Are there any books that talks about church fathers and what the individuals believes about slavery in their time?
This isn't quite what you're asking for, and I don't know if he's early enough, but Augustine talks about slavery in City of God, book 19, chapter 15, if you have that. I don't have Logos installed where I am so I can't give you a direct link. [Best I can do at the moment is a biblia link.]
I was just at the Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield, IL, with my 4th grade son, and there was a "theological justification" given for chattel slavery (different from ancient slavery), and reading it made me sad. Unfortunately I cannot remember the author's name at the moment. Lincoln expressed his disgust with the ideas in that letter, but it's a clear call to do careful exegesis and avoid eisegesis.
You may find discussion of this in some dictionaries. For instance, there is some treatment of it in the IVP Dictionary of Later New Testaments & Its Developments (which often includes discussions of early fathers).
I don't own this, but I wonder if volumes of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture have citations from church fathers when commenting on passages that mention slavery explicitly.
From the net I came across this post, I have not looked into its accuracy:
Many monks contributed much toward a more just and moral society. From the ranks of the monks emerged the earliest condemnation of slavery. Gregory the Theologian, bishop of Nazianzus first, and later Patriarch of Constantinople, denounced the practice of holding slaves. His friend Basil of Ceasarea did not favor it but tolerated the institution as an established evil. Their contemporary Eustathios of Sebasteia condemned slavery and even advocated revolts by slaves. Later in the eighth and early ninth centuries, Theodore the Studite denounced slavery and forbade monks to possess, and the monastery to employ, slaves. In his rules for the hegoumenos of the Studios Monastery, Theodore advised: “You shall not possess a slave either for your own use or for your monastery or for the fields, since man was created in the image of God.” Eustathios, the twelfth century monk, archbishop of Thessaloniki, and critic and reformer of monasticism, condemned slavery as an evil and unnatural institution and advocated manumission.
– Christian Faith and Cultural Heritage: Essays from a Greek Orthodox Perspective, p. 162.
This link to the Catholic encyclopedia is also very interesting http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14036a.htm
-dan
This link to the Catholic encyclopedia is also very interesting http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14036a.htm The Catholic Encyclopedia (17 vols.) It is a shame there is less traction on this wonderful resource. -dan
That's the tragedy, it has more bids than anything else but people have bid so ridiculously low that it will never go into production unless Logos funds it as part of a base package.
Follow the trend line. Looks like if all that have bid $30 bid $90 it would ship.
if all that have bid $30 bid $90 it would ship.
I did but I don't see much difference
if all that have bid $30 bid $90 it would ship. I did but I don't see much difference
Just wait until EVERYONE else also does!!