Biblical reasoning about slavery

The role that arguments from the Bible played in justifying slavery in mid-nineteenth-century America doesn't become less troubling for being well-known. Fuller's arguments really do seem to trade on scriptural texts both more numerous and more widely distributed than do Wayland's; moreover, Fuller's arguments remain closer to the texts than do Wayland's generalizations and abstractions. Noll seems to me substantially correct when he locates the strength of pro-slavery biblical arguments in their ability to appeal to numerous instances in which slavery is treated uncritically in biblical texts. Standing in this close relationship with biblical texts, which adamant abolitionists acknowledged as troublesome, it is far from incredible that future secessionists would see nothing inconsistent (1) in demanding that they reform themselves morally or (2) with this moral reform taking the shape of secession from the union (Faust, 29-31). Nor is it particularly incredible that godliness might be taken to be next to aristocracy (Faust, 32-34), given how comfortable were these elite, white, male, southeastern exegetes with standing close to the text of the Bible and how elitist was the worldly government throughout the New Testament period and much of the Old Testament period.

Faust and Noll make compelling cases for what these sorts of concerns mean for the interpretation of history; I'm not much inclined to debate their insistence that there was nothing structurally inadequate in elite, white male, southeastern nationalism or biblical exegesis. If I have questions at all, they are prospectively oriented. As matters of historical interpretation, are we obliged to say that American practical theology of the late-nineteenth-century, insofar as it accepted that slavery was inconsistent with the biblical and Christian witnesses, was at best nuanced and subtle and at worst further from the text than were southern, antebellum interpretations? Does the end of the Civil War mark a notable departure from the Bible in American theology? In part it does; liberal interpretations of the Bible do begin to gather steam. Do we need to begin reading the defeat of the Confederacy into the history of liberal theology alongside Darwinism?