Few topics make modern Christians more uncomfortable than slavery in Scripture. We rush past those passages or explain them away. But if we're honest with the text, and honest with history, there's something far more radical happening than most of us realize. The World Paul Was Writing Into To understand Paul's household codes in Ephesians and Colossians, we have to understand the world that produced them. In Aristotle's framework, which shaped the entire Greco-Roman social i

Paul is writing to a church in the middle of the Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire had very strong opinions about how a household should run. At the top sat the paterfamilias, the father of the household. His word was law. Husbands held full authority over their wives, who were essentially viewed as property. Fathers decided where their children went to school, who they would marry, and even, in a chilling practice common across the empire, whether a newborn infant would be

A Reflection on Ephesians 4:1-24 There's a shift that happens in the middle of Paul's letter to the Ephesians, and it's the kind of shift that changes everything. For three chapters, Paul has been building a case. He's laid out the breathtaking reality of what God has done for us in Christ: redemption, forgiveness, adoption into God's family, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as a guaranteed inheritance. We are God's temple, the very place where he dwells. It's stunning stuff

Imagine being shackled in a prison cell with every freedom stripped away. Your food is sparse and moldy. Your bedding reeks. The screams of other prisoners keep you awake through the night. Most of us, given a chance to write letters home, would spend every word complaining, begging for rescue, cataloging our misery. Paul isn't most people. Writing from a Roman prison, lacking basic necessities and depending entirely on the generosity of others, Paul has one word for his situ