Timothy Keller, a Christian writer and Pastor in New York city wrote:
“Christianity is supposedly a limit to personal growth and potential because it constrains our freedom to choose our beliefs and practices. Immanuel Kant defined an enlightened human being as one who trusts his or her own power of thinking, rather than in authority or tradition.27 This resistance to authority in moral matters is now a deep current in our culture. Freedom to determine our own moral standards is considered a necessity for being fully human.
This oversimplifies, however. Freedom cannot be defined in strictly negative terms, as the absence of confinement and constraint. In fact the absence of confinement and constraint is actually a means to liberation.
If you have a musical aptitude, you may give yourself to practice, practice, practice the piano for years. This is a restriction, a limit to your freedom. There are many other things you won’t be able to do with the time you invest in practicing. If you have a talent, however, the discipline and limitation will unleash your ability that would otherwise go untapped. What have you done? You have deliberately lost your freedom to engage in some things in order to release yourself to a richer kind of freedom to accomplish other things.
This does not mean that restriction, discipline, and constraint are intrinsically, automatically liberating. For example, a five-foot-four, 125-pound young adult male should not set his heart on becoming an NFL lineman. All the discipline in the world will only frustrate and crush him (literally). He is banging his head against a physical reality—he simply does not have the potential. In our society many people have worked extremely hard to pursue careers that pay well rather than fit their talents and interests. Such careers are straitjackets that in the long run stifle and dehumanize us.
Disciplines and constraints, then, liberate us only when fit with the reality of our nature and capacities. A fish, because it absorbs oxygen from water rather than air, is only free if it is restricted to water. If we put it on the grass, its freedom to move and even live is not enhanced, but destroyed. The fish dies if we do not honor the reality of its nature.
In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions. Those that fit with the reality of our nature and the world produce greater power and scope for our abilities and a deeper joy and fulfillment. Experimentation, risk, and making mistakes bring growth only if, over time, they show us our limits as well as our abilities. If we only grow intellectually, vocationally, and physically through judicious constraints—why would it not also be true for spiritual and moral growth? Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn’t we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it?
The popular concept—that we should each determine our own morality—is based on the belief that the spiritual realm is nothing at all like the rest of the world. Does anyone really believe that? For many years after the morning and evening Sunday services I remained in the auditorium for another hour to field questions. Hundreds of people stayed for the give-and-take discussions. One of the most frequent statements I heard was “Every person has to define right and wrong for him- or herself.” I always responded to the speaker by asking, “Is there anyone in the world right now doing things you believe they should stop doing no matter what they personally believe about the correctness of their behavior.” They would invariably say, “Yes, of course.” Then I would ask, “Doesn’t that mean that you do believe there is some kind of moral reality that is ‘there’ that is not defined by us, that must be abided by regardless of what a person thinks?” Almost always, the response to that question was silence, either a thoughtful or a grumpy one.~Timothy Keller, The Reason For God (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2008,2018), 46-48
27. Kevin Vanhoozer, “Pilgrims Digress: Christian Thinking on and About the Post/Modern Way,” in Christianity and the Postmodern Turn, ed. Myron B. Penner (Brazos, 2005),p.74.
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