I'VE DECIDED TO GO THROUGH at least some of the lecture For Freedom Christ Has Freed You: The Paradoxical Character Of Christian Liberty by Luke Timothy Johnson. Not because I agree completely with what he says in it, though I agree with most of it, but because I think it's one of the most dangerous things in American culture that what he talks about in his first paragraph (at least in my somewhat casual transcription) is so widely and wrongly believed. And he talks only of the positive aspect of America's "civic religion" That putrid O'Connor - Rehnquist name for that ersatz substitute for piety and religion, proper. And because so many Americans profess to be Christians, it is important to explore the relationship between morality and notions of liberty and the real moral restraints that are necessary for any real freedom, as opposed to unequal privileges, to exist at all and to be a moral benefit instead of a dissipating evil. Today much, perhaps most of Americans and many Europeans notions of "liberty and freedom" is an amoral and evil practice of dissipation. The neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, and other evil political movements are based in such dissipation.
I will note before what has to say by pointing out Luke Timothy Johnson doesn't seem to much make of a distinction that I think is important, the difference between notions of "liberty" and a responsible, realistic conception of freedom. That's somewhat idiosyncratic to me and not because of the denotation of the words but what I perceive is the cultural and habitual use of the terms "freedom" and "liberty." There are things about the ideas that need to be specified and always separated. I think "liberty" as it is more often used in talk and thinking is tied to an amoral notion of people being able to do whatever they want to regardless of the effects on other People and living beings, the environment, etc. That "liberty" is inherently anti-egalitarian and inevitably destructive. Freedom, if it is to be a virtue and not mere amoral license, has to be restrained by the damage doing what you want to do causes to People, to animals, to living organisms, to the environment AND TO THE GENERAL CULTURAL CONTEXT IN WHICH SUCH FREEDOM IS PRACTICED. It is, inevitably, limited by the rights of People and the needs of animals and organisms and the environment, it has to be exercised in a context which propagates the common well-being of People and other living beings and, so cannot be unimpeded and unlimited. Any good society has to set limits on freedom, all freedoms, including those idolized by American ideology, most of all freedom of speech and, I would say the far lesser items of "freedom of the press" and, yes, "freedom of religion." I don't think any moral or even rational egalitarian democracy can refuse to suppress ideologies and, yes, even religions of demonstrated danger to the lives and rights and the decent living of People and other living beings. I think it is one of the things we are living with that the "new left" the commercial "counter-culture" and the Warren Court rather stupidly gave such libertarian notions free of what were traditionally considered conventional restraints and THE LANGUAGE OF SUCH LIBERTY to the traditional form of American fascists, the white supremacists and the self-seekers of selfish "liberty" the rich and those who were to become rich in their silly imaginings. I think that is a huge part of how America got from the advances in equality from the late 1960s to the 1970s to where we are today.
I will assert that in the context of the Americas and Europe, at least, such a notion as responsible moral freedom is inevitably tied to the egalitarian morality of the Jewish religious tradition, Christianity being a further development of the radicalism of The Law, The Prophets and the Gospel. Most certainly the letters of Paul who, it should never be forgotten, considered himself a Jew till his dying day. It is obvious in the use of the story of the Exodus among the "founders" such as Benjamin Franklin and even Thomas Jefferson in the proposed iconography of the new nation that they also saw the Jewish Bible as a fount of American freedoms. I'm less familiar with that in the context of European countries or other countries in the Americas.
I am seriously skeptical that within the sweep of history in which notions of such freedom and "liberty" rose to become in any way a part of political and legal reality can be divorced from its prerequisite religious holdings of morality. One of the best things about the United States, especially within the context of the modern Democratic Party is that you don't have to be Jewish or Christian to fully and, in many cases, more impressively declare AND LIVE OUT out an allegiance to that radical equality and justice. I have also said I think it has been present in other religious traditions as well, though it would be dishonest to ignore that even within Christianity and Judaism its opposites have also been present. I hold it is self-evident that when that has been true it has happened in oppositions to the radicalism of the Golden Rule and other central commandments of that religious tradition. I think it is one of the glories of the Old Testament that it so impressively confesses the sins of the rulers and priests and rich people of Israel and Judea. The conventional history of the United States, when it isn't hagiographic lies, has a lot of catching up to do and Florida and other Republican-fascist ruled states and the American media can be counted on to suppress any such introspective that might lead to moral correctives. I wouldn't be surprised if sometime in the future they don't saw in half such prophetic critics as the kings did to the Prophets. Currently its best recognized face is in the Republican-fascist caucus of the Congress and the majority on the Supreme Court and Republican-fascist controlled state houses.
If you want to skip over the introductory material and listen ahead, the lecture starts at about 5:00 here.
Certain truths of our faith are so fundamental and yet so difficult to maintain with integrity that they must be repeated over and over again to check our tendency to slip and slide away from them into some kind of pale facsimile. Such is the truth of Christian freedom or liberty which is found expressed most explicitly in the Letter of the Apostle Paul. Our contemporary speech that's so dominated, even wrapped in and corrupted by political discourse, even within theology, that believes may be tempted to believe that when they talk about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness their speech is consonant with the Good News. Or that when they espouse some form of Liberation Theology they are advancing the mission of Jesus. But they are not. The paradox of Christian liberty is not about political problem solving that seeks to adjust the furniture within social arrangements, it is rather about the mystery of God's presence and power within human existence. And to grasp the paradox of Christian liberty, then, we must be willing to relinquish our default mode of political speech and enter into Paul's properly religious discourse.
The entire Republican-fasicst, "Christian nationalist," largely mid-20th century Hollywood bullshit presentation of Christianity, which is a totally denatured merely symbol waving secularized Protestantism,* mixed up with white-supremacist notions of Americanism, is, of course, not Christianity any more than it is actual American history. It is what is on display every single time any Republican speaks about Christianity in a political context. That such notions as "liberty" and "freedom" are tied so intimately into that dysfunctional dystopian mythology is, of course nothing to do with the Gospel of Jesus either in Paul's presentation of it or in the Gospels and the other letters of the New Testament.
As a strong supporter of liberation theology I can agree with what LTJ says in so far as even an authentic Christian theology of liberation has to be understood as something which is juggling fire. But given the context of The Gospel and Epistles in the context of the Hebrew Biblical tradition, which centers around the liberation of The Children of Israel and the Prophetic critique of the political economy among the Children of Israel, any attempt to remove the Gospel from political and economic life is, I think, wrong. But any political entanglement with Christianity is fraught with potentials for serious moral corruption THOUGH TO IGNORE THE MORAL NECESSITY OF POLITICAL ENTANGLEMENT IS A GUARANTEE OF MORALLY CORRUPT AMORAL GOVERNMENT. Talk about being innocent as doves while being as cunning as adders. It is such a difficult line to tread between political necessity and moral exigency that it's probably safest to admit right up front that constant reflection to prevent evil must be part of the process. Only by constantly checking for moral adherence can such a thing hold together. Look at the present situation in that tragic land, Nicaragua for a good example of the potential moral corruption that springs from any political program of "liberation" so claimed by those seeking to rule. I've gone over the reality of "liberty, equality and fraternity" in the French Revolution and, relevant to the next section of LTJ's talk, the slave-compact which is the American Constitution, the vehicle in which political liberty (in the mandatory imagination of Americans) drives through our history to the Trump dominated America of today. The talk goes over something that could not be more relevant to our situation now. It should never be forgotten that slavery and genocide were the law of the land for most of the time that the Bill of Rights has been part of the Constitution. Indeed, neither of those has passed into the past.
But let's start with some social realities. Paul's language about slavery and freedom should be startling to us precisely because it was forged within a political context in which slavery was not only real but was omnipresent. The Roman Empire inherited the practice of slavery from the Greeks and through military conquest massively expanded the number of slaves throughout the empire. And though ancient slavery had no racial dimension, and although it was at least theoretically possible for slaves to win manumission the actual experience of slavery was, nevertheless, demeaning, arduous and dangerous. Some highly educated Greek slaves, to be sure, served in households as scribes and tutors and poets and musicians, such as was the great first century philosopher, Epictetus. Countless others were worked to death in mines and mills. And most significant is that all slaves were, under law, property rather than persons. And they could be ill-treated, sexually exploited, tortured and even killed at the whim of a master. There were millions of slaves in the first century Mediterranean world, they constituted approximately ten percent of the population. Across the entire empire and up to forty percent of the population within Italy about two to three million people.
That Paul would understand the hardship of being under the power of another is clear from the extended period of time, between four to six years that he, himself, spent in local and imperial captivity, writing at least five of his letters from prison. He could wear the self-designation of "slave of the Lord" and "a prisoner in chains" in more than a metaphorical sense.
And that Paul's readers were intimately acquainted with real slavery is clear from the presence of slaves within his community. The scribe Tertius who took Paul's dictation when he wrote to the Romans bore a slave name, "the third," number three. The runaway slave [Onesimus] of Philemon had become a co-worker in Paul's mission. And Paul exhorts household slaves and masters concerning their respective responsibilities. So when Paul speaks of slavery and freedom in religious terms he does not speak as some kind of Olympian remove from the harsh realities of social existence.
I think one of the most common misunderstandings in Christianity is that Paul urged slave-owners to stop treating those they held in slavery as slaves but as " beloved brothers". If Paul, within the milieu in which he had to operate, was forced to treat the general ubiquity of brutal chattel slavery as a given and something which many of those he converted to an approximation of Christianity would be very familiar with and likely were bound up in, that's no reason we can't go beyond that. As certainly as he struggled with his own imperfect practice of his conception of Christian virtue against his own unconverted personal life, he would have had to deal with social conventions and customs and habits even among those who had become converts to his Christianity. Paul's confessed weakness about doing what he wanted to even when he knew it wasn't compatible with the Gospel is one of the rare things that is actually endearing about him. I think it is a common misreading of Paul that so much of what he presents as personal confession and religio-social critique is mistaken as commandments of normative conduct and law making. It is shocking how much of the reading of Paul totally misses his deeply subtle reasoning and persuasion.
I have, also, discussed the attraction of the slave-ridden Roman Republic among the so-called "founding fathers," the slave-owning, almost to a man slavery-friendly group of rich, white, almost exclusively Protestant men who gave us the form of anti-democratic government we are saddled with. It is clear that they were not in any way friends of general freedom, not only within the milieu in which they operated but going on into the future, they set many a booby-trap that would go off if any great move towards equal freedom, equal justice and, especially, economic justice were seriously pursued by even a majority of voters. I would go so far as to say the discourse of the Gospels and the letters, even with their accommodation to the slavery within the culture they were written tends towards equality and freedom whereas the secular discourse of the American Constitution and the Supreme Court rulings have an actual, demonstrated effect of always acting as a roadblock for that equality and, so freedom. I think the structure of court rulings and the legal system make any reform of things far harder in secular government than changes in religious thinking. Though a lot of that is due to the usurpation of powers by the Supreme Court which our written Constitution has done nothing whatsoever to overturn and correct. What gets corrected is the rare instance in which the Court uses that usurped power to promote equality under the law. The Roberts Court is destroying all of that and all of the legislation to that effect. The "traditional-Catholics" on the Supreme Court are as bad as the first Catholic on that blasted Court, Roger Taney. Confession of evil is the first step in overcoming evil.
* The understanding of the Republican-fascist, Protestant "Christian nationalist" alliance with Republican-fascist "traditional-Catholicism" is a product of the decision of racist TV "ministering" money and power seekers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to try to harness the independent force of the Catholic anti-choice movement, changing their traditional being OK with abortion in order to make common cause with them to dominate American politics. It is, of course, ironic because much of that Protestant cultural milieu was viciously anti-Catholic, though among such people a little irony to get lots of power and, so, cash is a price they're very willing to pay. Of course, none of it has anything to do with the Gospel of Jesus or the Letters of Paul.
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