By Paul Gordon Collier, Editor
“Were you a bondservant when called? Do not be concerned about it. (But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.) For he who was called in the Lord as a bondservant is a freedman of the Lord.
“Likewise he who was free when called is a bondservant of Christ. You were bought with a price; do not become bondservants of men. So, brothers, in whatever condition each was called, there let him remain with God.” – 1 Corinthians 7:21-24
A Christian Facebook friend of mine from Nigeria asked a question of his followers. This is what he wrote:
Think about this;
Slaves worked every day without wages, but they were given food, clothing, and shelter.
Today, many of us are told we are free. Yet we spend most of our lives working just to afford… food, clothing, and shelter.
So here’s a question worth thinking about:
Have we truly become free, or has the system simply changed?
Freedom is more than earning a paycheck. It’s having choices, owning your time, living with purpose, and not being trapped in an endless cycle of survival.
What do you think? Is modern society the ultimate freedom, or just a different kind of bondage?
My friend and brother in Christ lives in Nigeria. He has lost people to sectarian violence at the hands of raiding Islamists his government does not protect him from. His commitment to live out Christ publicly is far braver than mine is.
His question, to me, captures the heart of the worldwide civilization-level crisis that has emerged as the fruit of the “modern age.” In so many ways, humans are “freer” than they have ever been, especially materially., I can get in my car today and drive from Pennsylvania to California in less than a week. That journey was once months, and that by horse, through existentially challenging terrain.
Yet, with all the material freedom we possess, did the modern age that brought us this material freedom really give us more freedom than we had before?
Here is my response to him:
Before I give you my response, I want to create what I believe are the parameters of power, for understanding “power” helps us understand, I think, the type of “bondage” modern societies have created.
Power is the ability to influence action and the perception of the consequence of action.
The perception of power can create real power.
There are three types of power:
Coercive power – use of force, theft, or deception to directly influence action.
Cooperative power – use of advantaged power to limit non-self’s choice(s) – the use of force, theft, or deception is not directly influencing action, rather it is only limiting choice of action. This is indirect influence using force, theft, or deception.
Consensual power – influencing action through mutuality regardless of the differences in power between agents exchanging value (engaging in interaction) with one another. This is direct influence through invitation and mutuality, absent force, theft, or deception.
All action is influenced by all three types of power, but some action is dominantly influenced by one type of power.
Those are the parameters of power, coercive, cooperative, and consensual.
Here is how I believe you can plumbline your society to determine if you are in bondage or not:
The dominant form of value exchange within a community is the testament to the nature of stewardship within that community. Where self-stewardship flourishes, so too will consensual power. Where the spirit of humans as commodity flourishes, so too will coercive power.
Most of us in the world live predominantly in cooperative power realities, with some leaning more towards coercive power realities than others. Some live in predominantly coercive power realities.
The more a people of a land consensually embrace Christ and live out the great commandment and the great commission, the more the land itself will cry out for righteous magistrates. And that land will become, more and more, a haven for consensual power.
Here is what I believe the “modern” age (and thus its societies) attempted, and then what it actually produced:
The “Modern” age attempted to create a non-ontological Christianish ethos that derived its justice from logic and reason at the start; but that has since “evolved” into hierarchies of ethnic, sexual, and gender values which yet appeal to a Christianist justice while making the lawgiver, and the laws, the preferred states of being themselves (identity epistemology- wisdom from social castes).
The Christianish justice comes from lifting the low places up, of not preferring the rich to the poor, of the least being first. It is Christianish because it leaves out the part where it shows no partiality to the poor, or that the least are not the material least, but the self-spiritually least (as in, the people who rely on God for salvation, not their own understanding of good and evil).
The Christianish version is Isaiah 32:7 – “As for the scoundrel, his devices are evil; he plans wicked schemes to ruin the poor with lying words even when the plea of the needy is right.”
“In the name of the poor, let tyranny ring,” is the cry of the modern age, and from America to Africa that bell sounds, driving us all closer to earthly servitude, while we are yet able to flourish as free people in our spiritual servitude to Christ.
Here is where I believe most of us Christians around the world are, and how we should approach living out our faith when we are under earthly bondage:
In 1st Corinthians 7, Paul exhorts us not to change our situation we find ourselves in, but yet he says of those born as bondservants to pursue becoming free if there is a means to do so, for it is not righteous to be bondservants to men (or, conversely, to make bondservants of men), but pursue that freedom righteously, through spiritual power, not earthly power.
While in earthly bondage, we are “cheerful” servants who yet Boldy proclaim the gospel and Boldy seek to love our brothers and sisters in Christ as Christ showed us how to love one another in how he loved his disciples while he walked with them on the earth.
While in earthly bondage, we yet seek our freedom, but we work through spiritual means (lest you turn the spiritual kingdom into an earthly one) to free ourselves from such bondage.
We revel in our suffering under bondage while we yet seek to be freed from it, not for our freedom, but to honor the image of God within us, whom man has no right to bind. So long as our neighbors reject God, we are called to praise God in our suffering, seek spiritual solutions to overcome earthly bondage, and to walk as potential drink offerings for a people that despise us.
You count the cost through daily meditating on the whole Word, from Genesis to Revelation, and by living out that meditation with the community of Christ. In so doing, we fulfill the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.
We are called, regardless of our earthly situation, to understand and know the wisdom of God.
Our meditating is our understanding, our fulfilling the Great Commandment and the Great Commission is our knowing.
“Therefore the LORD waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the LORD is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him.” – Isaiah 30:18