“We captives of the industrial economy-who, by the measure of what we actually can do for ourselves, are surely the most helpless people who ever lived-now pride ourselves on our achievement of ‘personal autonomy.’”
This is very true. I think as someone who has grown up hearing this kind of message about true freedom, and has often struggled with it or resisted it (admittedly perhaps from the motive of being unhappy with a freedom that excludes this or that pet sin), I think the way this gets described as the freedom to choose to listen to the Spirit and act or not can feel very binary in a way that precludes creativity or choice that actually feels free - the choice between various things, or the choice of an open and unstructured set of possibilities. I'm not saying that's the correct way to understand it, but when we try to explain Christian freedom as defined in contrast to worldly freedom, I think we often end up describing something that sounds to the hearer like it's freedom in name only, and the word has lost its meaning, and that doesn't intellectually or theologically discredit the message, but it does create an emotional barrier to it.
Yes, but I feel suspicious that the desire for any kind of freedom I would like in eternity must be selfish or wrong somehow. Hence the suspicion that a heaven that is actually all one wants must be false, as opposed to a heaven of loving eating vegetables.
Wendell Berry says it so well:
“We captives of the industrial economy-who, by the measure of what we actually can do for ourselves, are surely the most helpless people who ever lived-now pride ourselves on our achievement of ‘personal autonomy.’”
This is very true. I think as someone who has grown up hearing this kind of message about true freedom, and has often struggled with it or resisted it (admittedly perhaps from the motive of being unhappy with a freedom that excludes this or that pet sin), I think the way this gets described as the freedom to choose to listen to the Spirit and act or not can feel very binary in a way that precludes creativity or choice that actually feels free - the choice between various things, or the choice of an open and unstructured set of possibilities. I'm not saying that's the correct way to understand it, but when we try to explain Christian freedom as defined in contrast to worldly freedom, I think we often end up describing something that sounds to the hearer like it's freedom in name only, and the word has lost its meaning, and that doesn't intellectually or theologically discredit the message, but it does create an emotional barrier to it.
I think that’s fair. Choice often looks broader than just binary options.
Yes, but I feel suspicious that the desire for any kind of freedom I would like in eternity must be selfish or wrong somehow. Hence the suspicion that a heaven that is actually all one wants must be false, as opposed to a heaven of loving eating vegetables.
Great post and distillation!