A Slave to Fear

There's a worship song we sometimes sing at church with an ambiguous lyric. It goes like this:

You unravel me with a melody

You surround me with a song

Of deliverance from my enemies

'Til all my fears are gone

I'm no longer a slave to fear

I am a child of God

(No Longer Slaves, Bethel Music)
listen to it here

It's a beautiful song--I really like it--but ever since I noticed it was ambiguous, I haven't been able to enjoy it. 

The ambiguous part is the a slave to fear. It happens to be ambiguous because both to and fear can belong to two different parts of speech. To can be a non-finite marker or a preposition, while fear can be either a noun or a verb.

The intended meaning is I'm no longer a slave of fear. That is, that I've been set free from fear. 

The idea of freedom from slavery goes hand-in-hand with salvation in the Bible. As I discussed in the post from a couple of weeks ago, the Israelites deliverance from Egyptian slavery was used as a model and a symbol for freedom. The idea of freedom comes up again and again:

• "Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death." (Romans 8: 1-2 NIV)
• "Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." (2 Corinthians 3: 17 NIV)
• "Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8: 32 NIV)
• "Jesus replied, 'Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.'" (John 8: 34-36 NIV)
• "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery." (Galatians 5:1 NIV)
• "Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death." (Hebrews 2: 14-15 NIV)

The other, unintentional, meaning is I'm no longer a slave to be afraid of. The meaning here is so different--it means that I am still a slave, but one that has been stripped of all my power. 

Normally, when there is an ambiguous phrase that is easily disambiguated from context, like this one, it hardly slows us down at all. In fact, I didn't even notice that this phrase was ambiguous for a long time (this song has been out almost two years). But once I did notice it, it really started to bother me. Why does it bother me so much? I think because there's a hint of truth to it, and that hint of truth is very uncomfortable. 

When I was in first year university, we had to read some Marxist theory in one of the courses I took, including one that discussed how the Church is used by the state in order to repress and control its citizens and make them productive. Here is an excerpt: 

"In other words, the school (but also other State institutions like the Church, or other apparatuses like the Army) teaches ‘know-how’, but in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its ‘practice’. All the agents of production, exploitation and repression, not to speak of the ‘professionals of ideology’ (Marx), must in one way or another be ‘steeped’ in this ideology in order to perform their tasks ‘conscientiously’ – the tasks of the exploited (the proletarians), of the exploiters (the capitalists), of the exploiters’ auxiliaries (the managers), or of the high priests of the ruling ideology (its ‘functionaries’), etc." (Althusser 1970)

This idea really bothered me, so much so that I in fact made it the topic of my term paper that year. Again, it bothered me because there was truth in it--at various times and places, both now and throughout history, the Church has been used to subjugate people and make them easier to control. In the Middle Ages, the people were taught that the world had a God-ordained order, to keep the peasants from revolting against the nobility. In the southern US, slaves were taught that their slavery was the will of God, and to submit willingly to their masters. 

So if the Church is just a tool of the state used to control and subjugate its people, why am I still a Christian? Well--and this is what I wrote my paper about, back in first year--I think that when the Church has been used to subjugate people, it was actually a hijacking of the actual purpose and teachings of the Church. Such hijacking seems to happen when the Church gets too big, institutionalized, state-sanctioned, and/or profitable. In those situations, the leadership of the Church often gets corrupted by greed and power. But the actual, original teachings of Jesus and the early church was to make waves, not conform, by subverting power structures and lifting up the oppressed. 

"Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will." (Romans 12: 2 NIV)

Alongside all of the times Christian discourse was used to control and subjugate people, there were also many times in history that there were reversals of power based in Christian faith. For example, leaders of the abolition movement based their activism on faith both in the US (e.g., Sarah Grimké) and the UK. 

Sources:

Althusser, Louis. 1970. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation). “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. Marxists Internet Archive.