If people are forced to live within boundaries, abide by laws, nature’s, humanity’s or God’s word, is that a loss of freedom or an aid to freedom? Could it be that that is what freedom is about?
My husband is reading an excellent book, Theology, Music and Time, by Jeremy S. Begbie, Vice Principle of Ridley Hall, Cambridge. Begbie also teaches systematic theology and is a trained musician.
I thought I would place some of the content here and let others think about it in relation to obeying the word of God and being faithful to Jesus Christ.
“Authentic personal freedom, genuine particularity and self-realization, can be exercised only in accordance with real possibilities and impossibilities. Constraints can of course threaten human freedom, as in epilepsy or solitary confinement. But what is dubious is the belief that we automatically augment freedom by reducing limitation and/or multiplying the number of possibilities open to us. For ‘if possibilities are to be meaningful for free choice, they must be well-defined by structures of limit.’1 To multiply possibilities indefinitely would in fact remove the competence of choice and thus of freedom.
My husband is reading an excellent book, Theology, Music and Time, by Jeremy S. Begbie, Vice Principle of Ridley Hall, Cambridge. Begbie also teaches systematic theology and is a trained musician.
I thought I would place some of the content here and let others think about it in relation to obeying the word of God and being faithful to Jesus Christ.
“Authentic personal freedom, genuine particularity and self-realization, can be exercised only in accordance with real possibilities and impossibilities. Constraints can of course threaten human freedom, as in epilepsy or solitary confinement. But what is dubious is the belief that we automatically augment freedom by reducing limitation and/or multiplying the number of possibilities open to us. For ‘if possibilities are to be meaningful for free choice, they must be well-defined by structures of limit.’1 To multiply possibilities indefinitely would in fact remove the competence of choice and thus of freedom.
Freedom, then, is not a thing or entity to be sought after, or a possession to be grasped. It qualifies arrangements of persons and things; it describes proper relationships and configurations between particularities: ‘The functions of ‘free’ are adjectival…it is not the name of our home or the description of our destiny but, at best, how we are at home and, at worst, how we may be at sea.’2 Theologically speaking, to be free is not to enjoy some supposedly unbounded contingency, it is to be at home in the world, at peace with each other and with God.”
And then the author goes on to write of improvisation and constraint using jazz …
And then the author goes on to write of improvisation and constraint using jazz …
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1Oliver O'Donovan Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics, Eerdmans 1986, 107.
2 Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and End of 'Religion," Cambridge,1996, 244.
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