The First Word

 I always find that the best time to engage with the latest intense internet drama is after everyone else is bored with it and no longer talking about it.

Blogging, you see, is like making french toast. You may think that it will be better with the subject coming piping hot out of the oven of twitter wrath. I'm sure you can almost smell it. But no, french toast and opinion pieces have this in common; they are far better once the substance we are working with is good and stale. We get to work with a firm medium, bringing it back to life; firm, full, and delicious.

If you try the same with fresh hot takes, you wind up with sad, spongy, opinion pieces with no chew.

I have one in mind, of course. I'm not just musing on generalities, so let me get you up to speed.

There was a certain man, who was giving a lecture at Bugenhagen. His lecture was on our discomfort with hierarchy. It was a full and ranging lecture, but in the course of the lecture there was a 5 minute segment that dealt with the topic of slavery.

The lecturer gave out that we cannot say that slaveholding is a sin, because there are laws given governing the relationship of masters to slaves; that it is technically a thing permitted.

I have the assurances of multiple terminally online people that things got very messy from there. The man found himself among thieves, who took very serious aim at his reputation, and made claims that he had said or espoused things that he did not, and then used it to cast aspersions on the recipients of the lecture.

There are certainly some groypers and similar unsavories running around, but this was not a dog whistle and I know a good handful of those who were present. I assure you, most of them are not dogs. Maybe a couple.

This is a long preamble to say that; I agree with the overarching thesis of the lecture, and I thought that it said a lot of good things, but although I do not think there was malice behind it, I do think that the point about slavery is an overreach, and that to say slavery is permitted is to stare sightlessly past the many evidences that it is not God pleasing.

The model for slavery in the old testiment is much like the model for divorce; it comes about because of sin. Slavery is permitted amongst Christians in the old Testament in the following cases:

1. You can sell yourself to pay debts

2. You can become a slave because you have comitted a crime

3. You can become a slave through being a prisoner of war

Further, slaves are subject to the Jubilee, so there is no lifelong slavery in God's law. The children of the slave are born free. In addition, the are rules about how you must treat your slaves. You must allow them to worship. You must allow them to rest on the Sabbath. You must treat them as members of your household.

We have these laws because of the hardness of our heart, and because there needs to be accountability and redress of grievances. The world is full of evils, and the law is there to act as a curb and guide.

Given the above rules, American chattel slavery is clearly right out; it is a sin to hold men and their children in bondage where they have no debt or sin to recompense. The plantation owner breaks the 5th and 7th commandments with every breath. There is no jubilee. There is no justice. There is no mercy.

Now perhaps you will say: "Aha! But slaves can be taken from among the nations of the unbelievers!" To which I will respond by striking you about the head and face while I remind you that we are on the other side of Pentecost. It may be that you have a separate nation now for the sake of good order and unity, but God does not. The covenant with Abram, Isaac, and Jacob is fulfilled, and the new covenant extends to the gentiles. You cannot take a slave from a tribe that is outside of the atonement, because Christ came for the gentiles. 

And yes, Cleetus, gentiles also means the people you don't like. Yes, Cleetus, this means that intermarriage is a phenomenon that has real world consequences for the men and women with the courage to undertake it, but the sacramental union of marriage--the picture of Christ's union with his church--between christian men and women of different pigmentation is equally pleasing to God in heaven. No, Cleetus, you don't get to ask any more questions. 

Most obviously, however, slavery is a condition which God repeatedly, explicitly defines himself against. I will not pull every citation, but I'll pull one you should already know by heart.

The first word of the 10 words in Exodus:

I am the LORD your God who led you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

In the world's first true constitutional monarchy, with the only king that men should seek, God in defining who he is as king to his people, emphasizes this; he brought us out of the house of bondage. Everything that follows are rules for sons to live in the house of their father. Not rules for slaves.

This is obviously a foreshadowing of the final release from our bondage to sin, but the temporal implication is clear. Our kinsman Redeemer did not make us to be slaves. He made us to be sons, and then suffered humiliation and death that it should be so.

Christian nationalism must include the rejection of ethnic nationalism by default, because it is faith, not earthly father that determines your nationality in the eyes of the lord.

Christian nationalism must also encompass the rejection of the confederacy, lost cause shenanigans, and anyone who uses the 4th commandment as a shield to cover the wickedness of his fore-fathers. The 4th commandment does not require you to beat your breast in the street because great-great-grand pappy had slaves, but neither does it command that you defend the "peculiar institution" in which he partook. Hell, some of my ancestors were horse thieves, you don't see me reenacting it because the 4th commandment requires me to honor them. Ancestor worship is a pagan past-time.

God did not make us to be slaves. Not slaves to our enemies. Not slaves to one another. Not slaves to sin. The world has always been full of slaves, in all of the above avenues; this is the fruit of the brokenness of our world, the hardness of our hearts, and the love of evil. Do not pretend the fruit is not as wicked as the causes.