Is slavery mentioned and discussed in the Bible?  This was a question posed to me at my atheist discussion group last night.
     Of course it is.  That's obvious even from a cursory reading of the text, Hebrew as well as Greek.  The people of ancient Israel shared many cultural commonalities with their neighbors in other parts of the ancient near east.  One of these was slavery.
     When God gave Israel instructions on how to deal with its slaves, he was recognizing a cultural reality.  He was acknowledging that Israel was a creation of its time.  He didn't like slavery, he didn't condone it.  He simply wanted to regulate it in the best interests of slave and owner alike.
     We see this in the New Testament, too.  Well aware of the cultural realities in which the early church lived, God tried to find a middle ground.  He tried to balance social dictums with biblical truth.  Paul's letter to Philemon demonstrates this aptly.
     The larger issue before us, however, is one to which some in my group pointed last night.  Because the Bible mentions and regulates slavery, they contend, we must ignore everything else in it.  Slavery invalidates the entire Bible.
     To me, this is myopic.  Do we dismiss the whole of the Iliad because it contains a few scenes invoking the supernatural?  Do we dismiss quantum theory because it presents some things we cannot readily accept or understand?  Hardly.  The Christians who led the abolition movements of the nineteenth century understood that the Bible is more than its parts.  They realized that although the Bible is the work of human beings, it is also the work of an eternal God who over thousands of years shaped a consistent and coherent narrative of his love for humanity, a God who spoke to each successive generation of people in cultural language they could grasp, a God who ensured that what is revealed in the pages of Scripture is existentially conditioned to speak to not just its immediate readers but to readers of all places and times.
     Besides, if we insist we judge the Bible by our standards, we must then ask ourselves this:  from where do we get them?
     The circle is endless.