TRS 834 The Philosophy and Theology of Slavery
Many commentators note the ambiguous status of the slave. That ambiguous status is captured in Roman law, which simultaneously identified the slave as a human being (persona) and a thing (res). The social status of the slave becomes complicated by the adoption of the term in early Christianity, from the Gospels forward, where Christians willingly refer to themselves as slaves. The history of the Christian west reflects the ambiguity of the slave's status and the embrace of slavery rhetoric in the Christian scriptures. In this course we will study some of the philosophical and theological approaches to the institution of slavery looking to identify two things: an adequate notion of slavery, and the theological resources to construct a "theology of slavery" that adequately addresses this relationship of man to man.