after listening to a message by vineyard sutton's jason clark i was challenged by the idea of perspective and what our spiritual descendants would think when they examined our faith with their '20/20' hindsight.
i texted several wise and honourable friends with this thought; 'we find it astounding that christians once kept slaves. what will future christians find astounding when they look back on our particular brand of christianity?'
i got many responses; some expected and some not, some concise and some not remotely, some specific and some broad, all thought out and all legitimate.
the point of the question is really about not about the issues (about which we have already spent much time and energy examining) - but about just how abhorrent and unacceptable some of our practices might really be when viewed with a perspective that we don't usually bring to bear on them.
might there have been slave-owning christians who had private doubts about the morals of their actions - but stopped short of changing their behaviours simply because 'there were no viable alternatives', or 'they had only a few slaves so unless the people who kept many slaves changed their ways then it really made no difference on a global scale', or 'the need for slaves was simply a commercial reality'?
are we using these or other excuses to justify continuing behaviours that we really know to be inexcusable?
do we pay lip service to the need to do better, but defer making outright changes until the rest of the world promises to do so too?
