Update: 4/13/20
As for your male and female slaves, whom you can obtain from the nations who live around you, you may buy slaves from them. You may also buy slaves from the foreigners who are living among you, that is, from their families who are with you, children who have been born in your land. They may become your property. You may provide such slaves as an inheritance for your children after you, to hold as property, and make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your brothers among the people of Israel with harshness (Leviticus 25:44–46).“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to tell good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. He began to speak to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:18–21).
Jesus invoked the language of deliverance. It is from Isaiah 61:1–2. [North, Prophets, ch. 14] The prophet’s language promised longed-for deliverance. The jubilee year was the year of deliverance for the poor of Israel under the Mosaic law (Leviticus 25). [North, Leviticus, chaps. 23–31] It was the archetype of liberation, the restoration of the family’s land to those who had been dispossessed or sold into servitude.
The Hebrew Masoretic text does not mention sight to the blind. The Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) does. William Hendriksen mentioned an alternate reading of the Hebrew text, “to those bound opening of eyes.” But the Septuagint’s rendering is “to the blind recovery of sight,” just as Jesus quoted it. Jesus gave sight to the blind on several occasions. These miracles were literal fulfillments of the prophecy in Isaiah, as recorded in the Septuagint.
The phrase, “to set free the oppressed,” does not appear in the Hebrew Masoretic text, the Greek Septuagint, or the Aramaic Peshita. There is no obvious explanation for this discrepancy. Was this phrase Jesus’ comment on the text, offered without warning in the middle of the reading? If He had added to the text, some of His listeners would have recognized this discrepancy. This would have undermined His authority. But there was no objection. Did this scroll differ from the copies that we have today? This seems unlikely, given the Jews’ care in making exact copies and destroying imperfect ones. Did Luke add these words? Did some early scribe? I wish I had a definitive answer. I don’t.
The jubilee law authorized the inter-generational enslavement of foreigners (Leviticus 25:44–46). [North, Leviticus, ch. 30] Christ’s announcement here of liberty for the captives suggests that the end of the Mosaic law of permanent enslavement was at hand, along with the rest of the jubilee laws. It is on this basis, and I believe only on this basis, that abolitionism can be defended biblically by someone whose hermeneutic assumes that a Mosaic law remains in force unless it was annulled by the New Testament. In contrast, for those whose hermeneutic assumes that a Mosaic law must be reasserted in the New Testament in order for it to be valid, abolitionism remains a problem because of Paul’s Epistle to Philemon.
The fulfillment of the jubilee year by Jesus at the outset of His ministry made plain the liberating aspects of the rule of Christ in history. He announced His ministry with the reading of Isaiah 61, to preach deliverance of the captives. His intention was clearly the spiritual liberation of His people, and this leads to progressive maturity in the faith, which in turn is supposed to lead to liberation out of chattel slavery, if offered by the owner (I Corinthians 7:21b). [North, First Corinthians, ch. 8] We have our “ears pierced” (Deuteronomy 15:17) spiritually by Christ; we become permanent adopted sons of His household.
The legitimacy of lifetime heathen slavery and inherited slaves ended with Israel’s final jubilee year in A.D. 70. In principle, that jubilee event came with Christ’s announcement of the meaning of His ministry (Luke 4:16–21). But the development of this jubilee principle of release progressed for one generation until God destroyed Jerusalem, in order to destroy the liturgical and political foundations of the Jewish religious leaders who had refused to let their spiritual slaves go free. The leaders had rejected Christ’s message of final jubilee release, and so had most of their spiritually enslaved followers; in response, God destroyed their civilization. Jesus Christ was in principle an abolitionist, for He was the fulfillment of the jubilee year principle, the great year of release. His fulfillment of the jubilee year announced the advent of His New World Order.
Nevertheless, He did not verbally require an overnight (or seven-year) program of manumission or abolition. As is the case with many of the implicit social and economic principles of the Bible, Jesus established the principle of abolition, and He was then content to wait for His people to acknowledge it and put it into action in history. He waited for seventeen centuries.
Critics of Christianity continue to bring up the issue of slavery in their war against Christianity. They seek to make Christians feel guilty regarding Christianity's theological and historical legacy. Christianity unquestionably condoned and even sanctioned chattel slavery until the nineteenth century. They trace this judicial sanctioning of chattel slavery back to the Old Testament. In this way, they seek to create a sense of guilt and doubt in their targeted victims. They understand that guilt-ridden people are not effective opponents of the prevailing messianic social order. That the Christians failed for many centuries to challenge chattel slavery is a black mark in the history of the church. But to lay the blame at the doorstep of the Bible is either a mistake or an ideological strategy.
Without a proper understanding of the theological foundation and institutional functions of indentured servitude in the Old Testament, the reader will be baffled by several of the case laws of Exodus. Modern man's automatic negative reaction against the word “slavery” makes it imperative that the serious Bible student understand the biblical concept of servitude before he begins a study of Exodus 21; otherwise, he will be tempted to conclude in advance that these case laws do not apply today, that they were designed for use by “primitive desert tribes” rather than designed for use by all societies everywhere.
The case laws of Exodus begin with rules governing slavery (actually, temporary indentured servitude). This is appropriate, for two reasons. First, as I have written, the Pentateuch is structured in terms of the five-point biblical covenant model: sovereignty, hierarchy, ethics, judgment, and inheritance. Exodus, the second book, is concerned with the question of hierarchy. It asks this crucial question: “Which God should man serve?” The book of Exodus presents God as the God of history who delivers His people from oppression.
The second reason why the case laws begin with laws governing bondservice is that the Israelites had just been delivered out of permanent slavery. They were ready to hear about laws governing servitude. We should recognize the obvious: civil laws making slavery as oppressive as the system that had governed them in Egypt would not have been laws imposed by the God of liberation on a nation that had suffered years of unjust oppression. Thus, we should recognize that these laws were a loosening of the bonds of servitude, not a tightening. Furthermore, to ridicule the case laws of Exodus that govern bondservice is in effect a call for a return to Egyptian bondage, namely, bondage to the autonomous State. Bondage is an inescapable concept. It is never a question of ‘bondage vs. no bondage.’ It is a question of “bondage to whom?”
The Israelites had just been delivered out of bondage. The whole book deals with the theme of deliverance from bondage into sabbath rest. Thus, having just been delivered from slavery, God caught their attention by beginning the case law section with laws governing servitude. He confronts people “right where they are” in life. The Israelites were in the wilderness, in transition spiritually and culturally from Pharaoh's slavery to God’s servitude. Biblical servitude is one of God's authorized modes of transition from wrath to grace (blessing), both personally and culturally. Pagan slavery, in contrast, is one of God's ethically unauthorized but historically imposed modes of transition from grace to wrath (cursing) for His people: bondage in Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. Becoming a slave-master over God’s people is prohibited, yet God raises up such tyrants as a form of judgment against His people and the tyrants themselves (Jeremiah 25). What the New Testament says of Judas applies to slave-masters generally: “For the Son of Man indeed goes as it has been determined. But woe to that man through whom he is betrayed!” (Luke 22:22).
Biblically speaking, there can never be a release out of servitude as such, although there can be a release out of human slavery. Men serve one of two masters, God or mammon, meaning God or Satan. The great warfare in history between God and Satan is the war for the covenantal allegiance of men. Men's institutions reflect the nature of the servitude they have chosen: bondservice under God or slavery to Satan. Permanent slavery of man to man is the system that covenant-breaking man autonomously (self-law) establishes, thereby imitating Satan: a system of permanent tyranny. God publicly smashed this permanent slave system at the exodus. In contrast, hierarchical temporary bondservice of man to man under biblical law is the system that God has established for the reformation of covenant-breaking men, which in turn reflects His permanent covenantal rule. Indentured servitude always points to liberty, meaning covenant-keeping liberty under God. Covenant-keeping men are institutionally subordinated to God in terms of a law-order that progressively brings long-term prosperity and liberty (Deuteronomy 28:1–14). Servitude is inescapable, but the forced system of bondage known as indentured servitude is used by God to bring self-discipline and maturity to His covenant people. This temporary legal servitude of man to man reflected God’s judicial relationship to His people in the Old Covenant era, in which He delivered them from Egypt by placing them under His covenant, but one which was temporary. It would be replaced by a better covenant, Jeremiah announced: “Look, the days are coming—this is the Lord’s declaration—when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I established with their fathers in the days when I took them by their hand to bring them out from the land of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, although I was a husband for them. This is the covenant that I will establish with the house of Israel after these days —this is the Lord’s declaration. I will place my law within them and will write it on their heart, for I will be their God, and they will be my people” (Jeremiah 31:31–33).
When English-speaking people use the word “slavery,” they have in mind especially the West's Negro slave system, or perhaps some other system of permanent slavery. The word produces an immediate negative response. This is why it has been so difficult for Christians to discuss the Old Testament institution of slavery in a calm, analytical manner.
First, the only form of inter-generational slavery in the Old Testament was the enslavement of foreign heathens. The children of these slaves were the possession of the family that owned the parents (Leviticus 24:44–46). This slave law was abolished with the fulfillment of the jubilee year by Jesus (Luke 4:18–19). [North, Luke, ch. 6] Second, the other five kinds of slavery applied to Hebrews. To understand these, we must first understand that God was placing the Hebrews under a form of temporary indentured servitude, to test them, teach them, and provide them with the self-discipline necessary for spiritual and cultural maturity. Wherever there is sin, there must remain some traces of the institution of indentured servitude, although there is progressive release from the visible manifestations of this system as men and societies progressively conform themselves to the ethical terms of God's covenant (point three of the covenant model).What God established for a certain class of Hebrew citizens was more like a system of indentured servitude, at least for the Israelites in their dealings with fellow believers. Five forms of servitude for Hebrews existed in ancient Israel.
1. Debt servitude for up to almost six years (Deuteronomy 15:12–15)
2. Voluntarily servitude for up to 49 years (Leviticus 25:39–41)
3. Up to 49 years as a slave in a resident alien's household (Leviticus 25:47–52)
4. Restitution slavery for convicted criminals (Exodus 22:3)
5. Voluntary lifetime servitude in a Hebrew's household (Deuteronomy 15:15–16)
I discussed these five forms of servitude in Chapter 4 of my book, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (1990), pp. 125–37. The chapter is titled “A Biblical Theology of Slavery.” It is over 90 pages long. I refer you to an online PDF of that book. (http://bit.ly/gntools) Most of this chapter comes from that chapter.
The Mosaic law’s system of indentured servitude stands in stark contrast to the system of permanent slavery in classical Greece. Those humanists who appeal to Greece as the supposed cradle of Western civilization, equal (and probably greater) in importance to Christianity, have a public relations problem with this fact. The city-states of Greece's “glorious” era after the seventh century B.C. allowed citizens to enslave each other permanently. They could sell their children into slavery in some cities (e.g., Thebes). Socrates (according to Plato, who was the most successful ghost writer in Western history), complained against the practice of Greeks' enslaving other Greeks captured during wartime. Indentured servitude functioned in the Hebrew commonwealth as a means of dealing with men who were unwilling or unable to manage their own affairs. Indentured servitude provided tools, supervision, education, food, shelter, and some of the comforts of prosperity to those without capital. It also provided security. It was a way of building a capital base. Jacob served Laban for seven years in order to earn Rachel as his wife (Gen. 29:20). He became, in effect, an indentured servant. The point is, he waited. He was a future-oriented man. He was also an independent man who amassed a great deal of capital in his 20 years of service (7 + 7 + 6) to his corrupt uncle and father-in-law.
In his book, Politics of Guilt and Pity (1970), R. J. Rushdoony summarized several aspects of the Old Testament’s system of indentured servitude: “In the biblical form, slavery was rather a form of bond-service. The term ‘servant’ or ‘slave was used to describe anyone owing service to another, permanently or temporarily. Thus, David and Daniel described themselves as God's servants (Ps. 27:9; Dan. 9:17), and the virgin Mary described herself as ‘the handmaiden of the Lord’ (Luke 1:38). Biblical slavery was a form of feudal association and protection. The stealing of men for purposes of sale was strictly forbidden by law, so that what is popularly known as slavery was outlawed (Deut. 24: 7), and Paul restated this condemnation and associated ‘men-stealers’ with ‘whoremongers,’ homosexuals, liars, perjurers, and heretics (I Tim. 1:10)” (p. 23). He added that this is not to say that indentured servitude is morally wrong. It is simply an inferior way of life that should not be preferred by Christians. “From the biblical perspective, therefore, slavery is not itself intrinsically evil; the failure to live as free men, the dependency or incompetence of a slave mind is, however, regarded as an inferior way. The believer cannot revolt against his situation, but he cannot become a slave in good conscience, voluntarily, for any form of slavery is an infringement of Christ's total rights over him (I Cor. 7:22, 23)” (p. 24).
A considerable percentage of the case laws of Exodus 21–23 is devoted to a defense of the biblical concept of penal restitution. Convicted criminals are supposed to make restitution payments to their victims. There is no restitution system in today’s penal systems anywhere on earth. This is the “dirty little secret” of those atheists, pietists, and antinomians who ridicule the biblical system of slavery: they have accepted the horror of unproductive imprisonment in place of the biblical institution of penal labor servitude, out of which an industrious slave could purchase his freedom.
If the criminal in ancient Israel was financially unable to pay his victim, his sale to a slave-buyer was what provided the victim with his lawful restitution payment. The prison system has always been the Bible-hater's preferred substitute for the Mosaic law’s system of law-restricted labor servitude. In short, in order to enforce the Bible’s principle of economic restitution to victims by criminals, there always has to be a more fearful support sanction in reserve: death, imprisonment, whipping, banishment, or indentured servitude. But only one of these reserve sanctions raises money for the victims: indentured servitude. The critics of biblical law just never seem to remember to mention this fact.
The thief is always fully liable economically to make restitution for his criminal acts. “If he has nothing, then he must be sold for his theft” (Exodus 22:3b). It was the threat of compulsory labor servitude (bondservice) that reinforced the Old Testament's judicial sanction of economic restitution from criminals to their victims. If a poor man committed an economic crime against someone, he had to repay his victim; he did not pay restitution to the state, nor did the state pay restitution to his victims. The punishment therefore fit the crime, for the restitution payments were proportional to the losses that the crimes had inflicted. There was no respect of persons in biblical law: the same sanction applied to all, rich and poor. If the criminal was unable to pay his victim, he was sold into slavery in order to raise the money necessary for repayment. This sale for cash was possible only because a buyer expected to profit from the transaction. He expected to gain a net return from the future productivity of the slave. He was therefore willing to capitalize this expected future productivity by means of a cash payment to the victim.
The criminal's term of service was limited in three ways. First, the extent of the damage he inflicted on his victims determined the amount of restitution that he owed to them. This established a ceiling on the price the slave-buyer was asked to pay. The worse the damage, the higher this ceiling price. Second, the price that the victim received from the buyer was proportional to the time the criminal was expected to serve as a slave. He was allowed to buy his way back into freedom; thus, the lower the initial purchase price, the sooner he could become a free man with any given level of economic performance. Third, because he was allowed to redeem himself at any time by paying the owner the pro-rated value of his remaining term of service (Leviticus 25:50–52), it follows that the more productive he became as a slave, the sooner he could become a free man. The length of the period of enslavement was inversely related to the ethical performance of the criminal: the better his performance, the shorter the sentence. The punishment fit both the crime and the program of rehabilitation through restitution.
The modern prison system is the product of the perverse logic of humanism. Humanists do not believe in making eternal restitution to the God of the Bible. They reject the doctrine of hell and the lake of fire. Nevertheless, the doctrine of hell is an inescapable concept. The question is: “Who will impose it, man or God?” The prison is the modern humanist State's equivalent of hell: an unproductive place of confinement from which the prisoner cannot legally buy his freedom. The prison is a widely acknowledged institutional failure, but humanists cannot bring themselves to abandon it, because in order to do so, they might be forced to reconsider their denial of the biblical principle of restitution to victims, as well as its economic concomitant, legalized bondservice. They much prefer the slavery of unproductive, taxpayer-financed prison sentences to the Bible's system of bondservice, a bondservice which points all too clearly to God's eternal punishment of unrepentant rebels who refuse to accept God's exclusive system of restitution: the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ.
“Serving time” in prison is today preposterously referred to as “paying one’s debt to society.” In fact, the reverse is true: society (taxpayers) must finance the criminal’s period of incarceration. Taxpayers and criminals alike pay a debt to the state, for it is the state’s bureaucratic functionaries who become the recipients of the tax money. The state, as the operational god of this age, receives its restitution payment. But in today’s humanistic theocracy, victims receive nothing except subpoenas to testify in court and bills from the tax collector. In the Old Testament, “serving time” meant serving other men productively in a compulsory employment system that benefitted everyone: victims, slave-buyers, criminals who learned obedience and work skills, and society at large, which always needs sanctions against criminals to protect itself. Today, the sanctions are themselves criminal: they penalize the victims a second time (tax bills for prisons). The victims are robbed twice. They are threatened with violence if they refuse to pay: first by the robber, then by the tax collector.
The question of heathen slavery then arises. Did this same ethical and cultural goal of personal independence govern the enslavement of the heathen in Israel? Were they also to become the beneficiaries of God's covenant blessings? Could they also find freedom in Israel? Was their enslavement permanent? The Hebrews repeatedly violated God's requirement that they annihilate the Canaanites. Instead, the tribes made local Canaanites pay tribute to them, which was only legitimate in distant foreign wars (Deuteronomy 20:11). [North, Deuteronomy, ch. 48:C] The Canaanites of Ephraim’s land paid tribute to them, but were not driven out (Joshua 16:10). The same was true of Manasseh (Joshua 17:12–13; Judges 1:28) and Zebulun (Judges. 1:30). The Hebrew tribes preferred to receive tribute rather than continue the war. The result, as God had predicted, was repeated apostasy. The Hebrews began to follow the gods of Canaan. For this sin, God repeatedly placed them in slavery to foreigners, whose societies were based on worshipping the demonic “first cousins” to the gods of Canaan.
Once the land was cleared of Canaanites, Israel was then supposed to use indentured servitude only to subdue evil “within the camp’—repayment for debt and criminal restitution—and, in the case of foreign slaves, to remove them from bondage to foreign gods and to place them under lifetime slavery as a means of evangelism. Foreign heathen adults and the children of resident aliens were to be redeemed—bought out of bondage to demons and placed under the authority of godly households (Leviticus 25:44–46). The jubilee slave law unquestionably taught that it was legal for the Hebrews to import slaves from foreign lands. These outsiders were moral slaves because they were in subordination to foreign gods. They had been judged externally by God, having been sold to Hebrew families by their military conquerors or else by their nations’ own slave merchants.
Because pagan slaves could be purchased for a lifetime of service, and because their children would become the property of the owner’s heirs, they would have commanded higher purchase prices than Hebrew indentured servants. The present price of any asset is its expected net return over its expected term of service, discounted by the prevailing market rate of interest. The longer its expected net return, the higher the price. The pagan slave could legally produce a lifetime of service; his market price would have reflected this fact. Add to this the future value of his heirs' productivity, and we can safely conclude that pagan slaves would have commanded a higher market price than Hebrew indentured servants. An indentured servant could legally produce a stream of income for a much shorter period unless he voluntarily sold himself into permanent servitude (Exodus 21:5–6), something that the buyer could not have safely predicted at the time of purchase. There was no long-term market for non-criminal Hebrew servants. In contrast, Hebrew criminals could be purchased for a price sufficiently high to pay their victims; thus, they could be placed into lifetime slavery, just as if they were pagan aliens. Still, there were greater risks associated with bringing a convicted criminal into a household. This would have depressed their prices somewhat.
A family could lease a neighboring piece of property for up to half a century, but then it reverted to the original family. We know that large families are a sign of God's covenantal blessing (Psalm 127:3–5). The larger that Israel's families grew in response to the nation's covenantal faithfulness to God, the smaller each family's inherited land holding would become. This made it economically impossible for any branch of a family to amass a large number of heathen slaves during periods of God's covenantal blessings, for it was illegal to amass permanently the large tracts of land that were necessary for the support of slaves. Thus, at the beginning of each jubilee year, when all land holdings reverted to the heirs of the original land-owners, most heathen slaves would have been released by their owners, whether or not the law allowed them to retain ownership of them indefinitely. They were allowed to buy the land in these walled cities, where the jubilee land laws did not apply (Leviticus 25:29–33). Those heathen who remained in slavery would have been parceled out among inheriting Hebrew children when the heirs returned to their share of the family’s traditional lands, thereby reducing the possibility of large-scale slave gang labor. It would also have increased the likelihood of manumission: freedom for slaves whose economic productivity, without large land holdings, would have dropped sharply. In other words, by reducing Israel’s per capita capital (land), the jubilee land tenure law would have reduced labor productivity for all those who remained in Israel. This was the whole idea: to encourage covenantal dominion outside the land by encouraging Hebrew emigration.
Slavery clearly was not supposed to become a major institution in Israel. Land and labor are complementary factors of production. The larger the population grew—a promised blessing of God—the more valuable land would become; the more valuable the land became, the less would be the return from net economic rents produced by slaves. Free laborers and tenants would be willing to work for low wages for as long as they remained in the land of Israel; slavery would offer no important economic advantages to rent-seekers. The primary economic goal in such a land-starved economy would have been to add to one's land holdings, not to one's supply of slaves. Without cheap land, or increasingly productive land, permanent agricultural slavery is unlikely to be maintained long term. Under circumstances of increasing land scarcity, the reasons for holding slaves would then be more consumption-oriented than production-oriented: slaves as status symbols, i.e., consumer goods rather than producer goods.
What we must understand from the beginning is that the whole economic thrust of the jubilee land tenure laws, when coupled with God’s promise of population growth for national obedience, was to push the Israelites out of the land, and therefore outside the geographical boundaries where the jubilee land law, including its slave laws, operated. The jubilee law’s goal was world missions and covenantal dominion, not the permanent enslavement of heathens inside tiny Israel.
Yet even in the case of Leviticus 25, God's goal was always liberation. These pagans were being purchased out of their covenantal slavery to demonic religion. They were being redeemed (bought back). They were being given an opportunity to hear the gospel and see it in operation in households covenanted to God. They were being given an opportunity to renounce paganism and thereby escape eternal slavery in the lake of fire. Obviously, if the legal provision that allowed Hebrew families to retain the lifetime services of heathen slaves, as well as to transfer ownership of the heathens' children to the Hebrews' children, is severed from the jubilee land tenure law, then the economic possibility of establishing slave gangs becomes a reality. The legal restriction against the permanent amassing of land disappears. Thus, to argue that the lifetime slave-holding provisions of Leviticus 25 were not an integral part of the jubilee land tenure system is to argue that the history of chattel slavery in the West was in principle sanctioned by the Bible. I am arguing the opposite: the lifetime slave-holding provisions of Leviticus 25 were an integral aspect of Israel's Jubilee land tenure laws) and therefore when God annulled the latter, He also annulled the former. By transferring legal title to His kingdom to the gentile world (Matthew 21:43), and by visibly annulling Israel's legal title to the land of Palestine at the time of the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, God thereby also annulled the Hebrew land tenure laws. What had been a God-approved spoils system for a unique historical situation—the military conquest of Canaan by Israel—became a dead letter of biblical law after the fall of Jerusalem.
The Christian gospel liberates men from the tyranny of sin. Jesus’ pre-crucifixion ministry was laying the foundations of the gospel. What was definitive—liberation—was broader than the internal life. Jesus was extending Isaiah’s prophecy to the whole world and its institutions. The jubilee year had come definitively, not just for Israel, but for redeemed mankind everywhere. Jesus was laying the foundations for liberty. This included economic freedom. The poor would be the beneficiaries.
The doctrine of perpetual slavery is nothing special when compared to the doctrine of eternal damnation. In fact, perpetual slavery is an institutional testimony to the reality of eternal damnation. It should direct the slave’s attention to the fate of his eternal soul. (It should also direct the master's attention to the same issue.) Slavery was designed by God to be a means of evangelism in the Old Testament. The question can therefore legitimately be raised: “Is it a means of evangelism in New Testament times?” For instance, why did Paul send the runaway slave Onesimus back to his master Philemon (the epistle to Philemon)? But anyone who dares raise this obvious question today faces the verbal wrath of Christian pietists and antinomians everywhere, not to mention secular humanists.
God punishes deceased covenant-breakers forever, not in order to reform them, but because they refused to be reformed by God’s saving grace in history. Hell is not a reform school; it is a place of eternal retribution. God therefore holds ethical rebels in perpetual slavery. God is in this sense the Cosmic Slaveholder. They do not work in order to please this Cosmic Slaveholder; they are stripped of the power to work, for labor is an aspect of dominion. They serve Him exclusively as recipients of His incomparable wrath. We may not like the idea, but this is what He says He has done and will do. No one ever escapes God's eternal slave system if he departs from this life as a moral slave to Satan rather than a moral bondservant to God. There is no “underground railroad” out of slavery in hell. This is why Christians offer the gospel of salvation to rebels against God: to enable them to escape eternal punishment and eternal slavery to the Sovereign Master of the eternal fiery whip.
In history, we are either involuntary slaves to God or voluntary bondservants to God. Both conditions are permanent beyond the grave. We either serve Him willingly in this lifetime, openly acknowledging our status as unprofitable servants in His covenantal household, or else beyond this life we will experience perpetual lashes from His judgmental whip as eternal slaves without hope. There is no middle ground. There is no alternative scenario. Being a bondservant to God is the essence of freedom. Being a slave to God is the essence of hell. Choose this day which condition of servitude you prefer.
God works through history, bringing theological anomalies to light, pressuring His people through historical forces to rethink their theological presuppositions. There is no better proof of this than the history of slavery. Lifetime chattel slavery was wrong in principle from the day that Jesus read in the synagogue (Luke 4), but it was not so great an evil that God felt compelled to reveal to the New Testament authors that they should stand against it publicly, making abolition a major dividing line between Christians and non-Christians. Slavery was not among the adiaphora—things of little importance—but it was not a major ethical issue, either. It was like representative constitutional government: implicit in the principles of biblical self-government, but not a top-priority theological issue in the first century. The church and the world could deal with other more pressing issues first.
When the economic means of abolition appeared—modern industrial capitalism—abolition could then become a top-priority issue in history, and did. The moral anomaly of slavery became too expensive an institutional anomaly for a Christian-influenced civilization to sustain. It was capitalism that made it too expensive. How? By lowering the price of alternative social and economic relationships. This economic process of social price competition combined with the newly popular philosophy of republican self-government (which was also an inevitable though delayed outgrowth of Christian social philosophy) to remove moral legitimacy from slavery. The productivity of capitalism's mass-produced cotton gin on the plantation could not offset the moral and political effects of this erosion of slavery’s moral legitimacy.
God still operates in history, making clear to His people what His principles are, and enabling them to conform their lives to His word. It takes time, but eventually we learn. He does not have to spell out everything in His inspired revealed word in order for us to work out His principles in our lives and in our societies over time. We have the Ten Commandments and the case laws.
Those who follow the Enlightenment tradition of tracing modern freedom and culture back to classical Greece and Rome seldom come to grips with the economic foundation of classical civilization: slavery—a problem that Enlightenment philosophes never overcame with respect to either classical slavery or modern colonial slavery. Historian M. I. Finley is correct: “Anyone who clings to the cause of neo-classicism or classical humanism has little room for manoeuvre” on the subject of slavery. It was the late-medieval scholastic philosophers, specifically the School of Salamanca, which also pioneered free market economics, who tried to check the evils of the new system of slavery and the wars of colonial conquest.
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