I have been participating in a Race and Social Justice Reading Group through First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C. We have been reading a series of books that provide historical perspective on race in the United States. Two of the most thought-provoking books that we have read are Lest We Forget: The Passage from Africa into the Twenty-first Century by Velma Maia Thomas, and The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby. Both books elucidate how race relations even today are a legacy of slavery.

A key question is how slavery came to be so widely accepted in the American experience. Tisby explains, in part, by saying, “the Scriptures seemed to accept slavery as an established reality” (p.51). It is true: slavery was an established reality in much of the Bible. In my book, Spelunking Scripture – The Letters of Paul, I note that slavery was common in the Old Testament. Abram and his wife Sarai were enslavers. In the Introduction to the book, I write, “In Genesis 16 Sarai instructed Abram to impregnate her slave Hagar. Today, we would call it rape.” And it is not just the Old Testament that seems to accept slavery as established reality. Of the 27 books in the New Testament, 19 mention slavery. Paul repeatedly told slaves to obey their masters (Ephesians 6:5; Colossians 3:22; 1 Timothy 6:1; and Titus 2:9). And it was not just Paul. 1 Peter 2:18 also instructed slaves to submit themselves to their masters. From those and selected other scripture passages, many Christians concluded that slavery was ordained by God.

The problem with that biblical (mis)interpretation is the failure to distinguish between cultural conditions and God’s eternal purposes. Slavery was a condition in many cultures of the Bible. But not every cultural condition was divinely ordained. Just as not every passage of the Bible is of equal value, not every cultural condition reflects God’s purposes for our lives. A key strategy used in “spelunking scripture” is to distinguish between cultural conditions and eternal truth. Such a strategy helps us to identify the most important passages of scripture, and to place other less important passages in their proper cultural context.

Slavery was a determinative factor in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845. Some northern Baptists objected to slave owners being appointed as missionaries. Baptists in the south withdrew from their northern Baptist associates to form a separate denomination which allowed enslavers to serve as missionaries, denominational leaders, and even seminary professors.

Of course, the selection of Baptist pastors was entrusted to individual churches, given the autonomy of the local Baptist church. I was dismayed to learn that the first and longtime pastor of the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C., Obadiah Brown (1779-1852), was an enslaver. Brown also served as Chaplain of the United States House of Representatives (1807-1809 and 1814-1815) and Chaplain of the United States Senate (1809-1810). How could Christians have so missed the mark? Much of it was due to a misinterpretation of scripture. Spelunking Scripture aims to get beneath the surface of important Bible passages and explore what those passages mean.