W. Bradford Littlejohn’s 2017 book, The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty: Richard Hooker, the Puritans, and Protestant Political Theology examined the differing accounts of freedom articulated by Richard Hooker (1554–1600), one of the most significant Protestant theologians of the sixteenth century.
The book’s final chapter is titled “‘The Truth Will Set You Free’: The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty.” In it, Littlejohn summarizes the book’s main argument, then examines Isaiah Berlin’s seminal distinction — articulated in his 1958 lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty” — between negative and positive liberty. He compares Berlin’s taxonomy with the sixteenth-century debates between Hooker and his Puritan adversaries. Littlejohn then summarizes the work of three contemporary thinkers who have presented theological critiques of Berlin’s framework. The first is the critique presented in David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions.
“Richard Bauckham mounts a similar, but more nuanced, line of argument in his God and the Crisis of Freedom, contrasting what he calls the ‘modern libertarian idea of freedom’ with the Christian idea. Today, he says, ‘freedom is felt to be opposed to all limits. Freedom means the ability to determine oneself however one wishes by making any choices without restriction.’ This, he argues, is essentially idolatrous, offering a ‘myth of humanity’s godlike freedom.’ His critique is not just theological, though, but also political. Perhaps Berlin, writing in 1958, could dismiss as manageable the conflicts sure to arise within an essentially individualistic and agonistic conception of freedom, but several decades down the line, their destructive effects on society are becoming ever clearer. Bauckham argues that, although seemingly well suited for a pluralistic society, the libertarian idea of freedom, ‘by renouncing all public values except individual freedom of choice, aggravates the difficulties of a pluralistic society. It contributes to the decay of public values and discourages the emergence of public values.’ Worse, by portraying all outward limits on my freedom of action as shackles, it has encouraged the atrophying not merely of political authority, but of the wide range of social bonds that make human life worth living (Bauckham mentions burgeoning divorce rates as one consequence).
“Since late industrial capitalism has succeeded, it would seem, at producing a limitless supply of consumer goods, our hunger for directionless freedom has expressed itself above all in consumption run amok, with ultimately disastrous consequences for a world that is, despite all appearances, stubbornly finite:
The consumer is persuaded to see himself or herself as an autonomous individual mastering the world by money, transcending limits by achieving an ever higher standard of living and enjoying endless novelty. But this freedom, such as it is, is bought at a very high price. . . . [I]t is my freedom at the expense of nature and future generations. . . . We cannot reject limits without destroying the creation on which we depend.
“In response to this destructive embrace of negative freedom, Bauckham sketches a rich and attractive vision of a Christian account of freedom. Although several points from his exposition invite comparison with the themes explored in this book, we will pause to highlight just one of particular significance. In contrast to Hart, Bauckham argues for the necessity of limits, not as an expression of our imitation of God’s own perfection, but more plausibly, on account of our finitude: ‘[H]uman freedom is not the absolute self-determination of God but the freedom of finite creatures, given us to be exercised within limits.’ As the specification of our distinctive identity as human creatures, our natural limits ought to be accepted as a gift that enables us to be ourselves, rather than a chain that prevents us from self-realization. Developing a theme that will be familiar to us from the political theology of both Luther and the Henrician reformers, Bauckham argues that it is by charity that we can express our freedom — a freedom for others — in the midst of accepting limits: ‘What we need to grasp is that limits need not be opposed to freedom. They need not restrict freedom but can enable true freedom.’
“Bauckham first applies this insight within matters of economy and ecology, but he develops it further within a theological context. Clearly our relationship to God as well is defined by limits, the limits of the moral law and numerous biblical commands with which God regulates our freedom. Like [Thomas] Cartwright, though, Bauckham insists that this kind of limit is the highest form of our freedom, at least, if rightly understood and accepted. ‘When I love God and freely make God’s will my own, I am not forfeiting my freedom but fulfilling it. God’s will is not the will of another in any ordinary sense. It is the moral truth of all reality. To conform ourselves freely to that truth is also to conform to the inner law of our own created being.’
“In Resurrection and Moral Order, Oliver O’Donovan develops an account of freedom along similar lines to Bauckham, though with greater methodological rigor and precision. From O’Donovan’s standpoint, something like Berlin’s concept of negative freedom is not simply potentially hazardous for society, and thus the worse of two coherent alternative conceptions. Rather, only one conception is fully coherent, the one that is much closer to Berlin’s ‘positive freedom’:
In saying that someone is free, we are saying something about the person himself and not about his circumstances. Freedom is ‘potency’ rather than ‘possibility.’ External constraints may vastly limit our possibilities without touching our ‘freedom’ in this sense. Nothing could be more misleading than the popular philosophy that freedom is constituted by the absence of limits.
“O’Donovan’s observation here is essentially a sharpening of Bauckham’s point about finitude. If we literally had no limits, then all possibilities of action would be equally compelling, which is to say they would all be equally uncompelling. There would be no reason to ever choose one course of action over another, and thus we would either fall victim to total paralysis of will, or else be capable of nothing but random lurches in one direction or another, which, being unsusceptible of any rational account, would not rise to the level of human action at all. Therefore, it is precisely the presence of limits that makes possible reasons for action, and therefore makes possible meaningful human choice. This does not necessarily mean that we should conclude ‘the more limits, the more freedom,’ but it certainly means that we would be foolish to conclude the opposite.
There is, to be sure, a truth which it intends to recognize, which is that the ‘potency’ of freedom requires ‘possibility’ as its object. For freedom is exercised in the cancellation of all possibilities in a given situation by the decision to actualize one of them; if there were no possibilities, there could be no room for freedom. Nevertheless, there do not have to be many. . . . Where the popular philosophy becomes so misleading is in its suggestion that we can maximize freedom by multiplying the number of possibilities open to us. For if possibilities are to be meaningful for free choice, they must be well-defined by structures of limit. The indefinite multiplication of options can only have the effect of taking the determination of the future out of the competence of choice, and so out of the category of meaningful possibility for freedom. . . . Decision depends upon existing limits and imposes new ones.
“It is for this reason that O’Donovan will speak of authority as ‘the objective correlate of freedom,’ a theme he returns to again and again throughout his work. Authority ‘is what we encounter in the world which makes it meaningful for us to act.’ Since we are by nature social creatures, the freedom that authority enables is above all a freedom to act in ordered relation to others, ‘the realization of individual powers within social forms.’ Accordingly, as Hooker realized much more fully than Luther had, the freedom of society and of the individual go hand-in-hand. The crisis of Luther’s Reformation was that it had upended the social forms that had constituted the framework for the exercise of freedom, however oppressive they were, in Western Europe. The result was the danger both of individual and social unfreedom:
But we can be deprived of the structures of communication within which we have learned to act, and so we can find ourselves hurled into a vacuum in which we do not know how to realize ourselves effectively. . . . But what we can say of the individual in these circumstances, we can say equally of the society. It is not free unless it can sustain the forms that make for its members’ freedom.”
— from W. Bradford Littlejohn, The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty: Richard Hooker, the Puritans, and Protestant Political Theology (Eerdmans, 2017)