slavery & salvation

Slavery and racism
There was an excellent programme on BBC Four the other night called The History of Racism. It looked at the link between slave-owning and racism. The central thesis was that slavery was not essentially racist, in that white Europeans did not enslave black Africans because they were black. They enslaved them for economic reasons. However, it is not accidental that they enslaved black people: they regarded them as lower down on a pyramid of racial hierarchy (which happened to mirror the pyramid of a hierarchy of humanity: the whites at the top were clearly and incontrovertibly fully human, while peoples became less human the further down the pyramid you went). They were racially prejudiced, in other words.

But racism is more than prejudice. It is about the ways in which the exercise of power – domination – is linked to racial prejudice. This was Steve Biko’s clear insight in the Apartheid years. Race becomes the justification for one group cruelly dominating another.

What the programme showed is how the brutality of the slave system bred fear among the slave-owners. Slavery required coercion and barbaric cruelty. It generated a bad conscience (that is not meant in any way to be a trite statement) which in turn generated the terror that, given the opportunity, the black slaves would rise up and slaughter their white masters (and mistresses) in an act of self-liberation and vengeance. The fear of such an uprising led to ever further repressive measures and to an ingrained terror of people of colour that required their subjugation for security reasons. This in turn was instrumental in producing the racist theories that were wheeled out to justify the slave system. Slaves became identified as a group not primarily by their place in the economy but by the colour of their skin.

Slavery, in other words, created racism – which then in turn intensified the racist justification of the whole system. To own slaves was to become a racist, even if you didn’t start out that way. It generated the hatred, fear and suspicion that fuels racist attacks of the kind we see on our streets today – where being black so antagonises and terrifies some whites that blackness in and of itself becomes reason and justification for murder.

Slavery and salvation
That got me reflecting on the link between slavery and our notions of salvation. Remember that slavery was administered and justified by Christians. The Church was deeply involved in the slave trade. Not even the Quakers were exempt! And the abolitionists were frequently opposed on biblical and theological grounds.

We’re used to seeing arguments about blacks being descendants of Ham and therefore destined by god to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for the racist rubbish that they are. Less “quaint” are the debates about what the bible does and doesn’t say about the institution of slavery: if slavery is so evil, why do Jesus and Paul (for example) not condemn it? Doesn’t that undermine at least a prima facie case for the abolition of slavery? When we read those debates today – as we do, for example, the debates about women’s leadership in the Christian Church – we wheel out sophisticated hermeneutical stuff about context, the priority of the Christological hermeneutic in Galatians 3:28 and so on to show that oppressive institutions are wrong and Christianly unacceptable, even in the absence of the explicit biblical condemnation.

But step back for a moment, and ask why people were even prepared to engage in these debates over the issue of slavery. How could any Christian even begin to try and justify the institution of slavery from the biblical texts? I ask that, once we recognise that liberation from slavery is the paradigmatic image of salvation in the Bible. The Exodus event is not just a commemoration of a historical event in the lives of the Hebrew people: it is an act of salvation that constitutes the Hebrew slaves as the new nation/community of Israel, and reveals to them who their God (Yahweh) is. To be “Israel” is to be the community that owes its existence to the God who liberates the slaves. To be Yahweh is to be the God of Compassion and Liberation – the God who hears the groans emanating from the brick pits of Pharaoh and who acts to free them. To be “mighty” is to be the God who performs the acts of liberation – who defeats the armies of the slave-owning empire represented by Pharaoh. Yahweh’s triumph is seen in the dead horses and soldiers of the pursing Egyptian army whom Yahweh drowns in the same waters through which Yahweh has enabled the Hebrews to pass to safety and freedom.

Liberation from slavery is what gives content to election and covenant. Crucially, it under girds the “divine difference” that the national community of Israel is to manifest in the face of the ways of other nations in the Ancient Near East. It is the foundation of justice: “Remember that you were once slaves … do not enslave one another or others!” The founding act of liberation that is to characterise Israel as Yahweh’s and Yahweh as Israel’s king and God is given legislative reality in the Jubilee – the year when all debts are forgiven, all land returned and all slaves freed.

The Exile is cast in terms of re-enslavement in Egypt, and the Return as the New Exodus. In the time of Jesus, the Roman occupation was understood through the lens of still being in bondage in Egypt/Babylon, and the hoped-for Messiah was to usher in the real return from Exile that had not yet happened. This is the image that Jesus uses to describe his mission and ministry in the synagogue in Luke 4. Mark, similarly, presents Jesus as the one who is ransacking the house of the Strong Man, who holds the world in bondage: Jesus is chaining the Strong Man and unchaining his slaves. This is how we are to read the healings and the exorcisms – they are acts of liberation that are a sign of the universal salvation of God for the world – what Jesus calls, “The Kingdom of God”.

“The Kingdom of God”, then, takes its content and its continuity from the nation of Israel as a nation of liberated slaves. The cosmic drama of salvation that the New Testament writers portray is the story of a cosmic battle between God and Satan – between the Enslaver of the World and the World’s Liberator. God’s reign is a reign of freedom and will bring freedom for a world presently in chains.

One of the key Pauline images of human beings in need of salvation is of being “slaves of sin”. “Sin” is a synonym for slavery. Sin binds human beings, paralysing even their will, so that Paul writes about his “wretchedness” (a description of a slave’s condition) when he laments his inability to do what he wants to, and not to do what he doesn’t. Sin makes an ally of the Law: our inability to keep the Law means that we are constantly under condemnation. So the Law, which is an expression of liberty and life, becomes part of that by which we are enslaved and from which we need liberation. My point is that even when Paul is using forensic images of salvation, the power of salvation – what salvation effects – is given by the image of liberation from slavery.

Exodus – liberation from slavery – is the air that the biblical writers breathe when talking about God’s saving acts. It is the dominant image of salvation – its presupposition, if you like. If we want to talk about “what the Bible says about slavery”, therefore, we are into something far more fundamental than amassing texts on the subject: we’re drawn into looking at how the liberation from slavery in Egypt functions throughout the Bible.

It is when we ask the question in this way that the godless obscenity of Christian involvement in the institution of slavery becomes clear: how can slave-trading and slave-owning be, in biblical terms, anything other than to ally ourselves with Pharaoh, with Babylon, with Rome and with Satan? So the really important question becomes, “How did our Christian forebears miss this? How could they get it so wrong? How could good Christian people, genuinely seeking to be faithful to God in Jesus Christ, become involved in such evil – and then seek to justify it biblically and theologically?”

Tearing the heart out of salvation
I think the answer to this question is devastatingly simple. It boils down to this: if you are in the slavery business, you dare not read the texts about liberation form slavery as though they have anything to do with this world. And so you spiritualise them. “slavery” and “liberation” become nothing more than “spiritual truths” – images that are drawn from this world but which only refer to the “heart”, or to life after death. Any reality to liberation from slavery becomes a reference to the hereafter – to another world, not to this one! What is salvation? “It’s pie in the sky when you die – and nothing more!” And if you’re not only slave owners, but also the Church, this is the anaemic story of salvation that becomes the dominant one.

That robs this life of meaning. It means that the world is ultimately godless and godforsaken. There is no “mighty God” – no Deliverer – who can take on the powers that enslave human beings in every possible sense. The best this god can do is to provide a divine exit strategy. Jesus’ mission is reduced from the enactment and proclamation of hope for this world (that this world is to become the Kingdom of God) to nothing more than a rescue mission – a “Let’s get the hell outa here!” strategy.

If that is true, then (a) small wonder we have concentrated on forensic models of atonement whose prime focus is on the state of the individual soul before God, rather than on the victory model which focuses on Christ’s triumph over all the forces that enslave: spiritual, physical, emotional, psychological, economic and political. Tom Wright urges that the victory model is the oldest and most dominant, and deserves the status of “first among equals”. At the end of the day, its power lies in the fact that it is the most comprehensive account of salvation, and most closely related to the gospel accounts of how we are saved and what salvation actually is.

The irony is that, when we choose forensic models because they are more easily spiritualised, we miss their rootedness in the liberation from slavery. Small wonder that they lose their power. Then we end up with a restricted notion of salvation, and end up wasting time and energy debating whether the doing of justice is actually a distraction from preaching the gospel! The most important question becomes, “If you die tonight, where will you go?” rather than “Are you experiencing Life in all its abundance in Jesus Christ right now?”

It further means that (b) the god whom we end up is a much smaller god than Yahweh, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Our mini-god is a punk. He (and this is very definitely a divinely-challenged “he-god”) hasn’t got what it takes to win the cosmic struggle for Life and salvation. Instead, he has to abandon the world he created to the Usurper – the Great Pretender. There isn’t a chance that this god can win the struggle against the Strong Man. The best he can do is rescue the few people who can be persuaded to follow Jesus and pin their hopes on heaven, and then nuke the rest of creation is a fit of pique. True, he can annihilate creation - but he can’t save it!

Where does that leave the world? It is godless and godforsaken – however much we dress it up otherwise. It means that human suffering is ultimately unimportant: it doesn’t provoke God to act now to save, but rather only to promise that “Things will be a lot better next life round!” That was Karl Marx’s gripe about the Christianity of his day. It justified oppression and kept the workers enslaved to their cruel capitalist masters by promising them a brighter future in the hereafter. That’s what he meant by “the opiate of the masses” – the satanic trick by which salvation – the promise of liberation from all forms of slavery and Life in all its fullness with God – becomes the means of making slaves comfortable with their chains.

But here’s the real rub: for as long as it makes it possible to tolerate any form of slavery or oppression as a follower of Jesus Christ, it makes the most trenchant atheist - a Karl Marx, for example – who struggles to change the world and who succeeds in liberating captives more compassionate and more powerful than the God who delivered up Jesus for our sin and raised Jesus from the dead for our salvation. It means that the best this world can hope for is to become the kingdom of Karl Marx, or Save the Children, or Amnesty International – and that’s still a darn sight better fate than to be left to its own devices by this mini-god who is insufficiently moved by the plight of human suffering and insufficnetly powerful to transform the reality he created. This is the god of slavers, who can afford to capitalise on god’s weakness and apathy, and create hell on earth. But it is not the God whom Jesus proclaimed was bring good news to the poor, freeing the captives, giving sight to the blind and letting the oppressed go free.

That’s the sort of blindness that being involved in slavery brought. It’s the sort of blindness that is a feature of structural sin - that leaves the Church in ideological captivity and makes it a sign of sin rather than salvation. If we want to understand structural (or “institutional”) sin - or what Paul calls “principalities and powers” - the place to look is at slavery. And if we want to understand how it is possible for followers of Jesus to shut out the deafening Word of Resurrection that God speaks, we need to look at how participation in the slave trade distorted our reading of Scripture. Instead of being the herald of the Good News, the Church was part of that from which the world needed saving. Hardly surprising, then, that it is the oppressed and enslaved people in this world who hear most clearly the liberating Word of the Good News. They understand – because it answers their deepest prayers. They act in the power of the Spirit – because they understand that “salvation” means to free the slaves and change the world. And they know that it is in the freeing of the slaves that we most deeply understand who it is that comes to us as our God and are freed ourselves to experience the Life of Liberation in Jesus Christ. That’s when slaves are freed and slave traders become hymn writers.

© Lawrence Moore March 2007