# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1863_S187
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A More Recent Lutheran Theologian on Slavery. 187

...reasons of the context to be the correct one) and also 1 Pet. 2:18. The
Apostle finds this relationship already in existence and shows how the
power of the Gospel must prove itself in the individual even within it.
Not in the individual's resisting slavery, but in the curse of servitude
becoming, through willing obedience, a blessing. The Gospel does not
abrogate the outward consequence and punishment of sin in such a way that
it first waits to see whether something good can be made of the now
unfettered, perverse heart. Indeed, it does not even say to the Christian
as slave: break your chains; rather, it breaks the chains itself, by
taking the master's harshness away in the fear of a higher Master,
extinguishing the servant's resistance in willing obedience toward him
who is Lord of both master and slave. Outward slavery is just as little a
product as it is a hindrance of the power of evangelical truth. Truth
first makes room for itself; whatever, among external things, does not
then cohere with its essence falls away of itself. It penetrates to the
root of the dead tree and, with new vital power, strikes off the withered
leaves. Human wisdom cleans the hard trunk of its withered leaves, so
that its ugliness may only be seen the better. But how one has been able
to designate the consciousness of "universal (?) human dignity and human
rights"* as the doctrine by which the Gospel abolished slavery — how one
has been able to call this doctrine a property peculiar to the Gospel — I
do not understand. Heathen antiquity possessed this insight long ago.
"Are they slaves? No, human beings. Are they slaves? No, companions. Are
they slaves? No, fellow servants (conservi)," says Seneca. Good maxims,
proposals for right lordship and right service ("serve freely, and you
will be no slave," says Menander) — antiquity does not lack these; but
this whole insight was unable to abolish slavery. What heathendom could
not get beyond: "Every free man is bound to one law, but the slave to
two, to the law and to his master" — and wherein slavery remained
slavery precisely there, Christianity abolished it, in that it gave to
master and slave alike one Redeemer, in whom only brotherly love holds
good, in whom there is neither slave nor free (Gal. 3:28; Philem. 16),
but all are only one in Christ Jesus. Could the Apostle, faced with such
freedom, not have counseled rather remaining in earthly servitude? Or
must he not at least have counseled that (1 Cor. 7:21) when someone
wished to abuse the essence of Christian liberty for the freedom of the
flesh? That the ancient church (cf. Ignatius, in his letter to Polycarp,
ch. 4) did not interpret that passage merely out of a perverse
asceticism, as it did, the words of Theodoret on 1 Cor. 7:21 can
sufficiently teach: "This hyperbole he did not set down as a general
rule, but in order to move men not to flee slavery under the pretext of
religion." And the master remained master and the slave slave, even when
they had become brothers in Christ."

*) The question mark is Harleß's own. The Editors.

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