The letters of the apostle Paul contain a clarion call to freedom that has rung down the centuries: “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1). Paul’s theology has given weight to an age-old yearning of the human spirit to be free to think, choose, and act. It has also inspired social and political movements that seek freedom from human domination and coercion in its various forms. Indeed, freedom has become the watchword of Western modernity, but with a radically individualized tone: autonomy, independence, and choice have become unquestionable virtues for the “buffered” self that is wary of obligations and prefers to determine which responsibilities to adopt, or to discard, in the quest for self-fulfillment. Freedom as self-determination seems, on the surface, a natural extension of the theology of Paul.

Not so fast! As soon as he issues his call to freedom, Paul adds a crucial dialectic. “You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence [literally: the flesh], but through love become slaves to one another” (Gal. 5:13). Paul knows he is using paradox: employ your freedom for slavery! But this is not a rhetorical trick; these are two sides of the same coin. As he remarks in Romans, “While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code, but in the new life of the Spirit” (Rom. 7:5–6). Released from captivity in order to be slaves, but slaves of one kind, and not of another. In Romans as in Galatians, “slavery” in the new life of the Spirit takes the form of love: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another. For the one who loves another has fulfilled the law” (Rom. 13:8). The freedom Paul proclaims is not individual autonomy or independence, but the freedom that takes place within the mutual commitments of love. What does he mean?

Paul understands the world not as an empty space in which individuals carve out their private sphere of freedom, but as a terrain already populated by competing powers greater than human actors, who only imagine that they are free. As far as Paul is concerned, our search for an individuated, atomized autonomy is itself an enslaving delusion, because we are, and are meant to be, free only as we are formed by relationships with God and with others. God is powerfully active in the world, in creation and re-creation, and the basic stance of human recognition of God is an act of trust that is at the same time a form of submission (“the obedience of faith,” Rom. 1:5). To recognize God’s saving act in Jesus Christ is to say, “Jesus is Lord” (Greek, kyrios, which means master; 1 Cor. 12:3). The fulfillment of human potential will come about not through the imagined freedom of an independent self, but through submission to the resurrection power of Jesus, when every knee will bend and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil. 2:11). Only then will “creation be freed from its bondage to decay” (Rom. 8:21). Only then will humans reach their ultimate fulfillment and will Christ “transform the body of our humiliation so that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself” (Phil. 3:21). The true freedom from all that restricts human completeness, including sickness, suffering, and death, is possible only because the “Lord” (kyrios) Jesus is more powerful than all the forces that constrain and constrict our flourishing.

Those forces are bigger than we imagine them to be in our little privatized worlds. They are the social and cultural forces that shape our worldviews and constrain our imaginations; they are the political forces that (now with even greater success) watch and control our movements. And, most importantly, they are the macrostructures of human existence. They are our appalling propensity to cruelty, indifference, prejudice, folly, and selfishness, which Paul labels simply “sin.” And beyond that, they are our physical fragility and mortality that Paul calls “decay” and “death.” He pictures the world as a cosmic battlefield, in which we are entangled whether we recognize it or not. What God is doing in Jesus is a loving act of liberation from occupying powers. Jesus, whose resurrection has blasted a way through death, is subduing all that spoils and inhibits our potential to flourish (1 Cor. 15:20–28). We will find freedom not in our own puny strength, but by enlistment into the victorious progress of “the Lord.” That march to freedom, confident in the security of God’s love, already frees us from the self-concern and insecurities that lie at the root of human “sin.” “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17).

Given that big picture, what does it mean to be “free” but “slaves” within the ordinary run of human life? The theme of freedom runs through several of Paul’s letters, but nowhere more powerfully than in his letter to the Galatians. Here he resists what he calls the “compulsion” of those who seek to impose on Christian believers a particular set of religious and cultural practices, as if that were the only way to belong to Christ. The presenting issue is the demand by competing missionaries that male believers get circumcised, according to the Jewish law, thus restricting “the freedom that we have in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 2:4; 6:12). What Paul opposes here is not “Judaism” as such, but the attempt to constrain Christian identity within the boundaries of one socio-cultural tradition. This fundamentally contradicts the barrier-crossing grace of God in Christ, which is “free” in its disregard of preexisting human conditions and acts without regard to differences of ethnicity, status, or gender (Gal. 3:28). What this grace brings about is a freedom to reconsider and reconfigure all the social and cultural values that we have inherited and in which we were raised, with a radical freshness that Paul attributes to “new creation” (Gal. 6:15). And the purpose of this freedom is to create the possibility of new, boundary-breaking communities that cross the lines of prejudice, discrimination, and fear, and provide new forms of belonging to one another in love: “for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith [or trust] working through love” (Gal. 5:6).

Paul propounds the paradox of freedom and slavery at the human level because the “slavery” he has in mind is, as we have seen, the mutual slavery of love: “Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.” He understands (and we too often forget) that humans are constituted by relationships, not by self-definition, and his vision for human flourishing is not that of isolated individuals who chart their own paths through life with as few commitments as possible, but the self-in-relation, the people who reach their human potential through life with others, in the mutual self-giving of love. All of Paul’s letters drive toward the formation of cross-cultural and cross-status communities whose members work out together how best to practice their commitment to Christ. As he makes clear in his famous image of the body of Christ, all the members have something to contribute to others and something that they need from others; no one is self-sufficient and capable of flourishing alone (1 Cor. 12:12–26). What holds this community together is what Paul calls koinōnia (solidarity or partnership) – solidarity with Christ (experienced in the Lord’s Supper) and partnership with one another. And the glue in that solidarity is love – love received from Christ, who gave himself “for me” (Gal. 2:19–20) and “for you” (1 Cor. 11:24), and love shared with one another (1 Cor. 13).

The freedom to love is the freedom to receive, offer, and share ties of belonging, and therefore ties of obligation. Paul understands what has happened in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ as the ultimate and definitive act of divine love (Rom. 5:6–11), a love that comes alongside us and inhabits our condition in order to break the shackles of all that constrains our fulfillment, freeing us to find our completion in trust and allegiance to Christ. That love is now “poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given us” (Rom. 5:5). Being love, it is expressed in bonds of commitment, trust, loyalty, and patience toward others, and the same is expected of them. Love does not give the self away, but it gives the self into solidarity with others, fulfilling our deepest needs and longings not in splendid isolation, which is not so splendid after all, but in co-flourishing with others. As in Luther’s brilliant pamphlet The Freedom of a Christian (still essential reading for any thoughtful Christian), it is because we are free from self-concern, secured by the love of God, that we are able to be slaves of others (1 Cor. 9:19). The love that we share, which is the expression and extension of the love of God, is also a kind of love-return to God – we express love, trust, and gratitude to God in love of one another – so that the freedom that we enjoy in love ties us both to one another and to God. How can we be free to be our best selves? Not in cutting (or diminishing) our ties to others, but in freedom from the self-centeredness that we falsely worship as freedom, and thus in immersing ourselves into the bonds (and hazards) of love, confident that, whatever our own failures in such an endeavor, it is the path that will ultimately be vindicated and completed in God’s loving consummation of ourselves and of all things in Christ.

But what did all this mean for those who were literally enslaved? Slavery was endemic to the social and economic world in which Paul lived – as fundamental and near unquestionable as our modern notion of private property. Paul encountered many a slave within and outside his churches, most famously Onesimus, who probably asked him to make an appeal to his owner, Philemon, and who became a Christian in the process (see the little gem, Paul’s letter to Philemon). Paul considered everyone, slave or free, to have the immeasurable worth of being loved by Christ, who died for all (2 Cor. 5:14–15). For him, slaves were not mere “things” (the property of their owners); it was possible to see them in an entirely different way (no longer regarded “from a human point of view,” 2 Cor. 5:16). Those who belonged to Christ (like the new Onesimus) were “a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17), beneficiaries of the liberating action of Christ, and with an identity and worth the same as any free man or woman (Gal. 3:28; 1 Cor. 12:13). Indeed, since Christ had effected the deepest and most meaningful realignment of power in the universe, what ultimately mattered more than any form of human belonging was the question of who belonged to Christ. “You have been bought with a price,” says Paul to all the believers in Corinth (1 Cor. 6:20; 7:23). Through his death and resurrection, Christ has bought them out of those destructive forms of enslavement that thwart human flourishing and placed them into a new form of commitment (“enslavement”) where they can become all they were meant to be. Paul can thus say, “Whoever was called in the Lord as a slave is a freed person belonging to the Lord, just as whoever was free when called is a slave of Christ” (1 Cor. 7:22). Freed persons (slaves manumitted by their owners) still had continuing obligations to the Lord. No one in this picture is free in our imagined terms of individualized autonomy, because in Paul’s view, no such state is possible. Everyone is in one kind of slavery (to sin and death) or another (to righteousness and life, Rom. 6:15–23). The only question is who you call “Lord.” The slaves in Paul’s picture have the dignity of being freed persons of the only Lord who has their ultimate welfare fully at heart and fully in his capacity to grant.

Paul considered everyone, slave or free, to have the immeasurable worth of being loved by Christ, who died for all.

But what of their human welfare in the conditions of the here-and-now? Slavery could be immensely cruel: slave families could be split up when individual members were sold, and slaves could be subject to dehumanizing treatment, including sexual abuse. Most slaves wished to be manumitted, so long as they had a chance to make a living thereafter; and owners were often willing to grant this, so long as someone could pay for it, and so long as it served to encourage compliant behavior among other slaves. What does Paul ask for? In the case of Onesimus, whom his owner considered “useless” and may have threatened to sell (Philem. 11), Paul asks that he be welcomed back “forever” (i.e., not sold out of the household), “no longer as a slave, but as more than a slave, a beloved brother” (Philem. 15–16). This is not a clear request for manumission, but it does expect a qualitative difference in the everyday treatment of Onesimus, in the household of Philemon and in the wider Christian community that meets there (Philem. 1–3). Paul here resets the relationship between Onesimus and Philemon at such a fundamental level that manumission is now far more likely to be an eventual outcome. Elsewhere, Paul encourages slaves to make use of their freedom if it is offered (the best translation of 1 Cor. 7:21, as most scholars now agree), and considers freedom rather than slavery a better condition in which to serve Christ (1 Cor. 7:23: “you were bought with a price; do not become slaves of human masters”).

Even if Paul had requested Onesimus’s manumission (which would have required a lot of face-to-face discussion), that would not have been a call for the abolition of slavery: manumission was a mechanism within ancient slavery, not, as we might think, a means to its dissolution. We must face squarely the fact that Paul did not call for the abolition of slavery as we, with hindsight, might have hoped and expected. One could offer pragmatic explanations (it was economically inconceivable, or would have sounded too radical), but the basic explanation is probably this: Paul did not see, as we now do, that the ownership of a human being is a basic injustice. The difference is due to a fundamental shift in modern Western thought regarding human rights, a shift that we can properly claim as a legitimate extension of Paul’s theology, but not one he envisaged himself. If we were to develop Paul’s own terms, the problem of slavery to a human owner is not that it denies autonomy (which is neither possible nor a means to human flourishing) but that it restricts or denies the capacity to serve God and others in love. Human beings owned are human beings lawfully constrained in their capacity to decide, choose, and act; they are therefore unable freely (and thus fully) to commit themselves to others, or to God. They are also liable to receive treatment that is contrary to love, but that cannot be effectively challenged because of the owners’ legal rights over their “property.” Paul did not see that as clearly as we now do, and unfortunately, his letters have been used to defend recent forms of slavery as much as to criticize it. At this point we would have to take a stance explicitly both with and beyond Paul: with him in urging the freedom that brings human fulfillment without the false expectation of autonomy, but beyond him in seeing slavery in itself as a fundamental obstacle to that possibility.

In any case, it is clear that freedom for Paul meant more than something “spiritual” or “inner,” as many modern forms of Christianity make out. Freedom is about the God-given release from all that inhibits and undermines our human potential as creatures of God, and thus from the multiple layers of constraint under which we operate, from coercive control to cultural prejudice, from obsessive behavior to death itself, and all the various forms of unfreedom in between. “For freedom Christ has set us free” at every level of our being. But ironically (or so it might seem to the modern mind), our freedom is acquired and enjoyed not through self-determination, but through our alignment to the liberating power of another, Christ, and through our immersion in the self-sharing practices of love that bind us to one another in commitment and community. Our freedom to love is the way we resonate with the transcendent love that comes to meet us in Christ. That divine love calls us to sing the melody of reciprocal, committed, self-giving love, a melody that foretells the ultimate liberation of the universe. Because of that deep resonance with eternal truth, this song of freedom-in-love turns out to be greater than any of the other songs of liberation passed down through history. It is sung, incompletely but powerfully, in countless lives throughout the world today. “Do you hear the people sing?” (Les Misérables).