Sep52013
Article excerpt

One of the themes that emerged in several interviews on Volume 118 of the Journal was the meaning of human freedom. I think Ron Highfield (God, Freedom, and Human Dignity) is absolutely right in insisting that the modern view of freedom is incompatible with the Gospel’s understanding of who we are and how we were meant to thrive. Unfortunately, much of American Christianity seems configured to justify many modern assumptions rather than critique them.

Do American churches have the capacity and courage to offer an alternative to the central assumptions that comprise the spirit of our age? In a recently published essay called “The End of American Protestantism,” Stanley Hauerwas argued that “Protestant churches in America lost the ability to maintain the disciplines necessary to sustain a people capable of being an alternative to the world.” He further observes: “More Americans may go to church than their counterparts in Europe, but the churches to which they go do little to challenge the secular presumptions that form their lives or the lives of the churches to which they go.”

I have a lot of sympathy with Hauerwas’s evaluation of the cultural captivity of the American churches. And I think Hauerwas is right in this essay to identify a particular view of freedom (and of America) as fundamental to our confusion. That view of freedom is implicit in the glib concept of “church shopping” (as Daniel M. Bell, Jr., observed in our conversation) and in the proud championing of the “market-driven church” that has become uncontroversial in much of Protestantism.

Hauerwas argues that “America is the exemplification of what I call the project of modernity. That project is the attempt to produce a people who believe that they should have no story except the story that they choose when they had no story. That is what Americans mean by ‘freedom.’” Hauerwas has used this “no story” formulation to discuss the modern view of freedom in other essays, and it’s worth spending some time with his essay to discern what he means. I think that he’s right in insisting (here and elsewhere) that this is a view of freedom that issues in nihilism. American society, he asserts, is “a society that shares no goods in common other than the belief that there are no goods in common.” If churches really want to confront the implicit (and often explicit) nihilism of our cultural moment, they will have to confront their complicity in its nurturing.

Related reading and listening

  • The gift of objective reality — Moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan makes an argument for the consistency of the idea of law when it is conceived in a theological context. (40 minutes)
  • Freedom as conformity to reality — W. Bradford Littlejohn summarizes the definitions of liberty offered by Richard Bauckham and Oliver O’Donovan
  • The Life was the Light of men — In a lecture from 2018, Ken Myers contrasts the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason with the Christocentric conception of reason. (57 minutes)
  • The dance of law and freedom — Calvin Stapert on the experience of joyous order in Bach’s music
  • Community, the giver of freedom — Thomas H. Naylor and William H. Willimon on why suspicion about big government shouldn’t take the form of autonomous individualism
  • Light from Neither the East nor the West — Ken Myers reads an essay by theologian John Betz titled “Light from Neither the East nor the West.” It is the third of three essays by Betz in which he distinguishes a Christian understanding of freedom from the conventional modern definitions. (41 minutes)
  • Promethean medicine? — Stanley Hauerwas on medicine and limits
  • Suffering and the vocation of medicine — Stanley Hauerwas on why the elimination of suffering is an inadequate (and unrealistic) goal for medicine
  • Rehabilitating authority — Authority, argues David Koyzis, is an aspect of the image of God, exercised to fulfill human vocations. (30 minutes)
  • Freedom on Holiday: The Genealogy of a Cultural Revolution — In this second of three essays, John Betz argues that freedom for the sake of conforming to the Good has been replaced by freedom as the space to choose whatever we want. (52 minutes)
  • Rejecting “two-tiered” Thomism —
    FROM VOL. 155
    David Bentley Hart on how “two-tier Thomism” deviates from historic Christian understanding of the relationship between God and Creation. (42 minutes)
  • Is irrational freedom truly freedom? — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger argues that freedom must be understood in the context of interplay of reason and the will
  • Freedom, real and counterfeit — D. C. Schindler contrasts the classical and Christian understanding of freedom with the modern understanding of freedom, and explains how true freedom is a condition of harmony with reality. (59 minutes)
  • We Hold These Freedoms: Modern, Postmodern, Christian — An essay by John Betz explores the theological grounding of real freedom. He argues that human freedom cannot be understood apart from divine freedom. (36 minutes)
  • God is not Zeus; you are not Prometheus — Ron Highfield addresses those who doubt Christianity’s goodness, especially as regards modern assumptions about identity, freedom, and dignity. (24 minutes)
  • Communion of saints — Jessica Hooten Wilson asserts that reading stories of holiness in the lives of “literary saints” helps to cultivate Christian character in us. (25 minutes)
  • Power to the people — Nathan O. Hatch on the DIY spirit of early American Christianity
  • Unreason destroys freedom — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the relationship between freedom and truth
  • How should we then die? — Stanley Hauerwas asks how the fear of death shapes the practice of medicine
  • Conventional “charismatic” speech, in service of the Zeitgeist — Richard Stivers on how the rhetoric of democracy invites tyranny
  • Why churches should be more attentive to space — Eric O. Jacobsen discusses New Urbanism with a Christian perspective, imagining how we might organize places in which life may be lived at a human scale and in which real community is nourished. (26 minutes)
  • Diagnosing our political conflicts — Michael Hanby explains why the modern pursuit of freedom — obeying its founding logic — has taken such a destructive turn. (36 minutes)
  • The social context of freedom — Brad Littlejohn talks about the necessity of a more expansive understanding of freedom, one which recognizes that we are really only free within the social experience of shared meaning and mutual recognition. (17 minutes)
  • The paradoxes of therapeutic culture — Stephen Gardner and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn discuss Philip Reiff’s diagnosis of how psychology replaced the social roles of religion, morality, and custom, redefining the meaning of what is public. (39 minutes)
  • The Sixth Commandment and the obligation to protect public health — Ethicist Gilbert Meilaender explains why our experience with COVID-19 has made it difficult for many — citizens and officials — to honor a proper obligation to protect public health. (17 minutes)
  • Freedom, ancient and modern — In a brief excerpt from David Bentley Hart’s book Atheist Delusions, and a longer excerpt from an Areopagus Lecture by D. C. Schindler, the modern view of freedom is contrasted with the understanding of freedom present in ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Roman thought. (27 minutes)
  • Perceiving the common good during a pandemic — D. C. Schindler reflects on the shape of our way of life in wake of a killer virus, seeing signs both encouraging and sinister. (35 minutes)
  • Quarantine’s lessons: patience, hope, the Church, medicine, and more — In the first in a projected series of Features, Stanley Hauerwas shares some thoughts about lessons to be learned while living under quarantine. (13 minutes)
  • Loving your neighbor during a pandemic — Brad Littlejohn reflects on how best to ask and answer some of the questions raised by our current disease-ravaged circumstances, particularly questions related to Christian freedom and love of neighbor. (29 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 146 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Mitchell, Hans Boersma, Henry T. Edmondson, III, Brian Clayton, Douglas Kries, Conor Sweeney, and Carole Vanderhoof
  • Freedom and equality according to Flannery O’Connor — Three guests discuss Flannery O’Connor’s ideas: Henry T. Edmondson, III, on O’Connor’s understanding of political life; Ralph C. Wood, on O’Connor as a “hill-billy Thomist”; and Susan Srigley, on O’Connor’s sacramental and incarnational fiction. (18 minutes)
  • D. C. Schindler: “For Freedom Set Free” — D. C. Schindler argues that the Christian notion of religious liberty is a synthesis of the Jewish, Roman, and Greek traditions. (61 minutes)
  • Is the First Amendment religiously neutral? — David L. Schindler and Nicholas J. Healy, Jr. discuss how the First Amendment is not as sympathetic to religious freedom as is commonly believed, as it is based on contestable assumptions about the nature of “religion,” “freedom,” and “human nature.” (33 minutes)
  • Fischer, Hart, and Highfield on freedom — Three past guests on the Journal explore the meaning of freedom and some common modern misunderstandings of the concept — errors with real consequences. (22 minutes)
  • The nature of freedom reconsidered — In anticipation of this Fall’s Areopagus Lecture entitled “‘For Freedom Set Free’: Retrieving Genuine Religious Liberty,” we present selections from interviews with three MARS HILL AUDIO guests who have raised questions about the modern understanding of freedom. (27 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  • Unbearable Lightness: R. J. Snell on Acedia and Metaphysical Boredom — Philosopher R. J. Snell argues that the metaphysical boredom of modernity is sustained by our deeply-held convictions about freedom and contingency, which view the former as necessary and the latter as offensive. (48 minutes)
  • Gisela Kreglinger: Victorian Wisdom for Contemporary Plights — Gisela Kreglinger considers how George MacDonald’s perspective on gender roles might guide us through some of the questions, problems, and concerns we face today. (68 minutes)
  • Fulfillment is ek-static — Pope Benedict XVI summarizes the understanding of Maximus the Confessor (c.580-662) on the true nature of freedom
  • Only domesticated religions are safe to be free — Stanley Hauerwas on why “freedom of religion” carries subtle temptations
  • Free for obedience — Glenn W. Olsen on Augustine’s understanding of freedom
  • God is more than a choice — Kenneth R. Craycraft, Jr. (and Michael Sandel) on why religious freedom is poorly understood (and vulnerable)
  • What is beyond our choosing? — D. C. Schindler on our nihilistic quest for freedom
  • What Ockham severed — Jean-Charles Nault on the advent of sheer freedom
  • Progress in the void — R. J. Snell on modernity’s preference for freedom over the good
  • Command and liberation — Oliver O’Donovan on the freedom of living under authority
  • Principles have to be discovered, not chosen — Alasdair MacIntyre on the problem of natural law and contemporary culture
  • “Freedom” as tyranny — Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon on democracy, desire, and freedom
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 123 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nicholas M. Healy, Christian Smith, James K. A. Smith, Esther Lightcap Meek, Richard Viladesau, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Radical faith in the nothing — David Bentley Hart on the nihilism of worshiping mere choice
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