Still Letting My People Go - Jack R. Davidson

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of socio-religious reasons relegated to positions outside the boundaries of God’s people.”143 Caruthers is certain that the Jubilee declaration implies not only spiritual liberty but also real freedom:

      Jesus Christ came to preach liberty to the captive and the opening of the prison to them that are bound and he will deliver his people who are so unjustly and so cruelly held in bondage here, either by the power of his grace on the hearts of their owners or by such judgments as will make them learn righteousness.144

      In Caruthers’s thinking the distinct but related concerns for spiritual and physical well-being are viewed under the image of the Jubilee. Isaiah 61:1–2 is traditionally understood as a typological use of the Jubilee. The ancient institution of Jubilee is prophetically pulled from the Torah to describe the greater realities of God’s forgiveness of Israel and their imminent release from exile and restoration to Zion. The Year of Jubilee image is used to hold together the importance of Israel’s forgiveness by God alongside the nation’s political freedom to return and restore their land, two distinct but related concerns. Sharon Ringe has noted that “human needs often experienced as competing for attention are brought together onto the single agenda of the Jubilee.”145 Luke’s use of Isaiah’s text characterizes yet another, even greater era of forgiveness and release to be accomplished by the Messiah. Caruthers’s approach understands and upholds these distinctions without diminishing the importance of either.

      Conversely, for the nineteenth-century contemporaries of Caruthers and many current commentators, the distinctive social reforms of the original Jubilee are diminished and transcended by the greater spiritual realities they prefigure. J. C. Ryle’s commentary on Luke states that Messiah’s “victories were not to be over worldly enemies, but over sin” and that he is “the Friend of the poor in spirit, the Physician of the diseased heart, the Deliverer of the soul in bondage.”146 More recent commentators express the meaning in terms of spirituality, such as “deliverance to those who were captives in the power of sin and spiritual wretchedness” or giving back “to the spiritually blind the power of sight” or “freedom from guilt and the effects of sin.”147 Darrel Bock emphasizes “release from sin and spiritual captivity” and the “spiritual overtones” of exilic identity. The Old Testament “viewed the exile as the result of sin.”148 For I. Howard Marshall Jesus’s announcement in Luke is an allusion is to the Old Testament Jubilee “appointed by Yaweh . . . and now made symbolic of his own saving acts in order to show his salvation.”149 Joseph Fitzmyer’s conclusion is similar: “The Isaian description of a period of favor and deliverance for Zion is now used to proclaim the period of Jesus, and the new mode of salvation that is to come in him.”150 An emphasis on the spiritual fulfillment of Jubilee and a muting of its social reforms in Protestant literature goes back to the earliest views of Martin Luther and John Calvin.151

      Caruthers’s appreciation of the Jubilee’s distinctions and their literal fulfillment mirrors another and more influential nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister. The highly regarded Patrick Fairbairn, a theologian in the Free Church of Scotland, exemplifies the Reformed perspective in The Typology of Scripture. At nearly a thousand pages in two volumes, Fairbairn’s magnum opus remains a standard text on the topic of typology for evangelicals since its publication in 1845. He is considered by some to be “the spokesman for the Reformation tradition” on typology.152 In line with traditional typology Fairbairn speaks of the “littleness” of historical types, “exhibiting on a comparatively small scale what was afterwards to realize itself on a large on” or of “historical personages and events being related to some higher ideal, in which truths and relations exhibited in them were again to meet, and obtain a more perfect development.”153

      For Fairbairn, as for Caruthers, the concrete social realities of the Jubilee continue to have application as its antitype escalates, and his understanding of the Jubilee’s application is very similar to his unknown colleague. The Jubilee addresses sin and effects, not simply as an individual issue that “still causes innumerable troubles and sorrows” but also as political and societal. “Even in the best governed states,” he writes, “the true order of absolute righteousness and peace is to be found only in scattered fragments or occasional examples.” The purpose of the Jubilee should be seen “as one of deliverance—deliverance from trouble, grievance, and oppression” so that the “the aspect of society might reflect” the “well-ordered condition of the heavenly world.” Fairbairn envisions specific social imperatives arising from the event of redemption. As he describes it: “When all in a manner, being set right between them and God, it became them to see that every thing was also set right between one person and another.”154

      The sequence of reconciliation noted above by Fairbairn, from God to others, requires continuation of the Jubilee’s fuller meaning. He observes that the year of Jubilee’s emphasis on the restoration of property and freedom from captivity is united to the restoration of the people’s relationship to God. It commences not at the beginning of the year, but follows immediately after the Day of Atonement (Lev 25:9) in which reconciliation with God is dramatically symbolized in the prescribed rituals, the same rituals that foreshadow the Messiah’s death for the sins of the people.155 Isaiah’s incorporation of the Jubilee follows the same pattern. Its declaration in Isaiah 61 follows after the “Redeemer” comes and ends the separation of the people from their God (59:16—60:1). Forgiveness and reconciliation precede their release from Babylonian captivity, the end of their oppression, and the restoration of Zion. The typological understanding of the Jubilee involves certain social imperatives or events that result from its redemptive antecedent and without which severely diminished its meaning.

      A few current studies corroborate the perspective of Caruthers and Fairbairn. Speaking of what Jesus actually did in his ministry, Paul Hertig observes that “Luke will not allow us to interpret this jubilee language as flowery metaphors or spiritual allegories . . . Jesus literally fulfilled the Jubilee that he proclaimed.”156 Samuel Aborgunrin complains that within traditional theology “the problem of the poor and justice, receive very little attention’ because it “does not regard poverty, justice, and other similar social issues as central to the mission of Jesus.” Jesus came not only to proclaim a solution to inner dimensions of sin “but also to bring about total deliverance from all forms of power that have held people in bondage” and “this means that the ministry of the Church, like that of its Lord, must always focus on the whole person.”157 The Jubilee’s emphasis on concrete social change cannot be diminished by its spiritual overtones and application. Although the implementation of the specific reforms of the Jubilee is not intended by Luke’s Gospel, David Pao stresses that “the Jubilee connection does highlight the social, economic, and political impact of the arrival of the eschatological era” and observes that, as in Isaiah 61, “this Jubilee theme is one among many that contribute to the wider prophetic paradigm of the second exodus.”158

      Like Fairbairn, his contemporary, and these more recent studies, Caruthers insists that the antitype of Jubilee remains characterized by its literal type. The fullest extent of meaning is achieved only when spiritual redemption is coupled to the Jubilee’s literal and universal application for the poor and oppressed of the earth. In his era there was no more obvious example of Jubilee’s application than American slavery. The Messiah had brought redemption, now it was the responsibility of a Christianized humanity to bring freedom to the slaves.

      In Caruthers’s view not only does Luke’s use of the Isaiah passage confirm his own use of the Exodus text but the “whole tenor of the Bible is a demand on all who are holding others in bondage and oppression to give them up and leave all free to serve God.” He singles out specific “passages which may be cited as corroborative.”159 Throughout the range of biblical literature Caruthers hears the echoes of God’s initial demand for the release of Israel from Egypt and argues for its continuing moral implications.

      Within the parameters of existing biblical interpretation practiced by American Evangelicals, proslavery advocates argued that slaveholding could not be identified as a sin because it was not expressly forbidden in the Bible. Donald Mathews has observed that “the Evangelical emphasis upon the necessity of a conviction of sin, . . . led a person into psychic confusion, from which he was saved by conversion and reintegrated into society through the church.”160 Because slavery was not expressly forbidden in the Bible, there

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