Let Freedom Ring?

Last updated on: August 26, 2021 at 1:13 am by Ben Witherington

Let Freedom Ring? 2021-07-09T08:52:03-04:00 Ben Witherington

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There has been a lot of loose talk in the past few years about freedom, well, at least certain kinds of freedom. The emphasis has been almost entirely on individual freedoms and individual rights, with no corresponding discussion of individual responsibilities, or the freedom of the communities we live in. Janis Joplin once said ‘freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’. In one sense at least she was right. When one is not encumbered with all sorts of obligations, responsibilities to family, bills, etc. one has nothing left to lose. One is footloose and fancy free. But is that how human beings are supposed to be— loners with no attachments and no responsibilities? I don’t call that freedom, I call that reckless abandonment of one’s societal relations and responsibilities.

It is interesting that in all the loose talk lately about political freedoms and rights— the right to bear arms as a private citizen, the right to private property, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, very little of any of this matches up with what the Bible says about freedom. In the first place the discussion of freedom in the Bible is talking about freedom from oppression and slavery. Read the book of Exodus. There is a reason so many African American spirituals are grounded or expound upon Exodus. They had personally experienced real slavery in recent history. Thereafter there is the discussion about freedom from exile in the exilic and post-exilic literature. Absolutely nothing is said to encourage the notion of private property either. Instead, we hear ‘the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof’. In short, everything belongs to God, and we are only stewards of God’s property. That sort of perspective cuts right across assumptions both about private property and public property which in both cases assumes it belongs to us. Our money may say ‘in God we trust’ but in fact we don’t really. We trust in our ‘property’, our bank accounts, our military, ourselves etc. Our thinking about all such essential things has little or no theological perspective to it.

And what about ‘the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’? From a Biblical perspective life, liberty, happiness are not rights. They are gifts from the Almighty. They are blessings, not rights. Again, we fail to think about these things in a more Biblical and proper way as Christians. And I haven’t even begun to discourse on what Paul means when he tells the Galatians ‘for freedom Christ has set you free’.

When the NT talks about freedom it mainly refers to a combination of freedom from oppression (the liberation of the captives, including liberation from economic oppression), and freedom from sin, especially the later. While we run around talking about freedom of speech, freedom of the press etc. the Bible is concerned with what we need to be freed from as well as freed for. The Bible tells us that transactional analysis was wrong– I’m not o.k. and you are not o.k., much less basically good. No, we’ve all fallen and can’t get up apart from the grace of God. As Pogo said a long time ago ‘I have seen the enemy, the enemy is me’. We are our own worst enemies, and without the transformation of human character by God’s grace the Bill of Rights is not worth the paper it is written on. In a narcissistic age we thump our chests and talk about ‘my rights’ ‘my freedom’, but rarely does this traipse into the territory of how do I need to change, what should I do about the command to love my neighbor as myself and so on? Nor do we talk about the myth of radical individualism that prompts so much narcissism in our culture. What I mean by that is: 1) it is false that anyone is a self-made person; 2) it is false that we are self-sufficient; 3) it is false that we can make it on our own. None of this is really true, but this myth of radical individualism has motivated a lot of the loose talk about freedom.

I remember hearing an interview with an African American man in S.C. who was 100, and the son of a slave. This was back in the 1970s. For some reason the interview took place in front of an old plantation house on the edge of this town. The man in question had lived a simple and good Christian life, and at one point in the interview the interviewer asked how seeing that old plantation house made him feel. His answer was memorable— ‘until I see someone born with clothes on, I ain’t going to figure he’s any more than me– a child of God, created in his image’. Property, clothes, money does not make us who we are, nor does it make us any better than anyone else. We are all created in God’s image (see the last post), and what we need most is freedom from sin, and selfish ways of living. How about we talk about freedom to help others (think for instance of Habitat for Humanity— thank you Jimmy Carter), freedom to love others and give to others without thought of return, freedom to strive to be better persons every day, freedom to worship God as really the ruler of our world, not merely as a self-help guru or cosmic blessing machine. What does it mean to let freedom ring for all that is good, true, and beautiful?

Watch this video, and contemplate these things—-

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