Picture, if you will, a non-dystopian society set in the 2300s. Here, humanity has invented the technology to master cold fusion or even more powerful forms of energy, like Star Trek’s matter-antimatter engine. In short, by the standards of 2024, energy has become extremely cheap. Meanwhile, this society also has paired that abundant energy with other tech, and this combination has made production of material goods much easier, less expensive, and superior in quality. Think advanced 3-D printing, or borrowing from Trek again, the replicator device.

Imagine how these new technologies have changed economics, culture, and even moral sensibilities. What are today’s most expensive goods and services—houses, cars, electronics and appliances, medicine—have probably improved in quality and even decreased in absolute price. The professions of realtor and car salesman (as we know them) have probably disappeared. In this world, there has likely never been less demand for physical labor, which increasingly strikes the average person as a highly undesirable, low status, and perhaps even inhumane means of earning a living. And there in the 2300s, Christians are still around, too. Like today, at least some of them read their Bibles and have a passing knowledge of history.

Now consider what it would be like for historians in the 2300s to explain, say, a home mortgage, car financing, or other forms of loans, debt, and capital procurement that characterize our economic system. They’d have the difficult job of clarifying why people in 2024 willingly went into debt for decades at a time just to secure a roof over their heads that they themselves actually owned. They’d also have to make sense for their students of why many people before the Energy Revolution made the same bargain for advanced schooling in fields such as medicine and law. Harder still to explain: some historical people used something called “credit cards” to cover their day-to-day expenses, and for not a few of these, the credit card arrangement put them into a form of lifelong debt. Moreover, many credit card companies intentionally set the system up that way for profit. Again, much of this would strike these futuristic people as somewhere on the spectrum of strange to repugnant. After all, if significant forms of lending still exist in their future world, it may not be used to secure what they consider “basic” goods, like housing, medicine, or food.

Glancing back at the historical record, twenty-fourth-century Christians especially might be somewhere between puzzled and incensed that these bizarre economic arrangements never seem to have received much scrutiny from the Church at the time. Even more perplexing, there is evidence that some Christians even worked in finance and banking without much apparent guilt or ecclesiastical objection. Indeed, what most stands out to them about 2024’s weird-to-cruel economic conventions largely seems taken for granted by the twenty-first-century Western Church.

If, in some bad time-travel plot, these future Christians went back and interviewed some contemporary pastors and ecclesiastical leaders about their apparent silence, at least some of the interviewees would defend themselves: yes, it’s true that there are abuses to be found, and there are plenty of things we don’t like about our economic world; our society can’t come up with a better system at present; your suggested reforms, like abolishing the home mortgage, would probably lead to worse outcomes that you cannot easily imagine because you don’t know our world well enough; it’s not like our preaching against these conventions and institutions would actually change enough minds anyway; our main job is to encourage Christians to live wisely within this system, not to tear it all down and then build it back according to outlandish twenty-fourth-century social expectations. Etc.

Where am I going with this sci-fi hypothetical?

The dynamics just depicted closely parallel, I think, the obstacles we face in understanding tolerated socio-economic conventions in the Bible or Christian history that strike us today as utterly distasteful. Polygamy is a classic example from the OT, just as slavery is one for the NT and the ancient Church at-large. In fact, the gap between us and antiquity, carved by the Industrial Revolution, is arguably larger than the hypothetical one between us and 2324. While we have a tendency to execrate these conventions out of hand (or at least feel extremely uncomfortable discussing them), they may have appeared to offer the ostensibly “least bad” option at the time. It’s not that ancient people were more primitive or morally inferior. Like us, most of them had to work within certain facts of life, and I think they put more stress on the moral actors themselves as agents. The question was not, “Is it okay to own slaves?” but rather “If you do, are you a good or bad slave master?”

There’s much more to say here on this big topic. For one, I don’t think it remotely throws us back into some kind of cultural relativism or historicism, where every social convention or norm within a given past society lies utterly beyond our moral assessments, simply insofar as we belong to another culture. Moral translation between cultures is, in other words, possible just as much as language. We may even find some of the grammar and vocabulary to be very closely related—perhaps even the progenitors—to our own.

As all good science fiction does, analogies like the one presented above might help us think more carefully about the past and the moral standards we encounter there. If we can think with more circumspection about the moral trade-offs at play in our own societies, it may help us to be more charitable and better able to make sense of the past.