Nevertheless, besides being a kitschy bumper sticker, “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” represents a disastrously misguided myth about what biblical authority, clarity, and sufficiency actually mean, and it is a misunderstanding every bit as dangerous as the Crusader’s fervent commitment to the Lordship of Jesus. Nowhere is this more evident than in the bitter hermeneutical debates over the Christian scriptural basis for the American system of slavery from the early to mid-nineteenth century.

Slaveholder Hermeneutics and the “Plain Sense” of Scripture

Beginning with a small minority of white evangelical Quakers along with enslaved and formerly enslaved African converts, abolitionist Christians began challenging the biblical warrant for Christian practices of slaveholding. Their primary interpretive strategies, as Albert J. Harrill helpfully summarizes in “The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy,” were to appeal to what they saw as broad biblical themes of egalitarian love that God shows for all humanity and desires for humans to show to one another, which they took to be encapsulated in the notion of divine image-bearing, God’s liberation of his people from slavery in the Exodus, Jesus’s summary of the Law and Prophets in the love command understood in terms of the Golden rule of treating others as one wishes to be treated, and Paul’s recognition of the anti-hierarchical implications of Christian identity in his Christian Magna Carta, Galatians 3:28, announcing that in Christ there is neither “slave nor free” (Harrill, 150-163).

These themes, they claimed, spell out an overarching framework of divine intention that worked itself out from seeds of egalitarian love to their steady flowering across the testaments. Our own consciences and moral intuition, they claimed, resonated with the outworking of Christian love that demanded mutual equality between all peoples, rather than the subjugation and dominating control of some over others. Slaves identified with Israel’s struggles for freedom from bondage and Jesus’s commitment to take on the “form of a slave” (Phil. 2:6-8) as well as God’s vindication of Jesus and warring to free his people from oppression in Revelation, claiming on these grounds more authentic and vital Christian faith than their white slaveholding masters.

Still, historians such as Mark Noll have highlighted how comparatively weak abolitionist readings of Scripture appeared in comparison to the pro-slavery readings that appealed the biblical authority, clarity, and sufficiency of a “plain sense” interpretation (Noll, 31-50). Biblical authors were themselves inspired theologians, mediating God’s word to us by way of their own backgrounds and intentions, and no plain reading of the teachings of these divinely authorized messengers in their historical context could possibly support an abolitionist interpretation. God frees Israel from slavery, but also clearly sanctions their own slaveholding, showing not merely them, but also us, how to do it properly. Jesus nowhere condemns slavery or seeks the freedom of the slaves he encounters, while Paul gives outright commands for slaves to obey their masters, even dutifully returning a runaway himself. While slavery may well be abolished in heaven, Scripture uniformly permits its responsible use here below. To read Jesus on love and Paul on spiritual equality as implying the abolition of slavery when these texts function in the background of slaveholding societies (whether Israelite or Roman) does violence to the plain reading of the text. To fashion a few passages suited to one’s own moral intuitions into an egalitarian love principle that biblical authors themselves clearly did not apply (and would not have endorsed), and then to force the rest of the Bible to conform to this key is not just an ad hoc complication of a simple and clear unanimous witness of the Bible to the permissibility of slavery. It is a clear denial of the authority of Scripture on one’s own moral authority, a preference for pagan philosophy and morality as a needed supplement to the inadequate and insufficient word of God, and an arrogant insistence that we know better than Scripture and hundreds upon hundreds of years of faithful pro-slavery Christian readings of it.

This slaveholder hermeneutic for reading Christian Scripture is mythical precisely because its apparent and professed interpretive rigor is a sham. It fails to account for what is most central to a properly Christian conception of scriptural authority, clarity, and sufficiency, which is of course Christ himself.
Instead of adopting the selective abolitionist hermeneutic, pro-slavery Christians insisted, those passages should be harmonized with the biblical background and its evident toleration of slavery and (male) hierarchical social order more generally. What they clearly commend in their context is not any radical egalitarian love, but rather a patriarchal and hierarchical love between those who rule and those who must obey: do to others as you would have them to do you, given your place in a divinely sanctioned social order. While renowned Princeton theologian Charles Hodge offered the academic defense for this slaveholding hermeneutic, Presbyterian minister James Thornwell offers a stirring display of devotion to it in his 1861 “Southern Address to Christendom.” It is worth quoting at length:  

We have said enough to vindicate the position of the Southern Church. We have assumed no new attitude. We stand exactly where the Church of God has always stood – from Abraham to Moses, from Moses to Christ, from Christ to the Reformers, and from the Reformers to ourselves. We stand upon the foundation of the Prophets and Apostles, Jesus Christ Himself being the Chief cornerstone. Shall we be excluded from the fellowship of our brethren in other lands, because we dare not depart from the charter of our faith? Shall we be branded with the stigma of reproach, because we cannot consent to corrupt the Word of God to suit the intuitions of an infidel philosophy? Shall our names be cast out as evil, and the finger of scorn pointed at us, because we utterly refuse to break our communion with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, with Moses, David and Isaiah, with Apostles, Prophets and Martyrs, with all the noble army of confessors who have gone to glory from slave-holding countries and from a slave-holding Church, without ever having dreamed that they were living in mortal sin, by conniving at slavery in the midst of them? If so, we shall take consolation in the cheering consciousness that the Master has accepted us. We may be denounced, despised and cast out of the Synagogues of our brethren.

But while they are wrangling about the distinctions of men according to the flesh, we shall go forward in our Divine work, and confidently anticipate that, in the great day, as the consequence of our humble labors, we shall meet millions of glorified spirits, who have come up from the bondage of earth to a nobler freedom that human philosophy ever dreamed of. Others, if they please may spend their time in declaiming on the tyranny of earthly master; it will be our aim to resist the real tyrants which oppress the soul – Sin and Satan. These are the foes against whom we shall find it employment enough to wage a successful war. And to this holy war it is the purpose of our Church to devote itself with redoubled energy. We feel that the souls of our slaves are a solemn trust, and we shall strive to present them faultless and complete before the presence of God (cited in Darius Jankiewicz, “Hermeneutics of Slavery: A “Bible-Alone” Faith and the Problem of Human Enslavement,” 56-57).

Jesus’s understanding of Scripture mediated through his love commands and worked out in his ministry did not uphold the established social order but threatened to radically upset itThis pro-slavery style of strict biblicism seemed far more rigorous than the apparently selective, speculative, and tendentious scriptural basis upon which African-American abolitionists and their allies appeared to adopt. For Christian slaveholders, matters were far simpler: the Bible said it, they believed it, that settled it. It was for that reason that abolitionist stalwart William Lloyd Garrison abandoned the attempt to find a biblical ground for anti-slavery, seeking instead more humanist and common-sense grounds for the abolitionist cause.

Jesus is the Hermeneutical Key

But this slaveholder hermeneutic for reading Christian Scripture is mythical precisely because its apparent and professed interpretive rigor is a sham. It fails to account for what is most central to a properly Christian conception of scriptural authority, clarity, and sufficiency, which is of course Christ himself. As the Gospel writers present him, and as recent scholarship has repeatedly shown, Jesus was not a radical critic of Jewish faith and practice, but rather himself a deeply invested and observant Jew who was regarded as a teacher of Israel’s scriptures. But when he announced that the coming restoration of Israel and establishment of its Law, the defeat of Gentile enemies, the renewal of Temple worship, and the promised reign of God had all begun to come about in his ministry and among his followers, he was met with great suspicion precisely by those who thought all this a sloppy and selective reading of their shared scriptures.

For example, Jesus’ reading of the Law continued to recognize ceremonial cleanness and uncleanness, but he interpreted these in a way that violated the “plain sense” prescription of separation from unclean people and objects that Scripture prescribed (e.g., Lev. 13:45). It was not an attempt to undermine Scripture, but an attempt to find its plain meaning as rooted in a deeper truth to which it must be subordinated. In this case, as Matthew Thiessen has recently argued, Jesus recognizes that it is the powers of death that generate uncleanness, making it more important to overcome those powers by a healing touch than it is to observe the biblical command to avoid the unclean for fear of one’s own uncleanness. Underneath the surface this apparent contradiction of Lev. 13:45 in fact runs with the grain of the life-giving function of the Law to render the unclean clean, just by another and more fundamental way, that of victory over the powers of death.

Likewise, while a plain sense of Scripture clearly identifies a desired overthrow of Gentile enemies, Jesus privileges the ultimate ends that the prophets describe in passages such as Isa. 2-1-4 and Isa. 61:1-11: Jewish/Gentile peacemaking, the cessation of war, mutual forgiveness, and shared worship, making these the very means of defeating one’s enemies: defeating them with the very love that God aims to bring about at the end of time. The whole of Israel’s story and divine expectation, he claims, can be understood in these terms, and this conviction leads him to make some apparently strange interpretive moves: identifying himself with the “temple,” or his movement of discipleship as a renewed Israel brought out of exile who embodied some rather creative forms of Torah observance.

Jesus’s novel way of reading Israel’s scriptures was thus an imaginative reconstruction that explicitly privileged some themes and through-lines of Israel’s scriptures over others, including an identification of the love of God and neighbor as the central interpretive key to his reading of the Law and Prophets. Crucially, though, Jesus’s understanding of Scripture mediated through his love commands and worked out in his ministry did not uphold the established social order but threatened to radically upset it, which is in the end what got him killed. His establishment of God’s reign did not merely “spiritually” center the relatively powerless poor, the morally, politically, and ritually compromised, but empowered them as those for whom and with whom God’s new social order had arrived, a kingdom that portends God’s renewal of all creation. And all this was in accordance with a hermeneutical strategy that generated a lot of fellow-Jewish opposition to his readings.

Jesus had his own Charles Hodges and James Thornwells. He recognized their brand of scriptural rigorism as a commitment to a form of social order that ultimately benefited them at the expense of those on the receiving end of their biblicism, and he diagnosed their central problem as a kind of moral and spiritual deafness, blindness, and insensitivity, instead appealing “to those who have ears, let them hear.” Not even the disciples consistently had the ears to hear, and their response was to rely on Jesus’s interpretive performances and commands as the key to their understanding of Israel’s scriptures. This is in part why it is that we can find their own appeals to the Old Testament passages as failing the hermeneutical tests that the likes of Hodge imposed on abolitionist readers.  

To read the Bible, then, requires not only becoming familiar with its various notes, but to know how they come together to form a composition whose theme is revealed only in and through the good news to the oppressed preached and lived out by Jesus.

To follow Christ, his early disciples recognized, is to rely on him not only as Savior, but also as the spoken divine Word through whom and by whom we can come to understand the whole of Scripture, from Israel’s Scriptures that provide a kind of score or sheet music that Jesus uniquely and canonically performs, to the New Testament writers who improvise on that performance. To read the Bible, then, requires not only becoming familiar with its various notes, but to know how they come together to form a composition whose theme is revealed only in and through the good news to the oppressed preached and lived out by Jesus. It was in part precisely because of their subordinate social position that they could look to the Bible and see and hear that it was in the best interest of Christian slaveholders to not see and hear. Their pro-slavery opponents may have been more familiar with a good many biblical notes, but they could not for the life of them find the tune of Jesus and his good news. Whoever has ears, let them hear.