Everybody wants to be free. For all of our political and religious polarization, all factions clamor for freedom. And yet they mean different things by it and are confused about how to become free.
The Christian political theorist Brad Littlejohn has written a mind-expanding book on the subject entitled Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. And he gets to the essence of freedom with the help of our friend Martin Luther.
I was asked to review the book for Religion and Liberty Online. Here is what I say about the book and its arguments in my review entitled Are You Free?
The early Protestant Reformers famously disbelieved in the freedom of the will. And yet they gave us a legacy of freedom. This paradox is at the heart of Brad Littlejohn’s Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. But Littlejohn, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is not just unpacking 16th century theology or uncovering influences. Rather, he is untangling today’s confusions about freedom and exposing our actual lack of freedom, while also showing a way forward.
“Professing to be free, we have become slaves,” he writes. “Yet the less liberty we feel, the more liberty we demand, without knowing anymore what it is we are asking for.”
There are many kinds and definitions of freedom, with some of them contradicting each other. Littlejohn observes that, during the Civil War, both sides raised the “Battle Cry of Freedom,” with the Union fighting to free the slaves and the Confederacy fighting for the freedom to have slaves. Today conservatives tend to focus on economic freedom, while progressives fixate on sexual freedom.
Even the simplistic definition of freedom as “doing whatever I want” does not get us very far, since, as Littlejohn says, “our desires are at war with one another.” We may desire power over others, which limits their freedom, while also desiring to be loved, which subordinates our freedom to someone else’s. We desire pleasure, which may lead to addictions that take away our freedom. We desire money and possessions, which may enslave us to the process of acquiring and keeping them.
Littlejohn usefully sorts out the different senses of the concept, all of which “center on our distinctly human ability to exercise moral agency, which is our capacity for purposeful or meaningful action.”
Ultimately, Littlejohn comes to the distinction between “external freedom,” the freedom to act in the world, and “inner freedom,” the freedom of our thoughts and inner lives. He then shows that
Inward liberty is necessary for the other kinds of freedom. And this is precisely the liberty that is so lacking in today’s world. “Trading liberty for license,” Littlejohn writes, “we have accepted a profound unfreedom of soul and spirit in return for the false promise of limitless external freedom.”
Here is where Luther and the Reformers come in:
Sin enslaves. The common assumption today is that sin liberates, so that people want freedom to sin. But according to the Bible and universal human experience, if we are honest, sin puts us into bondage. Sin is not only a matter of the bad things we do, our slavery to our disordered desires, passions, and appetites. It is also a condition. Littlejohn writes:
If freedom is, as I have defined it, “the capacity for meaningful action,” then no wonder the Scriptures describe sin as slavery; for sin strips us of this capacity, separating us not only from God, the source of all ultimate meaning, but also from ourselves and our own purposes. …
The power of sin causes us to lose our freedom, our capacity for meaningful action, in three main ways: forgetfulness, futility, and fear.
Our past gives us our sense of agency, and sin causes us to want to forget our past as a way to escape guilt, often by “dulling our memories in fresh acts of sin.” Sin creates a sense of futility by rendering the present “unintelligible to us,” so that we feel unable to achieve our purposes or, when we do, making them unsatisfying. Sin spoils our future “because of our terror of what lies ahead”; namely, that we might be harmed as a consequence of our actions, and, ultimately, that we will die.
But “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” The gospel of salvation through faith in Christ’s atonement frees us from guilt and so gives us back our past. It frees us from futility by assuring us of the purposefulness of our life and callings. It frees us from the fear of death by the promise of eternal life. Such faith gives inner freedom. This, in turn, bears fruit in external freedom.
Illustration: Hot Cup of Freedom! | Vintage Patriotic Military WW2 via Printerval, CC BY-NC 4.0
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