ON FREEDOM

Nato remarks on his blog:

It would seem the Christian "deal" runs something like: "You have the free choice between believing in Jesus and going to heaven or not believing, and spending eternity in torment. Choose any old way you want, and no pressure."

Now, I understand that it's not docrinaire to put it that way, but it certainly seems to amount to that often. I would feel the choice was more "free" if there was no mention of reward or punishment in the Bible, and the soul presumably found out about their happy reward (or terrible punishment) at death. It's suspicious, no?

Tom quotes this and adds:

Sure sounds like coersion to me, even if it is smothered in apologetics, and topped off with a bright, red appeal to faith. As an old poet probably once said, "Coersion by any other name would still seem as pavlovian."

But freedom can't possibly mean freedom from the consequences of one's actions. You're free to jump off a cliff, but you'll still splatter on the ground at the bottom. Am I coercing you if I inform you that jumping off a cliff will cause your death? I'm just telling you the facts, and so is the Christian who warns you that sin will lead to damnation. Of course, he may be wrong about the facts, but it doesn't make sense to equate it with coercion.

I'm somewhat agnostic about the afterlife. I believe in the soul and its immortality, but I don't claim to know what things will be like after we die. To the extent that I believe in eternal punishment and reward, it's an extension of my belief (which life has often tested, and which I cannot prove) that good behavior (not that I completely understand what that means in every situation, to be sure) leads to joy on earth, while bad behavior (and pride in particular) leads to misery and alienation. Heaven and Hell are not a punishment which God voluntarily applies. A good and loving God would save everyone if He could; if he doesn't save someone, it must mean that He can't. But how can there be anything that an omnipotent God can't do? A tricky question, but one which can be answered. Can God make anything that is both white and black? Can he make a mountain exist and not exist at the same time? God is bound by the laws of logic. We are in nature, in essence, free beings. Salvation is our free embrace of God, an act which engenders the joy of Heaven. If we choose to reject Him, He cannot override our will and save us, because it violates logic: "we" are free beings, and would cease to exist if our will were overridden.

Freedom can mean a lot of different things.

I have a friend from Russia who thinks that America is not a free country. She talks about how, if you commit a crime here, you destroy your life. You'll never be able to get another decent job. She talks about credit card companies which can track you down, destroy your credit rating. Russians have two words for freedom: svoboda is civic freedom (e.g. that of non-serf subjects of the czar); volia has stronger, more emotional connotations, like our "liberty," but it has nothing to do with freedom of the press but instead conjures the wild freedom of a Cossack on the endless steppes.

Freedom may be understood as a psychological rather than a political condition. Americans have legal freedom but nothing is more common than for them to be trapped in routines, hemmed in by fears far more immediate than that of Hell: how will I pay the rent? will I get fired if I don't turn in this report on time? how can I keep my girlfriend happy so she won't leave me? what's the normal thing to do in this situation so I won't be thought weird? etc. But the Christian (and here I'm speaking more of the idea of a Christian, or of people like the apostles in the early Church, rather than your everyday American Christian) is free from such mundane cares, because for him wealth stands condemned, and fame is not sought after, he does not marry and has no family... Think of St. Francis, or St. Paul, wandering the ancient world... That is a freedom of a wonderful and radical kind, which most people cannot even conceive of.

Why can't they conceive of it? Here it's useful to compare children and adults. In the very short term, children are much freer than adults. An adult on the subway sits in his/her chair and reads, or listens to music: they are quite predictable, observing a wide range of restraints. A child, on the other hand, may run, or sing, jump, change seats, as the mood takes him. But in the medium-term the adult is much freer: he can travel far and wide, if he so chooses, and buy many different items, eat and dress as he likes, while the child is governed in all these things by the parent. Call it "discipline," or "delayed gratification," but this restraint makes freedom possible, because the adult is trusted by others, and can trust himself to carry out long-term plans and projects. So with the Christian: the restraints which he learns make a far more expansive freedom possible; thus Christians forever venture into and master new worlds, of the intellect, of geography, art, music, sculpture, and so on, while Buddhists and Muslims end up in cultural treadmills, and atheists destroy themselves...

Well, this is tapering off into mysteriousness, appropriately, since a mystery is precisely what it is. If this doesn't sound like your average Sunday-school-brand Christianity, it's not meant to: churches are hybrids, mingling the divine message incongruously with (in America) bourgeois culture. And yet the secret of the most glorious and radical freedom in the world is right there in the Bible.