Last time, we looked at the first of three rhetorical questions Paul asks in Romans 6-7. In answering the question of whether we should continue sinning since sin prompts God to act graciously, Paul develops his argument that that we have died with Christ and since Christ’s death destroyed sin’s power, sin has no power over us. Now in today’s passage, he tackles the second question: If we are, as Paul argues, free from the law, does that mean we can sin all we want? He answers this using a different image, one rooted in the Exodus and the very origins of the Law of Moses.
Text
[6.15] What then? Should we keep on sinning since we are are not under law but under grace? Absolutely not. [16] Do you not know that when you present yourselves as slaves to someone for the sake of obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or obedience, which leads to justice? [16] But thanks be to God that you who were sin’s slaves are now obedient from the heart to the type of the teaching with which you were entrusted, [18] having been freed from sin you became enslaved to justice. [19] (I am speaking in human words on account of your limitations.) For just as you presented your bodyparts as slaves to impurity and lawlessness, which led to more unlawlessness, so now you present your bodyparts as slaves to justice, which leads to sanctification.
[20] For when you were sin’s slaves, you were ‘free’ where justice was concerned. [21] So then, what kind of fruit did you gain from those things about which you are now ashamed? For their end is death. [22] But now, being freed from sin and enlsaved to God, the fruit you gain leads to sanctification, and its end is eternal life. [23] For the wages owed for sin are death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Experience
Paul is often confusing, but here it’s less to do with his writing style than a confusing guiding metaphor. After a passage all about our participation in Christ and freedom from the power of sin and death, the implications he draws now are not that we have moved from being enslaved to being free (as in Galatians 5.1) or from being enslaved to being heirs (as in Galatians 4.7), but rather from being enslaved to being … enslaved. How might we understand this train of thought? And how might it have hit with his original audience, remembering that it would seem that many were either presently or formerly enslaved?
Encounter
Everything external seems to fall away here. Paul is directly addressing his readers, either directly, or by incorporating them into in the first person plural (’we’).
Explore
Today I really only have one big question: What’s Paul doing with the slavery imagery here? As has become a recurring theme in this series, we need to bridge two ancient horizons — the Roman sociopolitical context in which we was writing and the Jewish religious context in which he was operating.
Slavery in the Roman Empire
As we’ve seen previously in the series, there is reason to believe that Paul’s audience in Rome was largely made up of freedpersons and slaves (Kruse 280, Eberhart),* and that Phoebe, the woman presenting the letter to them, was herself a former slave (Eberhart). So this is serious imagery Paul is using here.
Slavery was ubiquitous in the Roman world, with enslaved persons accounting for one third of the Empire’s population by even the most conservative estimates (Eberhart). In that context, a world without slavery would be akin to us imagining a world without fossil fuels; even people like Seneca who were morally uncomfortable with the institution simply couldn’t imagine a viable alternative. It was simply the energy on which the world ran.
It’s also important to remember, however, that slavery in the ancient Roman world worked very differently from that in our own society’s recent history. There was no racial ideology behind it and slaves were not understood to be ontologically inferior to free persons. Enslaved persons had no rights and were in effect ‘socially dead’, understood to be property not persons. But anyone could theoretically become enslaved, and any slave could be freed; freedpersons were even granted a form of citizenship and often became wealthy. So ‘social death’ could always become ‘social resurrection’ (Eberhart).
Complicating this dynamic even further is that even free citizens weren’t ‘free agents’ in the way we think of freedom today. Again, Roman society was based in a patronage system, a hierarchy of honour and power, in which everyone (up to and including the Emperor!) was understood to be someone’s client and therefore not truly free to do whatever they pleased (Eberhart).
I think all this helps to explain Paul’s imagery here, such as the jarring juxtaposition of themes life/death and freedom/enslavement, and the confusing idea of being freed from one kind of enslavement to enter into another.
Slavery in Judaism
When we think of slavery in Judaism, we immediately have to think of that tradition’s founding myth, the Exodus, which tells the story of God’s dramatic intervention to free an enslaved people (Keesmaat & Walsh 122). But in this story, the Hebrews are not freed to their own devices, but immediately enter into a covenant with God (the Law of Moses), a covenant which took the form of an Ancient Near Eastern vassal treaty. This treaty included substantial protections for slaves, which were grounded in the Hebrews’ own history as enslaved persons.
While Paul does not explicitly mention the Exodus here, the theme of slavery and the movement from one kind service to another, all in the context of a question about the Law of Moses, makes it advisable to keep the Exodus story in the back of our minds (Eberhart, Keesmaat & Walsh 122).
Slavery in Romans 6
While it’s important not to gloss over slavery with the less problematic language of service, I think this is a place where it helps to do so in order to understand what Paul is saying. (And I feel justified since even Paul is aware that his metaphor doesn’t quite work (6.19, cf. Keesmaat & Walsh 122).) As we saw earlier in this series, in the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds, society, politics, and religion were all fundamentally about power and allegiance. The big question was not ‘What do you want to do with you life?’ but “Whom or what do you serve?” Not ‘Who am I?’ but ‘Whose am I?’ And, by Paul’s logic, this “universalizes the condition of slavery” (Tonstad 200).
So what he’s saying here is that, despite our illusions of personal autonomy, we’re always acting in service to something (Keesmaat & Walsh 122). And, echoing the ‘Two Ways’ rhetoric from the Wisdom tradition, that thing we serve can either lead to sin and death, or to justice, holiness, and eternal life. The choice is not slavery versus freedom (though again Paul uses that language in Galatians), but to whom or what one will be enslaved: Who will be our master (Nanos 320). And, as Kruse notes, Jesus himself uses the language of enslavement to sin (John 8.34) (Kruse 280).
Christians uncomfortable with the language of obedience really protest too much. For we cannot call Jesus our Lord and not expect to do what he says. And Paul’s writings are filled with the language of obedience (six times in Romans alone!). Paul also began the letter by calling himself a slave of Jesus. But this is not blind obedience to a tyrant, but obedience to the humble way of Jesus, which establishes justice and true peace in the world (Keesmaat & Walsh 122). None of this minimizes the shock of the enslavement imagery, but it does contextualize it.
Challenge
As we saw last time, Paul is working within the conventions of Jewish Apocalyptic, and so he envisions sin here not as the sum-total of the many ways we miss the mark in our relationships but as a spiritual force engaged in a power-struggle with God. While this language is powerful and I think useful, we need to remember that apocalyptic language is always heightened and highly symbolic, revealing hidden truths through often wild imagery. And I don’t think it’s out of line at all to see this sin-as-spiritual-power idea here as symbolic and revelatory of what contemporary social theory and criticism call “structural” or “systemic” injustice (Eberhart; Keesmaat & Walsh 122), and social contagion.
The ways human societies (’the kingdoms of this world’) work make it virtually impossible to live justly. This is even more the case in our society today with its global, energy-sucking, top-heavy economy. There is so much that is out of our control. But here, Paul calls us take control over what we can, and become slaves to justice as much as we can.
Expand
This discussion reminds me of some wise, if controversial, words from one of my favourite 20th-century theologians, Archbishop Michael Ramsey. Asked about the spirit freedom at the heart of the ‘Sixties, he responded:
As Christians we must be the sworn foes of persecution, of arbitrary imprisonment, of racial discrimination, of crippling poverty and hunger. We shall throw ourselves into these causes of freedom in the name of Christ; and our Christian discipleship will be tested by our practical concern for our fellows. But we shall be aware that while these issues are easily stated in terms of freedom from, awkward questions arise when we go on to questions of freedom for. (Freedom, Faith, and the Future 15)
The interpretation of Romans 6.15-23 that has emerged in this study fulfills the responsibilities of this ‘Expand’ step by reminding us of this tension. Freedom is wonderful, but comes with an uncomfortable question of what we will do with it. Here Paul insists that in being freed from the power and authority from sin (really, from ourselves) through our participation in Christ, our freedom now exists in service to Christ’s way, which is the way of faithfulness, justice, and peace, for all. Freed from the letter of the Law of Moses, we are now free to live in service to law of the Spirit.
Summary & Conclusions
After establishing that we have died to sin through our faith in and baptism into Christ so that sin no longer has power over us (6.1-14), Paul now switches to the image of slavery and service. Since we are no longer under sin’s domination, we are no longer slaves to it. But in our wonderful, beautiful but fallen world, our lives are always going to be in service to someone or something. So, if we are no longer slaves to sin and the self, what will be ‘slaves’ to? Our calling as Christians is to live in service of God’s justice and peace.
* For full references, please see the series bibliography.
Matthew Root 