Although difficult for modern Americans to grasp, the truth is that freedom depends on limits. Positive freedom, “freedom for” the pursuit of virtue, critiqued by Isaiah Berlin, often strikes us as no freedom at all. Negative freedom, “freedom from” external constraints, resonates with our culture’s most pervasive intuitions.
Yet as Brad Littlejohn shows in his excellent primer on Christian liberty, Called to Freedom, this abstraction of positive, purposeful liberty gains flesh and blood in the concrete situations that color our lives. Consider two examples: You spend an entire evening on your phone, passing on fellowship with friends, maybe forgetting to eat, and find at the end of it that you’ve gained nothing, did not truly rest, but drifted from post to post “by people you care nothing about on subjects that bore you,” in Littlejohn’s words. During a party, you fill the gaps in conversation with the same restless resort to the screen. Is anyone truly free in those moments?
Now, imagine a snowy mountainside in the Rockies. While my father-in-law is an expert skier, I myself started just this past winter. As we stand on the crest of the same slope, an expanse of powder before us, no external obstacles face us; we both enjoy equal negative freedom. Yet clearly in some sense my father-in-law enjoys a greater freedom, or a greater “capacity for meaningful action,” than I do. There is a depth of satisfaction and a height of exhilaration accessible to the skilled and experienced in such settings that the novice, one who hasn’t spent years virtuously honing his abilities, cannot attain.
Littlejohn lays out a rigorous taxonomy of freedom to help clarify some of the confusion surrounding this ubiquitous term. Besides positive and negative liberty, he also compares individual and corporate liberty as well as inward and outward liberty. There are three tiers of freedom that build progressively upon each other: The spiritual freedom of the Christian from sin precedes the moral freedom necessary for righteous living, which in turn supports healthy political freedom.
Arguing for the interdependence of various sorts of freedom, Littlejohn shows how we are freest in community and how spiritual liberty enables morally free acts. But he also emphasizes the “intrinsically competitive dimension to freedom,” the reality that different kinds of freedom clash. The barriers and discipline that enable positive liberty necessarily limit negative liberty. In the market, the freedoms of consumers and producers, of employers and employees, stand at loggerheads. Individual freedoms frequently collide, as when a baker’s freedom of conscience collides with a gay couple’s freedom to purchase a wedding cake.
These inevitable tensions require us to do something natural to man, if disconcerting to moderns: to forthrightly choose some goods over others, and to encourage positive liberty by curtailing certain negative liberties. Partisans of both sides often want their chosen freedoms to be absolute. Any qualification or exception to one’s freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom to bear arms, freedom to buy or sell, freedom to love whomever you want, freedom to control your body, freedom to publicly flaunt your identity, amounts to tyranny. This view fails to see that “limits are what makes free action possible,” and misses the necessity of legitimate authority to impose those limits.
In political matters, in a democratic context, that authority will come from the citizenry. Littlejohn explains how communal freedom, demonstrated as harmonious coordination, augments true individual freedom (think of the freedom to run a football play that an individual can only enjoy as a team member). Likewise, as Yuval Levin has observed, all of our First Amendment rights are actually communal. Speaking, exercising religion, assembling, and publishing require other people: interlocutors, co-religionists, and readers.
Yet corporate freedom often comes at the expense of individual freedoms. The community’s freedom to impose laws on itself entails the authority to compel obedience. As Littlejohn notes, it was precisely this collective liberty that our Founders prized even above individual rights: They fought not for freedom from taxation, but for the freedom to tax themselves. Today, many Americans seem readier to forfeit the right to self-govern collectively than to relinquish even a mite of autonomy.
We find freedom in the bounds of community membership, but also in the impositions of individual discipline. Whether it’s the expert skier or the trained violinist, the loftiest heights of
human potential can only be scaled by those who accept stringent demands. Human excellences don’t blossom spontaneously but require cultivation. If freedom is the capacity for meaningful action, such capacity must be developed, honed, brought to maturity. Understanding true freedom as a kind of maturity casts light on the bondage we suffer today: Littlejohn pinpoints our consumer economy’s interest in conditioning adults “to think and act like children” – that is, to act on impulses, blur the lines between needs and wants, and demand instant gratification.
There’s a difference between maturation and cancerous growth. Littlejohn’s treatment of technology warns that the attempt to use man-made inventions – in biotechnology, say – to transform and elevate human nature beyond its God-given limits will not liberate but degrade us. Many technofuturists reprise the primordial enticement of the Tempter: “ye shall be as gods.” But Christians become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4) only by God’s gracious sanctification, and we will have to wait to complete this transfiguration. Littlejohn here broaches in passing a question that other Christian thinkers must engage more deeply: how to proffer a vision of human greatness that avoids self-idolatry but competes effectively with the more neopagan or tech-centric accounts of theosis currently on offer. Protestants, in whose theology divinization tends to play a smaller role than in Eastern traditions, face a particularly urgent task.
Addressing Protestants, Littlejohn rebukes the impoverished conceptions of liberty prevalent among contemporary evangelicals, denouncing narrow biblicism, casual antinomianism, and the curious form of legalism that governs certain fundamentalists. Yet rather than blaming the Reformation for these defects, as has become popular, he leans into the Protestant tradition to make his critiques. Citing Luther liberally, Littlejohn insists that Christ’s atoning work cancels the debts of those who believe, substituting the righteousness of Jesus and reconciling us to the Father, whereafter, freed from the law’s condemnation, the elect enjoy a newfound liberty to obey God’s law. Littlejohn refreshingly argues that the problem with many Protestants is that they have drifted too far from the Reformation’s declaration of spiritual freedom as bondage to Christ, thereby forgetting its implications in ethics and politics.
Called to Freedom offers believers an answer to “our instinctive longing to reintegrate these two divided halves of our souls,” to harmonize our devotional or church behavior with our lives in the public square. Recognizing that spiritual, moral, and political freedom all require limits, community, and authority grants us a richer understanding not just of our relationship to God, but of how life in a free polity should look. Littlejohn sums up this reintegration in the words of the Psalmist: “Unite my heart to fear your name.” (Ps. 86:11)
