The question becomes one of what kind of dependence. The Principle of Authority and Service I Pet : The first epistle of Peter points out that as Christians we each have real liberty, are under authority, and in a familial relationship with one another. We are to "live as free men," "live as servants of God," and to "love the brotherhood of believers.
Instead, we are to motivated by a real unselfish compassion for the needs of others agape. This is more radical than one might guess at first blush. No social station can keep us from Jesus, nor should his church make such distinctions Col , Gal There can be neither "slave nor free" in the Body of Christ. Consider what it says to a slave to be fully included in the life of the church, for example, to be able to teach, rebuke, correct, or love someone who is a master.
To be afforded membership in the Body of Christ is to be afforded the full rights and responsibilities of family cf. Philemon Rather, Jesus is again using this historical and cultural reality to speak of ethical and spiritual conditions Lk Likewise, when Paul enjoins slaves to be obedient to their masters, and masters not to mistreat their slaves Eph , Col 3: , I Tim , he is not commending such a system; rather, he is appealing for Christians to exemplify Christ in those situations.
Effectively, Israelite slaves could break their service contracts simply by leaving. Slavery in Israelite law was entered into voluntarily and could be ended voluntarily.
This stands in stark contrast to other ancient Near Eastern law codes of the day, such as the Law of Hammurabi ca. If a man seizes a fugitive slave or slave woman in the open country and leads him back to his owner, the slave owner shall give him 2 shekels of silver. If that slave should refuse to identify his owner, he shall lead him off to the palace, his circumstances shall be investigated, and they shall return him to his owner.
If he should detain that slave in his own house and afterward the slave is discovered in his possession, that man shall be killed. Imagine that you are an ancient Israelite—the head of a household. You spend all day farming and keeping a small flock of sheep and goats, helped by everyone in your extended household. What do you do if you have a bad year, and are unable to feed your family? The answer is that you borrow from someone who has enough surplus grain or some other commodity to lend you.
Under Israelite law, this loan would be interest-free Lev —37 , but you still need to pay back what you borrowed. But now imagine that you have another bad year, and so you need to borrow again. Year after year, your debt accumulates, and you have no way to pay it back. Unless your intention is to default on the loan—effectively stealing from the one who lent to you at no interest rather than selling his grain—your only option is to repay your debt with your only means available, the labor of the people in your household.
The term of service that an Israelite could serve another under these conditions was six years. In the seventh, he had to be released Exod This is an upper limit; smaller debts could presumably be paid in less time. Under the care of a wealthier family, he would have been better fed, better clothed, and able to engage in work that was probably more rewarding. Then, at the end of their six-year term,[4] Israelite slaves had two options: They could return to their household.
If this is chosen, the master would be obligated to follow Deuteronomy — If your brother, a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, sells himself to you, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall let him go free from you. And when you let him go free from you, you shall not let him go empty-handed. You shall furnish him liberally out of your flock, out of your threshing floor, and out of your winepress. The Israelite slave was not expected to start over from scratch after he was released from service.
They could remain permanently in the house of their master. And his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall be his slave forever. Deuteronomy , which addresses the same situation, adds an additional reason why a slave might choose to stay: "Since he is well-off with you.
The passage at the beginning of Exodus 21 continues with a stipulation that requires some comment. At first blush, this seems misogynistic, denying the woman of the same rights given to the man in the previous verse. A man can be released after six years, but not a woman?
This is emphatically not what is going on here. Notice that the woman in question was given to the male slave as a wife during his time as a slave. This woman would have been a female slave. In such a case, his options would have been either to wait for her to be freed or to ransom her, perhaps with some of the provisions that he received at the time of his release.
As for the children, these would all be young, a maximum of five years old assuming the woman entered service a year after the man and was married to him immediately , an age at which they need their mother, not their father. This law probably would have influenced how often marriage between slaves would have taken place and would have prevented women from foolishly entering into a marriage only to gain an early manumission. The following paragraph also prevents a puzzling case: When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do [that is, she shall not be released from her service at the end of six years].
If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people since he has broken faith with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money Exod — If the notion of a father giving her daughter in marriage to man in order to pay off debt seems disturbing, it should be remembered that the practice of arranged marriage has been the norm in many cultures, even in our own day, and often results in marriages that are just as happy and fulfilled as ones that are not arranged.
At any rate, such an objection is not to the institution of Israelite debt-slavery per se, but to the practice of arranged marriages. Should the master desire to divorce her i. Since it was illegal to sell an Israelite to another Israelite see above , only foreigners are mentioned here. No Israelite could deprive another of their membership in the covenant people of God. Instead, he was to permit her to be redeemed v. The second situation, mentioned in verse 9, is that if she has been given to in marriage to his son.
Here she must be treated as a full-daughter, which means that her children would be legitimate heirs with full inheritance rights, not second-generation servants. Finally, in the event that a second wife is taken polygamy was sometimes practiced in Israel, always with disastrous results , her status is not to be lower than the second wife.
Despite some problems with this story—What was so terrible about seeing Noah drunk? Why curse Canaan rather than Ham? How long was the servitude to last? Surely Ham would have been the same color as his brothers? The rest of the Old Testament was often mined by pro-slavery polemicists for examples proving that slavery was common among the Israelites.
The New Testament was largely ignored, except in the negative sense of pointing out that nowhere did Jesus condemn slavery, although the story of Philemon, the runaway who St. Paul returned to his master, was often quoted. It was also generally accepted that the Latin word servus , usually translated as servant, really meant slave. Even apparent abuses, when looked at in the right light, worked out for the best, in the words of Bishop William Meade of Virginia.
And ought you not in such a case to give glory to Him, and be thankful that He would rather punish you in this life for your wickedness than destroy your souls for it in the next life?
On a basic level, Darrow takes this case because he believes in freedom of thought, and he believes that science has been constrained by these religious people -- the religious zealots, he would see them -- who want to dictate, "Here's what you can believe, and here's what you can't believe," If Darrow can bring Bryan down, he can make significant inroads into knocking down fundamentalism.
There's over reporters, some from around the world, there. Probably the most prominent reporter is H. Mencken, and people are reading his reports. You also get the defenders of both sides converging on Dayton -- in particular, the religious people.
So from out of town, you get all these people who come in who feel like they have a stake in this trial. They're around the edges of this community. The irony is, the community itself welcomed this lawsuit. But ironically Dayton becomes kind of the watchword for backward-thinking Bible thumpers. As the trial progresses, one of the things Darrow is going to do is bring experts in who are going to show that the Bible cannot be the literal word of God and to prove that evolution is a established scientific theory.
The court disallows that. And he says: "Well, Your Honor, I need a defense. I need to be able to mount a defense here. I need to be able to question somebody on this. I need to be able to talk about the Bible versus evolution.
He proposes that since William Jennings Bryan, who has been for the last decade out there as the public spokesman of fundamentalism, surely no one knows the Bible better than the Great Commoner. Let's put Bryan on the stand. And Bryan foolishly -- almost every historian believes this -- foolishly snaps at it and says, "Yes, I will go on the stand.
It's a trap because Bryan, even though Bryan is a fundamentalist, and he believes most of the fundamentals of Christianity, he is no theologian. He is no Bible scholar. Are Darrow's questions really about evolution? Does this have anything to do with Darwin? And one of the reasons that Bryan takes the bait and agrees to do something he probably shouldn't have is that he knows that what's going on here: Darrow is putting the Bible on trial.
At that moment, it's not about evolution; it's about the Bible. And Darrow thinks if he can make the Bible look foolish, then a larger point than whether this teacher is guilty of violating a state statute will be made. There's a couple questions that Bryan answers very confidently and quickly.
But quickly Darrow narrows in on a lot of things in the Bible that So he zeroes in on things that, from Thomas Paine on, that skeptics have zeroed in on, that are problematic about the Old Testament, and Bryan's stuck.
Darrow is going to ask him questions about the Bible. What could be easier than that? He's confident that he can answer the questions that this atheist is going to throw at him. Bryan knows the Bible. He's studied it all his life.
He's read it a bunch of times. He feels pretty confident in it. I think Bryan's mistake is he's not a theologian. Even though he's read his Bible a lot, he's not really been grappling with these really difficult textual problems that have been huge parts of denominational strife for decades. But he was a politician. He wasn't in the seminary bickering about these things.
So when Darrow seizes on these things, I think he's thrown. I really do think he's thrown. I don't know what he thought Darrow would ask him, but I don't think he thought Darrow was going to seize on these particular items because he would have studied them. When Bryan says he doesn't think it's necessarily a hour day, how is that the answer that Darrow wanted?
Darrow was trying to shake him up. If you believe, as fundamentalists purport to believe, that the Bible is the literal truth and every word in it is true, then a day has to be a hour day, or now you're doing what the liberal Christians are doing, which is saying: "Oh, a day doesn't mean a day.
A day is a metaphor for something. Bryan is criticized actually, in the aftermath of the trial, for claiming that a day could be a period, or that God's days might not be the hour day. Jerry Falwell criticized him in the s for that. When Darrow trips him up, that continues to be something that reverberates in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy today. If Bryan had been able to give his closing argument, how might that have changed how we think of the trial?
Bryan's closing argument is much more reasonable and empathetic than his short, clipped answers, irritated answers to Darrow's questioning.
You see in that closing statement The other thing he says is that parents should be able to control what kinds of challenges come to their kids' faith. This idea of local control of schools, it still continues to this day to be a hot-button issue. There's a number of people who would still adhere that parents should be able to dictate curricula. He doesn't seem like that much of a fanatic when you look at an unreasoning person, when you read his closing argument, as opposed to when you read that back-and-forth with Darrow.
In the wake of the trial, Bryan is made to look foolish. Unlike the movie suggests, he's not destroyed, and he's going to continue on. There's no reason to believe, if he hadn't died, that he wouldn't have been a defender of the faith. And probably if he had been able to speechify on it, he would have probably made up for the lost capital of this trial. Fundamentalists retreat. Not that those laws against evolution go away entirely, but fundamentalists retreat from public life, set up their own institutions.
They become a little insular. They work on building their own internal empire, their own publishing arms, their own radio stations, later their own TV stations. We don't see them again until the Moral Majority. So fundamentalism takes a public knock.
How do you interpret the Scopes trial? Is it about Darwin and evolution, or something else? The Scopes trial is about a lot of things. On a religious level, it really is about skepticism, fundamentalism and modernism all together thrown in there, that mix.
It's also about cosmopolitanism versus rural America. The Scopes trial, in Mencken's coverage of it, posits these two different Americas. One is backward and ignorant and rural, and the other is forward-thinking, secular and urban. I think that opposition stays with people for a long time after the trial.
What does the Scopes trial tell us about the divisions among Protestants? What are the divisions that we're seeing among religious people? There are two very diametrically opposed camps. Just like with the slavery question, they read the same book; they believe in the same God; they believe in the same Christ. But they are fundamentally at odds over basic questions of faith, so Protestants themselves are fractured. I don't think that these divisions are healed until the s, when, because of the Cold War, you get this idea that America is a religious nation, and so Protestant, Catholic, Jew, whatever you are, that we're people of faith.
The Communists don't have faith. Where are we with the notion that America has a special destiny and is chosen by God by the end of the Scopes trial? What you would have to conclude by the end of the Scopes trial is that no matter where you fall on the spectrum of faith in this time period, that you can no longer be so confident in America's special relationship with God. The feeling that religious people would be that, that's imperiled because of these divisions even between these religious groups.
How can God still have chosen America as favored if we don't even agree with each other, with like-minded people of faith? And then if you're Bryan, you're thinking, America is turning its back on God. It was chosen by God for this special mission, and now America has rejected God, certainly in the public schools. Even though he wins, he loses. He loses in the public relations. He loses in the hearts and minds of most Americans.
Is Scopes connected to the cleavage between conservatives and liberals in the Briggs trial and to the denominational splits within American Judaism? The great divide in America in the 19th century was about slavery. It's certainly not the origins, and it's not the end, but it marks a different religious divide in America, between people who are more literal in their interpretation of whatever holy book they have, the fundamentalists on the one hand and the modernizers on the other.
It's between people who believe in a literal and traditional reading of their sacred texts and people who don't. What does the story of Jews in America, as told through [Isaac Mayer] Wise , tell us about America and religion in general? I think it's inescapable that religious groups come to America and they are as shaped by America as America is shaped by them. I think there's something about Americans' perception of their special relationship with God that means every religious group that comes to America has to grapple with, whether they're going to be of America or outside of it.
And then, in making themselves more American, they shape their religion. Their religion changes. Catholics in America are different from Catholics on the continent. I think this conflict within Judaism that you see, between "Are we going to embrace modernity, or are we going to reject modernity?
They're all struggling with that question. Disestablish is the separation of church and state the Founders put in with the Bill of Rights. By not embracing an established church -- which is the first time since Constantinople that it happens, so it's really world-historic -- by rejecting an established church, the Founders enable religious competition in America. We like to call it the "marketplace of ideas," and that religious competition means that all of a sudden you're not getting your money from the state; you have to attract people to the church.
So now you're competing for converts. It just makes America a different kind of place for every religious body that comes. Jews don't suffer the kind of legal disabilities in America that they do in other places. They don't have to hide their Judaism. They don't have to pay special taxes because they're not worshiping at the state church.
America allows for the flourishing of religious difference. So I think that Jews -- even though, don't get me wrong, there's tons of intolerance, and there's tons of anti-Semitism in America -- at least at the political level, there's not those legal disabilities. So Jews have the opportunity to build synagogues and have organizations and practice their faith freely.
Can freedom of religion threaten religion in some ways, too, if there's no state-sponsored religion? They don't think that until the late 19th century, when it's apparent to everyone that there are a number of Americans -- a significant number; they're still a minority, but they're significant -- are choosing not to have any faith at all.
They're not choosing between denominations or between Judaism and Christianity; they're choosing between belief and unbelief. There's been people around in America from Ben Franklin on who reject churches, but not enough of them to register on anybody's radar until the late 19th century. Where do liberal Christians or modernists go with that challenge to their faith? How do they make their faith more relevant?
If you want to make your faith more relevant in the late 19th century, you embrace science rather than viewing it with hostility. With the perceived threat of evolution with Darwin, a number of Christians say: "Finally!
Now that evolution is proven, we are given finally the license to be able to use reason. We do not have to accept the entire Bible as a book that has no errors in it. When our brain tells us that this story conflicts with this story, we can say, 'Yes, the Bible is imperfect document.
So these Christians feel liberated by embracing the modern. Are they also embracing science? When the fundamentalists want to ban teaching evolution in public schools, how do liberal Christians react? What have they come to believe about Darwin? Liberal Christians come to believe that So they're not threatened by Darwin. So science should not shake their faith at all. In fact, science is something they can embrace, because science shows that the wonders of creation, science shows us how brilliant God was and how amazing this world he made is.
So they embrace it. In fact, [evolution] for many liberal Christians fits better with their worldview, because they were seeing the world as progressing and improving, and [that] Darwinian ideas -- is that the world does improve, that species improve -- fits in with that idea that we're moving toward something better. When the fundamentalists campaign to ban Darwin, what do liberal Christians fear? What is the threat if you ban Darwin in schools?
Liberal Christians perceive this to be a fight about tradition and progress. They feel like their children are going to be stifled because there's a group of conservative people who don't want them to learn what science is telling them.
They feel like America's going to be set back. The rest of the world is moving forward. Why should American children not have the received wisdom of science, what the best minds think? It's interesting that one of the things Bryan seizes on is the fact that these surveys show that the more education you have, the less religious you are.
Clearly the universities are creating atheists, he believes, in some way. That's one of the reasons he actually looks to his children's textbooks, is, what's happening in the school system to turn people who are more educated away from Christianity? What does it tell us about religion in America that so many people are interested in this trial? America is religious. Every foreigner who comes to America in this time period remarks on the number of churches and how many religious gatherings, how many times people go to church and how many things they do at church.
Not only is America religious; America is publicly religious. Even though we've separated church and state, religion is everywhere. You have prayers before Memorial Day celebrations given by preachers; you have preachers who are chosen to give commencement addresses. Religion is in the public square.
Interview: Cynthia Lyerly Lyerly is an associate professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses in American women's history, race, gender and the South. Is religion an important aspect of understanding the Civil War? What did it mean to be a major Protestant denomination in s America?
Why does Christianity appeal to African American slaves? Does Jesus hold any special message for people in bondage? What was the subject of much of their prayer? How pervasive is the notion that America is a special place in God's eyes? Who were the abolitionists? It's almost like they have their own church of abolitionism.
What is the importance of black churches for free blacks before the Civil War? What is Douglass' impact on America? How do pro-slavery Southerners interpret the Bible on slavery? Are there lots of examples of slavery in the Bible?
Are Southerners being pushed by abolitionists to argue these things? Everyone follows the same rule book, which says a bishop can't own a slave? What do Southerners do to defend their slaveholding? Why does the middle group want to avoid a split between North and South? Is the split purely regional between North and South? What is the Southern version of the hardening?
What happens when ministers start to talk about politics? Does Lincoln know the Bible? For an American of the s, '80s, '90s, what does it feel like? What does World War I do to people who are thinking that way? As religious people face this change, what are their options, their problem?
Where does progress fit into that? Where are we in in terms of evangelical Christianity in America? If people don't agree about what the Civil War meant, how does that break down?
Is there a fragility with evangelical Christianity, or is it still entrenched? How do most people read the Bible in the 19th century? What is a modernist? Describe Briggs' speech from his perspective. What is the reaction? Briggs hopes to bring Presbyterians together, but what is the result?
How do Americans respond to Ingersoll? Can you connect Darwin and science to an opening for secularism in America? How does Bryan view the slums, poverty, poor sanitation, labor problems? Does Bryan see a separation between these ideas and religion? What does it mean to make the Sermon on the Mount the basis for government? What does it mean to be a fundamentalist Christian? It is a response to change, that they feel the need to declare these beliefs?
What do fundamentalists want? Do they want to go back to a simpler time?
0コメント