A standalone study on slavery, the image of God, and how the enslaved read the Bible.
The Jude 3 Project | Study Guide | Based on the Problematic Passages episode with Dr. Esau McCaulley
Opening: The Question That Still Has Weight
Before you open the text, sit with the question honestly. For many people in the Black church, this is not an abstract theological puzzle. It is personal. Grandparents heard the Bible used to justify their oppression. Some people reading this study grew up in churches where this question was either avoided or badly answered.
Dr. Esau McCaulley opens with something that should stop us: the people who had the most to lose if the Bible endorsed slavery, the enslaved themselves, mostly concluded it did not. They read it as a document of liberation. This study asks us to take that reading seriously, trace it through the text, and ask what it requires of us today.
Why the Pro-Slavery Reading Failed
Pro-slavery preachers in antebellum America did marshal Bible verses. But they could not answer the simplest one: love your neighbor as yourself. When the argument came to that, they changed the subject. Their case rested on a claim that Black people were less than fully human. That is not exegesis. That is racism dressed in a clerical collar.
McCaulley puts it plainly: "It's weird that we now just assume the slave masters were better interpreters than the enslaved. We seem to start this thing on the back foot."
Dr. Charlie Dates, in the Jude 3 Project's Contributions of the Black Church course, adds the other side of that history: 'The black church gave to America a new hermeneutic, a new system of interpretation.' They read from below, from the margin, which is exactly where the biblical narrative keeps putting God.
Scripture Foundation: Reading From Below
Work through these passages together, slowly. Read them from the perspective of the enslaved, not the slaveholder.
Exodus 20:2: God's self-introduction at Sinai is not his power or majesty. It is an act: 'I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.' What does it mean that liberation is how God introduces himself?
Genesis 1:26-27: Every person is made in the image of God. No exceptions, no conditions, no racial category. Chattel slavery required denying this. The text does not allow it.
Philemon 1:10-16: Paul personally pleads for Onesimus to be received 'no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother.' The seed of abolition is planted in a letter from a prisoner to a free man.
Galatians 3:28: In Christ there is neither slave nor free. This is not a social policy statement from Paul. It is a description of what the gospel does to human hierarchies.
Exodus 21:26-27: A slave whose master knocks out a tooth goes free. McCaulley notes there is no law in any law book in American history that offers that protection. The trajectory of the law was toward the vulnerable.
The Case: How the Bible's Core Teachings Undercut Slavery
McCaulley makes an analytical argument, not a sentimental one. He defines slavery as the contradiction imposed by violence. A person is naturally free, so the only way you can enslave someone is through the threat of violence. Remove the violence, and you remove the power of slavery.
Then he shows what the New Testament does with violence: Paul tells masters not even to threaten their workers (Ephesians 6:9). Remove the threat, and the mechanism of slavery falls apart. Add to that the image of God in every person, the sanctity of marriage, the right of parents to raise their children, and you have a set of teachings that chattel slavery could not coexist with, not because the Bible was vague on the question, but because it was specific about human dignity.
And the trajectory matters. "God's fundamental character is one as a God who liberates. You want to understand who God is? He's the kind of God who takes people out of slavery." — Dr. Esau McCaulley
The Floor, Not the Ceiling: How to Read Paul on Slavery
The hardest question is the one about Paul. He did not call for abolition. He told enslaved people to obey their masters in several passages. Pro-slavery readers treated this as the definitive word. McCaulley calls that a fundamental misreading of how Scripture works.
"What you have in the New Testament is the floor, not the ceiling. To assume the floor in the first century is the ceiling in the nineteenth is a fundamental misunderstanding of God." — Dr. Esau McCaulley
Paul wrote as a member of a persecuted minority with no political power. Even from that position, he told enslaved people to take freedom if they could get it (1 Corinthians 7:21). He personally pleaded for a slave's freedom in Philemon. American Christians in 1850 controlled every lever of power: courts, legislatures, churches. A change in power changes what God requires. The floor was meant to be built on.
Dr. Nijay Gupta, who traces this same logic in how the New Testament handles other difficult texts, makes the principle explicit: "I believe every word of Scripture is true, but how we apply Scripture changes." Faithful reading asks where the text is headed, not just where it starts.
Discussion Questions
- Who taught you to read the Bible's passages on slavery? Whose perspective shaped your understanding of what the text says?
- McCaulley says the pro-slavery argument required denying Black humanity, not exegesis. How does that change the way you evaluate it?
- What does it mean to you that God introduces himself as the one who brings people out of slavery? How does that shape your picture of God?
- McCaulley says the New Testament is the floor, not the ceiling. What are other places today where we might be treating a first-century starting point as a permanent endpoint?
- The enslaved read this text as anti-slavery and found hope in it. What does it mean to read Scripture from below, from the position of the least powerful person in the story?
- Dr. Charlie Dates says the Black church gave America a new hermeneutic. What would it look like for your community to learn from that tradition of reading?
Scripture Engagement: A Reading Practice
This week, read Philemon slowly and in full. It is only one chapter. As you read, notice:
- The power dynamics: who has status, who has none.
- What Paul does not command but appeals for, and why that might matter more.
- What Paul calls Onesimus at the end: a dear brother, both in the flesh and in the Lord.
- What that language would have cost Philemon to obey.
Then sit with one question: what relationship in your life would look different if you treated it the way Paul is asking Philemon to treat Onesimus?
A Practice This Week: Read the Hard Passage From Below
Pick any passage you have found difficult, confusing, or troubling. Maybe a law in Leviticus or a Pauline instruction that has felt restrictive. Read it again, but this time, ask: who is the least powerful person in this text? What is God doing for them? Where does the text protect, limit, or move toward the vulnerable?
McCaulley calls this reading from below. The Black church practiced it out of necessity. It may be the most honest way any of us can read.
Quotes Worth Discussing
- "It's weird that we now just assume the slave masters were better interpreters than the enslaved." — Dr. Esau McCaulley
- "Slavery is the contradiction imposed by violence." — Dr. Esau McCaulley
- "God's fundamental character is one as a God who liberates." — Dr. Esau McCaulley
- "What you have in the New Testament is the floor, not the ceiling." — Dr. Esau McCaulley
- "The black church gave to America a new hermeneutic, a new system of interpretation." — Dr. Charlie Dates
- "I believe every word of Scripture is true, but how we apply Scripture changes." — Dr. Nijay Gupta
A Closing Reflection
The people who read this text under threat of death found liberation in it. That is not a small thing. It means the Bible was doing something in those reading communities that academic debates about slavery passages often miss: it was meeting people at the bottom of human experience and pointing up.
This week, carry that question: where is God calling me toward more freedom, for myself or for someone the world is pressing down? And where have I been settling for a floor when the Spirit is pressing for a ceiling?
Go Deeper
This study draws on the Jude 3 Project's Problematic Passages event with Dr. Esau McCaulley. For related studies in this collection, see:
- Is the Slavery in the Bible the Same as American Slavery? — Dr. Esau McCaulley
- Why Didn't the Bible Just Condemn Slavery? — Dr. Dennis Edwards
- How Did Enslaved People Read the Bible? — Emerson Powery
- Does the Bible Tell Women to Be Silent in Church? — Dr. Nijay Gupta (for the parallel argument about floors and ceilings)