripture, all scriptures are God's word to us for our good. Who could they read that combined both?

And he's saying both in the context here, both this social concern, this is really social justice and believes the Bible's God's word. How do we find both? And then he realizes something. This is the realization.

Page 17, he says, the social location of enslaved persons caused them to read the Bible differently. This unabashedly located reading has marked African-American interpretation since. Did this social location mean blacks rejected biblical texts that did not match their understanding of God?

Did blacks create a canon within a canon? And he also says on page 20, everybody has been reading the Bible from their locations, but we are honest about it. What makes black interpretation black then are the collective experiences, customs and habits of black people in this country.

So he's saying, this is the Eureka moment. This is what I'm lacking. This is what I'm looking for. This is the balance. This is the reconciliation of these two sides of me. We can have this tradition answers the question that we can have the biblical text.

We can have the canon. We can have the Bible. We can also have social justice. We can, and it's found in this perspective, this experience that traces back to even enslaved persons. They were able to read the Bible differently.

That's what he says, differently than other people. And in so doing, they found the key. Now you're already seeing the Gnostic language come out here. They found the key because of how they read it, because of their experience, because they were enslaved.

And it gave them this balance. It was the key that fit the keyhole that Esau Macaulay needs filled, a door he needs open. So hermeneutics, let's talk about it. Interpreting the Bible. Biblical interpretation is not a one-sided monologue,.

He says.

Oh, really? So it's not just the Bible speaking to you. Not one-sided. Says the tradition of biblical interpretation is dialogical, clearly beginning with the concern of black Christians. Okay, wait, hold on, stop.

That's where it begins. So it begins, it doesn't begin with God has spoken, authors have written inspired by him, and text is there for us to glean the information that's objectively there. It starts instead with the concerns of black Christians.

But being willing to listen to the scriptures as God speaks back to us. So then God speaks back to the concerns of black Christians. We have a patience with the biblical text born of its use against us.

We have had to wrestle like Jacob until the text delivered its blessing. And so he's saying there's a unique experience. Black people have suffered. Therefore, if you start with them, with black people, because of their suffering, then you'll get a more correct reading of scripture.

That's the point of the book. And so the interpretation takes into account some assumptions. One is that there's power dynamics at play. And I'll give you some concrete examples here of how this works.

Paul does not focus on individual actions. He says in Romans 13, but on power structures. So submitting to government, that's about power structures. You see, even though in the context of the passage is actually, it is about individual actions.

That is the subject. He was recognizing that there is institution that God has created, but that Esau McCulley is trying to take passages, finding passages that will support his metaphysic, the way he views the world and power structures.

So ideologues tend to reduce things down to power structures and oppression levels and these kinds of things. And so he's looking for passages that will kind of support this. He compares the Israelites and Babylonians to black and whites in the book.

So he's looking in the Bible and trying to take this, what he's, at least what he thinks of, what he's been really, in some ways, perhaps conditioned to think of as the American experience. And he's imposing that on the biblical text.

And so this is how he's reading the Bible. And this is part of the black interpretation, as he calls it. And the long and short of it is this interpretation renders activism. That's the result of it. People need to get busy.

We have never had the luxury of separating our faith from political action, he says. The present evil age, he states in Galatians 1 .4, can be understood to include the demonic evil of slavery in Rome and economic exploitation of the populace, both of which existed because of the policies of Roman leadership as dictated by spiritual forces.

So he reads into Paul that when Paul talks about the present evil age, he's talking about, he must be talking about slavery in the Roman Empire. Treating women equally is called for in Galatians 3 .28, would be a political act in an empire that had certain views about what a woman's place might be.

So he's turning Paul into this social justice crusader that when he says, hey, there's neither Jew nor Greek or male nor female. Well, that's about treating women equally. That's an egalitarian call Paul's making there.

Now we know it's not. We know that's not what he's saying, but that's the interpretation that Esau Macaulay's putting on it because of the black interpretive ecclesial interpretation. The testimony of Mary in Luke 1 is that even in the shadow of the empire, there is a space for hope and that sometimes in that space, God calls us from the shadows to join him in his great work of salvation and liberation.

And he calls Mary at one point, the patron saint of black interpretation. It's interesting what he does with Mary. So this becomes a political, he inserts political messages and activism into all these texts that are primarily concerned with spiritual realities when they were written in their presence and the circumstances in which they took place.

In the Exodus of God, in the Exodus, so this is Exodus story, God acted to free a people from slavery, not as an end in of itself, but so that the newly liberated people might testify to a different way of being human.

So you see how the primary purpose becomes activism. It's about a different way of being human. It's about scaling back political oppression. And we can't just look at these passages and think Paul's just talking about a present spiritual evil age.

We can't look at Galatians and think that, well, it's just saying that the salvation comes to all people without barriers because of gender or ethnicity or these things. We have to look at it differently.

We have to impose this activist understanding. And that's what the black ecclesial interpretation essentially is. Now, slavery is one of the big things he talks about in the book. And it's very interesting to me how he does this.

And I wanna give him kudos for this. I wanna say something positive about the book. And that's this. Esau McCulley actually tries to grapple with this. And I think he is wrong. I think he comes down in the wrong place, but he gives it an attempt.

And what I've seen from so many evangelical, not just social justice activists, those on our side of this issue of social justice, those who are against the social justice movement, say they are, they do not know how to handle this.

They have a hard time. A lot of the time, I've seen this. When I used to be on Twitter, I'm not anymore. I saw this all the time, that they would do, like bend over backwards to make the text say something it doesn't say in scripture, because they wanted to get away from the Bible, endorsing slavery, or an atheist, of course, bring this up all the time, or somehow the Bible's pro all kinds of horrible things, genocide and oppressing women, and then slavery being one of them.

It regulates it instead of does away with it, and abolishes it. How do we deal with this? Well, we have to then twist scriptures to make them say things they don't say. We have to read into scriptures.

And I see conservatives, so-called conservatives today, doing this very same thing. I have this quaint idea as a Christian that the saints for thousands of years have believed, that I don't think we should apologize for what scripture says.

We just, we need to conform our own lives and our own thinking to what scripture says. And no, scripture is not, it's not as bad as the atheists portray it to be. It's not bad at all, actually, it's very good.

It's the character of God as manifested in his moral precepts. But it's not this harsh thing that atheists try to make out. And so I think we can, we can have some nuance and some complexity, and we can explain what biblical slavery, if you wanna call it that, from Hebrew times was.

We can try to flesh out what Paul's regulations in a Roman slave system, which in many ways was even worse, much worse than the American slave system, because they had normalized sex slavery in gladiatorial arenas, and man capture was pretty, it was permitted on the borders.

By the time the federal period rolls around in the United States, that's not even, that's looked down upon. You don't, man capture's forbidden. It's more, it never happens. There's smuggling that happens.

But Rome, it was more normalized. I'll just put it that way. So anyway, all that to say, Paul has regulations in that kind of an environment for how masters and slaves should react in that labor relationship.

And I don't apologize for what the Bible teaches, for what Paul said, what Jesus said, what Moses said. We just, we should not apologize for it. That is my stand. So here's what Esau Macaulay says about this.

Here's how he tries to deal with this topic. He says, old Testament slavery regulations were permitted because of the hardness of heart. Now, so he's taking what Jesus said about divorce, and he's imposing that onto slavery, and saying, well, it's the same thing with slavery.

Now, could that be that there was a hardness of heart? Yeah, I guess. I mean, but you're not getting this from the text. This is assumption. And we need to be clear on that. And Esau Macaulay needs to be clear on that.