That is, proslavery advocates employed their mis-reading of Philemon to lend theological legitimization to the aforementioned Fugitive Slave Act. I will argue that such a reading distorts the text through a construction of what I term “Pauline paternalism,” which imagines the possibility of an authentic human relationship between a master and slave as a means of continuing, rather than obliterating, what Hegel described as the dialectic of master/slave.
