Quotes are from “The Ethics of Freedom”…
The Bible often talks about the bondage of man…We read of the institution of slavery. We also find bondage to corruption, to the stoicheia of this world….The ending of formal slavery has softened the term. But the situation described remains the same. In our own age the equivalent of slavery is alienation. This is not just a matter of modernizing our vocabulary and changing a word to give better understanding. The reference is to a concrete condition of man today just as the reference in the prophets and Paul is to a concrete situation in their day…
Now don’t zip past this. Paul’s soteriological vocabulary is heavily drawn from the institution of slavery. He got it from the Old Testament as a good rabbinical scholar and he got it from the Roman society around him, as a citizen and traveller. When that institution disappears, as it has in America, then it is natural for the language drawn from it to get transmuted into something else weaker. Today, when we read Paul say something like “slave to sin”, we think something like “bad habits I can’t break”. But Ellul is going to fill the term “slave” back in with the substance it has lost:
