The Bible sanctions slavery, so a Christian who owns no slaves is out of integrity with his never-changing God.

Part of the answer has to be a concession: Christians really did defend chattel slavery from the Bible, and that is a stain rather than a misunderstanding. But the texts they used do not say what they claimed, and the trajectory of Scripture runs the other way.

1. Kidnapping carried the death penalty. "Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death" (Exodus 21:16). The chattel system of the Atlantic was built on capture and sale, which is precisely what that law forbids. Paul lists "enslavers" among the lawless (1 Timothy 1:10), using a word that means a dealer in human beings.

2. Israelite servitude was debt-bondage. The law describes a man who sells himself because of poverty and insists he "shall be with you as a hired worker and as a sojourner" (Leviticus 25:39-40). Debts were canceled and servants released in the Jubilee, and Deuteronomy 15 sends them out with provisions. That is not hereditary, racially defined ownership of persons.

3. The protections were unusual for the ancient world. A servant permanently injured by his master went free (Exodus 21:26-27), and a slave who escaped to Israel was not to be returned: "He shall dwell with you, in your midst" (Deuteronomy 23:15-16). Comparable protections are hard to find in the surrounding law codes. These are limits built into the institution from the start.

4. Regulation is not endorsement. Slavery existed everywhere in the ancient Near East, and God's law met Israel inside an institution it did not create and set fences around it. Jesus names the same pattern when he says Moses permitted divorce "because of your hardness of heart" (Matthew 19:8). Accommodation to a fallen situation is not approval of it.

5. The trajectory runs one direction. Paul tells Philemon to receive Onesimus "no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother" (Philemon 16). He tells masters to stop threatening, knowing they have a Master in heaven who shows no partiality (Ephesians 6:9). And he grounds it all in the claim that there is "neither slave nor free" in Christ (Galatians 3:28).

6. Turn the objection's moral standard on itself. The confidence that slavery is objectively monstrous is not something nature delivers; it is a Judeo-Christian inheritance, and the abolitionists argued exactly that way. On a purely naturalistic account, why is exploitation a moral crime rather than an arrangement some people prefer? The objection uses the Bible's moral capital to indict the Bible.

7. "Never changing" refers to character. "I the LORD do not change" (Malachi 3:6) concerns God's covenant faithfulness, not the timing of his revelation. A God whose character is constant can still teach a people slowly, over centuries, and move them somewhere they could not have started. Progressive revelation is consistent with immutability; a single frozen legal code is not what the Bible claims to be.

8. Christians ended the trade. Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect, and the American abolitionists appealed to Scripture against the slaveholders, who appealed to Scripture too. When both sides cite the same book, the question is which reading is consistent with the whole. The abolitionist reading won, and it won on exegetical grounds.

9. So why does this Christian own no one?. Because the trajectory has arrived at its destination. If a man is my brother in Christ, I cannot also own him, and Galatians 3:28 makes brotherhood the standing of every believer. Refusing to own a person is integrity with the whole canon, not a departure from one verse of it.

10. Where Christians honestly differ. Some, following Paul Copan, stress how different Israelite servitude was; others think that argument risks softening the text too much and prefer to stress the accommodation and the trajectory. Both reject chattel slavery. No mainstream Christian body defends it today, and that near-unanimity is itself a result of reading Scripture.

The question is a good one, and the honest answer includes admitting that the church got this wrong for a long time. But the book that was misused also supplied the arguments that ended the practice, and that is the stronger evidence about what it actually teaches.

Sources: Paul Copan; Is God a Moral Monster?; William Lane Craig; Gregory Koukl.

Related challenges:
• Please check your facts – the biblical account of Noah was derived from the Babylonian myth of Utanapishtim. Your mythical God didn’t 'inspire' it.
• Sorry Christians, but the creation account in Genesis is borrowed -- it is based on the Enuma Elish.
• Christian claims are not credible! Wouldn’t we expect SOME evidence of the exodus from Egypt, if it took place? 2.5 million people wandering around for 40 years in a specific geographic location...and NOTHING!