Continuing from a previous post : Timothy Keller. . . his book ‘Making Sense of God’: Today we hold a new unqualified kind of freedom (only and exclusively excepting the impingement on others’ freedom). We understand freedom as the right of the individual to choose his or her own values altogether, something neither Locke nor his compatriots ever envisioned.12
The Enemy of Freedom?
Today as a culture we believe freedom is the highest good, that becoming free is the only heroic story we have left, and that giving individuals freedom is the main role of any institution and of society itself. It is, we could say, the baseline cultural narrative of our Western culture.13 It has always been important, but now it’s ultimately important. It is the one truth that vitalizes all other doctrines and beliefs.
That includes, in the minds of many people, the doctrines of Christianity. In much of our society Christianity is seen as the archenemy of freedom. Columbia professor Mark Lilla writes in the New York Times of meeting a man who had graduated from the prestigious Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and discovering, to his shock, that the man had walked the isle at a Billy Graham crusade and professed to have been “born again.”
Lilla, as a teenager, had flirted with Christianity, but then he found the place in the Bible where Jesus tells Nicodemus, an accomplished scholar and leader, “You must be born again!” Lilla wrote: “Jesus seems to be telling Nicodemus that he must recognize his own insufficiency, that he will have to turn his back on his autonomous, seemingly happy life, and be reborn as a human being who understands his dependency on something greater. That seems like a radical change to our freedom. And it is.” He goes on to say that this is the reason he couldn’t follow suit.14
Is he right? Do we have to choose between freedom and faith in God? The answer is yes and no. By speaking in this way, I am not being indecisive. Rather, I want us to look more closely at our definitions. Brendan Gleeson, in the movie Calvary, plays a man who goes into the Catholic priesthood later in life. He has a daughter who recently failed in a suicide attempt. As he expresses his concern to her, she says assertively: “I belong to myself, not to anyone else.” That, of course, is one expression of the cultural narrative of freedom. Her father answers, “True,” but then, after a pause, he says, “False.” He isn’t changing his mind. He is saying, essentially, “There is some truth in what you are saying about freedom, but if you define it in the way you do, it is ultimately false.”15
His insight applies not just to this specific case but to the entire way our society understands freedom, but if you define it the way you do, it is ultimately false.”15
His insight applies not just to this specific case but to the entire way our society understands freedom. True,—the ideal of individual freedom in Western society has done incalculable good. It has led to a far more just and fair society for minorities and women. Indeed, there is a danger that a critique of the idea of freedom could be used to weaken or roll back these gains.
But false. Freedom has come to be defined as the absence of any limitations or constraints on us. By this definition, the fewer boundaries on our choices and actions, the freer we feel ourselves to be. Held in this form, I want to argue that the narrative has gone wrong and is doing damage. ~Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God (New York, New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2016), 99-101 (For the first post of this three part series, click ‘Free to Live as I See Fit’.)
