Is a Bible that records slavery and discrimination against women really a standard of morality?

🔥The question: “If it's recorded in the Bible, didn't God say that institution was right?”

🛡️The Church's answer: The mere fact that an institution appears in the Bible does not let us conclude that God morally approved it. First we have to distinguish a text that records an event, a law that limits the harm of an institution already in place, and words that command or approve that institution as good. Some laws and exhortations in the Old and the New Testament did not abolish slavery and patriarchy at once but regulated them within that society, and by today's standards they are plainly insufficient. This must not be dressed up as “it was needed then, so it was good.” The Church takes as its criterion of interpretation the direction of the whole of Scripture — that every human being is the image of God and holds the same dignity and freedom in Christ — together with the love of Jesus, and so reads slaveholding and the oppression of women as impossible to justify today.

🧐If they press further: “The Church abused those verses too, didn't it?” — Yes. We have to admit and repent of the history in which Christians justified slavery and the oppression of women. At the same time we can look at the history in which many Christians opposed them out of Scripture's teaching on human dignity and liberation, but never use it as an excuse that erases the wrong.

✨In one sentence: “The Bible recording an unjust ancient institution doesn't mean it approves all of it. Read it in the light of its fulfillment — the dignity of every person and the love of Christ.”