Returning to Freedom

Is this freedom? Freedom is the first kiss. It’s kicking around the sandpit and making mudpies. It’s a fragrance once known and never forgotten. It’s a memory that sticks.

Is this freedom? Freedom’s life in the weekends and on holiday. Obligations cease; conventions fall away; authority is just a dusty four-syllable word. Time is empty, and I choose to fill it. Freedom is choice, optionality, determining one’s life according to one’s own lights. Freedom’s an extra-ordinary life.

Is this freedom? Freedom’s the sense of arrival. It’s the buzz of exhilaration. It’s life sucked in and savoured, breathed out and defined. It’s riding pillion on a summer’s day with shorts and a white t-shirt. It’s the chords of a song ringing true, and it’s the moment the drop hits.

Is all this freedom? If so, life often seems unpromising for freedom. We soon know dissatisfaction, frustration, disappointment, loss and suffering—or simply bog-standard, everyday slog. Experience raises questions. How long can I hope in the promise? Are only tastes of freedom on offer, which whet the appetite but never satisfy? Is freedom, then, bound to elude our grasp and dispirit us because it is nothing more than a cipher for life beyond our reach? In a word, is the promise empty?

Freedom is a central aspiration of Western modernity: the concept and its language, images, and symbols stir something within us.¹ It is a “myth” that animates the liberal democratic project—an “imaginative pattern” that aids in interpreting the world and deriving meaning.² Simply, freedom rouses desire and shapes people’s lives as a real or imagined good.

Yet if freedom is something we stake our lives on, have we understood it faithfully? How should we as Christians think of freedom? In this essay, I trace certain historical, Scriptural and theological aspects of freedom and aim to bring clarity to a difficult question. Freedom is both experientially ambiguous and conceptually elusive. As someone has put it, freedom “sings more than it speaks”.³ But we can and do speak of it in different ways: political, moral, ontological, and spiritual, etc. These all relate by analogy, though I take the primary sense to consist in spiritual freedom, or living with God, which grounds the other senses as their “inner meaning”.⁴

We’ll approach this meaning in three movements: time, space, and relationship. We set out, first, by thinking about modernity—and its focus on freedom—as an attitude toward time, captured in the metaphor of “growing up”. Second, we turn to the parable of the compassionate father and the two lost sons (Luke 15:11-32). The parable works marvellously with spatial locations: the father’s estate, a far country, and the pig sty of a citizen in the far country, “a long way off” from the father, the father’s house, and the fields beyond the house. As a whole, the parable offers a “gospel within the gospel” and a sort of initiation into the life of faith.⁵ In its movements, the parable displays the baptismal pattern—life from death—which recapitulates Israel’s own liberation and life with the LORD. In closing, we’ll widen our perspective with a brief theological reflection on freedom as gift.

Time: Modernity and “Growing Up”

A philosopher sent his students a letter soon before his death from cancer in 1940. It was a farewell and is a testimony to the love this man, Peter Wust, shared with his students for almost a decade. How difficult it is to write, Wust noted, but how fitting to write at Advent, for Christ’s coming lies just beyond cancer’s advance. In the letter, Wust looked back on the previous 150 years in the European West. He saw the failure of the “Enlightenment” project. Specifically, Wust considered the Enlightenment command to “Metanoite” (Change your mind!) to have run its course. As Wust understood it, the command was to turn from Christ and to inhabit a time, culturally, without Christ. Yet Wust thought the command—sustained by the European intelligentsia since at least the time of Napoleon—floundered on the “cannon fire” of the world wars. The thundering of cannon woke all but the deaf from the Enlightenment dream.

Wust was familiar with one of the most well-known texts associated with modernity in the eighteenth century, an essay entitled “What is Enlightenment?” by German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant opened with the words: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity”.⁶ What is Enlightenment? It is growing up. “Immaturity” translates the word Unmündigkeit, which means “not being of legal age”, that is, not being able to make legally binding decisions for oneself. With Enlightenment, however, the world comes of age and decision-making falls to its citizens. Growing up is not a “natural” development but needs to be taken in hand and won through endeavour and courage over and against “self-incurred immaturity”. Dare to know! Kant entreated. Kant argued for a public sphere characterised by uncensored, reasoned debate and governed by “strictly egalitarian, non-authoritarian principles”.⁷ With this, Kant challenged established authority even as he was no political revolutionary: “reason as much and about what you wish; but obey!”⁸

Still, revolution was in the air in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in North America and across the European continent, such that the period 1775-1848 has been named the “age of revolutions”.⁹ Revolution represented an extreme form of that which Wust understood as ingredient in the command metanoite!: a tendency to move on from what came before and was handed-down or inherited. In fact, to be a modern originally meant to be a person of the present, as opposed to someone of an earlier time. So modernity is, among other things, an attitude toward time. The attitude took a range of forms, and it also led to reactions. Modernity is therefore complex, even if the most visible forms dominate the imagination (the French Revolution, say).¹⁰

The notion of freedom in modernity reflects this complexity. Even if one grants that the French revolutionary slogan of “liberty” was initially part of an ordered programme of change—freedom governed by law—it devolved into licence and lawlessness, perhaps most vividly in the Terror from 1793, which cost thousands of lives.¹¹ The lawlessness can be rightly named “negative liberty”: freedom from interference. These two ways of conceiving freedom characterise modernity generally: what Quinten Skinner calls “liberty as independence” (where one “is not subject to the arbitrary power of any other person or institution within civil society or the state” and so enjoys a “distinctive status in social life”) and negative liberty, which is merely the absence of restraint and interference.¹²

Yet, whether we talk about liberty as independence or negative liberty, David C. Schindler argues for this “common core”: “…freedom as spontaneous or unconditioned causality, or as active power that produces effects as a result of self-originating energy rather than receiving determination from outside itself.”¹³ In other words, modern freedom is sheer indeterminate power, that is, the mere ability, which is not determined by anything beyond it, to make change: this power “is not necessarily coming from anywhere and it’s not going anywhere. It’s just the capacity to change, to make things different than they presently are.” We get at the distinctiveness of this modern “common core” by considering the question of who we are as human beings. On one premodern account, to start with what and who we are as given (“actuality”), rather than beginning with the self as a project to be realised (“possibility”), is simply to say that “we come from somewhere and we’re going somewhere”: life has determinate origins and ends.¹⁴ Within this context, the departures we take and the wondrous things we discover, are and always will be a flowering of what has been sheerly gifted—fruitfulness.¹⁵ On the modern account, however, whatever is given—such as tradition, an objective human nature, or even God—conditions the active and individual power to make change, commonly named the “will”, and so must be denied or overcome on pain of losing one’s singular identity.

We see this tendency where freedom is reduced to the power to choose. As capitalism developed in the West, the notion of freedom came increasingly to be associated with the business of choice. Selecting items, as from a menu, has become a way of life for more and more people. Indeed, it is life-making: choices constitute a life, and so we talk of life-styles. It seems we are the sum of choices we make across a range of areas: hobbies, ideas, politics, friends, and lovers, etc. As Sophia Rosenfeld puts it in her recent book:

…we like to think that when we are expressing our personal preferences, we are engaged in the business of self-realization as distinctive and independent people. Both having choices and making choices are largely what count these days as being, indeed feeling, free.¹⁶

This is the world come of age. Choice is serious, adult business. We stake our lives on it, or as we are wont to say, our identities. So-called choice architects like managers, advisors, advertising campaigns, and chatbots, say, help us to align our preferences with concrete options and so overcome the very real problem of “choice paralysis”; but these are mere assistants, at least in theory. After all, it’s my life and my body. What I say, goes.

Is this freedom, truly?

Space: Returning to Freedom

Some months after Wust sent his farewell letter to his students, he addressed another to his bishop. He wrote at Easter, a week before his death. As he considered his path and Europe’s path, he returned to some of his earlier thoughts. He had the younger son of the parable in mind:

… this person, in himself insignificant, left the peaceful, coddled small world of his village home as the “prodigal son” in order to follow the spirit’s allurements in the outside world, losing all solid ground under his feet until he recollected his origin and home—that is symbolic for the overall condition of the European world.¹⁷

Wust hoped that Europe would return to the father’s house, just as he had returned. Let’s now turn to the parable, because it offers a structure and orientation for reflecting on aspects of freedom.¹⁸ In doing so, I don’t mean to imply that this is all there is to interpreting the parable, or that the younger son’s venturing beyond the father’s house is the story of modernity. Still, as Wust saw, there are parallels.

“A man had two sons,” Jesus says (Luke 15:11). Not a father, a man. A man had two sons. The parable centres on this man, who is a father of course, as he relates to his sons and as his sons relate to him.¹⁹ But the parable concerns not simply the natural reality of the man’s relation to his offspring—his biological fatherhood—it concerns the full relational reality of fatherhood, which can only be realised where there is sonship in the fullest sense. This applies of course to motherhood and daughtership too. As we read the parable, we know the man loves his sons. But the full reality of fatherhood cannot be achieved from one side only: fatherhood is relational, and so requires sonship. Simply put, fathers and sons know the essential reality, and not merely biological reality, of fatherhood and sonship where there is mutual love: where the father loves the sons, and the sons know themselves loved, and love in return. In other words, the father is compassionate and loving, yes, but compassion and love are fully realised as and when the sons know and love the father as father.

A man had two sons. Here at the outset, then, we have the natural reality, but not the full reality, for the younger son, for some unknown reason, does not return his father’s love. The younger son demands his share of the inheritance and soon leaves the father’s house. There’s no struggle or argument in the parting, for the father gives his “life/living” (bios) away peaceably and graciously. The son alienates the father’s “living” from his house by cashing it out and taking it into a far country. Perhaps the son desired to live his own life and pursue a more abundant life.²⁰ In this case, the father is not simply an irrelevance but a barrier or obstacle.

Whatever the son’s motivation, he’s impatient and “obviously anxious to gain his freedom”.²¹ The son’s departure is emancipation: the Latin word emancipatus picks out the formal release of a son from paternal authority. The son is literally taken (capere) out (ex) of the hand (manus) of the father. The son liberates himself from the father’s authority: he is emancipated.²² In the far country, the son scatters what he had “gathered together”. But soon a famine brings him to indentured servitude. He becomes “attached” to a citizen, who puts him to work in a pig sty. The word for attachment here is kollaó, literally to cleave or join to, and elsewhere in the New Testament the word is used of the union of husband and wife. The son is now dependent on another.

When St Augustine read the parable, he took the word that is used for the inheritance that the father gifts the son (substantia in the Latin) and he drew out the implications.²³ Substance is what someone is essentially, and Augustine thought that the son demands ownership or control over what the Father has gifted him and what he is—which are the same. When the son spends his “substance”, he spends himself, or he ex-pends himself, by forgetting the Giver of life and attempting to live his life apart from the Father. He becomes increasingly less as a result. Augustine himself had experienced this, as he evokes the parable in his Confessions: “I flowed abruptly downward from you and wandered off, my God; in my young manhood I went on an awfully erratic course away from your steadfastness, and turned myself into a famished land I had to live in.”²⁴

Augustine also recognised that the son contrasts the famished land with his father. The son asks himself: “‘How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger!’” (15:17) On the one hand, the opposite to “my father” might seem to be the citizen to whom the son is cleaved. But this is not what is said. On the other hand, the opposite to “here” might be assumed to be “there”. But this is not what is said. Instead, the son’s location, “here”, opposes a relationship, “my father”. The whole parable in fact plays with space to indicate a particular quality of relationship. The far country is distant from the father. The father’s house is, to use a Lukan phrase, the kingdom of God, the father’s presence. The far country is where the father is not. As someone puts it, “proximity or distance in relation to the father determines weal or woe”.²⁵ The hired servants are the least of those who worked on the father’s property, and yet they are better off than “here”. Why? Simply, they are with the father.²⁶

The son somehow “comes to himself”, and he stands up. The word anastas appears twice in the parable (vv. 18, 20), and it means “having arisen”. The word is related to the verb anistémi, which is used by Luke to indicate resurrection from the dead as well as simply standing up (e.g., 16:31, 18:33, 24:7). Here the son’s rising from the pig sty implies resurrection, especially in view of the father’s later words: the son’s return is life from death (vv. 24, 32).²⁷

The father sees the son a long way off and runs to meet him. The scene is the inverse of the son’s initial venturing beyond the Father’s house when he set off and apparently emancipated himself, before attaching himself to another. Now, he returns to the father’s house in repentance, with feet unshod. Bare feet was a mark of degradation or mourning. More to the point, slaves typically wore no sandals, and so the son comes back unfree.²⁸ Yet the father meets him on the way and soon has the servants bring shoes, as well as the “best robe” and a ring (v. 22).

The father is “filled with compassion” (esplanchnisthē). This verb comes from the noun that denotes viscera or bowels and also deep, inward affection, or tender mercy (splagchnon). In Luke’s gospel, the verbal form is used of the Good Samaritan’s response to the half-dead man lying on the side of the road in an earlier parable (10:33). It’s also used of Jesus’ response to the widow, whose son had died, and it is Jesus’ motive in raising the son to life again (7:13). The father in his compassion embraces the son vigorously. The verb used for the embrace (epipiptó) is the same one used of the fear that seizes Zechariah when the angel of the LORD encounters him in chapter one of Luke’s gospel. The father grips the son with the depth of his compassion, we might say. This is returning to freedom. Soon there’s celebration in the house at the father’s behest. The son is not denigrated but elevated—he is the guest of honour. This is salvation as reversal, which is a motif of Luke’s gospel.²⁹

But while the father is filled with compassion, the elder son is consumed by anger as he returns to the house from his labour in the fields. He hears music and dancing, and he refuses to go in. The father goes out to him, as he went out to the younger son. Justice is at issue: on the one hand, the younger son had dishonoured the father with his request and left for a riotous life in a far country—yet the father has restored him and even celebrates his return; on the other hand, the elder son has spent years on the father’s property. He says to the father, “I never disobeyed your command” or literally, “never a (single) commandment (entolē) of yours did I disobey” (15:29). And yet, “You never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends.”

This is where the parable ends, outside the father’s house with the sounds of a celebration carrying on the air, and with the father’s response: “child (teknon), you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” Nothing is held back, and the father doesn’t contest what the elder son says except in one place. The father doesn’t contest the son’s account of his service. Nor does the father contest the elder son’s narration of what the younger son’s been up to. But he contests this: the elder son called his brother, “your son”; the father responds with, “this your brother”. Two things matter to the father: the relationship between the two brothers (they are brothers), and the fact they are with him. He wants them to be together, with him, notwithstanding their careers.³⁰ And where a career leads back from a far country, which is life from death and the end of lostness, there must (edei) be celebration.³¹

Where the elder son ends up is open to question. The three parables of Luke 15 are introduced by verses 1 and 2: “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear [Jesus]. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” In our parable, the elder son clearly elaborates the standing of the pharisees and the scribes before God, the father. In the parable, the father only ever speaks with the elder son; he never speaks directly to the younger son, even if he deals generously with him, embraces and kisses him, and throws a party for him. Yet the father “entreats” (parakaleó) the elder son—he calls him near.

Gift in Relationship: Understanding Freedom

If the father in the parable is an analogy for God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and the narrative space of the parable depicts relative proximity to and distance from God, we can understand freedom and relationship further through the notion of gift. Creaturely freedom is fundamentally a gift that is known in relationship to God.

Freedom characterises God’s own triune life, first and foremost. God’s life in and of himself is infinitely free.³² God is underived and is self-sufficient perfection as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Out of the depths of God’s own superabundant life, which is essentially Love, God gifts created existence, and the freedom of human creatures is founded in God’s own freedom, even as creaturely freedom is responsive and participatory rather than ex nihilo.³³ God’s freedom, in other words, is rooted in his own life of perfect Love, which creates from nothing and brings life from death. These things God wills and accomplishes as he turns to creation without compulsion or necessity. Creaturely freedom does not possess the absolute “natality” of God’s freedom (which is the ability to initiate something utterly new and utterly creative), even if our freedom is able, often ingeniously, to make new departures and initiate surprising novelties from the gifts of created existence.³⁴ We marvel at such creativity; but this is fruitfulness rooted fundamentally in the depths of being and not natality, notwithstanding modern pretensions. Let’s now trace aspects of creaturely freedom with reference to God’s gifts, which are variously appropriated to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Father.
Some have read Luke’s parable through the lens of the doctrine of creation, which is traditionally appropriated to God the Father.³⁵ The father/Father is gifting life (bios) itself, giving existence to creatures. This generous act establishes all that is not God, all that “sheerly receives” life. Each thing is given to be what it is, each thing receives itself with a sort of definitiveness—it is this, and not that. With this definitiveness, in the case of human creatures, comes the “capacity for self-expression, a kind of self-authorship, a manifestation of novelty from one’s own being” , as Schindler puts it.³⁶ This is part of God’s gift, and it is part of creaturely freedom. God gifts us existence, and in receiving life, we receive the capacity to decide and act in ways that determine our lives, albeit in a limited way. Our capacity to choose is limited most fundamentally by God’s creative purposing: God creates human creatures for fellowship with him. God wills and creates with direction, ordaining ends for his creatures, and so human choice is never “neutral”. Creation, no less than redemption, involves God’s free self-commitment to his creatures.³⁷

As we read in the parable, the father freely gives the younger son his “living”. From the perspective of creation, then, we might see this as the gift of freedom: the father allows the son to make up his own mind and act as he may, even sinfully.³⁸ But in fact, the son leaves the father behind. Augustine reads this as sin and the undoing of creation. Where the gift of being is the out-of-nothing expression of God’s original love, sin denies this love and tends toward nothing. Sin therefore reduces human creatures and is in this sense self-damage.³⁹ In the words of 2 Kings 17:5: “[The people of Israel] despised [the LORD’s] statutes and his covenant that he made with their fathers and the warnings that he gave them. They went after empty (haheḇel) idols and became empty (wayyehbālū).”⁴⁰

Son.
If the younger son’s journey implies the undoing of creation, it also implies forgetting the Exodus.⁴¹ The Exodus, beginning with the liberation of Israel from captivity in Egypt, is not only the event evoked most often in Hebrew Scripture, it is perhaps also the most fundamental event recounted in the Old Testament, rivalling and even surpassing creation in terms of its importance.⁴² In leaving his father for a far country, the younger son leaves behind his entire culture and way of life, which is defined by the LORD’s election of Israel, his covenant with Israel, and the law he gives to Israel. With great emotion the Apostle Paul gives voice to this inheritance in Romans 9 as he wrestles with what the gospel means for Israel:

…[Israel’s] is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen. (Romans 9:4-5)

Election, covenant, law. All these are bound up with the Exodus and “the creation of Israel”.⁴³ The LORD calls Israel his son (Exodus 4:22-3), and out of Egypt the LORD calls his son (Hosea 11:1; cf. Matthew 2:15).

The inverse occurs in the case of the younger son. As the younger son heads out, he relinquishes his sonship, or as Miroslav Volf puts it, he attempts to “un-son” himself.⁴⁴ In contemporary language, we’re talking about the disintegration of identity. The younger son not only lives as a gentile—and so he lives against the grain of his identity as a Jew—he comes under the covenantal curses.⁴⁵ He does not choose life, but death (cf. Deuteronomy 30:19).

Yet in his gospel Luke depicts a New Exodus, whereby Jesus’ own exodus (exodos, 9:31) will be completed or accomplished in his death and resurrection. Jesus releases the people from greater bondage than that of Egypt, indeed demonic possession, and leads them into the Kingdom.⁴⁶ Jesus is bringing “release” or “liberty” to the oppressed (Luke 4:18), as he announces in applying to himself the prophet Isaiah’s words. The time of the new Exodus is upon Israel: God is at work in and through Jesus in meeting and saving the lost—in liberating those in captivity.⁴⁷ Now we see that God’s freedom is “freedom to be God for us and with us”.⁴⁸

Both the younger and the elder son misconstrue freedom and find themselves in captivity. The father goes out to both of these “lost” ones—his progress beyond his house is a liberating mission, just as Jesus’ is. Theologian Karl Barth famously read the parable against “the horizon” of God’s own Son journeying into the far country to gather the lost to himself, atoning for their sins, and returning in exaltation to the Father’s house.⁴⁹ The parable depicts, in other words, the mission of God to save the lost, or God’s “utter determination to maintain fellowship” in the wake of broken covenant.⁵⁰ This is grace and a gift. Paul often uses the language of gift (esp. Romans 5:15ff) to speak of God’s saving action in Christ.⁵¹ In the words of Catherine of Siena: “O Abyss! O eternal Godhead! O deep sea! What more could you have given me than the gift of your very self?” ⁵² It’s only in God’s embrace that we come to know truly the difference that the embrace really makes.⁵³ Only from within God’s embrace do we see sin truly and know the gift of freedom. We see sin is not a stick to hit oneself or others with—it’s a shadowy space brought into the full light of God, now floodlit and unveiled as the nothingness it is. Through Christ, we’re brought into the light of God’s embrace—forgiven, set free.

Holy Spirit.
In his letter to the Galatians, the Apostle Paul writes: “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (5:1). Paul writes of the event of liberation—Christ setting us free—and the life of freedom that follows. This ordering recapitulates the Exodus pattern of liberation, covenant, and law. In the covenant which the LORD concludes with Moses at Mount Sinai, the LORD acts to bind himself to the people of Israel, creating them as his people, just as Israel binds itself to faithful outworking: “All that the Lord has spoken we will do” (Exodus 19:8). Instead of bondage to Pharoah, Israel is “dedicated and consecrated” to the service of the LORD.⁵⁴ Their life is structured by the law given to Moses, “the code of a free people”.⁵⁵ In a word, Israel is set free from Egypt for life with the LORD.

Just as the LORD claims Israel from the pseudo-god Pharaoh and sets Israel free from Egypt for the purpose of serving Him, so Paul understands the gift of Jesus Christ, received in faith, as that which decisively claims persons from the dominion of Sin and Death. There is no neutral zone or independent space for human creatures to make their own: they always belong or are subject to something or someone—whether to Pharoah or to the LORD, whether to Sin and Death or to Jesus Christ.⁵⁶ Just as the LORD’s liberative action is the ground of the covenant at Sinai, the grace of God in Jesus Christ establishes a New Covenant. Covenant is fundamentally the extension of kinship ties to non-blood relations, and so covenanted non-family members come to enjoy the standing of family members.⁵⁷ Covenant is “a familial experience of belonging”.⁵⁸ Paul names the change in Lordship incurred through incorporation into God’s family “adoption” (Romans 8:15).⁵⁹ That is, one becomes a child of the most high God through the power of the Holy Spirit and in the now-intimate relationship with Jesus Christ that Paul calls being “in Christ” (en Christo). Paul belongs “in Christ” such that he declares famously:

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)

The gift of Christ liberates and brings peace (cf. Romans 5:1). Paul later writes of the “freedom of the glory of the sons/children of God” (Romans 8:21). In prayer, “the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” (8:16) To be a child of God, for Paul, is to experience something of and anticipate the fullness of freedom: the glory at the end of all things.

Because freedom is found within fellowship and not simply in an encounter, it is not just a formal “interruptive moment” but a way of life—a life shared with Christ in the power of the Spirit. That is, it’s not mine or yours, but ours, and ours only because it’s open to us at the Father’s initiative, with the Son’s willingness, and in the love of the Spirit. Specifically, the Spirit channels God’s love into the very centre of our being (Romans 5:5). The Spirit, too, is Gift, the Love who animates the life of freedom. In Romans 8, we see the pattern of love as mutual in-dwelling: adopted children are “in the [dominion of the] Spirit” (8:1-8) and the Spirit is “in” adopted children (8:10f). These two perspectives are combined at 8:9.⁶⁰ The Spirit’s in-dwelling makes God’s redemption actual and operative in people’s lives. According to Paul, as he puts it elsewhere:

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:17-18)

The Spirit conforms us to the unblemished image of God, who is Jesus Christ, by transforming us progressively. Such is the “humility” of the Spirit that the Spirit only ever turns us to another, to Christ. In this relational environment, and not in independence, lies freedom.⁶¹ And what characterises and sustains the environment is obedience. As Paul puts it:

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. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. (Galatians 5:13-15)

Others’ needs and concerns are to be foremost in all aspects of life. The Holy Spirit in fact empowers the life of freedom through the fulfilment of the law in love (Romans 13:8f).⁶² This passage from Ezekiel lies in the background of a number of Paul’s texts:

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. (Ezekiel 36:26-7)

Love is the fulfilment of the law, Paul tells us. The life of freedom is not lawless but led in the slipstream of the Spirit.⁶³

To return to Luke’s gospel and illustrate the point: Jesus invites that compassion from his audience, including us, which corresponds to the father’s compassion.⁶⁴ We’re to turn to one another, and in doing so, remind ourselves that this is not an individualistic vision of human life, but an inherently relational vision that invites our participation. We are constitutionally relational, and only in freedom do we become who we are “with and for others”.⁶⁵ Freedom is known, then, only within clearly bounded, committed fellowship and not opt-in-opt-out fragmentary exchanges. It’s known truly in the embrace.

Conclusion: “Holy Yes-Saying”

The German language has a compound noun, Feierabend, which joins Feier (celebration, holiday) and Abend (evening). Celebration at the end of day enacts freedom. In this way, freedom is Feierabend. The younger son goes away and comes back. The father goes out to the son and restores him, commanding celebration at the son’s return. Sonship entails obedience: it is necessary to celebrate life from death, with band music, even, and dancing, in the father’s house. But will the elder son, who has kept every single one of his father’s commandments, remain obedient to the father while accepting his father’s son as his own brother? Will he become son and brother in the full relational sense?

As we’ve seen, creaturely freedom is relational and it involves obedience. It has a “vertical dimension” and a “horizontal dimension”: God’s liberative act in Christ remains the on-going basis of freedom, while the Spirit animates freedom with and for others. Such is the obliged and voluntary life of freedom: children of God willingly assent to Christ’s Lordship even as God claims them.⁶⁶ In this sense, freedom is both ours and it is not ours. The freedom that comes with adoption is a gift truly given away, which we receive having not deserved it; and it is a gift we must appropriate—we might say, with our wills—as it presses us, in the power of the Spirit, to live in accordance with true sonship/daughtership. Paul attests this dynamic as he names himself “slave of Jesus Christ” (Romans 1:1): he recognises the “Christ-Gift” and Christ’s Lordship established in the gift, and he yields to God with his whole heart (cf. Romans 10:8f).

“Choice”, then, plays a role in freedom, but not the leading role. An important part of freedom is choice—the ability to decide on things in our lives and for our lives. We have the wonderful gift of self-expression, which can be justifiably named a kind of self-authorship. Choice in our lives is connected to “mine-ness”: the capacity to “identify with one’s life or experience it as “mine,” rather than as something imposed upon or merely happening to one.”⁶⁷ This is well and good, and a boon of modern thought, but it is not the fullness of freedom. For freedom as life with God follows God’s priority in creation and redemption. An image for this is a choreographed dance with a clear lead. A waltz, say:

…our freedom [is] led, so that our every movement arises from the lead and the true dancer, where every movement is both ours and the other’s, but only truly ours—expressive of what we most desire—because it is led by the other, who alone knows how to sway to the music, and how to become one with the dance.⁶⁸

We learn how to dance as we follow the lead. Our humanity deepens with our “yes” to God. As we perform the child’s “holy yes-saying”, we know more of God’s own freedom and we become more ourselves.⁶⁹ The lead, and also the paradigm of lead and follow, is Jesus Christ, whose divine and human wills function in perfect synchrony. The Son is fully human and fully God, and he is the heart of creation.⁷⁰ He is the Son who wills what the Father wills in the love of the Holy Spirit. Hear these words in Gethsemane: “Not my will but your will be done.” Mary, secondarily, captures the sense of obedience with her words to the angel Gabriel in Luke’s gospel: “Let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). Less well known, but no less challenging, are her words to the servants at the wedding in Cana in John’s gospel: “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5).

This is a good place to close: with celebration and Jesus turning water into wine for the sake of celebration. God is sometimes seen as an overbearing kill-joy and arbitrary limit on our freedom to live as we please. No. God purposes our true freedom: he runs out to us, and he entreats us, and frees us, as we are called to see things as he does and respond obediently as his beloved children. The poet of Psalm 119 sings often of delight in the law, which is the expression of the LORD’s will.

Deal bountifully with your servant,
that I may live and keep your word.
 Open my eyes, that I may behold
wondrous things out of your law (vv. 17-18).⁷¹

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