For generations, a slaveholder’s minister could stand before enslaved Africans and read them one line of Paul about servants obeying masters. Many of those listeners went and found the rest of the letter. This guide teaches their method: reading Paul for yourself, with the whole passage open, so no one can hand you a single verse and tell you what it means. Use it alone over one week, or with a group across two or three meetings. You need a KJV Bible, a pen and paper.
First you will notice what you already assume. Then you will read three sets of passages the way enslaved readers did, test your reading against a hard objection, and begin a daily practice you can keep using.
Before you open the text
Write down, in one or two sentences, what you have been told Paul says about slavery. Do not look anything up. Then write a second line: who told you? Fold the page and set it aside until the end.
The readers in this guide started from the same place. Someone else had already told them what Paul meant. Dr. Lisa Bowens, who teaches New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary and studies Paul, set out to test a common story: that African Americans, as a whole, avoided Paul because slaveholders used him. That story often traces back to Howard Thurman’s grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, who heard Paul preached to keep her obedient and later wanted little from him except 1 Corinthians 13. Bowens kept hearing her story told as the whole picture, and in her words, “I started wondering, is this really the case?” Slave petitions, essays, autobiographies and sermons gave her the answer. Those writers argued from Paul’s own words.
Hold onto her question. You will ask it of every passage this week.
Reading one: stay inside the household
Slaveholders preached one sentence. Ephesians 6:5 reads, “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.”
Now read all of Ephesians 5:21-6:9 in one sitting. Then do three things on paper.
- List every pair of people Paul addresses, in order.
- For each pair, write the instruction that seems hardest to obey.
- Mark any instruction that assumes the family stays together.
You should find Ephesians 5:25, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it,” and Ephesians 6:4, “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” Colossians 3:18-4:1 holds a parallel set of instructions if you want to compare.
Bowens points to a 1774 petition from enslaved Africans to the government of Massachusetts that cited Paul’s words about husbands loving their wives and children obeying their parents. She describes the petitioners’ argument this way: “if you’re saying this is a Christian nation, and we’re supposed to abide by the words of scripture, then how can we as husbands love our wives when part of slavery is separating the family?”
Look back at your marked list. The petitioners granted that Paul spoke to servants. Then they showed that a system selling husbands away from wives and parents away from children makes most of the passage impossible to obey. You can learn that move: before you accept anyone’s use of a verse, ask what its own paragraph requires, and whether the person quoting it keeps the rest.
Finish with Ephesians 6:9: “And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.” Write one sentence on what this verse does to the claim that the passage simply blesses the master’s power.
Reading two: follow the argument to Athens
Bowens identifies a second petition, sent in 1779 to the government of Connecticut, that cited Acts 17:26 against the idea that the white race was superior to the Black race. In the KJV the verse reads, “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.”
Read Acts 17:22-31 and answer these with the text open.
- Who is Paul speaking to, and what do they not share with him?
- Where does he begin his argument, and why might he start there with this audience?
- According to the next verse, what does God want every nation to do?
Paul is arguing that one Creator made every people and calls every people to seek him. The petitioners carried that logic one step: if every nation comes from one source, a ranking of races has no ground in this text. Their reading stayed within the verse’s own claim. Many modern translations render the opening phrase “from one man,” and the point holds either way.
Bowens adds that “these petitions are before the abolitionist movement.” She describes the petitioners’ stance as a claim about Scripture itself: “they were willing to stand up and use scripture and say, this is the way scripture is to be interpreted.”
Reading three: what Paul says about who you are
Bowens also finds Paul in the conversion stories of enslaved believers, who often described their encounters with God in his language. Read 2 Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” Then read Ephesians 2:10: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.”
Bowens explains why these words carried such force. Some proponents of slavery told enslaved people creation stories in which God did not create them, or created them only for manual labor. Converts answered by calling themselves God’s workmanship. They also described their bodies as made new, bodies that were beaten and tortured. Bowens concludes that “these conversion experiences were not just religious or spiritual experiences, but they were also political experiences.”
Now try a careful exercise. Draw a line down the middle of a page. On the left, write what Paul is talking about in each verse in its own setting: union with Christ and the new life God works in the believer. On the right, write how the converts applied it. Then look at the wording of Ephesians 2:10. Paul calls believers something God made, his workmanship, and he uses the word “created” for it. The converts reasoned from that language to a further claim: the God who crafts a new life also made the person living it, whatever slaveholders said. That second step is their application, not Paul’s stated subject. Ask whether it grows out of the left column or contradicts it. Honest readers keep both columns visible.
Test your reading
Here is the strongest objection. Slaveholders found slavery in Paul. Enslaved readers found freedom. Maybe people simply find what they need. Bowens herself calls this tradition a protest or resistance hermeneutic, and says the readers “were constantly engaged in a counter hermeneutic.” Does that make the reading need-driven?
Test it with a question you can check: which reading needed more of the text, and which needed less? The slaveholder’s reading lifted one sentence from its paragraph and kept readers away from the rest. The petitioners’ reading needed the whole household passage and the whole speech in Athens. You can see that difference on the page.
Bowens notes that many of these interpreters also drew Frederick Douglass’s distinction between slaveholding Christianity and the Christianity of Christ. Douglass judged slaveholding religion false by the standard of Christ himself.
Name the hard part too. Paul does tell servants to obey. He writes to enslaved believers inside a social order he did not create, describing how they should live faithfully there. Instructions for living within an institution do not command that the institution exist. Christians still discuss how far Paul expected his convictions to reshape the structures of his day. You can leave that open and still see what the text refuses to support: a system that breaks families, ranks races and denies that God made the people it owns.
A week of reading for yourself
Bowens connects the false creation stories to the push to keep enslaved people from learning to read. If someone feeds you his own account of creation, he must keep you from the book that would correct it. She points to Jupiter Hammon, whom she calls a controversial figure for a number of reasons, who urged enslaved people to learn to read so they could read Scripture without depending on the slaveholder’s minister. Borrowing a phrase from Brad Braxton, Bowens says “they seize hermeneutical control when they’re interpreting these scriptures for themselves.” Lisa Fields puts it to students who call the Bible oppressive: “The best protest against white supremacy is to read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, because they never wanted us to read it to begin with.”
Before you start, write one sentence: who currently does most of your Bible reading for you? Then choose one passage you have only ever heard someone else explain, perhaps one used to shut you down or shut someone out. Give it about fifteen minutes a day for six days.
- Day one. Read the verse alone. Write down the explanation you were given and who gave it.
- Day two. Find where the literary unit begins and ends. Read the whole unit aloud, slowly.
- Day three. Write one sentence each: who is speaking, to whom, and about what problem.
- Day four. List everything the surrounding verses require that the short version left out.
- Day five. Make two columns: what the text meant then, and what you think follows now. Check that the right grows out of the left.
- Day six. Write three or four plain sentences you could say, from memory, to someone who hands you the clipped version. Then write what evidence would change your mind.
On the seventh day, read the whole letter or book your passage came from, start to finish, without taking notes.
Questions to work through
- In the household passage, which instruction did you find hardest to reconcile with slavery as it was practiced in America? Why?
- The petitioners argued from the same Bible their owners used. What does it take to make that kind of argument without discarding the verses you dislike?
- Where does the line fall between a faithful protest reading and a self-serving one? State a test that would catch your own mistakes, not only someone else’s.
- In your column exercise, where were you least sure that the application followed from the text?
- What assumptions about earlier readers did you bring to this week, and did any evidence challenge them?
- Who shapes how Scripture is read where you worship or study? How could you tell whether that influence sends people back to the text or keeps them from it?
If you are leading a group
Keep Bibles open the whole time. Ask people to read their observation lists aloud before anyone interprets, and hold off on explaining a passage until the group has done the work.
Some in the room may carry real hurt over how the Bible has been used against them or their families. Let that be said without rushing to fix it, and never ask anyone to share a personal story. Bowens says the enslaved autobiographies were so hard to read that “sometimes I would just have to take a break.” A group can pause too. If someone argues that the Bible is only a tool of the powerful, skip the debate and walk through the petitions together.
Back to your folded page
Unfold what you wrote at the start and read it beside your notes from the week. Did the whole passages confirm what you were told, complicate it, or overturn it? Bowens says of these interpreters, “how do we interpret scripture faithfully and well, they show us how to do that.” Pick the next passage you have only ever been told about, and start again on day one.