The bounds of the canon and the limits of its authors

I’ve been reading Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s commentary on Philemon (in the Anchor Bible series), preparing for a future sermon series; in the course of his discussion of slavery, which is an essential part of the introductory work on that book, I was interested to read the following paragraph:

What strikes the modern reader of such Pauline passages [as the Letter to Philemon] is his failure to speak out against the social institution of slavery in general and the injustices that it often involved, not only for the individual so entrapped but also for his wife and children. If I am right in interpreting the “more than I ask” of v 21 as an implicit request made of Philemon to see to the emancipation of Onesimus, that may tell us something about Paul’s attitude toward the enslavement of a Christian; but that “more” has been diversely interpreted over the centuries and its sense is not clear. Moreover that is an implicit request about an individual case of a Christian slave who could help Paul in his work of evangelization. Would Paul have written the same thing to the non-Christian owner of a pagan slave? Would he have agreed with Aristotle’s view about “friendship” with such a slave [that friendship with a slave considered as a slave was impossible]?

There are two issues in that paragraph. The first, the fact that Paul (and for that matter the rest of the NT writers) didn’t condemn slavery and demand immediate, empire-wide emancipation of all slaves, is a vast subject and beyond the scope of a single post. I will note that we should bear in mind that slavery in the ancient world was a significantly different thing, and quite a bit less vile, than slavery in the American historical context; that said, though, the injustice of it (both fundamental and circumstantial) was still very real. The basic argument here, in a nutshell, is that the system of slavery could only be changed gradually, and that it was Christianity which brought that change—a point made quite clearly by M. R. Vincent in a passage Dr. Fitzmyer quotes:

Under Constantine the effects of christian sentiment began to appear in the Church and in legislation concerning slaves. Official freeing of slaves became common as an act of pious gratitude, and burial tablets often represent masters standing before the Good Shepherd, with a band of slaves liberated at death, and pleading for them at judgment. In A.D. 312 a law was passed declaring as homicide the poisoning or branding of slaves . . . The advance of a healthier sentiment may be seen by comparing the law of Augustus, which forbade a master to emancipate more than one-fifth of his slaves, and which fixed one hundred males as a maximum for one time—and the unlimited permission to emancipate conceded by Constantine. Each new ruler enacted some measure which facilitated emancipation. Every obstacle was thrown up by law in the way of separating families. Under Justinian all presumptions were in favor of liberty.

Beyond that is for another post, or series of posts, or maybe a book or three; and while it’s an issue that offers a lot to discuss, it’s also not a new one. What really struck me in Dr. Fitzmyer’s comment quoted above were his closing questions:

Would Paul have written the same thing to the non-Christian owner of a pagan slave? Would he have agreed with Aristotle’s view about “friendship” with such a slave?

The reason that struck me is because it seems to me there’s an assumption there which needs to be considered: namely, that what Paul thought about such questions matters to us, and thus that if we had the answers to such questions, it would affect our interpretation of Scripture. At one time, I would have thought that was obvious—after all, this is Paul, the guy who wrote half the New Testament; of course we want to know more of what he thought about everything. Anymore, though, I don’t agree with that. After all, as much as I believe that God by his Spirit inspired Paul to write the letters which we now have, that only makes the letters authoritative; Paul, as brilliant as he was, was still a sinful, fallible human being. Just because we affirm that the Spirit inspired the thirteen letters of Paul that we have in the New Testament, it doesn’t mean that the Spirit inspired everything else, or even anything else, that he said or wrote or thought.As such, while I don’t know the answers to Dr. Fitzmyer’s questions, I also don’t care about those answers; I have no problem affirming that if Paul in fact agreed with Aristotle, that that’s the reason God kept him from saying so in any of the letters we have. The idea that Paul might have believed something means nothing to me if that belief is outside the bounds of the canon of Scripture, because I don’t follow Paul as such; I only follow him as he follows Christ. I recognize Paul as a fellow redeemed sinner who had his unrighteous behaviors and his un-Christlike ideas and his limits to his understanding just like me, or anyone else; the key for me is that in affirming the inspiration of Scripture, I affirm that the Spirit kept all those things outside the bounds of the canon. Inside those bounds, within the letters we have, we have Paul at his best, guided and shaped by the Spirit’s work; outside, it doesn’t matter.