American Freedom and Christian Freedom

To be an American is to be deeply concerned with freedom. I have a vivid memory of attending a town Fourth of July celebration as a child and hearing a recording of Lee Greenwood singing, “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free,” while the fireworks burst overhead. Even today I cannot hear that line in the Battle Hymn of the Republic without a little lump in my throat: “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” Freedom, and its near-synonym liberty, shows up everywhere in the canon of American civic texts: in the Declaration of Independence, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” old war posters, patriotic songs, and protest anthems.

And this is more than just national mythology. Many of the facets of our country I personally hold most dear are rooted in the idea of freedom: slave resistance and abolitionism, the labor movement, the struggle to end Jim Crow, and so on. It really has moved Americans, in different and not infrequently contradictory ways, in shaping our common life. Thus, for example, the same idea can fund both support for untrammeled private enterprise (as freedom from unaccountable bureaucrats, pesky regulations, and useless red tape) and government and union involvement in regulating economic life (as freedom against the private tyranny exercised by unaccountable bosses over workers).

On all parts of the American ideological spectrum, American freedom taken to its extreme can amount to a brief for unconstrained self-creation with nearly metaphysical implications, a rejection of loyalties or duties or even truth outside the free, freely-choosing self. Thus, for example, Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy famously declared in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” To be an American is to be concerned with freedom – perhaps even, like Justice Kennedy, to place radical existential freedom at the heart of one’s understanding of a good human life.

Photograph by Kenny Eliason / Unsplash.

To be a Christian is also to be concerned with freedom. Given the content of our scriptures, this is small surprise. The story of God’s deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt to freedom is foundational to the narrative of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. The prophets writing in the time of Israel’s exile and subjugation promised God’s restoration of freedom to his people. The Gospel of Luke records that when Jesus first preached in the synagogue in Nazareth, he read Isaiah’s promise of liberty to the captives and announced the promise fulfilled in his hearers’ presence. “If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed,” he tells a group of his Jewish followers in the Gospel of John (8:36). It is above all the apostle Paul who makes the concept of freedom central to his picture of the Christian life. He exhorts the church in Galatia, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1). He chastises them for forsaking this freedom and returning to bondage, and complains against those who sought to “spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 2:4). “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” he tells the Corinthians (2 Cor. 3:17). The gospel, Paul never tires of saying, is our deliverance from bondage to freedom in Christ Jesus. To be a Christian is to be free!

But this raises a danger for the American Christian, and perhaps for Christians everywhere, given the global popularity of the ideal of freedom that Americans so treasure. Given that freedom is central both to American ideals and the Christian faith, there is a danger of confusing the two, of failing to rightly distinguish between American freedom and Christian freedom. It is all too easy to start seeing the freedom for which Christ set us free as none other than the freedoms that America promises. Indeed, a long tradition of liberal Protestant thought in the United States did exactly this, so conflating the kingdom of God with liberal democracy, moderate capitalism or socialism, and scientific advancement that they came to seem essentially the same. Thus, for example, the early-twentieth-century University of Chicago Divinity School dean Shailer Mathews writes in The Faith of Modernism that “the Modernist’s eschatology” is “an uplifting hope for a social order in which economic, political, and all other institutions will embody the cosmic good will which Jesus taught and revealed,” along with the more traditional “advance through death of those possessed of Christlike attitudes to a complete and joyous individuality.”

Washington Gladden, a leader in the Social Gospel movement writing around the same time, suggests that the primary way the minister brings about the “kingdom of heaven” is through working for “social amelioration.” He notes with satisfaction that such transformation has been most fully accomplished in the Christian countries of Europe and North America. While the cataclysms of the twentieth century disabused all but the most optimistic liberals of an easy equation between the kingdom of God and Western civilization, the equation between Christian and American freedom remains a potent one in American religion.

A look at Martin Luther’s 1520 tract The Freedom of a Christian can help us out of this problem and aid us in discerning between American freedom (both the genuine goods it offers and its shadow side) and Christian freedom. This is because Luther – devotee of Paul that he was – placed freedom at the heart of his understanding of the gospel. Also like Paul, he was determined to distinguish true Christian freedom from its counterfeit. In this famous tract, he outlines his conception of Christian freedom in two seemingly contradictory theses: “The Christian individual is a completely free lord of all, subject to one. The Christian individual is a completely dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”

How can these both be true? Luther’s answer rests upon a crucial distinction. He argues that every human being can be considered in two ways or under two aspects: the “inner person” and the “outer person.” The inner person refers to one’s existence coram Deo, that is, in relation to God. The outer person, then, refers to one’s existence coram mundo, in the world.

The gospel, Paul never tires of saying, is our deliverance from bondage to freedom in Christ Jesus. To be a Christian is to be free!

Christian freedom, Luther argues, has to do with our existence coram Deo. It consists in accepting the good news that we are freed from having to earn our way into God’s favor by our own efforts, that we are saved entirely by what Christ has done for us. Luther writes that Christ “suffered and rose again for you, in order that, believing in him, you may become another human being by this faith, because all your sins are forgiven and you are justified by another’s merits, namely, by Christ’s alone.” This is what it means to say that faith alone justifies: true faith trusts in Christ’s saving work on our behalf, believes that we are now free from having to earn our way into God’s good graces.

And how is it that such faith in Christ justifies us? How does it make us righteous and free? Luther uses an image with a long history in theological and spiritual writing, ultimately derived from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Faith, he says, “unites the soul with Christ, like a bride with a bridegroom.” In marriage, spouses share all their possessions and take on each other’s debts, holding them in common. It is the same, Luther says, with the soul united to Christ by faith. Before the marriage, Christ has “grace, life, and salvation” and the soul nothing but “sins, death, and damnation.” But in what Luther calls a “joyous exchange,” Christ chooses to give the soul all his righteousness and to take on himself all the soul’s sin and destroy it on the cross. Now the soul can rejoice and say, “All that is his is mine, and all that is mine is his.”

And so, because the soul can say that all Christ’s righteousness is hers, the soul is free indeed – free from the need to prove herself worthy of divine love, free of doubt or fear about her standing before God. This is what it means to say that the Christian is lord of all and subject to none. This is Christian freedom: freedom coram Deo, freedom to trust in Christ’s saving work rather than having to earn one’s way into salvation.

But recall the basic distinction with which we began: the distinction between the human being coram Deo and coram mundo, in relationship to God and in relationship to the world. Our freedom coram Deo does not mean that “all things are permitted,” that we are to snub our noses at all rules, order, and standards that govern our life coram mundo, our life in the world among other people. Nor does it matter that good works are unimportant in the Christian life.

Quite the opposite! For Luther, Christian freedom means that we are free before God so we can love and serve our neighbor. Consider this: if we do not grasp our freedom before God by the gift of salvation through faith, we use works in an attempt to enter into a right relationship with God. Our good works are thus not entirely disinterested; we are hoping to get something for them. Even the best thing we might do for someone else is related to our desire for salvation. But for the Christian who understands that we truly are free coram Deo, says Luther, our works can function differently. Now we no longer need to perform works for ourselves. Instead, we can do good purely for our neighbor as an expression of our gratefulness to God.

In all of our works, writes Luther, we should have “nothing else in view except the need and advantage of the neighbor.” In this, we have the privilege of imitating Christ. If the Christian life coram Deo is embracing Christ’s free gift, the Christian life coram mundo is reflecting Christ’s own ungenerous, abundant love to our neighbors. This leads to what Luther calls the “freest servitude,” when the Christian, “abundantly filled with the completeness and richness of his or her own faith, serves another freely and willingly.” Such service is done wholly without concern for reward or remuneration; the Christian soul “expends itself and what it has in a completely free and happy manner, whether squandering these things on the ungrateful or on the deserving.” Ultimately, Luther declares, “I will give myself as a kind of Christ to my neighbor, just as Christ offered himself to me.” Just as Paul says in Philippians that Christ took on the form of a servant (Phil. 2:7), so too is the Christian coram mundo a servant to all, subject to all.

American-style individualism is not freedom but in fact a perverse form of unfreedom, a bondage of the self to itself, to its own fleeting whims and desires.

This is the key to Luther’s seeming paradox: it is true that the Christian is simultaneously the free lord of all and the dutiful servant of all, because the Christian simultaneously exists in direct relationship to God and in relationship to the world. Before God, Christians are totally free when we trust by faith in the gospel that our righteousness rests not on our own works but on Christ’s. It is this very freedom before God that allows the Christian to truly be a servant to all coram mundo, because the Christian no longer needs to gain salvation by works but can simply offer them to the neighbor, imitating Christ’s generous gift of himself. “Christian individuals do not live in themselves but in Christ and their neighbor,” Luther writes, “in Christ through faith and in the neighbor through love.”

What does all this have to do with the danger of confusing Christian and American freedom? Luther’s argument bears upon this problem in two ways.

First of all, Luther shows that freedom in Christ and freedom in the world are very different things. Freedom before God is about Christ’s gift of salvation, which liberates us from seeking it through our own efforts and makes us children of God and heirs of eternal life. This freedom, Luther holds, is far more important than any merely earthly liberty.

This need not mean, of course, that God does not care or that we should not care about earthly conditions of oppression. (Luther is rightly criticized for saying things like this in some of his more intemperate comments.) But addressing such conditions becomes a matter of the Christian life of service coram mundo, not of Christian freedom proper. That is, Christians can and should respond to the free gift of salvation God has given us by striving for a just and free social order for our neighbors to enjoy. Arguably, the undeserved grace that is the foundation of our freedom coram Deo should have implications for how we order our common life. Luther himself, after all, calls us to emulate Christ in loving and doing good for our neighbors regardless of how much they deserve it. But such a social order is not the precondition of Christian freedom, which is available to all regardless of political conditions. The earthly progress for which proponents of the Social Gospel strove might well be a good thing, but Luther insists that it is not the kingdom of God. Christian freedom and American freedom (or, for that matter, what one thinks American freedom should be) must be kept precisely and carefully distinct.

Secondly, Luther shows that the most important kind of freedom is found not in untrammeled self-expression, but rather in a sort of self-forgetfulness in God and our neighbor. True freedom for the Christian isn’t about making our own will or desires the measure of our reality; it isn’t really about exercising agency at all. Rather, it is about embracing the truth that our standing before God rests not on who we are but who God is, and what God has done for us in Christ. And then it is about responding to that glorious good news with gratitude, embracing our freedom from earning salvation by living for our neighbors with Christlike love and service.

In this light, American-style individualism is revealed as not freedom but in fact a perverse form of unfreedom, a bondage of the self to itself, to its own fleeting whims and desires. To “define” my “own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” is not something that interests me very much. I would much rather embrace both my creation and my salvation as a gift given from God, and (by God’s grace) to respond to these great gifts by loving those whom God has placed around me.

It is meet and right to thank God for the blessings of worldly freedom many of us enjoy in the world, and to serve our neighbors by seeking to extend these blessings where they are not enjoyed. But as Luther shows, this is not the same as Christian freedom at all – and of the two, the Christian freedom that makes us both lords and servants, setting us free before God so that we can serve our neighbor, is by far the better. Let us pray that God pour out this gift all the more!