John Stott says he finds it helpful to think over the claims of Jesus under three headings (are you surprised it is not four?):
Alister McGrath believes that Atheism as a living idea lived 200 years. He argues it was born in 1789 with the Storming of the Bastille and died in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. What gave Atheism strength and life was the experience of the church as oppressive, and what killed it was the experience that Atheist institutions were no different.
That the church should be an enemy of freedom should shock us when we read the bible and discover that freedom is a important description of our salvation. In the Exodus we see literal freedom from slavery, and in the New Testament we learn of our freedom from sin and the law.
But when Christians say they are free who are they kidding? To many they seem to have willingly restricted their freedom. When we think of freedom we understand it as freedom-to-do-this-or-that. I have heard Christians sometimes uncritically take over the same understanding and so when they read that we are free from sin, they read that as we are free to sin or not to sin, where as previously we could only sin.
But if that is our understanding of freedom how can we say that another fall is impossible in the New Creation? Even more importantly how can we say God is free, when we say he cannot sin?
I have recently heard/read John Stott and Karl Barth both address freedom. They both define it positively, and both start from God's freedom and work out human freedom from that.
Karl Barth first of all, doing what he does best, starting from God:
God's freedom is not merely unlimited possibility or formal majesty and omnipotence, that is to say empty, naked sovereignty. Nor is this true of the God-given freedom of man. If we so misinterpret human freedom, it irreconcilably clashes with divine freedom and becomes the false freedom of sin, reducing man to a prisoner. God Himself, if conceived of as unconditioned power would be a demon and as such His own prisoner. In the light of His revelation, God is free in word and deed; He is the source and measure of all freedom, insofar as He is the Lord, choosing and determining Himself first of all. In His own freedom, as the source of human freedom, God above all willed and determined Himself to be the Father and the Son in the unity of the Spirit.
(p. 67, The Humanity of God)
From this foundational understanding of freedom as defined by God, Barth is 'bold to say' four things about human freedom:
(1) Human freedom as a gift of God does not allow for any vague choices between various possibilities....
(2) Human freedom is not realised in the solitary detachment of an individual in isolation from men. God is a se (for Himself), but He is pro nobis (for us). For us!...
(3) Human freedom is only secondarily freedom from limitations and threats. Primarily it is freedom for.
(4) Human freedom is not to be understood as freedom to assert, to preserve, to justify and save oneself. God is primarily free for; the Father is free for the Son, the Son for the Father in the unity of the Spirit. The one God is free for man as his Creator, as the Lord of the covenant, as the beginner and perfecter of his history, his Heilsgeschichte. God says "Yes." Only once this "Yes" is said, He also says "No." Thereby he reveals Himself to be free from all that is alien and hostile to His nature.
(italics original, pp.74-75, ibid)
I cannot help wondering whether John Stott had read this when a few years later he gave some addresses on freedom and said:
Christian freedom is fundamentally positive and not negative as a concept. That is to say, it has to be defined in terms of what we are free for, not in terms of what we are free from. True freedom is freedom to be one's true self. God alone, the Creator, enjoys perfect freedom, because he alone is invariably himself; he never denies himself. God's creatures are free only when they fulfil their Creator's purpose for them ....this Christian freedom (freedom for God as his children) presupposes freedom from all those tyrannies which prevent us from being what God made us and meant us to be.
(from MP3 address, "Freedom ... From the opinions of men", 1 Jan 1971)
Stott is particularly good at analysing how all the contemporary calls for freedom are calls for freedom for something, even when they are presented as being freedom from something. Calls for freedom from foreign colonial power was a call for freedom for nationhood. Calls for free press were calls for truth to be published without restriction. He quotes Malcolm X in his autobiography who calls for a free society in which black people would be free to be who they were - human beings:
Human rights! Respect as human beings! That’s what America's black masses want. That's the problem. The black masses want not to be shrunk from as though they are plague-ridden. They want not to be walled up in slums, in the ghettoes, like animals. They want to live in an open, free society where they can walk with their heads up, like men, like women!
Let's pray for the church to be seen as a place of freedom, and celebrate ourselves the freedom that we have to serve one another and worship God (not considering these things as burdens). After all, as Barth summarises it 'freedom is being joyful.'
In the pub today a friend related how he went to a couple of churches before he got married in order to fulfil the criteria to get married in a church building. One he said was fire and brimstone, the other more positive. He asked me which I would indentify with. I was able to steal a comment from John Stott in a sermon on Ephesians he preached in 1971.
I said I was deeply pessimistic about humanity, but very optimistic about the power and love of God. He liked that.... thank you John Stott.
"because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ." (Romans 5:17)
John Stott comments on this verse:
It is not simply that the reign of death is superseded by a reign of life, for it is not life which reigns, but we who are said to 'reign in life'. Formerly death was our king. Death reigned over us and we were its subjects, slaves under its totalitarian tyranny. We do not now exchange death's kingdom for another kingdom, so that we remain slaves and subjects although in a different sense. No; once delivered from the rule of death we begin ourselves to rule over death and all the enemies of God. We cease to be subjects and become kings, sharing the Kingdom of Christ.
(p.27, Men Made New: An exposition of Romans 5-8)
