Continuing from a previous post * It is Practically Unworkable and Timothy Keller’s book ‘Making Sense of God’:
We see, then, freedom is not what the culture tells us. Real freedom comes from the strategic loss of some freedoms in order to gain others. It is not the absence of constraints but choosing the right constraints and the right freedoms to lose. Some might object to this way of framing things. You may grant that freedom is the choosing of the right constraints. Then you may say, “But these are the restraints that I have chosen. So that still makes me free by today’s definition, because I’m free as long as I’m doing what I want.”
That’s too simplistic. You don’t really choose most of these necessary limitations in life. You are just recognizing the limitations that are actually there in this world, that are independent of your desires and choices. For example, we have a body that is designed to do some things and not other things, and we only experience physical freedom when we submit our wills to the body’s limits. When you eat right and exercise right, you gain the freedom to live in ways you could not do without the stamina and health that comes from those regimens. This is not, however, anything like the postmodern ideal of “creating yourself.” The liberating “right” restraints we have spoken of, among many others, are not things you make to please yourself. They are hard realities about the way we are and the way the world is. You don’t choose them, you submit to them.
If you see a large sailboat out on the water moving swiftly, it is because the sailor is honoring the boat’s design. If she tries to take it into water too shallow for it, the boat will be ruined. The sailor experiences the freedom of speed only when she limits her boat to the proper depth of water and faces the wind at the proper angle.
In the same way, human beings thrive in certain environments and break down in others. Unless you honor the givens and limits of your physical body, you will never know the freedom of health. Unless you honor the givens and limits of human relationships, you will never know the freedom of love and social peace. If you actually lived anyway you wanted—never aligning your choices with these physical and social realities—you would quickly die and die alone.
You are, then, not free to do whatever you choose. That is an impossible idea and not the way freedom actually works. You get the best freedoms only if you are willing to submit your choices to various realities, if you honor your own design. ~Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God, (Penguin Random House, LLC New York, NY, 2016), 102-03
