Power, Service, Humility: A New Testament Ethic

2. Service

35 Service Chapter 2 Attachment between Enslavement and Liberation Differentiations in the Idea of Service The New Testament presupposes that the human being always exists in relationships. The human being is integrated into relationships, and they orient him and define him. This dependence is often called service. In this sense, for example, the verb douleuô denotes “an obligation to service and a readiness to service”1 that constitute the human being as such and have nothing per se to do with the freedom or lack of freedom of the human person. Freedom and the lack of freedom are determined not by the fact of serving but by the question, “To whom or to what is the one who serves subordinate, or does one subordinate oneself?” There are realities that bring the human being into dependence and thus into a lack of freedom. In the Letter to the Galatians, the apostle identifies the powers of the cosmos (Gal 4:3) and the gods that by nature are no gods (Gal 4:8) as spheres of power under which the believers were enslaved in the past. 36 Power, Service, Humility In the Letter to the Romans, Paul mentions especially the sin that dominates the human being and makes him its slave (Rom 5:21). It is, however, significant that this kind of dependence is spoken about from the perspective of the believers looking back at their former lives. They are indeed still warned against this dependence, since believers are continually threatened by the possibility of relapse. But the important point is that it is only on the basis of liberation in Christ that the earlier allegiances can be perceived as a bondage that made them slaves.2 The Gospel is presented, in contrast to this lack of freedom, as a countervailing power that sets free. For example, Paul says in Romans 6:6 that our old self was crucified with [Christ] so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer serve sin. When the apostle then goes on to repeat this assurance in the form of a demand that sin should no longer be allowed to rule in one’s body and that the members of the body should be made available to God as weapons of righteousness (Rom 6:12-13), he makes it clear that liberation through Christ does not lead to human autonomy. As a liberation that is generated by union with God or with Christ, it is the result of a new bond that can also be called a service. Now, however, this is a service that is to be rendered to God or to the Lord:3 For just as you once presented your members to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification. (Rom 6:19) Service of this kind is serving in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the letter. (Rom 7:6) Service 37 Service as Freedom “Service” is thus not a univocal term. On the one hand, there is a “yoke” of slavery to the entities that, as “powers of the cosmos,” enslave the human being (Gal 4:3) and take him captive through “the law of sin that dwells in my members” (Rom 7:23). And on the other hand, there is the bond to God that shelters believers in God’s loving care and thus— in accordance with God’s power, which does not deprive its partner of power but empowers him4 —liberates them through the Spirit to become children of God: So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then also an heir, through God. (Gal 4:7; cf. Rom 8:14-17) Whether serving is a heteronomy that enslaves or something that liberates to self-determination depends on the lord in question. A liberating service is possible where, as a “freedman of the Lord,” one submits totally to the “Lord” Jesus Christ as his slave, instead of being “slaves of human beings” (1 Cor 7:22-23). This explains Paul’s apparently paradoxical statement that believers, who were slaves of sin (Rom 6:17), have now been set free—liberated to become “slaves of righteousness”: Having been set free from sin, you have become slaves of righteousness. (Rom 6:18) It is in this sense that the paraenesis of...