Bonds

Doulos (δοῦλος) is not an ambiguous term. It suggests a very specific concept, which — while repugnant to our culture and our natural minds — should not be toned down or backed away from. It is the main Greek word that was used to describe the lowest abject bond slave — a person who was literally owned by a master who could legally force him to work without wages. In other words, a doulos (δοῦλος) was a person without standing or rights. According to Kittel’s definitive dictionary of New Testament expressions, words in the doulos (δοῦλος) group

serve either to describe the status of a slave or an attitude corresponding to that of a slave. . . . The meaning is so unequivocal and self-contained that it is superfluous to give examples of the individual terms or to trace the history of the group. Distinction from synonymous words and groups . . . is made possible by the fact that the emphasis here is always on “serving as a slave.” Hence we have a service which is not a matter of choice for the one who renders it, which he has to perform whether he likes or not, because he is subject as a slave to an alien will, to the will of his owner. [The term stresses] the slave’s dependence on his lord.

Unfortunately, readers of the English Bible have long been shielded from the full force of the word doulos (δοῦλος) because of an ages-old tendency among Bible translators to tone down the literal sense of the word — translating it as “servant,” or “bond servant” rather than “slave.” The practice goes back hundreds of years, even before the King James Version. The Geneva Bible, the main Bible of the Puritan era, consistently translated doulos (δοῦλος) as “servant” (though in the distinctive spelling of the time, it appears as “seruant”). Murray Harris surveyed twenty major translations of the New Testament in English and found only one, E. J. Goodspeed’s The New Testament: An American Translation (1923) — where doulos (δοῦλος) was consistently rendered “slave.”  No doubt that reflects our society’s longstanding discomfort with the practice of slavery and the severe abuses that have always occurred in institutionalized versions of human slavery.

Still, service and slavery are not really the same thing, and it is extremely unfortunate that the full impact of the expression doulos (δοῦλος) has been obscured in our English translations for so long.

There are at least six Greek words for “servant,” and doulos (δοῦλος) is not one of them. For example, diakonos (διάκονος) (from which our word deacon is derived) means “servant.” Oiketes (οἰκέτης) speaks of a domestic servant. Pais (παῖς) denotes a young boy who runs errands. Huperetes (ὑπηρέτης) (usually translated “minister”) literally signifies a low-level servant who pulls an oar on the lower deck of a large ship. Leitourgos (λειτουργὸς), also meaning “minister,” designates someone who performs some kind of religious ser vice. Therapon (θεράπων), used of Moses in Hebrews 3:5 (“faithful in all His house as a servant”), refers to a dignified kind of high-level ser vice. And there are several more specific Greek words that describe service in terms far loftier and more respectable than doulos (δοῦλος).

Doulos (δοῦλος) speaks of slavery, pure and simple. It is not at all a hazy or uncertain term. It describes someone lacking personal freedom and personal rights whose very existence is defined by his service to another. It is the sort of slavery in which “human autonomy is set aside and an alien will takes precedence of one’s own.”5 This is total, unqualified submission to the control and the directives of a higher authority — slavery, not merely service at one’s own discretion.

For example, in Matthew 6:24, Jesus said, “No one can be a slave to two masters” (literal translation). That translation is much stronger (and actually makes better sense) than what you will find in most versions: “No one can serve two masters.” An employee with two jobs could indeed serve two masters. But slavery — not merely service — is what the word doulos (δοῦλος) and all its derivatives speak of.

There is an important difference. A servant gives service to someone, but a slave belongs to someone.  It is not merely a nuance. Scripture repeatedly and emphatically places Christians in the latter category: “Do you not know that . . . you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:19 – 20). We have a Master who purchased us (2 Peter 2:1). To be specific, we were purchased for God with the precious blood of Christ (Rev. 5:9). This is the very essence of what it means to be a Christian: “For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Rom. 14:7 – 9).

Excerpted from The Gospel According to Jesus by John MacArthur