Abstract
This bold and much needed book tackles the twenty-first-century form of slavery, namely human trafficking. It is written by an activist freelance theologian who is secretary of the European Baptist Federation’s Anti-Trafficking Network. This is not a dispassionate academic study, but nor is it simply propaganda. Instead it is both an attempt to encourage Christians to take this issue more seriously and, at the same time, to square the Bible’s failure to condemn slavery outright with the almost universal conviction of Christians and others today that it is a moral abomination. As a Baptist with a high doctrine of Scripture, she wrestles at length with this sharp tension.
Like others she distinguishes between four types of slavery: ‘chattel slavery’ with women, for example, working in unpaid domestic service in African and Arab countries; ‘bonded labour’ where impoverished families, especially in India, Pakistan and South America, work sometimes for generations in the hope of repaying a ‘debt’ to the lender; ‘forced labour’ where migrant workers, for example in Brazil and Malaysia, are tricked into long hours and harsh conditions with little chance of escaping; and ‘sex slavery’ where women and children (and some men) are lured into prostitution, again with little chance of escape. It is the last type of slavery that she sees as particularly virulent and problematic within the West today.
Having sketched the types and prevalence of slavery in the modern world, Marion Carson examines how the Old Testament and New Testament separately treat both slavery and prostitution. What emerges is a largely balanced account of the tension in both Testaments between accepting long-established customs of slavery (and sometimes prostitution) and envisaging a different society that has neither. So she claims that the Old Testament has double standards, accepting slavery for foreigners but not for Hebrews, yet also has two striking examples of morally virtuous prostitutes, Tamar and Rahab. In the New Testament neither Jesus nor Paul actually condemns slavery, but slaves are seen to act morally in some of Jesus’ parables and Paul urges Philemon to treat Onesimus ‘as a brother’. Above all in Jesus Christ (himself descended from Tamar and Rahab according to Matthew) there is a vision of new life beyond slavery, even sexual slavery.
For the most part, Marion Carson’s biblical summaries are nuanced and aware of scholarly critical issues. But just occasionally she lapses into special pleading in order to resolve a sharp tension between Scripture and the modern world. At one point, for example, she argues that: ‘For anyone, even Jesus himself, to preach the abolition of slavery would have been to try to overturn social convention and practice in a way that would have been considered scandalous. They would have been laughed at, considered crazy, or even more dangerous than some people already thought them to be’ (p. 60). That does not fit my understanding of the Synoptic Jesus at all, who was more than prepared to call the religious leaders of his day ‘hypocrites’ and ‘vipers’ and, in turn, was not just laughed at but crucified.
Yet, these occasional lapses apart, this book is a ‘must read’. Well worth buying.