This, then, is the point: some forms of “coercion” are ultimately unavoidable, though they may be implicit. Many Christians who stand up for humanism (often seen as an antidote to an ill-defined “Postmodernism”) inadvertently end up defending too radical a notion of human freedom, a liberal development of ancient ideas that, when overemphasized, can lead to great error. We are finite beings and that finitude is constitutive for our freedom. From the Christian perspective and as long as we believe in concupiscence, we cannot believe free will to be some completely arbitrary dynamic involving unlimited choice (and this is not even to mention the many ways in which non-religious factors make clear the constant constraints on liberty).
I do not mean to construct a strawman. It’s simply clear that many entertain such a conception even if they cannot admit it to themselves; deep down, they retain some idea of unlimited choice, even as words like “duty” follow up attacks on “liberalism” (often understood in contemporary political terms and not, to my mind more precisely, in terms of the set of philosophical ideas that so dominates the center-Right and center-Left).
This is an issue on which we must not equivocate. Often, from Christians, we hear “freedom means responsibility.” Perhaps this is true. But the more fundamental point is that freedom only exists in a relationship to delimitation—otherwise it simply could not be freedom. In returning to such an idea, perhaps we would be able to reclaim a sense of social and political humility, a compassion for the situations in which others find themselves. Our defenses of humanism, of liberal agency, of (oddly) a sort of Sartrean Existentialism, have little to no place in Christian theology and anthropology. The Psalms make that clear enough:
A psalm of David.
I
The earth is the LORD’s and all it holds,
the world and those who dwell in it.
For he founded it on the seas,
established it over the rivers.II
Who may go up the mountain of the LORD?
Who can stand in his holy place?
“The clean of hand and pure of heart,
who has not given his soul to useless things,
what is vain.He will receive blessings from the LORD,
and justice from his saving God.
Such is the generation that seeks him,
that seeks the face of the God of Jacob.”Selah
III
Lift up your heads, O gates;
be lifted, you ancient portals,
that the king of glory may enter.
Who is this king of glory?
The LORD, strong and mighty,
the LORD, mighty in war.
Lift up your heads, O gates;
rise up, you ancient portals,
that the king of glory may enter.
Who is this king of glory?
The LORD of hosts, he is the king of glory.
(Psalms 24:1-10)
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