Difficult Texts: Colossians 3.22 – Slaves,obey your earthly masters in everything

This verse, which is part of a series of instructions designed to promote order in the church community, takes up the question of the relationship between slaves and their masters. That this is a recurring theme in the New Testament is hardly surprising, given that first-century Graeco-Roman society was largely made up of two categories of people: the enslaved and their owners. Normally, there was no question as to one’s social status. For the communities addressed in these letters, though, there was a problem – how should their new faith in Jesus Christ inform their daily life and social relations? As disciples of Jesus, they were equal (Gal. 3.28), but what about their everyday working relationships? It seems to be important to these writers that life remains orderly, and that everyone should know their place. Perhaps because of persecution, they want believers to be seen to be good citizens who don’t rock the social boat. So, they instruct the slaves in their congregations to work well for their masters, and to do so ‘wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord’.

Of course, life has changed now. Slavery has been abolished, and we no longer think it normal for one human being to own another. So how are we to understand this instruction? One common strategy is to suggest that there is an underlying principle: Christians are to do their work well. If we replace the words ‘slaves’ and ‘masters’ with ‘employees’ and ‘employers’ the verse can apply to us today. The message is clear – Christians in the workplace should be good employees, compliant and hard working. ¹

Undoubtedly, this approach has encouraged many, but it can be a blinkered one. For, despite having been outlawed by governments throughout the world, and declared illegal by the United Nations, slavery still exists – in fact, it is a multimillion dollar business. The United States’ State Department Trafficking in Persons Report estimates that there are 27 million people around the world in slavery today. ² For most of us in the West, this is something we don’t have to think about much. Campaigners may make us aware that it goes on, but most of the time it doesn’t affect us. This is not the case in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, however. There, families find themselves in debt bondage, children are pressed into military service, girls are forced into prostitution or hidden away as domestic servants, and men find it impossible to escape from work in factories or mines. ³

In the face of such a reality, the teaching of Colossians 3.22 seems not only to be anachronistic but also just plain wrong. Are we to tell people in such situations that they should serve their owners, pimps or abusers ‘wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord’? Such a teaching would surely be against everything Christianity stands for. So what should we do with this verse, and others like it?

We can learn much from the eighteenth-century abolitionism debate. Then, as in the first century, slavery was accepted as part of life. Indeed, most Christians believed that slavery was acceptable to God – on the basis of verses such as this. Slaves and abolitionists, however, saw things differently. For them, the Bible spoke of a God who led his people out of slavery (rather than into it), and who sent a redeemer to set them free. Moreover, the Golden Rule made it self-evident that slavery was contrary to the will of God. Slaveholders and traders, in contrast, maintained that God had given rules which had to be obeyed. Slave-owners taught their slaves that they should obey them because God’s word said that they should. Challenging the status quo was out of the question – it was God’s will. Small wonder that African American theologians today think that verses such as these have had a ‘malefic’ effect on their people. ⁴ The abolitionists’ hermeneutic won out, and the world was changed. But it was a long hard struggle. ⁵

The temptation to view the Bible as a book of rules is a strong one. It is comforting to find direct instruction for our daily lives. It is encouraging to find reassurance that we are doing the right thing. But such an approach to Scripture can ultimately be self-serving and narrow. If we are limited to our own world-view and fail to see that Scripture can be viewed very differently, depending on our situation and culture, we can end up with a spirituality that is, consciously or unconsciously, concerned only with our individual well-being. We can lose sight of the needs of those whose situations are different from our own. We can think ours is the only valid view, and even, however unintentionally, become insensitive to the suffering of others.

As the slaveholders’ argument demonstrates, this approach to the Bible runs the risk of redirecting our focus away from the teaching of love, freedom and justice which is central to the gospel. The abolitionists, however, knew that verses such as this must be seen in the context of the larger narrative of the God who redeems his people. They knew that in the face of injustice such as the slave trade, love trumps law, every time. So they urged Christians to see Scripture through the lens of God’s redeeming love for all men and women – and change came about. In our individualistic, self-seeking culture, they have much to teach us.