The apostles never wrote the sentence many readers wish they had written. No letter tells the churches to demand that Rome free its slaves. Dr. Dennis Edwards does not explain that silence by saying the apostles approved of slavery. His answer is historical. The first Christians were a small, distrusted minority inside a violent empire, and some of them expected Christ to return soon. So the writers did not campaign against the institution. In Edwards’s words, they “did not fully denounce the system, but gave seeds of dismantling that system.”
That answer has to be tested at the point where the story starts: the first century, when the seeds were planted. What kind of slavery were these writers facing? Could a handful of house churches have challenged it? What does the hardest passage tell enslaved believers to do? And what in these letters pushed against the institution from the beginning, so that later readers would eventually have to reckon with it?
What kind of slavery were Peter and Paul looking at?
A common apologetic move tries to settle the matter early. Biblical slavery, the argument goes, was really a kind of indentured service, closer to a job than to the plantation. Lisa Fields put that claim directly to Edwards, and his reply grants part of it before taking most of it back.
He grants two differences. In the Roman world, people usually became slaves through conquest or through debt, not by being kidnapped from another continent. And in principle, an enslaved person could buy his or her freedom, which did happen in some settings under the empire. For some readers, those two facts are enough to call Roman slavery “very different” from American slavery.
Then Edwards narrows what those facts prove. Few people were actually able to purchase their freedom. During the years of bondage, “while they were slaves, they were really still at the whims of their masters.” Their bodies could be exploited. The boss-and-worker comparison is, in his judgment, “a vast oversimplification” of the Roman system. His conclusion is blunt: “it’s still slavery.”
This sets the starting point of the chronology. A reader cannot shrink the apostles’ problem by shrinking Roman slavery. The institution in front of them owned people, and the writers knew it. Whatever explains their silence, the system was not gentle.
Why does the question feel so urgent now?
Edwards names the gap between the first century and our own: “the problem we have as 21st century readers.” We want Peter and Paul to be anti-slavery advocates of the kind we would want to be today. We want them to denounce the institution outright.
He makes the instinct concrete with the film Django Unchained: the enslaved rise up and turn their guns on the masters. Measured against that picture, Christian teaching that tells slaves to endure looks like a betrayal. The instinct is understandable. It also carries assumptions about power that belong to our century and not to theirs.
What could a tiny church inside the Roman Empire actually do?
Many American Christians picture believers as a public force that can move elections and shape laws. Edwards calls the idea of Christians as a voting bloc “a relatively recent phenomenon.” The churches Peter and Paul wrote to had nothing like that standing. They were small and marginal, and any talk of overthrow among people in that position would have been crushed quickly.
“We gotta remember how violent the Romans were,” Edwards says. Rome did not tolerate dissent. He points to the Jewish historian Josephus, whose writings show that “movements that arose even within Judaism got squelched pretty quickly.” That is Edwards’s reading of the ancient record, and it fits what the apostles’ own letters reveal about how exposed their communities were.
The result was a kind of pragmatism. Revolt was often not on the writers’ radar at all. And even if a group of believers had risen up, nothing in their situation gave them the power to topple the government. A call to arms in a letter to the churches would have freed no one. It would have handed Rome a reason to destroy the communities reading the letter.
The distinction underneath this matters. Declining to command abolition is a different act from commanding slavery. A writer can address people inside a system he has no power to end without blessing the system.
Did the first Christians expect the world to last?
Lisa Fields raised a second possibility: perhaps the apostles did not address overthrowing slavery “because they thought the coming of Christ was more imminent in that time.” Edwards treats this as a real factor among others.
The Thessalonian letters, among Paul’s earliest, speak of the Lord’s return and of “we which are alive and remain” (1 Thessalonians 4:17). Edwards reads this as a sign that Paul expected Christ to come back perhaps within his own lifetime, or within a generation or so. If that was the horizon, he asks, “why bother dismantling structures when we’re not gonna be dealing with them as they presently are?”
He links this to Paul’s apocalyptic eschatology, the expectation that God would soon break into history and end the present order. On that view, campaigning against temporal structures may simply not have occurred to Paul. Edwards calls this “one possibility,” not a full explanation. Christians still differ over how the apostles understood the timing of Christ’s return, and the argument here does not depend on settling that question. It only requires that the expectation shaped what the writers chose to address.
What does 1 Peter actually tell enslaved believers to do?
Edwards does not soften the hardest text. He finds the challenge in Peter “even stronger than some places in Paul.” The instruction comes in 1 Peter 2:18: “Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward.” The archaic word “froward” means harsh or perverse. Peter goes on to address slaves who are beaten unjustly. Edwards calls this “really tough for us,” and he is right not to hurry past it.
The weight falls on what Peter grounds the instruction in. His appeal is to Jesus: “For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps” (1 Peter 2:21). Edwards states the logic plainly: “Jesus won not by fighting back in the same way, but Jesus won by bearing up under suffering.” He calls it “this paradox of suffering, bringing victory,” and admits Americans struggle to grasp it.
Then he draws the line that keeps the passage from becoming an endorsement. “He’s not saying that slavery’s a good institution.” Peter is answering a narrower question. “The question is, given this institution, how should you behave?” Peter speaks to people who cannot change their legal status, and he tells them how to follow Christ inside it. He describes a situation they are in. He never says God designed the arrangement or wants it to continue.
The setting also limits how the passage applies. Peter’s instruction answers a world with no legal exit for the enslaved. Reading it as a timeless rule that every oppressed person must submit to abuse, even when escape or help is possible, pulls it out of the world it was written for.
Where were the seeds planted?
If the apostles did not demand abolition, what in their teaching worked against slavery? The letters themselves show several places where it cut against the system’s logic.
The first is in the same letter. Peter tells all his readers, free and enslaved alike, to live “as the servants of God” (1 Peter 2:16). Other translations render the phrase as God’s slaves. Edwards summarizes the move this way: “all of you are slaves to Christ.” A Roman master who became a Christian now stood in the same category as the people he owned. Edwards draws the consequence: “there’s a burden placed on the master who’s a Christian to behave differently” toward those he held.
The second is that masters were addressed too. Paul makes the same move in Colossians 4:1: “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven.” The owner is reminded that he is owned.
The third is a single relationship. Paul sends Onesimus back to his master Philemon, but asks Philemon to receive him “Not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved” (Philemon 16). Paul issues no legal order. He redefines the relationship in terms slavery cannot contain for long. Edwards sets this beside the Philippian jailer in Acts 16, a Roman official whose household was changed by the gospel.
Here Edwards locates the mechanism of change. “What did happen,” he says, is that “we see people’s lives changed on a more micro level” in a way that bears on the larger structures. “The seeds are there for change.” The apostles could not rewrite Roman law. They could change what a master owed the person in his house, and what the church believed that person to be.
Doesn’t the seed argument let the text off too easily?
A serious reader should push back here. Seeds are slow, and enslaved people suffered and died while they waited. Centuries later, the instructions to servants in these letters were read to enslaved people in America to demand obedience. If the apostles’ teaching truly undermined slavery, why did so many Christians for so long fail to see it?
The honest answer keeps the claim narrow. Edwards does not argue that the apostles foresaw abolition or planned it, and nothing in the first-century record shows that they did. Nor does the record show the later history moving in a straight line. The claim is that the texts contain principles that, taken seriously, make slavery impossible to justify. A master who is a fellow slave of Christ, a runaway returned as a brother, a household code that reminds owners of their own Master in heaven: these sit badly with owning human beings.
That distinction explains the later failure without excusing it. Christians who used these letters to defend slavery read the instructions to the enslaved and set aside what the same letters said to and about the masters. The fault lies with readers who silenced half the text. It is still a real fault in the church’s history, and naming it belongs to reading that history honestly.
Who has read these letters most clearly?
In the apostles’ own lifetime, Roman slavery stayed legal, and the believers in Peter’s churches still lived under masters who could beat them. Peter’s instruction to endure carried no promise of release. What shifted was the ground under the institution. Inside the church, master and slave stood under one Lord, the suffering Christ defined victory, and a slave could be welcomed as a brother. Those claims did not end slavery in the first century. They set the terms by which the church would eventually have to judge it.
Edwards adds one more observation that reaches from Peter’s time to ours. He describes Peter’s audience as people treated like aliens and strangers, socially marginal and often mistreated. Marginalized communities today, including African Americans and immigrants, are often the readers best placed to hear what Peter was saying. The question he puts to the majority culture is direct: “can you learn something from people on the margins?” People who have endured unjust treatment and kept their faith belong among the most perceptive readers of these passages.
That is where the history turns back on the present reader. The apostles’ silence about Roman law is real, and it should not be explained away. But the letters carried, from the first generation, claims about God, Christ and the people in a household that no slaveholding society could fully absorb. The long delay in taking those claims seriously says more about later readers than about the seeds themselves.