“Freedom has all the power and all the danger of a radically under-determined notion. Left to function at the level of habitual associations and unexamined assumptions, it becomes a serious obstacle to understanding, manipulable by all kinds of political and commercial interests, sheltering desires that would seem much less admirable without its cover, enticing rather than convincing us, offering in cut-price versions what can be truly had only at considerable cost. Moreover, the meaning of freedom is unstable, because it necessarily varies with the context of world-interpreting or life-directing meaning to which, in any instance, it belongs. Its meaning relates to that of other big and malleable terms, such as goodness, justice, equality, rights, truth, progress, authority, and God. Contemporary rhetoric of freedom requires some demythologizing or deconstruction if we are to get beyond rhetoric to the issues that are really at stake at the present juncture of political, social, cultural, and religious history in the West. . . .

“Freedom seems to lead inevitably to the atomization of society. And while freedom is one of the most popular of all concepts, authority has become one of the most unpopular, virtually defined as the enemy of freedom, synonymous with authoritarianism and coercion. If this is problematic, the problem lies in the kind of freedom, the particular understanding of freedom that has become culturally dominant: freedom conceived exclusively as the emancipation of the individual from all constraints and as unlimited freedom of choice. This is also a freedom constructed as the only absolute in a radically relativistic culture. In our increasingly postmodern culture, all other values become matters of individual preference. It is dubious how freedom can survive at all in such splendid isolation.

“An argument of this book is that we need to recover a richer understanding of freedom that is possible only by restoring it to a context of other values and beliefs. Such a freedom is not threatened but formed and nurtured by dependence, belonging, relationship, community, and — importantly and most controversially — authority. Of course, these other factors must themselves be understood as hospitable to freedom and productive of freedom if they are to function in positive synergy with an appropriate form of freedom. . . .

“But because this understanding of freedom is drawn from the resources of the Bible and the Christian tradition, it also requires reference to God. . . . [O]nly in a context of values and practices of life in which human life is related to God can such freedom be adequately sustained. Outside such a context, reduced to the absolute right of the individual to self-determination, freedom degenerates into the banal pursuit of self-gratification or the cynical pursuit of power.

“God is undoubtedly implicated in the contemporary crisis of freedom. In the present cultural climate, belief in God — or, at least, in a God to any extent resembling the Christian God — seems to many incompatible with human autonomy. The modern process of emancipation of life from traditional authorities has also been a process of liberation from God. Can we think and speak about the authority of God in such a way as to affirm human freedom, as given and nurtured by God? Are there Christian understandings of both freedom and authority that avoid the dilemmas of contemporary culture and point to a positive interaction of the two? Can we find God to be the ground of true human freedom and the one who liberates from compulsions that go deeper than the restraints contemporary people are concerned to throw off? This book offers reasons for answering these questions in the affirmative.

“‘The bigger the words, the more easily alien elements are able to hide in them. This is particularly the case with freedom,’ observed Ernst Bloch. Because freedom is such a ‘big’ word, appealing to such fundamental human aspirations and therefore so politically potent, it is easily abused. The defense or promotion of one form of freedom is frequently used as a political excuse for suppressing other forms of freedom. As often as the word seems to open unlimited horizons of human self-fulfillment for those who aspire to freedom, so often its real meaning is reduced to a minimum by those who use it to acquire or maintain political power. Because all too often the selective use of the Bible has been used to justify the restriction of freedom — in the claim that the Bible endorses only this kind of freedom and not that — we must try to be open to the actual dimensions of freedom in Scripture. And because the ambiguity of the notion of freedom makes it all too easy to cloak our own concept in biblical rhetoric, we need to work hard at discerning the central thrust of the Bible’s understanding of freedom. . . .

“If the law and the prophets (cf. Jer. 34) based their attitude to slavery on the salvation-historical ground of the exodus liberation, it is typical of the Wisdom literature that it reaches the same conclusion on creation-theological grounds: that the same God created both master and slave (Job 31:13-15). In the end, both kinds of argument require the abolition of slavery, and it is perfectly proper that we should follow the direction of these Old Testament principles as far as they point, even beyond Old Testament practice and, for that matter, even beyond New Testament practice. Indeed, they carry us further than the abolition of slavery defined in a narrow sense. All relationships of subjection that permit the exploitation of one human being by another are contrary to the fundamental will of God as the Old Testament reveals it. They have no basis in the created status of human beings, who are all equally subject to God, and the historical purpose of God is for the abolition of all such relationships. God’s liberation of Israel from slavery cannot, in the end, be an exclusive privilege for Israel alone, but is prototypical of God’s will that all humanity should similarly come under God’s liberating lordship. . . .

“[T]he New Testament gives a quite new emphasis to freedom as voluntary service. Although the New Testament continues to use the somewhat paradoxical language that equates subjection to God’s lordship with freedom (e.g., 1 Pet. 2:16), the heart of its understanding of freedom is that, through Jesus the Son of God, Christians are free sons and daughters of God their Father (John 8:32; Gal. 4:7; Rom. 3:14–17). The point is that, while a child fulfills himself or herself in dedicated obedience to his or her parent’s will, as Jesus did, this is not the involuntary subjection of a slave, but the glad and willing service of a child. Voluntary service to God means also, again on the model of Jesus, voluntary service of others. Instead of replacing a model of society in which there are masters and slaves with a model in which everyone is his or her own master, Jesus and the early church replaced it with a model in which everyone is the slave of others — with, of course, the understanding that this ‘slavery’ is entirely willing (Luke 22:26–27; John 13:14; Gal. 5:13). In other words, freedom is the freedom to love: ‘you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another’ (Gal. 5:13). If the Old Testament emphasis is on God’s people as freed slaves, the New Testament emphasis in on God’s people as free slaves.”

— from Richard Bauckham, God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives (Westminster John Knox Press, 2002)

Related reading and listening

Links to posts and programs featuring Oliver O'Donovan:

Links to posts and programs featuring Adam K. Webb:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Bauerlein:

Links to posts and programs featuring Felicia Wu Song:

Links to posts and programs featuring Joseph E. Davis:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thaddeus Kozinski:

Links to posts and programs featuring Craig M. Gay:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark T. Mitchell:

Links to posts and programs featuring Karen Dieleman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Tim Clydesdale:

Links to posts and programs featuring J. Mark Bertrand:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mathew Levering:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark G. Malvasi:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kirk Farney:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bradley J. Birzer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Ralph C. Wood:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Heintzman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Gil Bailie:

Links to posts and programs featuring Zygmunt Bauman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Lee Anderson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mike Aquilina:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bishop Robert Barron:

Links to posts and programs featuring Frederick Buechner:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jeffrey Bilbro:

Links to posts and programs featuring James A. Herrick:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Wilson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan Cain:

Links to posts and programs featuring Marilyn McEntyre:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Spencer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Albert Borgmann:

Links to posts and programs featuring Catherine Prescott:

Links to posts and programs featuring Maggie M. Jackson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Garret Keizer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andy Crouch:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kyle Hughes:

Links to posts and programs featuring Philip G. Ryken:

Links to posts and programs featuring Eric Miller:

Links to posts and programs featuring Landon Loftin:

Links to posts and programs featuring Barry Hankins:

Links to posts and programs featuring Quentin Schultze:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Walker:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Peters:

Links to posts and programs featuring Alexander Lingas:

Links to posts and programs featuring Fr. Damian Ference:

Links to lectures and commentary by Ken Myers:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Cayley: