Martin Henry

On the fly leaf of Orlando Patterson's monumental study, Freedom, appear the words of the Apostle Paul to Galatian Christians: "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."

The 200th anniversary of the end of the Trans-atlantic Slave Trade in Africans has brought slavery and freedom into sharp focus. And, carnival notwithstanding, this is another Christ season.

Freedom scholar Patterson declares in his preface, "No one would deny that freedom stands unchallenged as the supreme value of the Western world." But then the editor's jacket blurb for Freedom asks the provocative questions: Why and how did freedom originate in the West? Why only in the West? And why did it achieve preeminence as the supreme Western value?

'Supreme Western value'

Precisely because freedom has achieved the position of the 'supreme Western value', we, steeped in modern Western values, hardly now consider how widespread human servitude has been - and how 'normal'. All the great civilizations, including Western civilization, were built on and sustained by servitude. The transatlantic slave trade capitalised on existing African domestic slavery with the collaboration of Africans.

Orlando Patterson went on to identify freedom as the central value of Christianity: being redeemed, being freed by and in Christ is the ultimate goal of all Christians. This best explains, I think, why only the 'Christian' West has ever repudiated servitude on theological and moral grounds.

Western secular humanists have preferred to romantically ground Western freedom and challenge to servitude in Greek and Roman culture and in later European Rationalism with its greatest triumph in the French Revolution with its Reign of Terror. The Greek and Roman accommodation of servitude, which infiltrated Christianity with the progressive paganisation of the Freedom Gospel of Jesus the Christ, best accounts for the 'Christian' accommodation of servitude for so long. The freedom and equality in Christ of the Gospel would have destroyed slave systems, as the later Christian anti-slavery campaigners so clearly understood.

The Christian writer, C.S. Lewis, once remarked dryly, "Aristotle said, 'some men are born to be slaves'. I do not dispute with Aristotle; but no man is born to be master." On Patterson's Freedom fly leaf occurs the Euripides quote, "Greeks were born to rule barbarians. They are slaves by nature; we have freedom in our blood."

Not coincidental

It is not coincidental that the churches which were most comfortable with the hellenisation of Christianity were the most supportive of slavery, and were the last to repudiate servitude in Christ's name. Nor is it surprising that Christian revival and reformation, which rejected much of the Graeco-Roman influence on the Church and recovered much of the purity of the Freedom Gospel of Jesus the Christ, led the way in the fight against slavery and servitude in general.

In closing his analysis of Jesus and the Jesus Movement in the section of Freedom on "Christianity and the Institutionalisation of Freedom", the Harvard professor in powerful preacher's tone pronounced: "Jesus commands that we surrender totally to God as a perfect slave does to his master; but in our surrender we are relieved of our slavelike spiritual impotence."

Equality in the image of God, redemption equally available to all to become saved children of God, spells freedom. Jesus who boldly proclaimed Himself the Truth, unequivocally declared: "If you abide in my word (hold fast to my teachings and live in accordance with them) you are truly my disciples. And you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free" (Amplified). Patterson, in a mighty finale, raises the cross of Christ, the 'vertical crossroad' of choice, as the supreme symbol of the paramount value of the West - Freedom. Hallelujah!