# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1863_S146
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

146 The Old Lutheran Teachers on Slavery.

the name of master or servant seems to be held disgraceful; for since baptism makes all men brothers, how does it befit one brother to call another brother a servant? — But he errs very greatly, in that he confuses Christian liberty with civil liberty. It is therefore to be known that man is to be considered according to a twofold state and relation. First, as a Christian and a member of God's household, who is concerned with the things of eternal salvation; and there, indeed, is the highest equality among masters and servants, for in Christ there is neither male nor female, neither servant nor free, Gal. 3:28. Yet there is a certain voluntary servitude, of which Gal. 5:13 says: Through love serve one another. And servile duties of this kind men would also have rendered to one another in the state of innocence, just as it is fitting that the younger obey the elder, the less experienced the wiser. In the second place, however, man is considered as a civil person, or insofar as he lives a civil life, which has to do with bodily and external things. Here there is a difference between free men and servants, where neither mastery increases Christian liberty nor servitude diminishes it; for it does not consist in that external relation, nor does it belong to civil rights, but to the kingdom of Christ, which is spiritual; and therefore servitude can coexist with Christianity and Christian liberty just as well as the dutiful subjection of children to their parents. Concerning the origin of servitude, the statesmen speak one way, the theologians another. The former hold, following Pliny in the 7th book of his Natural History, chapter 56, that the Lacedaemonians, those first among the Greek peoples (among whom servitude, according to the testimony of Herodotus in his 7th book, was unknown for a long period), invented servitude, and that it afterward gained the upper hand, in that victors kept for themselves those whom they had taken captive by hand (manu cepissent) and had not killed (servarent), whence they were called servants (servi) and bondsmen (mancipia); to which Horace refers in his Epistles, Book 1, Epistle 16, where it says: If you can sell the captive, do not kill him (vendere cum possis captivum, occidere noli); and so too the Apostle Peter, when he writes, 2 Pet. 2:19: By whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought into bondage. But the origin of servitude is far older than the theologians suppose, who call servitude a punishment for sin — and not without reason. For since man was created in the image of God, and it is God's nature to command, not to do what is commanded, it follows that it does not belong to man's nature that he should be a servant. And for this reason there was also, in the state of innocence, no dominion of men over men, since they undertook and accomplished everything of their own free will, in order to satisfy the will of the Creator. But after the Fall everything turned into its opposite, and gradually a dominion of man over man arose, and the distinction between master and servant