St. Paul’s theology ratified slave hierarchy while equalizing souls

Evidence

By the birth of Christ or the start of the Common Era, Romans were justifying their slaveholding practices using Aristotle’s climate theory, and soon the new Christianity began to contribute to these arguments. For early Christian theologians—whom Puritans studied alongside Aristotle—God ordained the human hierarchy. St. Paul introduced, in the first century, a three-tiered hierarchy of slave relations—heavenly master (top), earthly master (middle), enslaved (bottom). “He who was free when called is a slave of Christ,” he testified in 1 Corinthians. “Slaves” were to “obey in everything those that are your earthly masters, not with eyeservice as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing the Lord.” In a crucial caveat in Galatians 3:28, St. Paul equalized the souls of masters and slaves as “all one in Christ Jesus.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 38

Categorization

• XREF: The distinction between equal souls and unequal bodies parallels Kendi’s later differentiation of assimilationist vs. antiracist positions — a ‘spiritual equality, earthly hierarchy’ split the reader may recognize in contemporary arguments. — connects to: Slaveholders justified slavery through a divinely ordained patriarchal family hierarchy — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 236