“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”
Ephesians 2:1-3
“Like what I’ve done,” said the Faun. “Taken service under the White Witch. That’s what I am. I’m in the pay of the White Witch.”
C. S. Lewis, The Lion, THe Witch, and the Wardrobe
Articles in this Series
See the first article for the list.
Service under the White Witch
In our current cultural climate, freedom is valued as a kind of highest good. This valuing can be found in the feminist or LGBTQ cry for “reproductive freedoms” or “sexual liberation”, which includes abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, abhorrence of traditional Christian views on gender and marriage, and so on. Another example is the Marxist cry for the proletariat to throw off their chains inflicted by capitalism and the unjust bourgeoise. Eastern religions teach freedom from the flow of life and ceaseless suffering as we are subsumed into Hinduism’s Brahma or Buddhism’s Nirvana. Secularists call for freedom from the restrictive bonds of religion and its allegedly toxic impact on families and society. Humans desire freedom. Contrarily, the Christian view is considered harsh, restrictive, Victorian, Puritanical, and a list of other pejoratives. Our culture claims that being a Christian is a stultifying, soul-crushing affair.
But the question, Biblically speaking, should not be whether we are enslaved to anyone or anything, but who or what we are enslaved to. The Apostle Paul presents only two alternatives: we are slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness (Rom. 6:15-23).1 Logically, this dichotomy means that there is no middle ground. There is no neutral space of agnosticism when approaching God. To be a slave to God means that we give our all to Him and that we pray “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10) not with an empty formality but with a deep desire to align our will more with His, and from then on to do His will. This notion of slavery is one that seems deeply repulsive, but really it is not one in which the slave’s identity is crushed under the domineering spirit of the master. Biblically, submission, servitude, or slavery to God is the opposite: it is one wherein our identity is found in Him and our service for Him. More on this later.
This Biblical reality means that the list of alleged freedoms in the first paragraph are not actually freedoms. Like a desert mirage, they appear as things that can satisfy. But they inevitably fade, as all idolatrous options do, into a profound ineptness. “Thou hast made us for thyself,” prayed the restless Saint, with the implication that He had made us for no other.2 Like the proverbial adulteress, these options appear attractive, operating with “seductive speech” and “smooth talk”, but their end is death (Prov. 7:6-27). I call these options idolatrous because we substitute ourselves instead of God as the arbiters who define freedom. We proclaim that freedom is not defined by God but by us. It is also because after this substitution has been done, we act on this reasoning and proceed to seek living water in broken cisterns, in the spirit of the Old Testament Israelites. (Jer. 2:12-13). The idolatry is not only that we redefine freedom to fit our fancies but that we believe this redefinition will work. We reject Christ’s cry to “come to [Him]” (Matt 11:28), thinking that we ought to come to an assortment of other potential options first.
But there is a deeper truth that in this idolatrous seeking of freedom, we find ourselves enslaved. No human, whether regenerate or not, would seek slavery.2 Nobody wakes up and goes, “Aha, I know what I shall do today. I shall become enslaved.” Mr. Tumnus certainly did not think that. He was a sensible Faun. It is not because of slavery itself but because of the allure of the things that bring about slavery that one becomes enslaved.
The Scriptures speak of our enslavement to the “course of this world”, “the prince of the power of the air”, and “the passions of our flesh” (Eph. 2:1-3). The Bible describes carnal man in terms of enslavement and death. This slavery does not occur because the world, the flesh, and the devil are inherently attractive. This slavery occurs because Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14), though at heart, he desires not the happiness of his slaves but the taste of having them devoured (1 Pet. 5:8). This slavery occurs because the world, in a deceptive yet alluring reversal, declares that it is what will abide forever: its desires are permanent, but Christianity is mere wishful thinking conjured up by the minds of weak men. The Bible says otherwise (1 Jn. 2:15-17). This slavery occurs because the flesh desires the aforementioned proverbial adulteress (Prov. 7:6-27) but lacks the Spirit-given vision to discern that “all her slain are a mighty throng” (Prov. 7:24-27). And the strangeness here is that when I say “find ourselves enslaved”, I am not implying that we were not enslaved in the first place. Just as a snowball becomes larger as it rolls down a mountain, slavery begets more slavery.
And the Christian view, cliched though this may be, is profoundly and wonderfully liberating. I could cite particular examples regarding Christianity’s relation to abolitionists like William Wilberforce, which led to literal liberation, or its relation to women and children in the Graeco-Roman period around the time of the early church3, and so on. But I want to address the seeming antithesis between Christianity as slavery and Christianity as liberation. These two elements seem disparate, and the first appears to clash with notions of our being children of God or Christ’s statement that we are no longer called slaves but friends (Jn. 15:15).4 My statements may even seem eerily reminiscent of Islam and its cry to submit to Allah.
I will answer it thus: Christianity liberates us from the world, the flesh, and the devil, which enslave us (Eph. 2:1-3) and enslaves us to the God who liberates us (Matt. 11:28-30). There is no contradiction, Biblically speaking, between slavery to God and freedom in Him. The two exist, and this existence is not in a fraught tension, like two friends who have fought and not apologised to each other, but in a harmonious relationship. We delight and find freedom in the God whom we serve as slaves, and we serve as slaves the God in whom we delight and find freedom. I am not engaging in cute wordplay. I am trying to state that our slavery is not something burdensome but the glad duty performed to our loving Father who saved us (Jn. 3:16). This is why the same Paul who described himself (and by implication all Christians) as a servant or slave to Christ (Rom. 1:1) simultaneously describes Christians as being in Christ and united to Him (Phil. 1:1, etc.).
All this is to say that we either serve sin or we serve God. Tumnus was taken service under the White Witch. In other words, the Faun was enslaved and used for his master’s bidding. The opposite of this malevolent enslavement is not the jubilant unfurling of pride flags and the autonomous #ShoutYourAbortion movement. The opposite of the White Witch’s enslavement of Tumnus was not his autonomy. It was enslavement to Aslan after the Lion turned the Faun from stone to flesh. The opposite of our enslavement to sin is not doing what we desire, for that is enslavement to self and hence still enslavement to sin, but rather enslavement to and loving service of the Triune God. Realise this concept and forget all other linguistic inaccuracies I may have committed.
Footnotes
- I am somewhat aware of the complexity surrounding the translation of the Greek word doulos or the Hebrew ebed. My point remains regardless of whether one renders it “slave” or “bondservant”, so substitute what you want as you please. I use servant and slave and other words related to these nouns somewhat loosely in this article.t
- This quote comes from Saint Augustine’s The Confessions.
- Nancy Pearcey mentions this relation to women in her book Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality somewhere. I do not remember where it is nor do I have the book anymore.
- If someone flings Greek at me, which I do not know a word of, the reply is that even if one does not enjoy the word “slave”, the concept is certainly Biblical (Rom. 1:1, etc.).