Is there a crisis in contemporary western society? I think there is and I think it is quite widely perceived, but differently understood and differently labelled. One could call it the crisis of modernity, a crisis in that understanding of itself and the world that in western societies derives from the eighteenth century enlightenment. What is happening when the Western world attempts, as it did throughout the last two centuries, to export its own values - and freedom is its own epitome of them - elsewhere and meets the kind of reaction it has in the Middle East? Why is the selfevident superiority of western modernity over repressive Islamic societies, hidebound by medieval tradition, not clear for all to see? I am inclined to think the crisis in Iraq reflects a crisis back home in the West.

How easily the word freedom comes to the lips of western leaders, as readily available once again as it was in the period of the Cold War. But what do they mean? - freedom from tyranny, yes, democracy, the free market economy, freedom of speech perhaps, the hyper-individualism of contemporary western society, I wonder? The concept has a number of automatic associations, but occasions little real reflection. This is dangerous. 

Freedom is an enormously potent word - no doubt it has always been powerful, but it is especially so in our contemporary world. I think it is plausible to claim that freedom is the primary value of modernity - and postmodernity, while changing many things, has certainly not changed that. Remember the slogan of the French Revolution, the epitome of the ideals of the European Enlightenment - it had 3 components: liberty, equality and fraternity. Of these, it is liberty that has worn best and come to be most widely valued. But this is not to say that freedom always means the same thing. Big words like that rarely do. Isaiah Berlin said that the meaning of freedom 'is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems able to resist.' A potent - for contemporary people, one might say, a magic - word, but also a protean word, a complex and very culturally variable notion, and one that for that very reason can also be dangerous. A word so suggestive of unlimited good, so hospitable to all sorts of aspirations, can easily conceal the disadvantages of those aspirations, can easily camouflage evils.

When I speak of a crisis of freedom in contemporary western society, what I mean can probably be most easily approached by considering the relationship of freedom and community, or freedom and belonging. There is I think a quite widely perceived contemporary problem about the compatibility of freedom and community - between, if you like, the human need to be independent and the human need to belong. The increase in both the desire and the concrete opportunities for individual freedom - along with doubtless other connected factors, like increased mobility - has led to what is sometimes called an atomized society, in which community is no longer a given context of relationships in which individuals find themselves embedded but results only from the free choice of individuals to associate. Most people want to belong, but many experience this as in tension with the desire for freedom, and contemporary cultural and economic factors give a strong advantage, in this tension, to individual freedom. Community loses out.

Is freedom necessarily destructive of community? Does community necessarily inhibit freedom? Must we be content with some kind of uneasy balance between the two? Or does the dilemma result from particular cultural construals of freedom and community? Part of my argument in the material about freedom in my book is that the Bible and the Christian tradition offer ways of understanding and practising freedom that actually enable community rather than destroying community. 

If freedom is conceived as opposed to belonging, exalted as a value purely in itself, leads not only to the destruction of community but to the distortion of freedom itself, then that is an aspect of a wider point I would like to urge: that, in a pluralistic society like ours, there is a real danger of freedom becoming the only common value, and that, if this happens, freedom will be seriously distorted, even destroyed, because freedom only really flourishes for human good when it is valued in a context of other prime values and virtues. A so-called freedom-loving society (to use a term with strong recent resonances) will be no more than a jungle of competing interests unless it values other goods as well as freedom. The pioneers of modern democracy - in the USA for example - took this for granted, but we can no longer afford just to assume it. 

My point is not just that other values have been neglected, but that freedom has come to be understood in a way that itself actually threatens other values. An apparently self-evidently good thing, freedom, has become destructive of human good. We must rethink what freedom is - in other words, we must pay attention to this protean concept, get beyond the empty rhetoric of freedom - and try to reconceive it in a way that puts it in its place in relation to other beliefs and values that society needs. 

What has God to do with all this? Not merely the very general point that it's hard to think for long about values without some reference - positive or negative - to God. Much more specifically, the narrative that modernity has told about itself, a narrative replacing the biblical Christian narrative of the pre-modern west, is a narrative of progressively realised freedom, a narrative of human emancipation - which, for its prime storytellers, the architects of modernity, was a narrative of human emancipation from God. In the very complex tale of the modern west's loss of faith in God (an aspect much more characteristic of Europe than of America, of course) - in that complex tale the conviction that God is incompatible with human freedom has been perhaps the most powerfully driving force. Somewhere in the origins of modernity the idea arose that true freedom can only be attained as freedom from God, from the rule of God and from the obligation to obey God's laws. (Note the political imagery that is essential to this field of ideas). God was understood as the oppressive tyrant of the universe, who must not exist if humans are to be truly free. 

We cannot speak responsibly about God in the crisis of modernity unless we confront the problem that characteristically modern and postmodern views of freedom pose for belief in God. The crisis of modernity, the crisis of freedom is also a crisis of God. For unbelieving modernity God, opposed to freedom, has been the problem: for the sake of freedom God must go. But if in the crisis of freedom it is possible now to see that freedom has become the problem, might there be a sense in which God is now the solution? Only if we think God and freedom together in a properly Christian way.

Now -I'd like us to take a look at some of the kinds of freedom that have become culturally dominant in the modern and contemporary periods in the West (and exported to other parts of the world). 

Modern and contemporary freedoms⤒🔗

Democratic freedoms←↰⤒🔗

Since the rest of what I say about the legacy of the European Enlightenment, the culture of modernity, will be mostly critical, I want to stress at the outset the positive aspects of freedom that Enlightenment has bequeathed to us. The Enlightenment insisted, with some degree of novelty, on the rights of the individual over against the power of society or the state. Ideas of the dignity of the individual and the fundamental human rights of the individual which must be universally respected took their modern form through the Enlightenment, though arguably they have roots in the Christian tradition. The notion of human rights, though it is probably not a matter of self-evident universal values, as the Enlightenment believed, has proved very useful legally and internationally. Some people now associate talk of rights with contemporary hyper-individualism and the decline of social obligation - rights without responsibilities - but this is not the fault of the idea of human rights itself, but of the decay of a wider context of values.

So, whatever else I say about modern freedom, I don't wish to undervalue the fundamental freedoms of modern democracies, which include such things as freedom of speech and freedom of worship.

Freedom from all limits←↰⤒🔗

But modern concepts of freedom range much more widely than that. I think there is in the spirit of modernity an aspiration to absolute freedom or freedom from all limits whatever. To illustrate roots of this kind of concept of freedom in the Italian Renaissance I quoted in my book a famous and remarkable passage from the fifteenth-century philosopher Pico della Mirandola. He imagines God addressing Adam, just after he has created him:

The nature of other creatures, which has been determined, is confined within the bounds prescribed by us. You, who are confined by no limits, shall determine for yourself your own nature, in accordance with your own free will, in whose hand I have placed you.... We have made you neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, so that, more freely and more honourably the moulder and maker of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever form you shall prefer...."

O sublime generosity of God the Father! [Pico continues] O Highest and most wonderful felicity of man! To him it was granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills.

This is humanity as the creature with no given limits, absolutely self-determining, able to choose what it will be, in effect, self-creating. What Pico has really done here, following the trend of the Italian Renaissance to treat humanity as a god, is: he has transferred to human beings a theological understanding of God as the absolutely selfdetermining reality. It says something about the continuity of this notion of human freedom from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment that Pico does more or less what in the early nineteenth century Ludwig Feuerbach advocated. For Feuerbach our ideas of God are just projections of human qualities and potentialities. We need to reclaim our humanity by rejecting the transcendent God and re-appropriating for humanity our own true divinity. This is what Pico was doing, except that he did not give up belief in God. What he effectively gave up was the finiteness of humans as finite creatures, investing humanity with the infinite freedom to transcend all limits that theology had attributed to God.

One cannot deny that the rejection of given limits in the project of modernity was genuinely liberating in important ways. It rescued people from fatalism - from simply acquiescing in whatever is the case out of a general conviction that nothing can really be changed. It gave huge energy to the project of improving human life and its conditions. But it had a Promethean tendency - a tendency to suppose that all given limits can be transcended and abolished. We have seen the downside of this understanding of freedom in the ecological crisis, which in many ways has been a very hard lesson in learning that there simply are given limits in the nature of things, and that humanity's too promethean attempts to disregard these have been reckless and ignorant, bringing on disasters that no one predicted. But the rejection of human finiteness, the understanding of freedom as an ability, even a right to break out of all restrictions, to recognize no limits, has also been very damaging I think when adopted as an idea of individual freedom.

Modern individuals came to think that the more freedom they have the better and that the freedom they wanted was self-determination. For this understanding of freedom other people can only be restrictions on my freedom. Society becomes a sort of contract in which we promise not to exercise our own freedom to the extent of impinging on other people's freedom. This is John Stuart Mill's famous definition:

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to attain it.

Freedom here is something the individual exercises as an independent individual. It has no positive relationship to anyone else's freedom. Essentially it sees freedom as competitive. On this definition of freedom my freedom really would be increased if I denied other people their freedom, overruled their freedom, subjected them to my will. For someone really driven by this kind of freedom other people simply get in the way. For society to be possible at all - this is Mill's argument - we have in fact to restrict our freedom, compromise our freedom in order to allow others theirs. But this restriction of the individual's freedom is precisely a restriction. We'd be able to be more free if it weren't for other people. So freedom and society pull in different directions. This is where we first see the incompatibility of freedom and community. Obligations to other people restrict freedom. So the lowest-common-denominator morality of contemporary Britain puts obligation to others in an entirely negative form: Do what you like so long as you don't harm anyone else. This is what we're left with if freedom for the individual is understood as transcending all limits and if freedom is the only common value left in a pluralistic society.

Freedom as maximal independence←↰⤒🔗

Modern individualistic freedom is a full-scale revolt against the given. This means not only that it accepts no given limits, or does so only grudgingly, as a concession. It also means that freedom is conceived as complete independence. That is, it rejects dependence. Freedom is not received from others or enhanced by others. Freedom is an inherent capacity that the individual deploys in an exercise of self-creation. Each has, in Pico della Mirandola's words, the freedom to choose who they will be.

This kind of freedom as maximal independence makes people unwilling to make long-term commitments or to stick with relationships or situations that are not going well. People want the right to move on. They don't want to be tied down. They want to keep their options open. They hate being dependent on others because it is restrictive. All these facets of freedom are antithetical to community, which requires such old-fashioned virtues as faithfulness and commitment. Or to put it another way: maximal independence is incompatible with belonging. Of course, people still want to belong, but contemporary people experience the desire to belong as in considerable tension with freedom. They get divorced and then they regret it. Or they want lifelong loving commitment to a partner, but feel it would be unbearably restrictive actually to marry. Family relationships are the obvious victims of freedom as maximal independence, but neighbourliness is another. Even spirituality is affected: private versions of new age spirituality leave one freer than so-called institutional religion that requires commitment and obligation.

Lest we think of this solely in terms of attitudes in people's minds, I should note that economic factors play a role: it's hard to belong when you have to keep moving from one job to another or from one place to another. How many people now have neighbours they have known all their lives or colleagues they've worked with all their career, as most people did not so long ago?

Freedom as consumer choice←↰⤒🔗

Alongside freedom as maximal independence the other dominant aspect of freedom in contemporary western culture is freedom of consumer choice. Now having choice can certainly be a very good thing. Even rather trivial forms of choice make life more enjoyable. But we may well wonder whether our society hasn't gone about as far as it can in simply multiplying choice in every aspect of life that can be bought. Consumer choice certainly can be a means of commercial manipulation cloaking itself in the illusion of freedom. And probably worst of all is when the model of consumer choice is applied to things other than those we purchase, such as choosing our moral values. The effect of a culture that overvalues consumer choice is to give the impression that freedom is really enhanced by the mere multiplication of choices, regardless of how we exercise choice. What matters is having the choice, not making the right choice, not choosing well or rightly. This is one of the points where one may fear that freedom is becoming the only value. Distinguishing good choices and bad choices is serious when there are accepted notions of good and bad. In a culture that socializes people into a range of values and virtues that constitute good life, the main value of choice will be that it enables the making of good choices. Freedom is a faculty, choice is an opportunity for the good. But without a widely accepted range of values and virtues, choice becomes the good that is valued in and of itself.

Freedom as domination?←↰⤒🔗

A question that must always be raised about freedom is whether it has domination as its corollary. In other words, is it freedom for some at the expense of others? Is it the freedom the master enjoys only because he has slaves? It's easy for us to see that Athenian democracy was possible for the free citizens of Athens only because their slaves and their wives did all the work and left them the free time to engage in the democratic debates and decisions of direct democracy. British democracy was for a long time really a kind of plutocracy, in the sense that there was a property qualification for voting. Universal franchise came late in the day. The economic relationships that free some while enslaving others are not always so obvious, but there are always economic aspects to freedom. What is happening in a democracy where the poor have the vote but few of them actually turn out to vote? How far does consumer choice in the west depend on cheap labour in parts of the third world, where small children work thirty-hour shifts?

So in addition to the point I made earlier about individualism - individual freedom seeing other people only as restrictions on the individual's freedom - we have to press, in some cases, a harder critique: are freedoms we value ourselves only possible because others are denied freedoms?  

Freedom, we have to conclude, is such a magic word, such an alluring notion, that it is also a powerfully ideological word - in the bad sense of ideology: mystifying a situation we would dislike or be ashamed of if we saw it more clearly. Freedom can cloak oppression and justify selfishness. It covers a multitude of goods and a multitude of evils and a lot of rather ambiguous things. It deserves a lot more attention than our society usually affords it, while priding itself precisely on its freedom.

Beyond hyper-individualism - reciprocity←⤒🔗

If we are to try to construct a notion of freedom that can serve as an adequate alternative to the kinds of modern freedom that are proving inimical to human flourishing, there are two motifs that I draw from my understanding of the Bible and the Christian tradition - that freedom is finite and freedom is relational.

Freedom is finite. That means, partly, that it is given, just as for finite creatures all goods are received. Freedom is given ultimately by God, but also in the concrete circumstances of life it is given by social structures and traditions and by other people. We don't simply win freedom for our individual selves, we receive it. We grant freedom to each other (or fail to), we enhance each other's freedom (or suppress it). In well-functioning community we are not restrictions on each other's freedom, we enable each other's freedom. Freedom is not a zero-sum game, so that the more freedom I have the less you have. The more freedom we give each other the more we all have.

If we are given freedom by others, then it is a mistake to want a kind of independence that excludes any sort of dependence. The independence of finite creatures is always rooted in their more fundamental dependence on God. But the same is, less absolutely, true of our dependence on others. Children grow to independence from the dependence they have on adults, and are forever indebted to those adults for the independence they acquire. But adult independence is also really always only an aspect of the complex web of interdependence that human society is. 

That freedom is finite does also mean that it has limits. It is the condition of a finite creature to live within limits. But of course finite creatures are created such as to find fulfilment within limits. Limits belong to the good of finite creatures. I would not be happier if I could be in 200 places at the same time, because I have not been made to find happiness in such a capacity. I do not mean that we can always know in advance where we shall find the limits to be (could we colonize Mars? for example), but we should not find the very idea of limits alien and restrictive, and so we should be open to discovering limits at the same time as we may discover new possibilities. In other words, we must abandon that element in the modern spirit that aspired to the limitless freedom appropriate only to God. Feuerbach was wrong: in the concept of God we recognize necessary distinctions between God and ourselves, we recognize ourselves to be finite, not infinite. 

Freedom is finite, and it is also relational. That means: not only do we give and receive freedom, but furthermore freedom is fulfilled in being freedom for. The contemporary concept of freedom is deficient, I've suggested, in not having any real idea of what freedom is for. When freedom is the only value, it becomes no more than having the choice to do whatever I choose, which in itself is entirely without value. What I choose to do with my freedom could be wholly destructive to myself as well as to others. For freedom to be worth anything we have to have notions about what it is good to choose. But once we see that the tension with community disappears. Freedom is for the common good.

But to sustain such a notion of freedom as rooted in givenness, dependence and fulfilling itself in serving the common good, we need a good deal more than this notion of freedom itself. We need a context of other beliefs and values. This is only possible when hyper-individualistic, modern or postmodern person is able to transcend their supposedly autonomous, self-sufficient, wholly self-determining selves, and find their true selves in relation to the truly determinative reality (God) that graciously gives them selves that subsist in freedom and relationships.

In my book I quoted a passage from American theologian Ellen Charry, who sums up her narrative of the way the idea of the autonomous self has led to the problems of contemporary American society - thus: pp. 193-4. 

Freedom in the trinitarian God←↰⤒🔗

I've talked about the ways we need to understand freedom if we are to surmount the crisis of freedom. So far as the typically modern opposition between human freedom and God is concerned, the understanding of freedom as finite and relational opens the way to surmounting that polarity. But fully to do so we also need to think about God. It is notable that in the period in which God came to be seen as the oppressive tyrant, the omnipotent despot, the opponent of freedom, the God who was so understood was a monadic, unitarian God, God the supreme individual. If freedom is competitive, a zero sum game, if more freedom for one individual means less freedom for another individual, then an omnipotent individual is a uniquely privileged competitor whose will is bound to prevail at the expense of the freedom of all others.

But the Christian God is not a supreme individual. The Christian God is trinitarian - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This trinitarian God himself is relationship, his own freedom constituted in the loving relationships of Father Son and Holy Spirit. Through Jesus Christ and the Spirit God includes us in this trinitarian field of relationship. This means that our freedom as given in relationship to God could be thought of as constituted by three poles, which are the way that we relate to each of the three trinitarian persons, each relationship a facet of our freedom. Thus (I suggest) - we could think in a spatial image of three directions in which we know God - God above us, God alongside us, God within us. Those three directions are the field in which we experience the freedom of the Christian as given us in our relationship to the trinitarian God - thus:

• God 'above' us: In relation to God the Father we know God as authority to command in a relationship of loving belonging (so this is God not just as king but also as father, not just commanding authority, but commanding with love, authority with belonging). 
• God 'alongside' us: In relation to God the Son, the human Jesus Christ, we know God as loving solidarity, God as our fellow-human who befriends us. God as fellow human opens up freedom for us in the ways that we can do for each other.
• God 'within' us: In relation to God the Spirit, we know God as the spontaneity in which we make God's will our own. This means that obedience to God's will is not a constrained subjection to an external and alien will (heteronomy), but a loving and willing inner consent to God's will, recognizing God's will as our own good. In technical terms the polarity of heteronomy and autonomy is overcome in theonomy. Of course, fully so only eschatologically.

This may seem complex, but as I've insisted the notion of freedom is complex. I think any adequate notion of freedom in relation to God actually has to be complex enough to need that the kind of trinitarian unpacking I've just summarized. It's the oversimplified versions, the reduction of God to some single idea like absolute sovereignty, that leads to the seeming contradiction between God and human freedom. This is why the unbeliever's perception of the matter (if there is God there cannot be human freedom) is not recognized by believers as the reality of their own experience. In this, as in other matters, we should not be drawn into discussions about God that speak merely abstractly of any God there might be, but must always come back to the God with whom as Christians we really have to do: the God of Jesus Christ.