"Trapped" by Freedom?

The purpose of a free will is to bind itself in commitment to others

NOTE: Today’s post is the text of a sermon I was invited to deliver at Christ the King Anglican in Alexandria, VA on Sunday. My text was Galatians 5:1, 13-25.

I will have a full Substack update this Friday.

Last year, a friend of the family got married to the love of her life—after, like most modern couples, living together for a couple of years just to make sure they were compatible and wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. When they finally tied the knot, it seemed meant to be—he loved her, she loved him, her family adored him. Just a few months later, though, she filed for divorce. What had gone wrong? Nothing, she said. He was great, but she felt “trapped” in the relationship and needed to take some time to “find herself.” It did not seem to occur to her that perhaps she already had—that we are meant to find ourselves in one another.

Hers is a too-common tragedy today. Indeed, afraid of being “trapped” in a committed relationship, more and more young people don’t marry at all. An even larger number shun the lifelong commitment of bringing children into the world—all in the name of “freedom,” of “not being tied down” and “keeping their options open.” But what if that’s not what freedom is all about? G.K. Chesterton once said, “the purpose of an open mind is the same as that of an open mouth—it’s meant to close on something.” The purpose of a free will is to bind itself in commitment.

Few if any ideals are so important to modern Americans as “freedom.” As Christians, we are easily seduced by this language—after all, “freedom” is a constant theme of the New Testament. But what if that word doesn’t mean what we think it means? Today’s text offers us a jarring wake-up call on the kind of freedom that Christ calls us to.

The first thing to notice about this passage is that freedom is not just something won for us by Christ’s work, not just a status we have received, but something that we must continue to fight for and grow into. It is both the origin and the destination of the Christian life: “For freedom Christ has set us free,” Paul says in verse 1, and then again in verse 13, “For you were called to freedom, brothers.” Freedom is not something we can take for granted. Nor is it merely something that others can take from us; the greatest threat to freedom turns out to be ourselves.

Now, before we dive into this passage in depth, it’s worth noting just how diverse and disorienting our language of freedom can be. At the American Revolution, Patrick Henry declared “give me liberty or give me death”—demanding the freedom of colonial assemblies to make their own laws. During the American Civil War, the “battle cry of freedom” was raised on behalf of African-American slaves, and a century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. called for freedom from continued racial oppression in his “I Have a Dream” speech. Between the two, Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed the ideal of “freedom from want” and poverty as an essential American freedom, but other Americans have denounced the resulting policies as a socialist attack on genuine economic freedom. How can the same word mean so many different things?

Well, our word freedom, as theologian Oliver O’Donovan observes, is invoked mainly when it is under threat—“Freedom is the looking glass in which we search our features anxiously for signs of ‘unfreedom.’” But freedom can be threatened from many different directions. In this sense, it is a bit like our word “health” which can be invoked in response to starvation or obesity, fever or hypothermia. Most of the freedoms with which we pre-occupy ourselves, however—like most of the forms of health—are outward, bodily freedoms. But we are both body and soul, and our souls can be sold into slavery as readily as our bodies—indeed more readily, and with worse consequences.

So it was with the Galatians, who were in grave danger of spiritual and moral bondage despite their external freedom. For Paul, there are two great threats to true Christian liberty: one is the bondage to good works—legalism—and the other is the bondage to evil works—libertinism. Good works, of course, are good in themselves, but not as a means of salvation. We are simply not good enough. We try to hide from the guilt and shame of sin by sewing fig-leaf garments of good works, but they turn out to be embarrassingly see-through. But while they may not deceive others, they can sometimes deceive ourselves, blinding us to the fact that we are, as St. John wrote to the church at Laodicea, “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” We must admit our helplessness and be clothed with the true righteousness of Christ if we are to receive true freedom from the accusing voice of the Law, and the fear of death and hell. This is the first freedom of justification, with which Paul is preoccupied for most of the book of Galatians, and which he recapitulates in the first half of chapter 5.

This freedom is the greatest of all freedoms, the fountain from which all others flow. The Christian, writes Luther, “is free from all things and over all things so that he needs no works to make him righteous and save him, since faith alone abundantly confers all these things.” By receiving the word of promise, by which Christ promises to cover all our sins and deliver us once for all from both physical and spiritual death, we experience the deepest of inward freedom, able to hold our heads high knowing that “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1).

That said, while I am sure that everyone in this building today needs to hear that message, and accept Christ’s promise of freedom from the burden of legalism, I would wager that most of us are in greater danger of the other error that Paul tackles in Galatians 5, libertinism: “For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.”

Now, at first glance it sounds like Paul is saying, “Yes, you are free now, and freedom is good, but there can, you know, be too much of a good thing. Don’t allow yourselves to indulge too much freedom.” Indeed, our word “libertinism” suggests that it is the vice of too much liberty: by all means, do what you want, but not too much. But this is not quite right. Indeed, it can’t be right—if it is for freedom that Christ has set us free; if freedom is what we are called to pursue and grow into, then how can there be too much of it? The reality is that libertinism, far from being the expression of freedom, is in fact another form of slavery: it is the slavery to our own passions—and, I should add, to anyone else who is willing to prey upon those passions, stirring them up and exploiting them for their own advantage. St. Peter warns of the false prophets of his day—today we call them advertisers: “speaking loud boasts of folly, they entice by sensual passions of the flesh those who are barely escaping from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved.”

In contrast, in our collect for peace every Sunday, we pray, “to serve him is perfect freedom.”

In the rest of this sermon, I want to amplify on that theme, which rings so oddly in our modern ears. We are accustomed to think that to serve anyone but myself is a compromise of my sacred freedom. What then is this second freedom, the freedom of sanctification?

Today we are told that freedom means “having it your way”; “do what you want.” It’s simple, right? Really? You think so? I have this exchange with my kids all the time. On a weekend or over the holidays, we’ll do some family activity or outing, and they’ll grumble and complain that we’re taking away their “free time.” But when I press them what it is they are wanting to do with this “free time,” they rarely have an answer; they want to be free to do whatever it is that they want, and they’ll figure out what that something is later.

Isn’t this how so many of us are as adults, as well? Often you just want to be able to plop down on the couch with the wife at the end of a long day and watch a good movie on Netflix…but which one? Thirty minutes later, you’ve given up on picking a whole movie and are just looking for a sitcom episode!

We laugh at ourselves for such follies, but too often, this sort of freedom turns into a form of slavery. For if we do not have a very clear idea of what it is that we truly want, our bellies—our appetites—will happily pipe up and say, “well I can tell you one thing I’d like right now.” The freedom to follow our impulses quickly turns into the bondage of being led by our impulses. The freedom to “do whatever we want” finds its completion in the compulsion to do what we hate. As Paul writes in Romans 7: “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” Similarly in this passage: “For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.”

We all recognize this vividly in the phenomenon of addiction, which has become almost the default state for many of us in the modern world: not merely drugs, alcohol, or caffeine, but perhaps above all in those arenas where we are quickest to celebrate our freedom—in sexuality, or in our technology. We are slaves of our desires.

As Paul lists off the “works of the flesh,” he begins and ends where we might expect—with these lower appetites and addictions: “sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality…drunkenness, orgies.” Ancient Greco-Roman society was awash in sexual license and self-indulgence, which turned out to be the lowest form of bondage. But we have no room to talk; in our porn-soaked culture, we must heed more than ever Paul’s warnings against the flesh’s tendency to enslave itself to unreality. That said, it is often too easy for us to gloss over the other items on Paul’s list, with sins that might seem more mundane and less alarming: “enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy.”

These are perhaps not what come first to mind when we hear “works of the flesh.” These seem to be sins of the mind more than the body, and they are provoked less by our sensual appetites than by our ambition, pride, and self-regard. But this list is a reminder that “the whole man is flesh,” as Luther memorably summarized St. Paul’s teaching. For Paul, the works of the flesh describe the works of the old man, the works of human nature curved in upon itself, rather than, as God designed us, open and attentive to the needs of the other. In these sins, we forget that our brother or sister is someone for whom Christ died, and we imagine them rather as a threat to our own dominion, our own ability to get what we think is ours by right. This is so much easier to do when the brother is out of sight, out of our physical presence. Today, we have all become experts at maintaining a mirage of outward calm and friendliness, while we mock, slander, or rage at one another on social media—sometimes, behind the mask of anonymity.

Often, we justify such behavior to ourselves as a kind of zeal for righteousness. It is only because we care so much about the church, or about America, or indeed, about freedom, that we are unafraid to give our fellow believers and fellow citizens an earful or a “sick burn” online. But of course, the Galatians were fighting over matters of doctrine and discipleship too; no doubt, they thought they were showing their zeal for Christ. But no, Paul warns, “if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.” We are, Paul teaches elsewhere, members of one another, members of one body. When we turn on one another, it is as if we were biting off our own fingers.

This too is a form of slavery that masquerades as freedom—today, it takes the form of the idolatry of “freedom of speech.” “It’s a free country,” we say, “I can say what I like.” Here, too, though, we find that sin is habit-forming. You start off by stretching the truth a bit about what someone said, justifying it to yourself on the basis that “well, they probably said even worse stuff in private.” Pretty soon, though, you start believing your own lies, and you feed on them to increase your envy and enmity. Only the truth can set us free from the web of self-deceit and self-justification, but this truth includes an honest reckoning with ourselves.

Here, we see the deep connection between the freedom of justification and of sanctification. Our various sinful habits are like weeds that grow up in a soil of pride and self-justification. We are not so bad after all, we are doing a pretty good job compared to others, and so what’s one little fleshly indulgence? And another… and another…. Again, we must accept the truth about ourselves that we are “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” In the soil of a soul that has stripped itself of all pretense, the weeds of sin struggle to take root, and wither. A soul open to the Gospel will bring forth the fruit of the Spirit.

Notice how Paul talks about sanctification here. It is a hard journey that we must undertake, “walking by the Spirit,” “keeping in step with the Spirit,” and there is no better season to focus on that journey than our current time of Lent. During these forty days we consciously put to death the desires of the flesh, and pull out the weeds of sin that have taken root in our lives. But the new life that must spring up within us is God’s work, not ours. The Spirit will bring forth these fruits in us, as surely as a tree brings forth its fruits. You don’t grow in love, joy, peace, and patience by screwing up all your effort and concentrating your attention on being loving or joyful. This would still be a form of being curved in upon yourself. Rather, the Spirit bears fruit in our lives as we experience the freedom of self-forgetfulness: “through love serve one another,” Paul says.

Freedom, then, does not consist in keeping one another at arm’s length so as to avoid being “trapped” or “tied down” by commitments. Quite the opposite. Because we were made for one another, we find our freedom in giving ourselves for and to one another.

In closing, we should note that even this freedom for one another can go off the rails if detached from the law of God. Today, many Christians who care deeply about serving others often pit “love” against the clear teaching of God’s Word, which they see as exclusionary, judgmental, and even offensive. They may appeal to epistles like Galatians where Paul emphasizes that in the new age of faith, we are no longer under the law. But this confuses justification and sanctification—the law does not tell us how to be saved, but it does tell us how to live as saved and saving people. “Love is the fulfilling of the law,” Paul says in Romans, but what does love look like? It doesn’t mean just giving others whatever they want, any more than we should give ourselves whatever we want. Love still needs concrete moral guidance, and the law of God provides this: it revives the soul, makes wise the simple, rejoices the heart, and enlightens the eyes, as Psalm 19 teaches. For the justified believer, the law is experienced no longer as a terrifying judge, but rather as a benevolent teacher that guides us on the path of sanctification.

Coming Down the Pipe

Postliberalism in Conversation: Why Has Liberalism Become Illiberal?

I’ll be having a conversation/debate with Kevin Vallier, author of All the Kingdoms of the World, this Thursday at GWU. If you’re in the area, please register to join us here.