These two complementary passages from Wilken and Hart (see below) remind me of Paul’s counter-intuitive vision in Romans 6, in which neither freedom nor slavery are perceived as inherently desirable or oppressive. Rather, both only attain the status of good–or evil–consequent of their relation to the objects by which they are so defined. To be free from God may be the joy of those whose hearts are darkened, but such freedom is actually (from the truest perspective) slavery to sin. But to be a slave to God, Paul writes, is the essence of true freedom. Any other so-called “freedom” is essentially dehumanizing to those who participate in it, regardless of how they themselves understand the matter.
So for Paul, both freedom and slavery receive their various moral appraisals only derivately, only subsequent to their prior orientation towards either God or sin. Wilken and Hart conspire to say this another way–for them, freedom is not a thing to be valued in itself, as if it existed for its own sake (as, they both rightly argue, moderns tend unconsciously interpret the matter). Instead, true freedom is ever only a means to an end. Which in turn implies, of course, that true freedom inevitably has a telos, a purpose independent of and external to any given human being’s actualizing of his or her ability to freely choose between competing alternatives. For Christians, that telos is found only in God through Christ:
“Among the divine qualities the maker impressed on our nature, the most important, says Gregory [of Nyssa], is freedom. The measure of man’s uniqueness is the ‘gift of liberty and free will.’ In an almost Jeffersonian phrase Gregory says that human beings are ‘free by nature,’ and in another place, ‘by nature equal.’ Gregory was one of the few church fathers to condemn slavery explicitly…More often, however, Gregory speaks of human freedom as moral freedom, the freedom to become to become what we were made to be. Freedom, as he puts it, is the ‘royal exercise of the will,’ but will is much more than choice, than deciding to do one thing in preference to another. It is an affair of ordering one’s life in terms of its end, freedom oriented toward excellence (the original meaning of virtue) and human flourishing. As we grow in virtue we delight in the good that is God. Hence freedom is never set forth in its own terms, but rather is always seen in relation to God. Because human beings were made in the image of God, our lives will be fully human only as our face is turned toward God and our actions formed by his love. Freedom is as much a matter of seeing, of vision, as it is of doing. We know ourselves as we transcend ourselves, and we find ourselves as we find fellowship with God. Happiness, the happiness that gives fullness to life, will be ours only as our will conforms to God’s will. And that finally is found in Christ.” (Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, pp. 153-54)
And Hart continues:
“Modern thinking differs from premodern nowhere more starkly than on the matter of freedom…the modern notion of freedom is essentially ‘nihilistic’: that is, the tendency of modern thought is to see the locus of liberty as situated primarily in an individual subject’s spontaneous power of choice, rather than in the ends that subject might actually choose. Freedom, thus understood, consists solely in the power of choosing as such. Neither God, then, nor nature, nor reason provides the measure of an act’s true liberty, for an act is free only because it is done in defiance of all three…Traditionally, throughout most of Christian history, theologians followed classical precedent in conceiving of creaturely freedom principally as the freedom of any being’s nature from any alien constraint or external limitation or misuse that might prevent that nature from reaching its full fruition in the end appropriate to it. And much the same was true, though in infinite magnitude, of divine freedom: God, it was assumed, is free because his nature, being infinite, cannot be hindered, thwarted, or corrupted by any other force. Hence he can do no evil precisely because he is infinitely free, and so nothing can prevent him from being fully what he is: infinite goodness itself. The ‘ability’ to choose evil would have been thought a defect in God, a limitation of the divine substance, a distortion of the divine nature, all of which is quite impossible…[But] here explicitly, for the first time in Western thought, freedom was defined not as the unobstructed realization of a nature but as the absolute power of the will to determine even what that nature might be…It is enough simply to ask where the ascendancy of our modern notion of freedom as pure spontaneity of the will leads the culture is pervades…At the level of conventional social behaviors, it leads perhaps toward a decay of a shared sense of obligation or common cause, or toward an increasingly insipid and self-absorbed private culture, or toward a pronounced tendency in society at large less to judge the laudability of particular choices by reference to the worthiness of their objects than to judge objects worthy solely because they have been chosen. As prognostication goes, however, none of this is very daring; all of it is at once obviously true and obviously vague. Our modern concept of freedom can, however, lead to other, more terrible things as well: for what the will may will, when it is subordinate to nothing but its own native exuberance, is practically without limit. As a matter purely of logic, absolute spontaneity is an illusion; all acts of the will are acts toward some real or imagined end, which prompts volition into motion. But something dangerously novel entered our culture when we began to believe that the proper end of the will might simply be willing as such…Moreover, if there really is no transcendent source of the good to which the will is naturally drawn, but only the power of the will to decide what ends it desires—by which to create and determine itself for itself—then no human project can be said to be inherently irrational, or (for that matter) inherently abominable. If freedom of the will is our supreme value, after all, then it is for all intents and purposes our god. And certain kinds of gods (as our pagan forebears understood) expect to be fed.” (David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, pp. 224-27)
The Strange Triumph of the Lamb 