THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AS SLAVERY:

PAUL'S SUBVERSIVE METAPHOR

1. GEOFFREY TURNER
Article first published online: 28 MAY 2010
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2265.2010.00591.x
The author 2010. Journal compilation Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes
Registered 2010
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The Heythrop Journal

Volume 54, Issue 1, pages 112, January 2013
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Abstract
Recent scholarship has shown chattel slavery in the Roman Empire to have been a deeply
oppressive experience. Paul knew that reality well and used the language of slavery
metaphorically in Galatians and Romans to describe humanity's subjection to sin. However,
he also made a remarkable shift in his use of the metaphor to indicate a new form of slavery
to God which brings freedom, thereby subverting conventional ways of understanding
slavery.
In Paul's sense, slavery is an ineluctable part of human existence in which we have a choice
of being a slave to sin or a slave to God. Becoming a slave means giving up all claims to
status and relates to Christ's humble-mindedness in Philippians. The slave is also a model
of faithfulness, comparable with God's faithfulness to Israel and Christ's faithfulness to the
mission given him by his Father. Being a slave (in Paul's sense) is at the heart of the
Christian life, exemplifying the obedience of faith, for it is through this faithfulness that
we become righteous.
Philosophical discussions about slavery were by no means uncommon in the ancient world,
especially among the Stoics. As only the educated, leisured class wrote philosophy,
precisely the ones who benefitted economically from slavery, the standard approach was to
justify the economic status quo, as Aristotle did, by supposing that many people in Greek
society were by nature inferior in ability and needed to be guided as slaves by wiser
men. To keep a long history of this discussion short, it can be said that this harsh doctrine
was ameliorated in the ancient world only by the Stoics who spoke of slavery
metaphorically as well as literally, so that they could distinguish between the literal, chattel
slavery of the body and the metaphorical slavery of mind or human spirit. Slavery of the
body was not such a bad thing, they suggested, if one still had freedom of the spirit. Peter
Garnsey sums up the Stoic position under four principles:

Slavery according to the law, institutional slavery, is an external, beyond our

control, and therefore not worth caring about;

2
Slavery as a condition of the soul is both within our control and all-important. So
we move to the paradox:

3
Only the wise or good man is free and independent; the inferior/foolish or bad man
is dependent and slavish. And finally:

4
The wise are very few, while virtually all of humanity is inferior. Most men, then,
are (moral) slaves.1

It is unlikely that many slaves were impressed by this argument, both because few would
have had the opportunity to read philosophy and also because their actual condition did not
match the theory. Garnsey calls slavery the most degrading and exploitative institution
invented by man2; it was far from being an irrelevance even if the mind of the slave was
free.
As is well known, Paul too wrote of slavery both literally and metaphorically. Literally,
because there were clearly slaves and slave-owners in Paul's churches. The Letter to
Philemon addresses one of these instances. It has traditionally been understood that
Onesimus, who had been supporting Paul in prison, was a run-away slave who had taken
Paul's message of Christian freedom literally and fled his master, but who was now being
sent back to Philemon with this letter. Whether those were the precise circumstances that
produced the letter (and that may still be the case), Philemon is being urged in this letter to
take Onesimus back as a Christian brother.3
Elsewhere, especially at the end of Romans, Paul names individuals who, many
commentators think, might well have been freed slaves. In the next generation PseudoPauline letters began a moral discussion of chattel slavery in Christian literature by giving
advice to slaves and slave-owners on how to behave, but there is nothing here to threaten
social revolution, no suggestion that slavery itself might be a bad thing:
Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order
to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. Whatever your task, put yourselves
into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, since you know that from the Lord
you will receive your inheritance as your reward: you serve the Lord Jesus Christ.
On the principle of reciprocity, Paul added:

Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, for you know that you also have a master in
heaven (Colossians 3.2224 and 3.1; see also Ephesians 6.59 which looks derivative of
Colossians).4
These passages may not be from Paul but they mesh with Paul's own advice on how to be a
good citizen:
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities those authorities that exist have
been instituted by God. It [the state] is the servant of God to execute wrath on the
wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of
conscience . Pay to all what is due to them - taxes revenue respect honour .
(Rom 13.17 abbreviated)
However, Paul only gets interesting when he begins to speak of slavery metaphorically, of
being a slave to sin for example, and it is to this use that we shall turn shortly. The way in
which he developed the metaphor, as we shall see, had the potential to subvert the whole
idea of what slavery might mean, though later generations of Christians did little to adapt
the metaphor to the social reality of chattel slavery in the Roman world by actually
recommending its abolition. Paul has been criticized for tolerating slavery but no one else
in those centuries, Christian or pagan, recommended its abolition apart from Gregory of
Nyssa.5

SLAVERY IN PAUL'S WORLD

Every citizen in the Greco-Roman world understood the reality of slavery in a way that we
do not. While using prisoners of war as captured slaves had been commonplace, Greece and
Rome transformed it into an institutionalized system of large-scale employment of slave
labor in both the countryside and the cities.6 It has even been suggested that Roman wars
became slave hunts. It has been estimated that over 30% of the population of Roman Italy
at the beginning of the Christian era were slaves, had been freed from slavery, or were of
slave origin, though the figure was about half that elsewhere in the Empire.7 This
extraordinary figure shows that everyone knew what slavery was like as everyone would
have known slaves and, apparently, very many would have lived in slavery for a time at
least and often from childhood.
In some ways we get contradictory pictures and so a disputed overall picture of what
the experience of slavery was like. At times it does not appear so bad. Slaves could save
money, perhaps to buy their freedom eventually or to start their own business. As slaves it
was possible for some to be employed in a range of skilled trades, to be appointed
household or financial managers, or to act as a tutor or governess (paidaggos) to the
master's children. To give slaves hope and to head off mass revolts by those without hope,
slaves could expect to be freed by the age of thirty if they managed to reach that age!8
Freed slaves were often awarded Roman citizenship and occasionally one might rise high in
society like the Roman governor Marcus Antonius Felix mentioned in Acts 2324.9 At the
least slavery could offer a roof and meals, so that sometimes those impoverished by debt
would sell themselves into slavery, though that would have been a desperate thing to do.

Such was the emphasis of historical scholarship until recently. Since about 1990 we have
seen a much harsher interpretation of slavery in the Roman world, which is no longer based
on state law, which is thought to represent an idealised situation, but on sociological
evidence like inscriptions, which is more likely to reflect social realities. Bartchy claimed
that slaves would be free by the time they were thirty but other evidence suggests that
slaves should not be freed before they were thirty and, as average mortality was about thirty
years, a slave would be worn out and literally past their sell-by date by then. In fact a
slave's life expectancy would have been lower than the general average of thirty, so
probably only a limited number of slaves would have lived long enough to be
manumitted.10 A slave actually became a non-person with no legal rights, who was often
treated brutally and in practice could be killed almost with impunity. They could not marry,
hold property or give evidence in court.11 Any children born in slavery became the property
of the master.12 The penalties for running away were severe and, if involved in rebellion,
could involve crucifixion. Jane Glancy has shown how slaves, and particularly women
slaves, were the sexual chattels of their owners.13 Most slaves in the Italian peninsula seem
to have worked as unpaid labourers in the fields of the estates of their masters, who had
confiscated the land in lieu of debt payment by peasants who had been conscripted into the
army and could no longer pay the rents while they were stationed abroad. Some slaves
escaped and some succeeded in disappearing, but most stayed-put out of fear.
If foreign slavery was all but ubiquitous in Italy and Rome, it was less common in the
Middle East where the land was worked by serfs in hock to landlords, rather than slaves.
And Jews had their own laws which may have made it less likely that they would enslave
fellow Jews, though circumcised slaves in effect became members of the Jewish household
where most worked as domestic servants.14 As a Jew, Paul might not have seen slavery
wherever he went, but many of his gentile converts in his churches in Greece and Asia
Minor were likely to have been slaves or manumitted slaves. So, Paul's use of the language
of slavery to clarify aspects of his gospel came from an observation of a harsh social reality.
He also knew slavery to have been a foundational experience in the history of his own
Jewish people.

PAUL'S METAPHOR OF SLAVERY

Paul sets the tone in Galatians 2.4 where he speaks of false brothers secretly brought in as
spies to enslave us. Slavery is here clearly a bad thing, reflecting the social reality of
enslavement in the Roman Empire, and this is what feeds Paul's negative use of the
metaphor in the central passages of Galatians 4 and Romans 6 and 7. In this metaphor, what
is it that we are enslaved to? The first suggestion is the elemental spirits of the world (ta
stoicheia tou kosmou, 4.1). It is we who are enslaved and behind this lies a narrative in
which we are involved. Minors, before they reach the age of legal adulthood, have no
more rights than slaves. They remain under a legal guardian the paidaggos of 3.24 and
25 until a date set by the father. Here in Paul's implied narrative, the child growing into
an adult has the law as his guardian, while the parallel narrative of the slave becoming
free has the stoicheia as his master. Yet Paul fails to keep these two images child and
slave separate, as he says that we have both been enslaved to the stoicheia and redeemed
from the law. We seem to be both children and slaves. However, Paul's main point is that

the father's appointed date has now come. We are minors who have become adult heirs, and
slaves who have been freed and adopted into the family as children. Paul merges the
metaphors when he says,
So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God (4.7)
In speaking about minors and slaves, Paul may perhaps have been thinking of the two
categories of Jews and gentiles but, if so, he has not been clear in differentiating them. At
any rate, the power of the stoicheia and the authority of the law over us have been ended.
Who exactly, then, is Paul's we, and is it the same as the I of Romans 7.725? There is
no general agreement among critics about the identity of the I of Romans 7, but as with
Galatians 4 there is an implied narrative in the text for that I. Sin, we are told, has been in
the world [from the time of Adam], but I didn't know it until it was brought to life by the
law [from the time of Moses]. The law is holy and just and good because it comes from
God (see also Rom 9.4) but it aroused all kinds of sinfulness (Paul's example is
covetousness) in me and I died. For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment,
deceived me and through it killed me (7.12). But Paul also writes, I was once alive apart
from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died (v.9). At no time
was Paul himself alive apart from the law, so when he uses the first person here he cannot
be writing about himself specifically. He has in fact just sketched the history of the Jewish
people in one respect: Adam/sin to Moses/law to the present time, a time of spiritual death.
So I seems to stand for the Jewish people. At the root of the problem, however, is not the
law but sin (vv.712). From verse 14 Paul speaks about sin, which affects the whole human
race not just the Jews. He continues to speak of the law but in this passage the law could
just as well refer to a natural moral law, not the Torah specifically. Paul is not being
autobiographical here, he is writing about the history and experience of the human race but
from the standpoint of a Christ-believing Jew. Yet the experience of conflict and moral
inadequacy expressed in vv.1520 includes Paul. It sounds as though Paul knows what it is
to have coveted, even though he knows it to be wrong.
So the we of Galatians 4 and the I of Romans 7 are closely related. Both are about the
experience of the whole human race but observed from a Jewish point of view, and both are
related to the idea of slavery.
Galatians 4 continues with the identity of our slave master established as the stoicheia, who
by nature are not gods (vv.89). However, when Paul returns to the theme of slavery at
v.21, the slave master has become the law, at which point he moves into his famous
allegory which relates the slave woman, Hagar, to her and Abraham's son, Ishmael (not
actually named here), flesh, the Sinai covenant and the present-Jerusalem whose inhabitants
are children of slavery. Paul contrasts this line of descent with that of Abraham's other
son, Isaac, who is associated with Sarah, promise, the Jerusalem-above and freedom. Paul
affirms that she [Sarah] is our mother (v.26) with the emphasis on our. Paul and his
readers are children of the promise who must not submit again to the yoke of slavery
(5.1). So his readers have evidently been freed from a form of slavery which, in the context
of the historical circumstances which lay behind this letter, was a slavery to the stoicheia
and to the law, that is the Torah.

Our other central passage is Romans 67 where the metaphor shifts to a slavery to sin. As
this is contrasted with freedom, it suggests that slavery, as the opposite of freedom,
represents any kind of oppression. Paul later speaks about captivity, using the model of
imprisonment to represent oppression generally (7.23). He then develops further
associations with sin, where being a slave to sin leads to impurity, iniquity, shame and
death:
Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves
of the one you obey, either of sin, which leads to death
you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater
iniquity
When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. So what advantage
did you then get from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is
death.
the wages of sin is death. (6.16, 19, 20, 21, 23).
In order to be freed from this sin that holds us captive and from all that follows from it,
there must be a death. This death takes place in baptism; a metaphorical rather than a literal
death, of course there is no death by drowning here but still a real death to one's old life,
which opens the possibility of newness of life (6.37). Then, in the next chapter, Paul
shifts his imagery and speaks of dying to the law, which certainly implies that he and his
readers had been enslaved to the law precisely the language he had used in Galatians.
you have died to the law through the body of Christ
But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are
slaves not under the old written code but in the new life of the spirit (7.4, 6).
It is in this passage at v.5 that the three forms of the oppression of humanity in Paul's
argument at last appear together: sin, law and death, with flesh also used to characterise
the state of human life before baptism.
While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in
our members to bear fruit for death (7.5).
Paul later reminds his readers that they have received a spirit of adoption to be made
children and heirs, for you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear (8.15).
And finally in his last use in this letter, he applies the metaphor of slavery to the whole of
creation. Creation has been subjected to futility in a bondage to decay and groans in
pain, waiting for the revealing of the sons [NRSV: children] of God (8.1922).
In all this Paul speaks of slavery in a purely negative sense. Slavery is oppressive in a
variety of ways and we need to escape from it. Given the nature of chattel slavery, this is

what you would expect, even if he is not speaking here of chattel slavery but the slavery to
sin with its various associations with flesh, law, impurity, iniquity and death. Slavery is bad.
Even the Stoics had accepted this; their advice was to free the mind/spirit so that physical
slavery seemed relatively unimportant, an expression of a neo-Platonic anthropology no
doubt. But in the middle of all this Paul does something remarkable. He begins to speak of
slavery in a positive way, albeit a metaphorical form of slavery. This inclination to speak
positively about slavery is all the more remarkable in the light of the fresh interpretation of
chattel slavery that has been outlined by Horsley, Callahan and Smith,15 and summarised by
Bryon,16 an interpretation that paints a bleak picture indeed with few redeeming features of
what it was like to be a slave.
Paul makes this move in Romans. In the earlier letter all the positive language is of
redemption and adoption, while slavery is there seen as being entirely negative: So you are
no longer a slave stand firm and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery (Gal 4.7; 5.1).
In Romans, however, an alternative type of slavery is outlined to which we should submit.
Paul now contrasts slavery to sin with slavery to obedience and to righteousness (Rom
6.16), and to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted (6.17). Paul's readers in
Rome are told that they should now present their members as slaves to righteousness for
sanctification (6.19). But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the
advantage you get is sanctification, and the end/goal (telos) is eternal life (6.22).
This shift in Paul's use of the language of slavery tends to go unremarked but its intended
effect is to make his readers think about slavery in a new kind of way.17 He subverts
traditional ways of thinking about slavery as a form of oppression. Paul implies that
everyone owes obedience to something or someone:
Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves
of the one who you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience which leads to
righteousness? (6.16).
It now seems that being a slave is an ineluctable dimension of human existence. In Paul's
sense, this is equally true for slave masters as much as anyone else, even though they were
enjoying the benefits of chattel slavery. All unbelievers, all the unbaptised are slaves of sin
and are controlled by the stoicheia. In this discussion, Paul long antedates modernity, the
world of Feuerbach and Nietzsche, where all traditional gods were to be displaced and man
set free at the apex of the world, with his God-like species-being and his self-realised
bermenschlichkeit. For Paul, however and here he speaks as a Jew of his time we all
have to be obedient to someone or something. Theologically two forms of obedience are
possible, which are each determined by their objects: either sin, law, impurity and death,
which is characterized as life in the flesh; or God, righteousness, sanctification and eternal
life, characterized as life in the spirit. Since the writing of Romans, slavery can no longer
be thought of as simply being a bad thing, because what we might call theological slavery
is an unavoidable condition of human existence. Paul is telling his readers that there is a
form of slavery which is not oppressive, because it brings freedom, the freedom to do what
we truly desire (7.1424), the freedom not to be condemned (8.1). We can speak
paradoxically of a slavery of freedom.

This way of thinking about slavery metaphorical, theological, but real means that Paul
can speak positively of himself and his fellow believers as slaves of Jesus Christ (Phil 1.1,
Gal 1.10 and Rom 1.1, though English translations often soften this by speaking of
servants). So Paul has become a slave to those in the Corinthian church (2 Cor 4.5) and
Christians, who have themselves a new freedom (from sin), must through love become
slaves to one another (Gal 5.13). Paul even says that he has made himself a slave to
everyone so that he might win more of them to the gospel (1 Cor 9.19), though this
introduces a highly rhetorical passage which shows how he would not put any social or
racial barrier in the way of winning converts.
The foundation for this positive understanding of enslavement is, of course, Christological.
Paul may or may not have been the original author of the verse in Philippians 2.511 but he
certainly subscribed to its ideas; they have become his words. Christ Jesus was in the form
of God (en morph theou) but lowered/emptied himself to take the form of a slave
(morphn doulou labn), being born in human likeness. The last clause strongly suggests
that being human entails being a slave; the two go together. And in verse 8 becoming a
slave leads to humility, obedience and death, though the death, a literal death on a cross,
eventually leads to exaltation. If Christians are to live in Christ as Paul repeatedly says
they do, they identify themselves with him through baptism (Rom 6.3f.) not only as a
son/daughter of God, as a child and heir (Rom 8.1417), but also as a slave. In one sense,
then, to be a slave is simply part of what it is to be Christian so far as Paul is concerned. To
understand the practical effect of this, we must look more closely at Philippians 2 which is
about humility/humble-mindedness.
Philippians is principally about ethics, not in the sense of proposing rules for proper
behavior something Paul (and Jesus) rarely did but in outlining predispositions and
values that lead to proper behavior. We have to live worthily (Phil 1.27) and Paul is
concerned here with how we set our mind (phrosun).18 Christians are to be of one mind
(Phil 1.27 and similar phrases in 2.2 and 3.15). What sort of mindedness should this be?
Humble-mindedness (tapeinophrosun, 2.3). Let the same mind be in you, Paul writes,
that was in Christ Jesus (2.5 - and 4.2), and in the hymn that follows this is expressed as
the mindedness of a slave (2.67).19 Then in the next chapter Paul contrasts this with the
mindedness of those who are set on earthy things (hoi ta epigeia phronountes, 3.19),
enemies of the cross of Christ whose end is shame and destruction. Our citizenship,
however, which is in the heavenly places, is characterized by humble-mindedness, humility,
abandoning all claims to status, and slavery, because in slavery it is not possible to make
any claim to status at all. A slave was legally a non-person. In all this Paul is in continuity
with the teaching and example of Jesus: take the lower place at table for the first shall be
last and the last first (Mark 10.31); all who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who
humble themselves will be exalted (Luke 14.11); whoever wishes to be first among you
must be slave of all (Mark 10.43);
The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called
benefactors. But not so with you; rather the greatest among you must become like the
youngest, and the leader like one who serves (Luke 24.2426).

Jesus and Paul are both in their own ways proposing behavior designed to subvert
conventional patterns of social behavior in the Roman world and any other social world.
We have here a transvaluation of values that 1800 years later Nietzsche pushed, and with
some success, in the other direction. Both Rome and Nietzsche despised Christianity and
held it in contempt for its feeble, untermenschlich morality of compassion, forgiveness and
humility; what Nietzsche called its slave-morality. 20
Jesus certainly used the language of slavery and service to characterize the life of
discipleship, but Paul might have had a further reason for developing his idea of what it is
to be a slave.

THE SLAVE AS A MODEL OF FAITHFULNESS

The letters that speak about slave/slavery in a metaphorical terms are, as we have seen,
Galatians and Romans, and it is in these same letters that we find Paul's notion of
justification by faith, which is at the heart of Paul's theology. Of course, there are debates
about how central justification is in Paul's thinking and it has to be admitted that he only
works on the idea in Galatians and then in Romans, with a passing mention in Philippians.
In the first of these letters it is a crucial idea for developing a theological rationale after the
Apostolic Council for the inclusion of gentiles in the Church as gentiles, and the idea
becomes central in his most theologically profound letter, Romans. Certainly justification
by faith has had an immense influence on subsequent theology, particularly in the last fivehundred years, which is why recent attempts at a so-called new and non-Lutheran
interpretation of Paul have had to re-position the relative importance of justification in
Paul's thinking and they have had to be clear what Paul meant by it.
In this context an important shift has been suggested about how we should understand
pistis in Paul.21 Key texts are Galatians 2.16 and Romans 3.212 which read in NRSV:
we know that a person is justified not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus
Christ (ean m dia pistes Isou Christou). And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so
that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing works of the law, because no
one will be justified by works of the law. (Gal 2.16)
But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed the
righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ (dia pistes Isou Christou) for all who
believe (eis pantas tous pisteuontas). (Rom 3.21f.)
The central issue is whether dia pistes Isou Christou is an objective or a subjective
genitive. Traditionally it has been thought to be an objective genitive and has been
translated through faith in Jesus Christ as in NRSV above. Alternatively many now think
it a subjective genitive to be translated through the faith of Jesus Christ, where pistis
means trust or loyalty or, better, faithfulness.22 Douglas Campbell has argued that pistis in
Paul should be rendered consistently as faithfulness, provided it works in context, a less
cerebral understanding than is normally given to faith.23 This works remarkably well in
most instances. One's response is less likely to be determined by technical arguments than

by the effect of the overall understanding one gets from rereading Paul using faithfulness
for pistis, and especially from rereading Romans and Galatians. Space does not allow us to
cover all instances here but consider how Gal 2.16 now looks (in addition, using counted
righteous for the more usual justifieddikaioutai, and giving ean m its more natural
meaning of unless):
We [are Jews who] know that a person is not counted righteous from works of the law
unless through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, and we have remained faithful to Jesus
Christ so that we might be counted righteous from the faithfulness of Christ and not from
works of the law, because [as scripture says] no one will be counted righteous from the
works of the law.
And Romans 3.212 reads as:
But now the righteousness of God has been disclosed apart from the law, but born witness
to by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through the faithfulness of Jesus
Christ for all who are faithful.
A third text from his introduction to Romans shows how naturally faithfulness represents
Paul's thought:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who is
faithful, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed
through faithfulness to faithfulness; as it is written, The one who is righteous will live from
faithtfulness (Rom 1.16f.)
This reflects something that we can find in the Book of Psalms and Paul's use of Psalms in
his citations in Romans.24 The LXX version of the Psalms that Paul used for his quotations
(or a Greek OT that is close to the LXX) contains all the central concepts and vocabulary
that Paul needed for his doctrine of justification (or how one becomes righteous). Indeed it
can be seen that the Psalms themselves have a doctrine of righteousness. In the first place, it
is God who is righteous. He demonstrates this by forming a covenant with his elect people,
by remaining faithful to it and by vindicating them in the end, even if they are now
suffering at the hands of the nations. In the second place, the Israelites are God's righteous
ones through having entered into a covenant with God. Yet it was all too possible for them
to fall away from that covenant individually or collectively, so how were the Israelites to
remain righteous? According to the Psalms, it was through demonstrating their faithfulness
by avoiding idolatry and by keeping God's law. So they were counted righteous through
their faithfulness, and the mark of that faithfulness was faithfulness to the God of Sinai and
his law.
Paul has re-presented this doctrine in the two opening chapters of Romans, first to condemn
the gentiles for their decadent behaviour even though they do not have the law, and then to
condemn Jews for not keeping the law that God had given them. Paul has then produced a
catena of quotations mainly from the Psalms in the passage 3.1020 to show that no one,
Jew or gentile, keeps the law, so all are deserving of the wrath of God. To use Luther's

language, this is an expression of works-righteousness in which all are destined to fail

according to Paul, though not the Psalmist.
However, at 3.21f. Paul has radically transformed the doctrine of righteousness that he
found in the Psalms by christologising it:
But now the righteousness of God has been disclosed apart from the law the
righteousness of God through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all who are faithful.
We are still to be counted righteous through our faithfulness but it is now faithfulness to
Christ, with the law not abrogated but falling into the background as it is no longer
especially relevant. There is nothing inherently wrong with the law after all, Paul regards
it as a gift from God (Rom 9.4) but its time is up. The advantage of this new measure of
faithfulness is that it is open to gentiles, who do not have the Torah, as well as Jews.
It is at this point that Paul's understanding of slavery comes together with his theology of
righteousness through faithfulness (a better expression, I suggest, than justification by
faith). In Paul's account, Christ was the righteous one who remained faithful to the end, and
who has become the model for our own faithfulness. After all Paul offers his readers the
same prospects that Jesus experienced: suffering and death, but also resurrection and
eternal life (Rom 8.11, 17, 18).
This excursus has been to show that in Paul it is Jesus who is the model of faithfulness to
God, the new pathway for remaining righteous before God, a model we are invited to
emulate. Elsewhere in Romans, Paul characterises faith/faithfulness as obedience when he
speaks of the obedience of faith (1.5; 16.26), and this is language he associates with being
a slave:
Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves
of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads
to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have
become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and
that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness (6.1618).
In the previous chapter, Jesus Christ has already been presented as the model of obedient
faithfulness:
Therefore just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of
righteousness leads to justification [literally: righteousness of life] for all. For just as by one
man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by one man's obedience the many will
be made righteous (5.1819, NRSV).
Righteousness, faithfulness, obedience and slavery are all tied together in these chapters. I
suggest that Paul has introduced the metaphor of slavery into this context, not because it is
any kind of aberration, but for the positive reason odd as it might seem to us in our social
situation that a slave is an exemplar of what it is to be faithful and obedient, which Paul

has chosen as the highest of virtues before God. Being obedient, then, is as ineluctable a
dimension of being human as is being a slave. The fundamental issue is: who shall we obey,
to whom shall we be enslaved, to whom shall we be faithful? Sin or God? And in place of
God we can speak of his emissary Jesus Christ, the prototype of obedience, faithfulness and
the slave:
Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to
be held onto, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of
death even death on a cross (Phil 2.68).
That is not Paul's last word, of course, for Jesus is then exalted and all knees bend to him
and all confess him to be Kyrios. Here we clearly see the christological grounding for the
Christian life as a life of faithfulness, obedience, slavery and humility. Humility having the
sense of not claiming status.
Once more, Paul may have got his image of the slave from the Psalms. Doulos occurs 56
times in the LXX Psalms, though English translations hide this by invariably translating it
as servant (apart from Ps 104/105.17).25 Who is the slave of the Lord in the Psalms? Five
times it is David, once Abraham, once Moses, and once Israel. Sometimes it is the Psalmist
himself but usually it refers to those (Jews) devoted to the Lord (Kyrios). This pattern
reflects the general use of slave as a metaphor in the Old Testament.
Given this rich interlocking of language and imagery in his theology, it is easy to see why
Paul did not condemn chattel slavery, especially as no one else of his generation, Christian
or pagan, ever expressed the hope of abolishing the institution of slavery.26 Nonetheless
Paul (probably) encouraged his slave-readers to grasp the opportunity of freedom if it were
offered, notwithstanding his encouragement to those in Corinth to generally maintain their
current social standing in view of the impending crisis (1 Cor 7.26).27 Yet for Paul the
obedient slave remained a model of faithfulness, in which being a slave to the Lord-of-all
leads to righteousness and life. In speaking of slavery in this positive, albeit metaphorical
way, he shifted the parameters of how the first Christians might think about slavery. On the
one hand, this may have made Christians slow to realise that chattel slavery should be
abolished but, on the other hand, it introduced a striking pattern of moral behaviour into the
practice of how one might be a Christian. Each of the baptised must become a slave, must
give up all claims to status and privilege, must offer themselves in obedience to God and in
service to each other. The Christian life should be a life of selflessness and fidelity; a life, in
Paul's sense, of slavery. This is not peculiar to Paul, it can be found in the teaching of Jesus
in the Synoptic Gospels, in Luke's Mary, the handmaid of the Lord (h doul tou kyriou),
and in John's footwashing ceremony (13.3ff.) that became ritualised in later Christian
liturgy. Obedience and fidelity have provided a moral framework for Christian marriage,
religious orders, missionary work, education and care for the sick and the poor over the
centuries. Slavery is at the heart of what it is to be a Christian.
Footnotes

1. 1 P. Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: CUP, 1996),

p. 133.
2. 2 Ibid. p. 5.
3. 3 Richard Horsley disputes that Onesimus was ever a slave at all, but vv.1516
suggests that he was. For Horsley's discussion see Paul and Slavery: A Critical
Alternative to Recent Readings, Semeia 83/84 (1998), pp. 17882.
4. 4 See also 1 Timothy 6.12, Titus 2.910 and above all 1 Peter 2.1820, probably
from the second-century, which pushes the Pauline advice even further: Slaves,
accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind
and gentle but also those who are harsh. For it is a credit to you if, being aware of
God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly if you endure when you do right
and suffer for it, you have God's approval because Christ also suffered for you,
leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps.
5. 5 P. Garnsey, op.cit. pp. 805. In his conclusion (p. 240) Garnsey writes, Gregory
of Nyssa's lively attack on slave-owning as an aspect of the sin of pride is unique.
Slave-owning, it is clear, was a structural element of Christian as well as pagan and
Jewish society and was accepted as such by Church leaders. And his final sentence
is, It will surprise no one that the hero of my narrative is Gregory of Nyssa who,
perhaps uniquely, saw that slavery is a sin (p. 243). The other notable exception
from the norm, according to Philo, was the Essenes.
6. 6 M. I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Viking Press,
1980), p. 67.
7. 7 O. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1982), p. 354, though he depends on Finley, p. 80.
8. 8 S. S. Bartchy, Slavery (New Testament), Anchor Bible Dictionary, VI, 6573,
especially p. 70f. On manumission in Rome see Garnsey, op. cit., pp. 97101.
9. 9 M. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem (London: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 120f.
10. 10 R. A. Horsley, The Slave Systems of Classical Antiquity and their Reluctant
Recognition by Modern Scholars, Semeia 83/84 (1998), p. 48ff. Probably most
slaves who were freed would have been manumitted by testament at the death of
their master.
11. 11 C. Hezser, Slaves and Slavery in Rabbinic and Roman Law in Rabbinic Law in
its Roman and Near Eastern Context, ed. by C. Hezser (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2003), pp. 133176.
12. 12 P. Garnsey, op. cit., p. 1.

13. 13 J. A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford: OUP, 2002).

14. 14 See Leviticus 25.3953 and the general discussion in R de Vaux, Ancient Israel
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), pp. 825. See also Goodman p. 228f. In Slaves
and Slavery (see note 11) Catherine Hezser's broad judgment is that there was no
great difference in the status or experience of slaves in Roman and Jewish society.
While the OT says that Jewish slaves (but not non-Jews) must be freed in the
seventh year or at the Jubilee, she thinks (like Roland de Vaux, see above) that these
were ideals that were not often put into practice. However, in another article, The
Impact of Household Slaves on the Jewish Family in Roman Palestine, Journal for
the Study of Judaism, Vol XXXIV No. 4 (2003), pp. 375424, she suggests that
Jewish slaves might have had a rather gentler experience as a member of a Jewish
household.
15. 15 See the Introduction to the double issue of Semeia 1998, pp. 115 by A. D.
Callahan, R. A. Horsley and A. Smith.
16. 16 J. Bryon, Paul and the Background of Slavery: the Status Questionis in New
Testament Scholarship, Currents in Biblical Research 3 (2004), pp. 116139.
17. 17 Dale Martin in Slavery as Salvation: the Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline
Christianity (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990) takes up this point when he says, Paul
sides with those on the bottom of the social scale, and, in a move perceived as
radical in his day, he calls on other higher status Christians also to give up their own
interests and to identify themselves with the interests of those Christians of lower
status. Paul does not advocate social revolution; but he does deconstruct the
presuppositions that make hierarchical structure unassailable and Paul undermines
the ideological supports for that [patriarchal] structure with his labor and rhetoric
(p. 148). But Martin's aim here seems to be no more than to restore Paul's reputation
against those who have accused him of failing to oppose slavery as a social
institution which provides the economic basis for a particular form of social
hierarchy.
18. 18 Aristotle thought there were five ways in which the human mind can grasp the
truth, three theoretical ways: nous, epistm and sophia; and the two practical ways:
techn and phronsis, the last of which is moral prudence or practical wisdom
which guides our actions so that the appropriate ends of human life may be secured
(Nicomachaean Ethics, VI, 38, 1139b15 1142a30).
19. 19 For an interesting discussion of how to understand and translate this passage see
P. Doble, Vile Bodies or Transformed Persons? Philippians 3.21 in Context,
JSNT 86 (2002), pp. 327.
20. 20 It is all the more surprising, then, when Dale Martin claims that Paul used slavelanguage as a model for his own leadership in the Church: Surprising as it may
seem to modern readers, Paul's slavery to Christ did not connote humility but rather
established his authority as Christ's agent or spokesperson, op. cit., p. 147. This

highly questionable judgment may result from Martin's narrow focus on 1

Corinthians 9.
21. 21 See D. A. Campbell, The Quest for Paul's Gospel (London: T & T Clark
International, 2005), pp. 903 and R. B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: An
Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3.14.11 (Chico CA:
Scholars Press, 2001).
22. 22 For the two sides of the debate see R. B. Hays, PISTIS and Pauline Christology
in Looking Back, Pressing On, ed. by E Elizabeth Johnson and David M Hay, vol 4
of Pauline Theology (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), pp. 3560 for arguments for
the subjective genitive (or D. A. Campbell, op. cit., pp. 208232), and for the
objective genitive J. D. G. Dunn, Once More: Pistis Christou in the same volume
pp. 6181, or more briefly in the more accessible The Theology of Paul the Apostle
(Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), pp. 37985.
23. 23 D. A. Campbell, The Quest for Paul's Gospel, chapter 9 The Meaning of Faith
in Paul's Gospel, pp. 178207. Campbell puts the ideas of this earlier chapter to
particular use in his important rereading of justification in Paul in The Deliverance
of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Eerdmans: Grand
Rapids, Michigan, 2009), especially pp. 6109 and 83847.
24. 24 For a much fuller account with supporting arguments, see my article The
Righteousness of God in Psalms and Romans, Scottish Journal of Theology, July
2010.
25. 25 It is worth noting that Paul's use of doulos probably covers a wider range of
meaning than chattel slavery. There are three words in Greek (and a fourth if we
were to discuss hypretas) that could be used of one who owes obedience to a
master. Paul never uses pais even though it is used a number of times in LXX Isaiah
and translates ebed as in 42.1. So it seems that for Paul doulos covers pais, someone
who is not strictly a chattel slave. Even though diakonos is not used in the LXX
apart from Esther and Proverbs (four times only), the word is used in Pauline letters
(including Colossians and Ephesians) but it covers a range of meaning where it is
best translated as deacon/deaconess, minister or agent. Paul uses it of Roman rulers,
Christ, himself, and servants of Satan, but always of one who is obedient to a
superior. Doulos perhaps has the more specific sense of one who not only owes
obedience but also cannot claim rights or status.We might also note that Mk 9.35
and 10.44, and also Mt 20.267 show that diakonos and doulos could be used
interchangeably by the latter part of the first-century, at least for a Jewish writer.
The Marcan verses show that the same saying of Jesus has been remembered and
translated in two versions, one with diakonos and one with doulos. Matthew records
a poetic parallelism which uses the variant words in successive lines.When thinking
about slavery in the NT we must certainly try to detach ourselves from the particular
horrors of the African slave business of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
something which seems to be especially difficult for writers in the United States.

26. 26 Richard Horsley, The Slave Systems of Classical Antiquity, Semeia 1998, p. 59
comments that, it must be recognised that taking a stand in favour of abolishing
slavery in Greek and Roman antiquity would not have occurred to anyone. Slavery
was part and parcel of the whole political-economic-religious structure. The only
way of even imagining a society without slavery would have been to imagine a
different society.
27. 27 R. A. Horsley, Paul and Slavery: A Critical Alternative to Recent Readings,
Semeia, 1998, pp. 1827, convincingly argues for the RSV's translation of the
difficult 1 Corinthians 7.21: Were you a slave when called? If you can gain your
freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity, against the NRSV's Even if you can
gain your freedom, make use of your present condition now more than ever.

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