We are not as free as we think, yet are made for more freedom than we realize.

Is it against our nature to submit to another? In our society there have been many who push back severely against Christianity, and pretty much every other religion except maybe Buddhism, because many find the concept of submission to a sovereign dehumanizing and degrading. There are many who feel that true humanness is found in being open, skeptical, and free from imposed structures and rules, rather than living within structured servitude, unable to rise to full human potential. But is submission and relinquishing a sense of autonomy truly incompatible with reaching full human potential? I’m not so sure.

This is only one side of what freedom or liberty is all about, however. This is the side that tends to get the most emphasis. It’s what philosophers call negative freedom, or negative liberty. Since at least the 1950’s thinkers have recognized both a negative and a positive sense of freedom; negative referring to lack of obstacles, positive referring to ability to achieve or move toward a goal.

My aim here is not to give a philosophical treatise on the subject of freedom. I’m not a philosopher. But as I’ve learned and thought over the years I’ve noticed some things about freedom and human nature that call attention to the reality that human beings are not as autonomous as we think we are, and that true freedom (both negative and positive aspects) is only found in the sovereignty of one greater than ourselves.

Bob Dylan, it turns out, was right when he said, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.”  To use some bad grammar, no one lives for nothing. We all live to worship something, even if that thing we live for is our own sense of freedom.

Agnostic novelist, and professor, David Foster Wallace, in a commencement speech at Kenyan college in 2005, had this to say about servitude (what the Bible calls worship):

“[H]ere’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship […] is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already – it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122178211966454607

Below is another approach at answering the question of what it means to be free, and why freedom biblically is a totally different concept than simply negative liberty. The truth is strange, but beautiful if you can embrace it.

Freedom and Sovereignty.

Freedom is subordinate to sovereignty. Accepting the existence of sovereignty is the denial of autonomy. There cannot exist two ultimately sovereign beings. The universe is not dualistic, as in the Chinese idea of Yin (good) and Yang (evil), or the Gnostic idea that there is spirit (good) and matter (evil). C.S. Lewis observed that dualism requires we say one power or being is right and the other wrong, one good and one bad. This means more than simply saying we prefer one to the other, and requires a higher standard than both of them by which can determine one is good/right or bad/wrong. Furthermore, no one ever desired evil for evil’s sake, but rather many desire evil thinking it is good. There cannot exist anything for the sheer purpose of being evil; even the devil desired what he believed was good.

Here’s Lewis: 

If Dualism is true, then the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake. But in reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad. The nearest we can get to it is in cruelty. But in real life people are cruel for one of two reasons—either because they are sadists sadists, that is, because they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual pleasure to them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get out of it—money, or power, or safety. But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much.

Mere Christianity, Book 2, “The Invasion.”

The idea of good and evil as two equal forces seems far too simple.  That aside, to believe oneself to be autonomous is also too simple, and enormously naive. I remember hearing Jordan Peterson (I don’t remember where so I can’t provide a link or citation) saying something like, “If you’re truly autonomous and in control of your own destiny, why can’t you just tell yourself what you ought to do and then do it? If you know you need to make diet changes, why can’t you just tell yourself to do it and then it happens? That alone proves we are not autonomous beings like we think we are.”

To claim we are truly autonomous is to deny the essence of our existence as beings that are dependent on, and subordinate to, a sovereign power. A person who claims autonomy denies the basis of the existence of all things and sets himself up in defiance of the order of the universe and the sovereign power which brought it (and himself) into existence.

The idea of freedom, then, is subordinate to the concept of sovereignty, because freedom (in particular, negative freedom) does not mean liberation from order, but right alignment to it. What good is it for a man to liberate himself from the order and basis of the existence of all things only to find himself in defiance of what he cannot control? To illustrate this, one might imagine a man feeling a sense of freedom by celebrating his autonomy in the face of a tsunami, firmly planting his feet in the sand and saying to himself, “I am free! I am free!” only to find himself tragically subordinate to powers he cannot control, namely the laws of physics. But for the man, aligning himself rightly with the existence and nature of the laws outside of his control (in his case fleeing from the coming disaster) would grant him (positive) freedom. His freedom is dependent on another’s sovereignty, not his own autonomy.

So we might argue, then, that the only way to attain total negative freedom is positive freedom. Right alignment with sovereignty is freedom; living in light of presumed autonomy is death.

Freedom in the Bible

In the Bible, this is exactly what we find freedom means. In the book of Exodus there is a very strange encounter that God has with Pharaoh, Moses and Moses’ family. There have been a number of different interpretations of these verses, so I will grant that I may not be 100% correct. The Bible is inspired, and my interpretation is not, but here is a view I think is accurate.

If you can, please read chapters 4-5 of Exodus before continuing. Read it a few times if you can. God places a threat of death on Pharoah’s firstborn (Exod 4:22-23), Moses’ first-born (Exodus 4:24-26), and His own first-born, Israel (Exod 5:3). Is this a cruel demand on otherwise autonomous people to place themselves under the sovereignty of another when they were already free? Of course not. This was God’s call to people to be aligned with the ultimate Sovereign, not some lesser, subordinate power, in order to rescue them from the death towards which they were already heading because of the sin that already separated them from God.

Death is not a punishment on autonomous beings for not submitting themselves to a deity to please Him; death is the result of refusing to be rightly aligned with the ultimate Sovereign and Power of the universe. The threat of death is not a threat of imposed punishment, but the warning of disaster to come if they do not flee; it is the invitation to life. Freedom comes from subordination to the highest sovereign, not liberation from rules and order. 

A major theme in the book of Exodus is servitude; many times in the book the word “serve” is used. God’s people are under forced servitude to the Egyptian government, and God’s plan is to rescue them from the clutches of wrong servitude to bring them under right servitude to Himself. His plan was never to bring them out into the wilderness to then be “free” on their own, but to serve Him, because true freedom means servitude to the right master. Indeed, if God had led the people into the wilderness and then told them they were “free,” they would have soon died from the elements. The book of Numbers depicts post-exodus life in the desert where God supernaturally sustains the people, teaching them that He is life.

Going back to the tsunami illustration, the atheist or skeptic, then, is the one standing on the shore, denying what is staring him in the face, and demanding proof from those behind him urging him to run. One could argue then that the individuals on the shore have a dual task of fleeing and warning others to flee. An application for evangelism becomes immediately apparent. Endless debates and arguments with someone who refuses to see the obvious is not a worthy endeavor, but is a distraction from the task of grouping together those who are fleeing and those who will join them. Pray for their eyes to be opened, but don’t get sidetracked from those God is calling now.

Find freedom in submission to Christ. Both aspects of freedom. Through the cross of Christ, the sin that separated us from God is wiped away, and in Christ we are given the Holy Spirit that enables us to resist temptation and please God. And after this era, when Christ returns, the earth’s society will be one that lives in the presence of God. In this plan we have negative freedom from what kept us from God, and we have positive freedom to reach the glorious potential for which we were created. The Bible reminds us that the one we are to submit to is loving, self-giving, produces justice and is eternally gracious. I’d much rather submit to a God like that than to me. I will let myself down every time.