# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S107
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Dr. Hengstenberg on the Slavery Question. 107

which dreams of a universal human dignity because it ignores the Fall and the hideous devastation brought about by it, down through its manifold gradations to brutish dullness and stupor; which ignores the mysterious counsel of God resting upon the Fall, whereby he, as Agobard says, "raises some by all manner of distinctions, subjects others to the yoke of slavery"; which, in the psychological superficiality proper to the natural man, measures all men by one and the same standard, and fails to recognize that the relation of those who rule and those who serve has its basis in the peculiar characteristics of peoples; which overrates the significance of outward freedom, because it has not itself become partaker of the high good of inward freedom, and does not know how to value it, and falls under the Apostle's judgment: "they promise them liberty, while they themselves are the servants of corruption"; which, finally, knows nothing of the eternal goods and of the life beyond, and therefore attaches an excessive importance to the goods of this life, and has lost all sense for the understanding of the Apostle's word: "art thou called being a servant? care not for it."

Already through an event in primeval times, Genesis 9:25-27, we are guided, in the matter of slavery, to lift our gaze above human arbitrariness and injustice and direct it toward the divine dispensation — toward God's well-deserved judgments, which, when one does not violently withdraw from them but submits to them humbly and puts them to the use for which they are sent, are always at the same time a means of salvation. We must enter the kingdom of God through many tribulations. Slavery too is a gate to that kingdom, and everything depends only on opening this gate; then, behind the judgment, grace breaks forth.

In the New Testament slavery, no less than the relation of wives to husbands and of children to parents, is placed under the fourth commandment, Ephesians 5:21-23, 6:1-4, 5ff., Colossians 3. The relation, then, cannot be, as is now being preached, one that is in itself immoral. Otherwise Holy Scripture could not have recognized it as a divine ordinance. The slaves are instructed that behind their earthly masters they should perceive another Master, who has laid this estate upon them, and that in their earthly masters they should serve this Master willingly and joyfully — however much the earthly masters may make it hard for them to perceive, in their rule, a form in which his own is manifested. "Servants" — thus says Paul in Colossians 3:22-25 — "obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with eyeservice, as menpleasers, but with singleness of heart, fearing God. And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance, for ye serve the Lord Christ." And, as proof that even within the church the relation of master and slave is not something simply impermissible, the same Apostle says in 1 Timothy 6:2: