FREEDOM (Alan Reynolds)

Freedom

Alan Reynolds 1

It is abundantly clear that God has called you to a free life

Freedom Alan Reynolds

© 2017 Alan Reynolds.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmited in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permision of the publisher or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright

“It is abundantly clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love: that’s how freedom grows.” (Galatians 5:13)

Licensing Angency.

(The Message, The New Testament, translated by Eugene Peterson)

Published by: © 2017 Alan Reynolds.

Editor: Gordie Bowles Cover Design: Image by Alamy

For digital circulation

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Chapter 1 – THE REALITY OF FREEDOM . . . . . . . . . 11 In Puritan Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 The 20th Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 A Dilemma for Christian Faith . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The Reality of Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Chapter 2 – THE LIMITS OF FREEDOM . . . . . . . . . . 20 Freedom within Finitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Living Within the Limits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 The World is My Piano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Chapter 3 – A PARADOX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Torah and Logos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Freedom and Responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Faith and Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Chapter 4 – A PARADOX OF FREEDOM . . . . . . . . . 26 A Paradox of Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Introduction

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here is a fault in the heart of America today, a flaw that is proving fatal to the health of our society. We have made freedom an idol rather than an ideal. We think we can have absolute freedom, freedom without limits. This is true not only in the United States, but in Canada and much of the so-called “western world”. It is especially true of the United States where freedom has been a watchword since the War of Independence.

“Freedom” – a word we often use but seldom stop to think about!

A word, which has meant so much in our culture and tradition, stands in danger of being lost, surrendered, not to attacking forces of communist or fascist hordes, but simply because we have lost our understanding of what it means.

For most people of our culture, freedom means simply the right to do what we please, “the power to exercise choice and make decisions without restraint from within or without,” according to one dictionary definition. But that’s not freedom, it’s license, and the social and political result, sooner or later, is anarchy, not democracy. And the result of anarchy is despotism.

Back in the 1960’s, the “free speech movement,” originating at Berkeley, California, capitalized on our confusion. It claimed the right to use words, any words, even “four letter words,” in public speech and common social custom. “Free speech” was the right to use any words you might choose to express yourself in any way you wanted.

Freedom, in the 1960’s, became the right to “do your own thing.”

But something happened. Freedom, so understood, became

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devalued. Worthless. One of the popular songs of the time was “Bobbi McGee.” One version of the chorus ran,

Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose ...

Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free.

If something is free, it’s worthless. It has no value, no price. Freedom means having no obligations, no responsibilities, no “ties.”

The sad singer of the song lost his Bobbi because he wasn’t willing to make a commitment to her. He wanted space rather than place, the freedom to roam rather than the responsibilities of home.

Somewhere near Salinas, Lord, I let her slip away, Lookin’ for the home she hoped she’d find.

But if freedom is worthless, why have so many people in the past talked about dying for it? Patrick Henry was an orator and statesman in the American War of Independence, why would he cry, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” Perhaps we who talk so glibly about freedom need to do some more thinking about what it is.

I realize that some of my “faith-claims” are out of fashion and may seem dogmatic or extreme, but they are presented with an openness to discussion and a willingness to pass them on to others in the continuing dialogue of theology.

CHAPTER 1

THE REALITY OF FREEDOM

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ur Puritan forebears held a basic belief in the reality of individual freedom, of self-determination, the capacity of each individual to shape his or her destiny. The reality of freedom was based on a person’s will power, the dedication, discipline and courage to become whatever you willed to be.

IN PURITAN TIMES Every American baby, born in a log cabin in the wilderness, might one day become a leader of the nation – and Abraham Lincoln was the proof. Children were reared with a strict and even a stern discipline intended to make of them men and women who possessed strength, determination and endurance. Punishment of criminals was harsh, predicated upon the belief that people were capable of controlling and determining their actions. The drunkard (the word “alcoholic” was not thought of), the wastrel and the thief could change if they wanted to change.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, champion of self-reliance and individualism, quoted Matthew Arnold, the eminent Victorian poet,

The will is free; Strong is the soul, and wise and beautiful; The seeds of God-like power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will (Arnold, Sonnet #4, quoted by Emerson in his “Essays.”)

One of the best-known poems of the day was William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus”:

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Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeoning of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

It matters not how straight the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate.

I am the captain of my soul.

In religion, Charles Grandison Finney, “the father of revivalism” in North America, preached a Gospel of rugged individualism.

Finney was not one to wait patiently for God. He would beat persistently upon heaven’s door to move the Mind and the Spirit of God. “You must strive hard and struggle – you must groan, you must agonize, why you must pray till your nose bleeds, or it will not avail.” With this kind of perseverance, “we had a right to expect the Holy Spirit to cooperate with us,” he said (quoted in Wm McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism; and Bernard Weisberger, They Gathered At The River.)

THE 20TH CENTURY

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n the twentieth century, all this has changed. The earlier confidence in human self-determination has been eroded almost to the point of extinction. “Self-determination” has been replaced by a belief that we are determined (or conditioned) by factors external to the self.

In the scientific realm, Newtonian physics taught a physical

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determinism based on the law of cause and inevitable effect. By the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin had advanced his theory of biological determinism, and Karl Marx proposed his theories of social (historical) determinism. It remained only for Sigmund Freud to demonstrate that the actions of any individual were not primarily the result of a conscious process of reason and decision, but rather of impulses and compulsions rising out of the depth of the unconscious.

Freud gave basis for the rise of psychological determinism.

Much of our twentieth century literature and philosophy has been based on the assumption that freedom is an illusion, everything is determined by what has gone before, by our physical, social and psychological conditioning – the law of cause and effect applied even to the personal realm.

In this century we have no longer been able to see ourselves as “gods, bards, saints or heroes if we will,” but rather as insignificant insects crawling on a bit of rock hurling through space; as “other directed” rather than “inner directed” (Theodore Reisman, The Lonely Crowd); slaves of our genetic inheritance and our environment, our genes and our scenes.

Eliphaz, one of Job’s comforters in Archibald McLeish’s play J.B., put it cogently (Scene 9):

Science knows now that the sentient spirit Floats like the chambered nautilus on a sea That drifts it under skies that drive: Beneath the sea of the unconscious; Above the winds that wind the world.

Caught between that sky, that sea, Self has no will, cannot be guilty.

The sea drifts. The sky drives.

The tiny, shining bladder of the soul Washes with wind and wave, or shudders Shattered between them.

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“The winds that wind the world” – the forces of environment and experience which mould us. “Beneath the sea of the unconscious” – thank you, Dr. Freud! The conclusion, “Self has no will.”

A DILEMMA FOR CHRISTIAN FAITH

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In contrast to that earlier Puritan day, we put less emphasis on spiritual discipline and the development of “character.” Children are brought up with permissiveness lest their egos be bruised by the too-great demands of parental expectations. Juvenile delinquents, and even hardened criminals, are granted clemency because their actions are seen to be due to an unfortunate childhood or other factors beyond their control.

hristian faith itself has faced, down through all its centuries, this debate between those who argued for “freedom of the will” on the one hand, and those who advocated, on the other hand, “predestinarianism” (or determinism). Determinism is the naturalistic equivalent of predestinarianism,” the former understanding that we are “determined” by natural law, the latter that are “predestined” by God.

One of the most shocking murder trials of the early part of the 20th century was that of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loebe for the kidnapping and murder of a young boy. It happened in Chicago in 1924. Leopold and Loebe, sons of wealthy families, were brilliant students, both university graduates at eighteen years of age. There seemed no reason for their action, neither money nor revenge, except for a desire to prove themselves superior to others, above the ordinary laws of society.

The theological question, put simply, is this: How does one affirm the sovereignty, the omnipotence of God, and also affirm human freedom? If God is all powerful, how can it be said that humanity is free? On the other hand, if human freedom is real, how can faith claim that God is omnipotent?

Clarence Darrow, a famous defence lawyer of the time, managed to save them from the death penalty in spite of the intensity of popular feeling. His defence was in part an attack on capital punishment, in part a plea for mercy, but also in part based on the argument for determinism. Quoting A. E. Housman,

The theology of the mighty Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century, and of the brilliant Jean Calvin of Geneva in the sixteenth century, emphasized the sovereignty of God. But for all its philosophical strength, emphasis on God’s sovereignty led to a predestinarianism so extreme that it seemed abhorrent to common sense: God arbitrarily choosing some for salvation and some for perdition.

The night my father got me, His mind was not on me.

Darrow argued that we have so little control of our destinies that we cannot be held responsible for our actions. Meyer Levin, who wrote a fictionalized account of the affair, titled his novel Compulsion.

On the horns of this dilemma, Christian faith has tried to find ease by resting its understanding on one point or the other.

The respondents, an ancient Briton named Pelagius and a more recent Dutchman named Arminius, shared an emphasis on human freedom which, while never as respectable in orthodox circles as the grand systems of Augustine and Calvin, nevertheless proved an influential and humanizing influence in the life of the church.

This dilemma was most glibly resolved by Samuel Johnson when he said to Boswell, his friend and biographer, “All thought favours

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determinism, and all experience is against it.” “Sir,” said Johnson, “We know our will is free, and there’s an end on’t.” (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Vol. II, p. 82, 16 October, 1769) A. J. Ayer, in his essay “Freedom and Necessity” (Philosophic Essays), criticizes the latter remark. Yet Johnson does seem to hit right to the heart of the problem: “All thought favours determinism, and all experience is against it!”

Order seems essential to our human way of understanding our existence. We try to build a four-square world of straight lines and angles where every joist fits tightly into every beam. Our way of understanding is commonly a process of analysis and classification, putting things, even thoughts, in “categories.” This is the usual basis of our scientific method – induction, gathering data, sorting, and then ordering each thing into its pigeonhole. This method has been basic to much of our effort to find truth and understand reality, since Plato and Aristotle, through Charles Darwin, and into the present century.

But there’s a marvellous dynamism in life which, it would seem, cannot be comprehended in rational terms. Mathematics cannot comprehend motion. Not really. It can only understand movement as a series of fixed points, stopping it in mid-flight. We cannot, scientifically, understand the mystery of life. We have to kill it to dissect and analyse it. But then, all we understand is the working of a mechanism, not the life of an organism.

What we call freedom, an essential part of the dynamism of life, cannot be understood finally by thought. It can only be experienced.

As Samuel Johnson, the wise old teetotaller of London’s best days, said, “All thought favours determinism; and all experience is against it ... we know we are free, and there’s an end on’t!”

We can deny the reality of freedom only when we make it an object of thought and study. And objects cannot be free.

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Freedom can never be abstracted from the person, who is always subject as well as object and who himself (sic) does the abstracting.

(George Buttrick, Footnote on Freedom, in Sermons Preached in a University Church.)

The one who by profession is a complete determinist, denying any human freedom, nevertheless acts in personal life as if freedom were a reality. A philosopher or scientist, who in study or laboratory may claim to be a determinist, is not able to act that way in personal life.

When we seek to treat freedom as something apart from our own subjectivity and experience, we lose the reality of it. But in our consciousness of our own experience, we know the reality of freedom, and live and act accordingly. In our present situation and within the understanding of freedom in our present culture, we must recognize two things. We must realize first the reality of freedom (against our contemporary determinism). Second, we must recognize the limits to our freedom.

THE REALITY OF FREEDOM

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he Bible seems to take freedom for granted. Adam and Eve choose to eat the forbidden fruit. The people of God are continually being called to choose the will of God. “Choose this day who you will serve” is Joshua’s challenge to the people. “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).

“All things are lawful for me,” writes Paul, “but I will not be enslaved by anything!” (I Cor. 6:12). God’s creation is good, nothing is prohibited, but we are given freedom to use the things God has created for good purposes or for evil purposes.

Jesus too calls people to make a choice. He calls his disciples, saying, “Follow me!”And they must make their choice. Throughout

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the Bible there seems to be the affirmation that we are both slaves of sin, but also that we do have a choice.

The self is influencd, but still at its centre is autonomous … spiritual power gives a centre to the whole personality, a centre which transcends the whole personality and, consequently, is independent of any of its elements …

Spiritual power works neither through bodily nor through psychological compulsion. It works through man’s total personality, and this means, through him as finite freedom. It does not remove his freedom, but it makes his freedom free from the compulsory elements which limit it.

(Paul Tillich, Love, Power and Justice)

man responsibility is a very real thing. To think we are the victims only of our genetic inheritance … is not only a social disaster. It’s an ethical disaster.”

The basis of our freedom is our ability to transcend our own consciousness. As self-conscious beings, we can see ourselves. Therefore we can to some extent change ourselves, change the way we respond to our circumstances and to others. We can even change the conditions which influence us. We can respond rather than just react. We are respons-able.

The great universal law is – each of us is committed to the task of personal existence. None of us can escape from this responsibility. (James Thomson).

It’s still true.

Present scientific thought is not nearly as deterministic as it was at the first of the 20th century. Einstein’s thought made way for Heisenberg and “the principle of uncertainty,” which, while it doesn’t affirm human freedom but only the uncertainty of the strange sub-atomic world, nevertheless has re-introduced probability into physical law against the “necessity” of Newtonian physics. Einstein himself, with his firm belief in the order of the universe, found this difficult to accept. “God does not play dice,” he said. But the implications were there in his own physical theories.

In psychology, Viktor Frankl’s “logotherapy” and Rollo May’s “existential analysis” are both predicated on some degree of personal freedom, and even B. F. Skinner’s “behaviourism,” believes in the possibility of change in human conduct, even if it achieves the change by a process of conditioning.

Sir John Eccles, Nobel prize winner in 1963 for his work on nerve impulses, said at the University of British Columbia, here in Vancouver, Canada, in 1973, “We have to realize that we are masters of our fate to a very large degree. I want to insist very strongly that hu-

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CHAPTER 2

THE LIMITS OF FREEDOM FREEDOM WITHIN FINITUDE

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hile maintaining the reality of freedom, we must nevertheless recognize the excesses of one hundred years ago. We are not to the extent that W. E. Henley claimed, “masters of our fate and captains of our soul.”

There are limits to our freedom.

Physically I am free to run instead of walk, but I am not free to fly (without an airplane or equivalent mechanical assistance). I am free to lift my arm over my head, but not free to take it off and throw it in the air. Some of us are free to run a mile in less than eight minutes. Some are not free to run at all. And some cannot walk, or use their arms, or hands, or even their fingers.

Nowhere is the limits of our freedom more obvious than in mental illness, for here the will itself is sick. Harry Emerson Fosdick, famous American preacher of the last century, suffered what we would call “a nervous breakdown” during his student days. Here’s how he described it:

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For the first time in my life, I faced ... a situation too much for me to handle. I went down into the depths where selfconfidence becomes ludicrous. There the techniques I had habitually relied upon – marshalling my wit and my volition and going strenuously after what I wanted – petered completely out. The harder I struggled, the worse I was. It was what I did the struggling with that was sick.

(Fosdick’s autobiography, The Living of These Days, p. 75).

The extent and limit of our personal freedom and responsibility is one of the central problems of juridical procedures today. When is a person responsible for his or her actions, and when not responsible?

Where is the borderline between murder and an act of insanity, between stealing and kleptomania? Does it do any good to lock up a drunk for seven days in a cold cement cell with a steel bed and atrocious food? Does it indeed “teach him a good lesson?”

The traditional legal definition of insanity (the accused could not distinguish right from wrong) is hardly adequate to present psychiatric understanding, nor to the complexity of our present world’s social problems. We affirm the reality of freedom, but only within limits. Our freedom is not the freedom of spirits. It is not absolute. The apostle Paul, in his letter to the church at Rome, cried anguished words that speak both his own sense of responsibility and also his lack of self-control: “The good I would I do not, and the evil I would not I do (Romans 7:19). His words speak for each of us and for our condition.

If we are honest with ourselves, I think we will admit that we are conscious in ourselves both of a sense of freedom and of the responsibility that goes with a sense of freedom, and we will also admit that we have very real limits to our freedom, to our power to will. For finally, freedom is not something we hold in our own right, but only in relation to God. We have affirmed the reality of freedom in the face of the powerful arguments which favour determinism. In the words of Samuel Johnson, “All thought favours determinism, and all experience is against it.”

Our rational thought processes order and categorize reality by logical, mathematical and scientific methods that cannot comprehend the reality of freedom. When we make freedom an object of our study, we destroy freedom. Objects are never free, and freedom “can never be abstracted from the person who is always subject as well as object and who himself (sic) does the abstracting.” (George

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Buttrick, note above.) That’s why we find that the people who in their professional or scientific study claim to be determinist nevertheless in personal life are forced to act as though freedom is in fact a reality.

Our freedom, we said, is “freedom within limits.” It is essentially connected to responsibility. Freedom is not possible apart from responsibility. Responsibility is the vine; freedom is the fruit. And responsibility brings with it the possibility of guilt. And as we shall see, freedom is dependent on what the New Testament calls faith.

For freedom can only be maintained when we are enabled to accept our ultimate responsibility, our responsibility to God! We have no absolute freedom. Our freedom exists within limits, within the laws and structures of our existence, of the world in which we live and the life we know. This is what is meant by “freedom within finitude.”

We are not pure spirits. We live in physical bodies, and our freedom is conditioned by the realities of our existence within the dimensions of space and time.

We may say we are free to walk out of a 12th story window, but we are not free to jump right back up again when we hit the pavement. We can travel from Vancouver to London in a few hours, but we still can’t and probably never will manage to be in two places at the same time.

In the social realm, living in community necessarily intimates limits to our individual freedom. One cannot drive a car on the wrong side of a busy highway without running into some difficulty.

Even at the individual level, those of us who are older are all too conscious that the decisions and directions of the past limit the possibilities of the future. Because you decided, 20 years ago, to study medicine and become a doctor, it’s more difficult now to become a chartered accountant.

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The heavy smoker had the freedom, in the beginning, to decide whether to take that first cigarette. Later there was still a possibility of quitting, even if it became more and more difficult. Now that the diagnosis is lung cancer, there’s not much one can do to reverse the result of years of abusing our lungs.

There is no question that, psychologically, we are in many ways conditioned and limited by both our heredity and our environment (our “genes and scenes” again). Some of us are born with severe limitations, physical or mental or both. Some have very little musical ability. Some, with minds like computers, have little appreciation of music or art.

And there are many, so very many, who are limited because of where they were born or how they were brought up. The child who is born and who grows up in a ghetto of poverty does not have the same opportunities and freedom as the child who is born and grows up in a middle or upper class environment.

LIVING WITHIN THE LIMITS

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hat person is most free who has learned to “live within the limits,” who has learned to make the most of the conditions which are imposed by the circumstances of his or her life. Take Stephen Hawking. He developed, as a graduate student, a crippling nervous and muscular disorder, a form of sclerosis commonly called “Lou Gehrig disease.” Today Stephen Hawking is severely crippled, confined to a wheel-chair, his speech is unintelligible to all but a few.

Yet in these intervening years, he married (subsequently divorced) and had three children. He teaches at Cambridge, and until recently has travelled and lectured extensively, and the scientific world hangs upon every sentence.

The history of human life is amazingly full of such people, often

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common people, who in spite of severe limitations have lived lives which were amazingly free. They were happy, and they contributed, sometimes in large measure, to the welfare of others around them.

It seems that there is written into the heart of our existence something which is too dynamic to call “laws” or “structures,” but by which we have to live if we are to be reasonably happy and fulfil our being.

Freedom, in this sense, is freedom within a “structure,” within the forms and processes of our dynamic existence. It is a limited freedom which we (using Paul Tillich’s phrase) have called “freedom within finitude.”

The person who is truly free is the one who has learned to operate most capably and effectively “within the limits,” according to the laws and structures of human existence. Paradoxically, while we are free not to follow the innate laws of human existence, we are only truly free as we follow and fulfil that which we are made to be.

word which itself denotes freedom)?

Now we see that the oaf who sits and pounds the keyboard with his fists is not free at all but a frustrated fool. He is the prisoner of his own incapacity. Given the situation, the keyboard of the piano, freedom is making the best of it, not doing anything you feel like doing.

Given life, freedom is making the most of it in terms which life itself imposes through its very structures and processes, the way God has created it and the circumstances which life itself has imposed upon you.

Freedom has nothing to do with lack of training; it can only be the product of training. You’re not free to move unless you’ve learned to walk, and not free to play the piano unless you practice. Nobody is capable of free speech unless he (sic) knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at.

(Northrup Frye, The Educated Imagination)

THE WORLD IS MY PIANO

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ut it this way. A person sits down at the keyboard of a piano.

There are certain “keys,” some black and some white. These signify certain tonal intervals.

Some would suggest that freedom in this context is the right to pound the keys with your fists or hit them with a hammer, the right to “do your own thing.” But think -- in this situation, considering what the piano is and the purpose for which it was created, isn’t freedom rather the freedom of the pianist, the artist, who can sit down at that keyboard and “make the instrument sing.” In that situation, isn’t the person who is free the one who through discipline, commitment, and many, many hours of practice, is able to “play” (a

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CHAPTER 3

A PARADOX

TORAH AND LOGOS

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uman religions and our philosophies are attempts to understand the way we are to live, in accordance with the nature of our existence and the purpose of the Creator reflected in the nature of the creation.

The Hebrews developed the concept of “the Torah,” the Law of God. It was based on the Ten Commandments but we do not understand if we think of it simply in terms of ten mostly negative regulations which keep us from doing what we want. The Jewish understanding is that Torah is that which guides us to fullness of life, to live the way God purposed for us to live. And if one lives under Torah, God will give life, health, happiness and peace. The Hebrew word shalom intimates all that is good and desirable for human happiness and fulfilment, individual and communal.

Ancient Greek philosophers spoke of the logos. Initially it meant the way that existence is structured, the “laws” which seem written into life itself. It has come to mean our “study” of the structures and forms of existence and the words we use to describe them.

“Biology” (from the Greek words bios, life, and logos) means the study of the processes of the organisms of life.

Logos can also be translated as “word,” because it is through language and thought that we become conscious of life’s “structure.” “Theology” may be translated as both “the study of God” and “the Word of God.” For Christian faith (at least for my faith), Jesus is logos.

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In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the life of men (John 1: 1-4).

When the Gospel of John begins “In the beginning was the Word (logos),” it is claiming that in Jesus Christ there is revealed the very purpose of the Creator, the structures and processes upon which our lives are fashioned. “And the Word became flesh and dwelled among us” (John 1:1-14). In Christian belief, to live and act in the Spirit of Jesus is to live as God intended us to live, to live in what the New Testament calls “perfect freedom”. This is “freedom in Christ,” who is Himself the logos, the Word, the plan and purpose of God revealed “in human form”.

In our biblical tradition, we use our limited freedom to respond to the call of God, that we may become the kind of people God has purposed us to be, and so to form the kind of community which Jesus called the Kingdom, the Community, of God.

FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY

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nly those who are free can be said to be responsible. Only that which is free is able to respond, to decide, to act, able to give account of and be accountable for its actions. To be able to respond, and therefore to be responsible, is the essence of all freedom.

Those who are growing out of their teens have had to realize this.

Certainly parents of teenagers have wrestled with it. Teenagers want freedom. They want the right to make their own decisions.

They don’t want to be told what to do. But they have to learn that, if they want freedom, they have to accept responsibility.

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You don’t want your parents telling you what time to come in at night? Then you have to be sufficiently responsible to come in at an intelligent hour – especially as your mother never goes to sleep until she knows you’re home and safely in bed.

We talk about a “free, democratic society” as one with a minimum of restraint. But a “free democratic society” is only possible if its citizens bear a reasonable measure of responsibility for the welfare and unity of the society.

If you want the freedom to decide if and when to do your homework, you must show you are responsible by producing the marks that show you are doing the homework and keeping up with your assignments.

If you want the freedom to drive the family car, to use it for an occasional evening’s outing, you’ll have to show that you’re sufficiently mature and responsible to use the car with discretion and common sense. And the responsibility of driving a car is a big responsibility.

Where society is made up of individuals and social units (whether family units or corporations) which lack any sense of responsibility for the common welfare, society moves either to chaos or enforced control through a totalitarian system. Either represents the downfall of democracy. A free society is only possible where people are responsible to one another and care for one another.

We hear a great deal about “freedom of the press.” Our time calls for not just a “free press” (so necessary to a free and democratic society) but also for a responsible press. Our society needs publishers, editors and journalists who are more than opportunists who capitalize on the sensational and the scandalous, who go to any length to “get a scoop.”

Civil libertarians resist anything smacking of “censorship.” And what is said here should not be understood to understate the dangers of censorship. But publishers have obtained “freedom” to publish just about anything they choose. The result is a market glutted with stuff that is, in pseudo-sophisticated circles, called “erotic.” It panders to a rather base part of the human personality.

It treats women as “sex objects” and men as sex machines. It’s difficult to see that most of it has any “redeeming social value.” Yet we tolerate it in the name of “freedom.”

We talk about “freedom of religion.” But perversions of religion which have become common indicate the need for some sort of social and civil accountability. Religion is not always a good thing.

In fact, a great many of the most horrible things done by the human race have been perpetrated in the name of religion.

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Free society is the most difficult to establish and maintain, for the only free society which can maintain itself is one made up of reasonably responsible people. There are always those benevolent patriarchs or malevolent despots anxious to overcome the inefficiencies of the democratic system by bringing society under their control – whether for their own power and personal aggrandizement or for their vision of the good of all.

They are a continuing threat to a democratic society – which becomes most vulnerable as its people lose the sense of their individual and corporate responsibility.

Democracy certainly has its faults, but as Reinhold Niebuhr (Christian theologian of the 20th century) said, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible. Man’s capacity for injustice makes democracy necessary.”

In some ways, we would rather not be free, or rather, would prefer to be free without accepting responsibility. However, it’s only in the short term or by chance that a person can do what he or she wants and not have to “accept the consequences.”

Herein is the greatest heresy of our contemporary democratic society – “freedom” for our time doesn’t intimate responsibility, it means the right to do whatever we want.

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Even the restriction that it must not “hurt someone else” is obsolete in the light of statements by artists, musicians and also philosophers and others who want to make money.

is so resistant to the categories of human thought. Our consciousness reaches to infinity, and our freedom allows us to transcend all human systems and structures, even those we call “free.”

The right to do anything you want to do is not freedom, but license – and the social order resulting is not democracy but anarchy!

And we sing with the sad singer of “Bobbi Magee,”

Think what this means for our sense of responsibility. It puts our lives, our consciousness, in the context of a responsibility that is ultimate. It means that we face, and know in our depths that we face a responsibility to God. It may mean that we can, in fact, decide our own eternal destiny. This is, at the same time, a thought both wonderful and terrible.

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, Nothin’ ain’t worth nothing, but it’s free!

And the end is nihilism.

FAITH AND FREEDOM

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e said that our freedom was based on our ability to transcend ourselves – our self-consciousness. We have the unique ability to be aware of our own being. Because we can “see ourselves,” we have the ability to change ourselves, our circumstances. We are determined by the conditions of our existence, but we also are free to some extent to determine the conditions of our existence.

Because we are able to see ourselves within the dimensions of space and time, we are therefore able to transcend space and time, to stand outside of space and time.

Our ability to transcend ourselves is “indeterminate.” It is theoretically without limit. The self can be aware of itself being aware of itself, and so on to infinity. The human spirit transcends the dimensions of space and time. So we use words like “spirit” to speak of that which is other than space, and “eternity” to speak of that which is outside of the dimension of time.

We cannot define freedom purely in empirical terms. This is why it

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Moreover, as freedom is dependent upon our acceptance of our responsibilities, our freedom in its fullest sense is dependent upon coming to terms with our ultimate responsibility, our responsibility to God I suggest that, in the long term, it is only when we have faced our ultimate responsibility to God that we may be able to face our responsibility to others, to our fellow human beings, to our society, and to the creation God has given into our charge and care.

But how does one face this final and awesome sense of responsibility, especially if one has accepted as God’s will the teaching of Jesus with its seemingly impossible demands?

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and strength and mind; and you shall love your neighbour as yourself.

If someone strikes you on one side of the face, turn the other also.

If you have two coats, give to the person who has none.

Take no thought for tomorrow; let tomorrow look after itself. Forgive us our sin, as we forgive those who sin against us.

The person who says, “I live by the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount,” has obviously not read either of them.

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But there seems to be something within us that responds to these seemingly impossible demands, something that says, “Yes.”

In this is perfect freedom, to know the grace of God in the face of Jesus, our Lord.

Even when Jesus counsels us to “be not anxious for tomorrow” but to be as the birds and the flowers, something in us says, “Yes, that’s how we should live. That’s the way it should be.”

Jesus said to the Jews who believed in Him, “If you trust in what I have said, you are truly my disciples. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”(John 8:31-32).

Yet our concern for ourselves, for our own survival, our security, contentment and happiness, keeps us back from living as we are called to live by Jesus.

“The truth shall make you free.” We have taken these words and posted over the gates and entrances of some of our greatest academic institutions. But we no longer understand or appreciate them.

In New Testament terms, there is only one way we are able to face our “ultimate responsibility” before God. It is not by doing what we believe we should do, for we do not do what we should do! (“O wretched man that I am! Who will save me from this bondage to death” Romans 7:24).

They refer not to some objective propositions or facts, but to the truth of the One who said, “I am the truth!” In knowing Him, the goodness and grace that is Him, we may know the love and mercy of God and so be “freed” from guilt and fear.

It is by faith in the grace of God, by trusting in the goodness and righteousness of God, says the New Testament, the God we know revealed in Jesus Christ, that we may accept ourselves as forgiven. In Christ we know both the reality of our ultimate responsibility to God and we know that we are accepted even though we have not fulfilled that responsibility, even though we know we are not what we are created to be.

This is our Gospel, our “Good News,” which may enable us to face our responsibilities to God and to others. God, who has given us the freedom to be so much more than we are, also accepts us where we are and as we are – “Just as I am, without one plea.”

And God’s Spirit works with us and in us toward the goal of the high calling of our humanity which we see in Jesus Himself.

I am saying that we can know true liberation only when we have “made our peace with God,” when we have come to terms with our sense of “ultimate responsibility,” our responsibility to God.

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To “know the truth” in the Biblical sense is not just to “know the facts.” Much knowledge is personal, relational. To “know God” is not to know about God, but to enter into a personal trusting relationship with the Creator of all and the One to whom we feel such a deep sense of accountability.

And we know God in and through the grace of Jesus Christ, who is “the Word,” the logos. To respond to that grace, to enter into relationship with God – not because we are fully responsible but because God calls us and accepts us, in spite of what we are. This it is to be free, to begin to become what we are created to be.

PARADOX OF FREEDOM

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he word “paradox” means literally something standing beside itself, something which is in two places at the same time. It signifies two seemingly contradictory statements both of which seem necessarily true.

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First, we affirmed the reality of freedom. Freedom is a reality of our experience, but when we try to think about it, we make it an “object” of our thought or study – and as objects are not free, we can never understand freedom by the categories of our thought or reason.

Second, we thought about the limits of freedom. We have our freedom within limits, “freedom within finitude,” within the structures and processes of this physical world in which we live. We are not spirits, we are creatures of physical substance and limitations.

The “paradox of freedom” can be stated quite simply in several short sentences: Decision is the exercise of freedom. We exercise our freedom by making decisions. But every decision we make is a commitment, a limitation of our freedom. And yet we are in fact only free when we are making decisions.

That’s the paradox. Thank you, Jean Paul Sartre.

To say it again in more detail: To live is to act. To act is to decide, to do this rather than that. Every decision is a commitment. Many actions are quite conscious and deliberate. But many are more or less unconscious, habitual. But even here, most of these decisions were conscious decisions at some point in our lives.

That is one of the things to realize about teen-age years. This is the time of our lives when we are making decisions which become habits and which bind us for the rest of our lives. As the sign on the old dirt road said, “Choose your rut carefully. You’ll be in it for the next twenty miles.”

Our freedom is exercised in making these decisions and acting on what we have decided. But when we do decide and act, we are no longer free to do the thing or things which were alternative to our action. Every time we decide to do this, it is no longer possible to do that. If last night we decided to go to dinner and a movie,

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we were not free then to spend the evening playing bridge with friends.

Take the decision we make each morning – to get up and face the day or to stay in bed. For most of us, it’s easier to stay in bed – to roll over and go back to sleep when the alarm goes off. But to do even this is to make a decision. When you reach out and turn off that alarm, you may have chosen the path of least resistance, but it was still a decision. And once you’ve rolled over and fallen asleep again, you’re no longer at the same time free to get to class or to work. In the same way, if you do decide to get up and you do haul yourself out from under the warm covers to face the cold, cruel world, you are no longer free at the same time to lie there and sleep.

So the same process which is the exercise of our freedom is also the destruction of it. That’s the paradox. Think what this means for what we have already said about the nature of freedom.

Freedom exists within limits, within the structures and processes of our existence. Freedom is not so much the right to live anyway we want as it is the ability to live to the fullest within the conditions life has dealt us, the “nature” of our creation, to be what we are created to be, to bring out of our lives the kind of music they were created to produce. (As freedom, sitting at a piano, is not the right to pound the keyboard with our fists but the ability to “play” the piano, to make the music come from the “instrument” which it was created to produce.)

So the paradox of freedom in our living is that while we are able to do many things, our freedom lies in making the commitment to live according to life’s purposes, to develop our human nature to the fullest, to become the women and men we are created to be.

In terms of Christian faith, that person is most free who can commit herself to live in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, to “live love”.

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A new commandment I give to you, that you love one

another as I have loved you! And He went on to say that

we are then no longer servants (“slaves” is the literal

translation), but that we are “friends” – sons, heirs, free.

(Note John 15:11-17.)

The words are indeed true: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (II Corinthians 3:17).

For the person who has learned to live in the love of God is indeed free.

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