"5 Bondservants, obey your earthly master, with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, 6 not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart,7 rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, 8 knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. 9 Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him."
Ephesians 6:5-9
What is usually - and rightly - pointed out in the slavery issue is that while the New Testament nowhere explicitly condemns slavery, it nevertheless enunciates principles which are fatal to its ultimate continuance, and which undermine its very existence - principles of the equality in dignity of all souls made in the image of God. So that, while in one sense the gospel left the issue of slavery alone, in another sense it doomed it. There are those, however, who are uneasy about this viewpoint, and who feel that it hardly meets the case, so we need to look at it with some care, looking at the whole issue of slavery in general.
In Old Testament times slavery was practised by the Hebrews under the sanction of the Mosaic law, and in this they shared common ground with the Greeks and the Romans. But there the common ground ceases, for the Hebrews were not allowed by lawgiver or prophet to forget that they themselves had been bondsmen in Egypt, and all their relationships with those who were slaves were moulded by the sympathy of this recollection. The Hebrew's slaves were members of his family, and members of the congregation of Israel. They had both religious and social rights. If the slaves were Hebrews, their liberty was secured to them by Mosaic law after six years' service. If they were foreigners, they were protected by that law from tyranny or violence from their masters. And, as Lightfoot says, 'considering the conditions of ancient society, and more especially of ancient warfare, slavery as practised among the Hebrews was probably an escape from alternatives which would have involved a far greater amount of misery'. In contrast, however, slaves in Greece and Rome were in a far more parlous state. As Lightfoot observes, 'In our enthusiastic eulogies of free, enlightened, democratic Athens, we are apt to forget that the interests of the many (i.e. the slaves) were ruthlessly sacrificed to the selfishness of the few'. We continue this discussion in the next Note.