"Faith, for Freedom"
Delivered at Hillsdale College's Spring Commencement
April 11, 2024
We live in a fretful world. I don’t mean Hillsdale. I mean, you know, out there. Here at Hillsdale things are different, and as a relative newcomer to this College I bring an acute awareness just how different they really are. Higher ed “out there” has been politicized with the result that a classical education in the liberal arts and sciences has become all but impossible. Too often today, American schools parrot the moral sensibilities of the newly dominant culture of the progressive left. Most have gone too far, allowing themselves to be co-opted by the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. By over-emphasizing sensitivity to the felt needs of the day, many have compromised their own institutional identity and mission. Hillsdale College stands out today precisely because it has chosen a different path. Classical education here attends to contemporary concerns, but it is grounded, as ever, in the perennial wisdom that is always new, always relevant. Education in the liberal arts and sciences gives students both eyes to see and wisdom to understand, setting young men and women free for a life of service.
But precisely how shall they be free? Many are understandably fretting about the future of our traditional freedoms today. Consider some of the perils freedom faces in this modern, globalized culture. Think, for example, of the myriad ways in which the all-seeing eyes of an always-on Internet inhibit free expression. As others have noted, on the Internet you can do or say anything you want. But, and this is a big but, everyone is watching. Unless one is prepared to be put under the Internet microscope it will be best to keep one’s opinions, well, private. The sociologist Peter Berger had a name for this phenomenon back when it was confined mostly to the workplace: “self-anonymization.” As online culture has increasingly colonized much of what was once the private sphere, the scope of this self-anonymization has expanded, with a corresponding shrinkage of the social space within which we feel free to speak our minds.
As a second example, call to mind one of the now commonplace paradoxes of freedom today. On the one hand, people seem to be free to define themselves however they choose, from alternate genders to your favorite furry. On the other hand, this seems to impose on their neighbors an obligation to acknowledge that identification. In the United Kingdom, just now one can be jailed for refusing to do so. Even if the freedom to speak the truth has not been entirely lost, the cost of doing so seems to have gone way up.
Finally, consider the wondrous ways in which today’s high tech frees us, conquering space and time and enabling our virtual presence just about anywhere. Miss your loved ones? How about a Facetime? At the same time, Big Tech has been taking advantage of the tools that enable this freedom over space and time, amassing data on us for many years. This data has been monetized, sold to advertisers who micro-tailor their ads based on very precise demographic information about us. Equipped with AI-enabled algorithms, those advertisers—a category that now seems to include political candidates—know just how to push our buttons so that we will in turn push theirs: purchase now, contribute now. Anyone remember the old Skinner box?
My point in noting these commonplaces of life today is simply to illustrate some of the ironies of a world in which new or expanded freedoms gained seem to come only at the cost of freedoms lost. With our free choices so incessantly encumbered, with so many options on the table, and with so many eyes observing our every move, small wonder that many young people today report that they suffer from a new ailment: “decido-phobia,” the fear of making decisions.
Thankfully, there is a better way, one that fosters a life lived in courage and confidence. We begin with a classification. The long Christian wisdom tradition recognizes not only a negative freedom, a freedom from, but also, and more fundamentally, a positive freedom, a freedom for. Regarding the former, freedom from, well, that is certainly an important part of the Christian tradition. As the Anglican theologian Oliver O’Donovan has argued, a Christian grounding for classical liberal rights such as free speech can be found in Christ’s victory over the powers and principalities. This victory means that no merely human authority can claim our ultimate allegiance: “We must obey God rather than men.” This is not the place to probe political theology further, but a sharp formulation may make the point clear: faith in God is at the same time a faith that supports the kind of responsible freedom from coercion and limited government that have long been cherished in our democratic society. We banish this faith from the public sphere only at our own great peril.
Positive freedom, on the other hand, a freedom for, means more than mere negation. In the Christian tradition, human freedom has long been understood as a core element in that ineffable something the Bible calls the image of God. We are creatures who have been gifted not only to think and know, but also to choose freely. One’s unique personhood is meant to come to expression by means of one’s own free choices. In an image I owe to the French thinker Remi Brague, each of us is a bit like a snowball rolling down a hill. As we move on in life, the original mystery of our personhood, the soul, is shaped not only by our unique experiences but also by the choices we make in response to them. Being and becoming thus coincide in us, and the choices we make change the path our snowball takes. Put simply, we are the willing agents of our own emerging personhood. So it is that our choices, which may seem significant at the time we make them, often become even more so over time, as we come to see the larger tapestry of the life into which our choices have been woven.
At the same time, the Western tradition has long recognized that the freedom by which we make those choices is encumbered, weighed down by sin, by our own prior bad choices, and by the long and often difficult history of the human family. In this tradition, the reality of original sin has been clear since the pathbreaking work of St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine discerned that although we sinners are made for God and are restless apart from him, nevertheless our sinful hearts cannot greet his love with a full-throated answer of love until and unless we get some help. We are disordered within, and this disorder taints our free choices. We love penultimate goods as if they could be our highest good. But they cannot. The human heart is curved in upon itself, and without his help we can do nothing to change that. Apart from God’s gracious interventions we may indeed choose freely, but we do not choose well. It takes grace for sinners to make a new beginning. So it happens that when we find that we have made such a new beginning we also gradually begin to recognize the gifts of grace that, long before we loved Him, made possible our turning toward Him. The God who is our final end has been alongside us from the beginning.
The recognition that God is both behind and before us enables us better to understand that our creaturely freedom originates in a divine gift, and that this freedom finds its proper end only in the heart’s union and reunion with God. Two logical moments are reflected here, and perhaps a third. One, we are created beings, born into a world not of our own making. Our existence is not a matter of our choosing, and still less of our doing. We are, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger put it, “thrown into” existence. We may respond to the gift of existence either with gratitude or rejection. The best path is gratitude. Two, we are ordered beings within whom both rational powers and an aptitude for God may be found. Our freedom is ordered to ends, including both this-worldly ends and that Other and Greater End, the triune God who, even today, speaks each one of us into being. In short, we are made by God, and we are made for Him, too.
With these truths in mind, we may also glimpse—dimly, to be sure—a third logical moment. In the Western tradition at its best, the Providence of God is seen as our greatest comfort. Our knowing, our willing, and our doing are nestled, so to speak, under God’s own free decision and promise to bring all things to completion in Christ. We realize our own human personhood over time and through our own choices. This diachronic process may not, however, be understood primarily as a project of self-creation. Instead, we recognize, as Augustine once did, that God’s steady presence has been with us all along the way. Reflecting on our life’s course, each of us will discern moments of grace. Sometimes these moments come to us in the clarity of a mountain top experience. But perhaps more often they are given in the darkness of suffering, disappointment, or loss. Each of us is invited to take a retrospective view of our past choices, receiving in humble gratitude the story of our life, and so developing our capacity to see that God has somehow been working all these things together for our good.
In that way, we may also discover, even during the trials and troubles of this life, a foretaste of the sabbath rest we hope to enjoy in the life of the world to come. Having faith in God means resting in him. In this faith we also gain insight and come to see that the freedom of God is the abiding foundation for our own creaturely freedom. Remember that God’s freedom in no way contradicts or compromises his own goodness. God’s freedom is thus a freedom for self-giving love, one which is fully actualized in the life of the Holy Trinity. We have been graciously invited to participate in this freedom, to find, in God, our own freedom for love. And just as God’s freedom cannot be pitted against what He is, His nature or essence, so also our own freedom cannot be pitted against our given nature. Real human freedom therefore subsists in freedom under God, the right exercise of which can fulfill the promise of our own given goodness within the limits proper to our creaturely frame. Faith thus stands in service to freedom when, day by day, we choose the path of the self-gift, activating our freedom for God in lives of service and sacrifice poured out for others, and for a world that has become lately, but hardly for the first time, fretful. Except in Hillsdale.
