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proslavery position.”161

      Antislavery writers responded by moving away from the description or regulation of slavery found in the Bible to texts they believed more clearly reflected the divine will. In his explanation of the demand of Exod 10:3, Caruthers briefly discusses eight other texts that corroborate his understanding, specifically that “every one must be left free to act on his own responsibility.”162 In the order they appear in the manuscript the texts are Ezek 18:4, Rom 12:1, Rom 6:1, Jer 34:8–22, Neh 5:1–12, Isa 58:6, Ps 72:4–14, and Ps 68:31.

      The first text touched on by Caruthers is Ezek 18:4: “All souls that is all persons, all men and women, are mine” and “the soul the man or the woman, that sinneth shall die.” In Caruthers’s view, slavery confuses the accountability envisioned. If a master commands a slave do things which are “palpably wrong and injurious to the interests of vital piety” and especially in the case of an ongoing repeated violation ordered by “impenitent masters and mistresses” such as “desecrations of the Sabbath” that become “inseparable from the institution as it now exists” then their accountability to God no longer makes complete sense. The passage can only make ethical sense if “all men and all women, all human beings are his and woe to those who infringe upon his rights or dare to interpose, in whole or in part, between any of them and his authority.”163

      Similarly slavery does not allow compliance with the consecration of Rom 12:1 and 6:13. The passages urge readers to “present your bodies a living sacrifice” and “neither yield your members as instruments of unrighteousness.” If a slave is a Christian and “their masters claim the whole of their time and strength it is impossible” for them to be consecrated and devoted in the manner “and to the full extent of the . . . requirements” prescribed by the Apostle Paul. What about the plain New Testament teaching that servants are to serve their masters? According to Caruthers those passages were addressed to servants “who were rendering a voluntary service and therefore had the disposal of their time” or to slaves “who belonged to . . . unchristian masters.” He does not allow for the possibility of a Christian owning a slave. A slave who is a Christian in the south, and of “any intelligence” cannot comply with the teaching of Romans “as he wishes to do” because “his time and his physical powers are all at the disposal of another.”164

      Jeremiah 34:8–22 is singled out by Caruthers as providing “the clearest proof that there could be no such thing as slavery among the Jews” like that of America. Jeremiah condemns the failure of “the king, the nobles, and all who were able to employ servants” for not keeping their covenant to set them free as they had said they would do. Instead they “forced them back into service” and this was “an act of cruelty and a violation of their solemn engagements.” Soon after they broke their word, Caruthers points out, “the city was taken and burned, the king, the nobility and all the better classes of people were seized and carried captives to Babylon.” In these events, Caruthers sees “God’s abhorrence” of slavery.165

      Nehemiah 5:1–12 demonstrates that “in the mind of all pious Jews” there was “an invincible opposition to slavery as we understand the term.”166 Nehemiah is “indignant” upon learning about the bondage imposed on some of the Israelites and requires a “solemn oath of the nobles that they would no more oppress their brethren.”167 All of the teaching of the major and post-exilic prophets “was in constant and direct hostility to anything like an entailed or perpetual enslavement of each other or strangers.”168 The “explicit and comprehensive” language of the Isaiah 58:6—“undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free”—exemplifies their attitude.169

      Psalm 72:4–14 is “a most animated and glowing description of the Messiah’s universal reign.” Surely, Caruthers figures, “the slaves of our country must certainly be included among the poor, the needy and the oppressed” whose rescue by the Messiah is announced therein. And if Psalm 68:31, “Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands to God,” does mean that the “African race will believe in Jesus Christ,” then a slave’s rightful claim upon such a deliverance is undeniable. Caruthers specifically identifies American slaves as included in the psalm’s messianic vision of the future. Strictly understood, this is a Messianic interpretation of Israel’s earthly king and empire presented by the psalmist. However, Caruthers’s identification of the psalmist’s local vision for the needy and oppressed of Israel with universal freedom for all in bondage further demonstrates the role of typology which underlies Caruthers’s application of the Exodus passage to American slavery.

      Summary

      For Caruthers there are no limits to the application of the Exodus text: “God is demanding the surrender of them to his service. All men and all women, all human beings are his, and woe to those who infringe upon his rights or dare to interpose, in whole or in part, between any of them and his authority.” It cannot be restricted to the realm of history. “The passage which we have placed at the head of this discussion . . . ” he writes in reference to the Exodus text, “ has no condition or limitation and makes no allowance for the interest or convenience of those on whom the demand is made.” There can be “no time . . . to sell them off or to make the best arrangements” since “all nations, the Africans included, were given to Jesus Christ in the covenant of redemption and they belong to him.” Slaveholders are “to give them up and leave all free to serve God with whatever powers he has given them.”170 “You,” he says to slaveholders, “have no valid claim to them and must let them go.”171

      Although Caruthers probably would have appreciated Goppelt’s understanding of typology and its emphasis on “the church’s place in redemptive history,” he does not allow the political liberation of the Exodus event to be diminished, as Goppelt’s understanding tends, by the “new people of God, a new humanity, which is distinct from the Jews and no longer needs their shadowy means of redemption because it possesses the reality.”172 To the contrary, Caruthers hears in Exodus a continuing echo of “the whole tenor of the Bible” which is “a demand on all who are holding others in bondage and oppression.”173

      If the Exodus text “has been overlooked, in its true import, for more than two hundred years, it is not the only important one that has shared the same fate.” Important texts on the doctrine of justification were overlooked or misunderstood “for a thousand years.” Romans 3:28 and Galatians 2:16 along with “scores of others teaching the same doctrine, were “misapplied by the whole Christian world” except by “ a little handful” who are “now known as witnesses for the truth.”174 The larger meaning of the Exodus text has suffered a similar fate but now it should be recognize that, as all of the above passages confirm, the “demand which was first made on Pharaoh, king of Egypt by Moses and Aaron and is now made by the lively oracles of God on all, here in America and every where else, who are holding their fellow men in bondage.”175

      Providence

      God’s demand regarding the American slaves is to “Let My people go” and it is also “enforced by his Providence.”176 Caruthers asserts God’s demand for the “unreserved and speedy surrender of our whole slave population.”177 The deteriorating economic and intellectual conditions of the slave states are cited as providential evidence of God’s demand. Caruthers understands “providence” as the “constant and absolute good which God exercises over this world and all that it contains,” including “humans and all other agencies and his employment of these agencies to accomplish his own purposes.” In the distinctive national providentialism of nineteenth-century America, providence demonstrated God’s favor on the nation as it carried out its divine purpose. While Caruthers probably embraced such a form of providentialism, he also challenged providence as a justification for slavery. “There are few words in our language,” he writes of providence, “that are in more frequent use and few that are more oftener perverted or misapplied.”178 In a longer passage on providence he writes,

      It is strange how inconsiderately and unmeaningly the term is generally used; for Providence is made to favor every successful undertaking whether right or wrong. If a man has prospered in his efforts to accumulate property, tho’ it has been been by taking advantage of those who are ignorant of business or less crafty than himself, Providence has certainly favored him; . . . Slave holders talk very fluently about the wise and kind Providence

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