What is Freedom?

The last two centuries have seen a radical divergence in the doctrine of freedom. The thinking of Jean-Jaques Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade departed sharply from Christian thinking. Freedom for them was in individuality, in a radical independence from God and man. It required for Sade a defiance of public opinion and morality. The free man “did his own thing” in contempt of others and in a sharp departure from accepted standards. The student rebels of the 1960s, and the writers of film and television scripts, reflect this perspective. Freedom in this sense requires rebellion. However ridiculous the rebellion, the proponents of this modern doctrine of freedom pursue it rigorously. In the process, reason is sacrificed to this ideal of lawless and rebellious freedom. The past is seen as a chain because nothing other than his anarchic freedom should necessitate the free man.

As against this, the Christian doctrine of freedom begins with the fact that sin is slavery, and Christ gives us freedom by His regenerating power. The Fall (Gen. 3:5) made man a sinner and a slave because of his evil delusion that he can be his own god and know or determine for himself what is good and evil, right or wrong, law and morality. Our Lord tells us that it is by knowing Him as Lord and as the truth of being that we are free (Jn. 14:6; 8:32-36). 

Essential to this Christian doctrine of freedom is the premise that freedom is God’s way, not ours, and God’s law-word is the way to freedom when we are regenerated. His saving act sets us free from sin, and His law then provides the path of freedom.

The anti-Christian concept of freedom began with man’s assertion of freedom from God, not freedom under God. To be free from God means then freedom from His law. Sin is antinomianism to its core. It requires a religious dedication to immoralism, which it sees as freedom when it is in fact the way of death.

The premises of Rousseau and Sade are now the premises of our courts of law, and the drift into legal positivism has been a steady departure from any religious and moral foundation for law. The technicalities of the law have replaced justice as the basis of more and more court decisions, and manufactured rights and entitlements have supplanted justice.

The foundations of our civilization are thus being destroyed, and the churches, by their modernism and antinomianism, are too often on the side of Christ’s enemies.

One aspect of the revolution created by Rousseau and Sade is the worship of Nature. But this is another way of exalting the fall of man because Nature is also fallen. Before Christian man began his redemptive work, building dikes and reclaiming the sea in the Netherlands, and turning desert places into productive farm lands in France and elsewhere, Europe was a very different place.

America too was becoming a buffalo-created wasteland as the many great herds of over 100,000 bisons destroyed trees and churned the ground into blowing dust. It was Christian settlers who reclaimed the land and nursed it back to health. It took capital to settle in the West, or, earlier, in the East, because it took time to make the soil productive.

Freemen are workers, productive and future-oriented. Fallen men are slaves to sin, and, because they see themselves as gods (Gen. 3:5), they gravitate to political answers in preference to work. By their fiat word, they seek to legislate wealth and freedom while actually destroying them.

Thus, the question, “What is freedom?”, must be faced. We cannot accept the answer of fallen men without destroying ourselves and civilization. Only if the Son of Man make us free are we free indeed (Jn. 8:36).