By Maria Sermersheim, Meditatione Ignis
How can God not only permit slavery in the Bible, but also apparently ordain it, since he gives particular rules regarding the practice in the Mosaic Law? The question seems to be intensified in light of God’s redemption of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. How could God deliver people from slavery in one moment and legislate it in the next? I find that these are two importantly different questions, though they can be easily confused — one about God’s intention in delivering his people from Egypt, and one about the character of God’s operation in history. The answers to both, however, coincide — God is Love, and love must work through freedom.
In Exodus, God delivers the Israelites not to make a statement against slavery, but to care for his chosen people. It’s not about God’s politics, it’s about his love for Israel. When he appears to Moses in the burning bush, he acknowledges the oppression of Israel and their cries of suffering (Ex 3:7), but he doesn’t say that he will deliver them because slavery is wrong — he says that he will deliver them because they are his chosen people, dear to his heart and their suffering provokes his action. God calls Israel “my people,” which is why their affliction disturbs him (Ex 3:7-10).
God’s intention for the Exodus is focused on his relationship with the people of Israel, then, and not primarily on the social injustice of slavery. But why did God allow and legislate slavery in the Law? This, too, is a matter of relationship; the Lord gave the Law to form the hearts and minds of the Israelites to be in relationship with him through the categories of understanding typical for ancient people: dietary rules, purity concerns, sacrificial legislation, agricultural practices and yes, even slavery. God’s mode of operation is not to abolish but to redeem; not to override the world order, but to work within the structures of our human ways to gradually augment our hearts, because he hopes to win our souls, not our votes.
Joseph Ratzinger described God as a conscious, creative Love, which therefore requires freedom. In this way, the highest principle of the universe is not cosmic necessity, but freedom, and because freedom can be called the “structure of the world,” then a great incalculability is implicated in human action and inaction, with all of its great woes and joys. Ratzinger wrote, “A world, which is created and willed under the risk of freedom and love . . . is as a playground of love for freedom, and that includes the risk of evil.” Because God is Love, which requires freedom and desires to be freely loved in turn, freedom is the structure of the world, and that freedom explains the presence of evil, as well as God’s refusal to simply override our human wills in favor of his preferred world order, which would certainly not include slavery.
Two exemplifications of this divine mode of operation are Scripture and the Incarnation. In Scripture, God speaks to us through human words and idioms, according to the norms of human grammar and vocabulary. In the Incarnation, God makes himself present as a man, like us in all ways but sin, but operating with bone and muscle and even suffering things such as hunger and pain, which — being God — he could have avoided. But it wasn’t appropriate for his mission and his intention for him to extricate himself from such daily human realities, just as it did not accord with his mission to simply abolish slavery without working through the slow, laborious and irreplaceable process of changing free human hearts.
Though we may wish for God to intervene more dramatically sometimes, and though his operation through our freedom requires much more patience, this essential characteristic of freedom is far more beautiful and far more loving than any alternative.
Maria Sermersheim is pursuing her doctorate in biblical studies at the University of Notre Dame and is a graduate of Reitz Memorial High School. She welcomes emails at msermersheim@evdio.org.