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29 Slave Wo/men and Freedom Some Methodological Reflections In his book The Bible and Empire, R. S. Sugirtharajah paraphrases former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s announcement of a new mission: “The new missionary command is to preach the gospel of freedom, democracy, human rights and market economy, distinctly as defined by its western interest.”1 This neoliberal gospel of freedom is preached in a world in which slavery exists on an unprecedented scale. However, most of us are not conscious that millions of people in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas have been forced by traffickers into prostitution or debt bondage because we believe that slavery was abolished in the nineteenth century.2 For most people, “slavery” has become just a metaphor for undue hardship. This metaphorization of slavery and freedom renders global exploitation acceptable.3 1. R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and Empire: Postcolonial Explorations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 223 2. This essay was first published as “Slave Wo/men and Freedom: Some Methodological Reflections,” in Postcolonial Interventions: Essays in Honor of R. S. Sugirtharajah, edited by Tat-siong Benny Liew, 123–46. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009. This controversial paper was prepared for the interdisciplinary and international consultation on “Concepts and Practices of Freedom in the Biblical Traditions and Contemporary Contexts” sponsored by Dr. Michael Welker, Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg. I want to thank professor Michael Welker and Ms. Sabine Wagner, the administrative organizer of the consultation, for inviting me and for supporting my work. 3. E. Benjamin Skinner, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery (New York: Free Press, 2008); Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Suzanne Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2003); Andrew Cockburn, “21st Century Slaves,” National Geographic, 204.3 (2003). 447 Interpreting biblical texts in terms of such metaphorizations reinscribes this neoliberal rhetoric of the “gospel of freedom” in religious terms. Hence, it is crucial to read the biblical references to freedom and slavery in social-political rather than just in metaphorical terms, and I will do so here with respect to the “Pauline” correspondence. By placing the freedom of slave wo/men—which I use in the generic sense to include men4 —into the center of attention, I seek to bring to the fore that freedom can be fully seen and understood only when juxtaposed and measured with respect to a materialist reading of slavery. Thus, to be free means not to be a slave wo/man in the global economy. Like slavery, freedom must be understood as first and foremost a sociopolitical expression that applies to the life of real people and not just to ideas. Hence, its rhetorical or philosophical use needs to be adjudicated in light of the institution of slavery and the effects of its ideologies on slave wo/men. Yet this methodological approach is a minority approach. Works on slavery focus on the institution and ideology of slavery without listing “freedom” as a key term in their index of subject matter, and works on freedom tend to focus on the ideological-conceptual level5 and generally lack “slavery” as a reference term. If one juxtaposes freedom and slavery as sociopolitical-religious realities rather than just as distinct categories, then the question immediately arises as to whether the N*T in general and the Pauline tradition in particular have anything to say about actual freedom—that is, freedom from force, violence, and dehumanization, as well as freedom to move, act, and decide according to one’s own judgments and desires. Do these texts speak about such freedom of slave wo/men, or do they only speak about the idea or concept of freedom? Do they use freedom only in a metaphorical but not in a material sense? Does this mean that Christian freedom is not actual or social freedom but only 4. Such a use seeks to bring to awareness the fact that the generic masculine “slaves” erases slave wo/men from consciousness and reduces the category of “woman” to elite, free wo/men. 5. For the discussion of freedom from various perspectives, see Chaim Wirszubski, Libertas as A Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge: University Press, 1950), B. F. Harris, ed., Freedom as a Political Ideal (Sydney: McQuarrie University, 1964); Dieter Nestle,“Freiheit” in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (ed. Theodor Klauser; Stuttgart...

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