Early Christians regarded slaves who converted to Christianity as spiritually free men, brothers in Christ, receiving the same portion of Christ’s kingdom.  However, this equal regard apparently had no legal power, since as Paul pointed out slaves should continue to obey their masters.  Although Jesus denounced sin as a kind of moral slavery, he did not say a word against slavery as a social institution.  Certainly, the writers of the New Testament did not oppose slavery either.  Many of the early Christians were slaves, but Paul advised them that each person should remain in the condition when they were called.  Some estimate that the slave population in the first century Roman Empire constituted approximately one third of the total population.  In the fourth century, Christian councils condemned those who urged slaves to liberate themselves.  Saint Augustine described slavery as being against God’s intention, since it resulted from sin.  By the end of the fourth century, the manumission in a church, a form of emancipation ritual, was added to the Roman law.  Slaves could be freed by a Church ritual performed by a Christian bishop or priest, since bishops had the power to free slaves.  There even was a church practice of buying slaves and then releasing them.  The Byzantine empire called for the emancipation of slaves by baptism.  During the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas accepted slavery because of original sin.  The Roman Catholic church often condemned slaves who fled from their masters, and refused them communion.  In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, several popes explicitly endorsed the slavery of non-Christians for the Portuguese and Spaniard in their explorations, especially Muslims, Africans, and other indigenous pagan people.  In 1537, Pope Paul III revoked the previous authority to enslave indigenous people of the Americas.  Several popes condemned both slavery and the slave trade.  Since the Middle Ages, the Christian understanding of slavery has seen significant internal conflict and endured dramatic change.  The Anglican Church condoned slavery from 1710-1833 in the Codrington Plantations in Barbados.  Many American Christian clergy in the eighteenth and nineteenth century owned slaves.  However, in the nineteenth century, there was a very strong Christian abolitionist movement to free all slaves.  Today, nearly all Christians are united in their condemnation of modern slavery as wrong and contrary to God’s will.  Do you think that slavery is wrong?