The institution of slavery is not inherently evil. It is not inherently evil to own another human being.

It is very important that every Christian affirm what I just said. Not only should they affirm it, every Christian in today’s society should be able to defend what I just said. Every Christian should be able to defend it ... Christians in America have been led astray on this topic. They’ve been led to believe things that the Bible doesn’t teach, and when we go beyond the Bible, there are dire consequences.
[…]
We must also acknowledge that men like our Founders, men like Jonathan Edwards, who owned slaves, could in fact treat their slaves the way the Bible tells them to treat their slaves and that they weren’t living in grave sin. They weren’t living in unrepentant grave sin.

We’re condemning them for being a product of their time. Given the fact that the Bible does not explicitly condemn that as sinful, then we ought not explicitly condemn our forefathers, condemn Jonathan Edwards as grave, unrepentant sinners. That is chronological snobbery at its finest.

Do not condemn our forefathers who may have been treating their slaves biblically. In fact, it’s like two percent of the Americans actually owned slaves. And anyone who actually engaged in real abuse, we condemn that. We condemn treating other image bearers as subhuman. That’s evil. That’s bad. That’s not good. We can condemn that, okay? But we cannot condemn the entire institution of slavery outright; we just cannot do that because the Bible does not do that.