On Misusing Freedom
Q. Why then do we live apart from God and out of harmony with creation?
A. From the beginning, human beings have misused their freedom and made wrong choices.
Q. Why do we not use our freedom as we should?
A. Because we rebel against God, and we put ourselves in the place of God.
You’ll notice that I’m deviating from the previous two weeks by dealing with four questions at once. In part, if I don’t deal with multiple questions at a time, it’ll take two years to go through the whole Catechism. Also, these two questions, ones which, while not naming it as such, deal with Sin, really are one continuous answer to the question “why are human beings not in right relationship with God, each other, or the natural world?” as we were created to be. While we were created to “live in harmony with creation and with God” as the last answer indicated, we in fact live in discord with both creation and God, and they attempt to explain why that is the case (importantly, the Catechism does have a whole section on Sin and Redemption that we will get to later this year).
I follow the tradition of certain nineteenth-century Christian thinkers, specifically Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Søren Kierkegaard in trying to understand how it is that human beings have become trapped in the quagmire of Sin we find ourselves in. I believe that both thinkers follow the broadly Augustinian Christian tradition while offering some important correctives to it. I also find their interpretations very germane to the questions on Sin as it is related to human nature included here in the Catechism. What I offer is my own perspective that more or less summarizes and harmonizes these two thinkers—and I offer it without direct quotation from either owing to how extensive their treatments are. However, I’ll give you some resources at the end to read what both thinkers have to say in their own words.
As the questions above begin, the issue of Sin begins with freedom. Since freedom is related to the question of the image of God, freedom must start with a conversation about the nature of God. Bear with me: This is going to get a little heavy. Throughout Christian history, God has been acknowledged to be or have the primordial or first or highest Will (that is, “Will” in more or less the way we use the term when talking about “free will”). Will hear simply means the ability to do or act direct by something internal. If something claimed to be “will” is actually directed by something external, then it is not really a “will” as anyone conventionally uses the term, but mere power. A power drill or a saw or a speedboat all have the capacity to do things, that is, they have power, but they don’t have wills in any meaningful way because they require some external entity to direct that power toward the doing of something. So, Absolute or First or Highest Will implies direction by Absolute Intellect as something that is simultaneously united with and also distinct from Absolute Will. You may notice at this point that we have the sketch of a Trinitarian relationship if we assume that there necessarily is something that is the uniting of the Absolute Will and Intellect. And in fact, this is one way of looking at the being of God. Because of their absolute nature, and because of the union between them, God as Will is always perfectly directed by God’s Intellect. There is no discord between them. God’s action is wholly determined by God’s being, and thus no external constraint, with the effect that God is perfectly free.
Human beings are then created in the image of God and thus in their personhood also exemplify the capacity for free choice. Like God, we can each be our own center of the ability to act, meaning we can each have within ourselves individual wills. However, Truth or Intellect, ultimately being one, cannot be something that each individual has their own of. Each individual can have copies of the ordering principle of the world or they can participate in it, and this is what we mean by individual human intellects, but they all have to conform to the one Absolute Truth (or Logos or Reason) if they are to actually partake of truth.
While in God there is no “choice” for God to have God’s will conformed to God’s intellect because they are united in the same ultimacy of being, in humans they are necessarily different. For human will to truly conform to the pattern of Divine Will, and thus to act as it is created and intended to act, humans must make the choice to have their will be determined and ordered by Divine Intellect. Humans in some fundamental act of self-constitution must decide whether they will ground their wills and thus their action and being in the world in God or in something else.
This account allows us to answer one of the fundamental questions that often arises in relation to the question of Sin—why couldn’t God have created us in such a way that we can choose between various competing good things but simply not be able to choose what is evil? After all our freedom is admittedly not absolute since we already can’t choose to fly under our own bodily power or to teleport or to stop our hearts through mental exertion alone, so why not simply limit the range of choices even more? The answer from the above account would seem to be: What it means to choose rightly is to choose in conformity with the Divine Intellect or Reason. Only God can do this necessarily without it infringing on God’s freedom. To then say that only good choices are made is to say that only choices made in conformity to the Divine Intellect are made, and this is only possible in a way that is simultaneously necessary and free in the case of God. To have the will determined by something outside itself (in this case the Divine Intellect) would be to render the human will simply a power, in which case we would not actually have wills.
What I’ve said is highly technical, but it’s hard to boil it down to an easier argument. Perhaps a simpler way of thinking about it is this: If God is going to create beings that are going to reflect God’s nature in a way that is more than just existing (and importantly we do believe that God is reflected in the mere existence of all of creation), they would need to do so by reflecting God in doing. God is perfectly free, so a being that can made decisions, that can act in some way like God can without being purely at the mercy of external compulsion, will be more like God than one that cannot. Insofar as we believe that humans are created in some special way to reflect God’s nature, then we must be in some way free. However, only God can necessarily choose according to what is true or good without that being compulsion because only in God is such a choice made in line with something that is not external or different. In other words, for us to be created in the image of God, we must be different from God. For us to be created in the image of God, we must be able to choose freely. Because only in God is choosing freely necessarily the same as choosing rightly (and choosing God), if something is both different from God and can choose freely, it must necessarily be able to exercise its free will wrongly and thus choose something other than God.
It is important here to distinguish between “Sin” and “sins” at this point. Sin, with a capital “S,” is the fundamental break with the relationship with God, it is the choosing to ground our being and our action in the world in something that is not God (which, as the second question in the Catechism answers is ourselves, or at least the things of creation, giving them the place that belongs only to God). This is an important distinction because it arrives at the real gravity of the problem humans find themselves that can often be dramatically diminished by looking at “sins,” meaning individual bad actions or thoughts that we may have. To focus on the individual sins, the individual misdeeds, can leave many people who find themselves leading relatively decent lives, feeling as though they really may be able to work their way to God and may feel that all this talk of our help coming from God and God’s grace a bit far-fetched and unnecessary. It can lead to a Christian moralism that exacerbates the gap between “good Christians” and “wicked sinners” who “do bad things.” The real core issue, and what we really need saving from, though, is not simply doing bad things. Christians hold that in the fundamental act of disobedience, in the fundamental act of choosing to be rooted in something other than God, our whole act and being in the world is distorted. Every action, even if they are objectively “moral,” flows from this fundamental constitution broken off from God. There is thus no choice that can be made subsequent to this that does not emerge from the distorted will, and thus nothing we can ourselves do to undistort it. Importantly, this is both why Christians hold that we need God to intervene to save us and this is also what is actually meant by the doctrine of total depravity. Total depravity is not, as it has itself in depraved fashion been wielded, a claim that people are utterly and irredeemably wicked—it means that while humans remain good, that goodness is thoroughly corrupted and thus are incapable to any attempt at self-salvation that doesn’t reinscribe the corruption.
Christianity, at least among the traditions of the Roman Catholic and Protestant world, has gone on further to say that not only is it impossible to save oneself once one is under the power of Sin, but furthermore that all human beings, save Jesus, are under the power of Sin. This is often referred to erroneously as the doctrine of Original Sin. The doctrine of Original Sin is really about how all human beings after Adam (or whoever the first human in our collective genealogy was) bear his guilt for his first or original sin, the first action that a human being engaged in that led to broken relationship with God. The correct way of describing the way in which human beings bear the effects on our will of that first sin is to say that we all are under the power of Original Corruption. St. Augustine, who I introduced in previous entries, first formulated the specific way of thinking of both Original Sin in the tradition. Thinkers from the Eastern Orthodox tradition joined by some from the Anglican tradition such as Jeremy Taylor have rightly pointed out that it seems highly morally dubious to ascribe guilt of one person to someone who did not actually engage in any action or willfully neglect to engage in action for which. These accounts say that it is misguided or even monstrous to say humans can be guilty for the misdeed of their ancestor and instead should only have guilt ascribed to them for their own actions. However, Coleridge further points out that in positing this while still maintaining a genetic understanding of Original Corruption, meaning the belief that humans are born such that they cannot but Sin because of the condition of humanity created by Adam’s first Sin, such thinkers are potentially proposing the equally monstrous solution of saying that everyone will be held guilty for their own sins, but those sins were inevitable and the result of a condition completely outside of their own control.
Coleridge proposes instead that the central and helpful insight of the doctrine of Original Sin is its universality: To follow Paul in Romans, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). In a fundamental constitutive act, one that occurs outside of the normal flow of time and lies behind all of our individual actions and being in the world, every human being actually really has the choice to ground themselves in God or in something else, and we all, to quote Indian Jones and the Last Crusade, “choose poorly.” Why we all choose poorly is ultimately a mystery.
While some may find it unsatisfactory to say something that amounts to “no one will necessarily choose to root themselves in something other than God, and yet we all as humans have and will continue to do so,” but David Kelsey points out that this is not all that different from even attempting to answer why any individual would make such a choice (Eccentric Existence, 1035). Christianity rejects the idea that evil or distortion in the world come from God and it rejects the possibility of purely evil beings that have no origin in God—thus, while creation may have within itself the possibility of such distortion, including the possibility of choosing to root ourselves in something other than God. The Genesis narrative doesn’t offer us much more explanatory power despite one would say. One may say that the temptation of Eve or Adam is what led to their choosing poorly, but that is to just push the question back—something would have had to have misfired or been distorted in the choosing for them to give in to temptation. The origin of Sin, for each individual as much as a universal of human existence, is a mystery and may be, as Kelsey proposes, an absurdity that simply has no possible explanation.
Importantly, the Catechism implicitly affirms this! The second question we are dealing with today appears on the surface to propose a solution to the origin of Sin, attempting to answer the question of “why” we don’t use freedom as we should. However, if we look at the answer with some care, we see that it doesn’t answer this question at all. Insofar as choosing God is the correct use of our freedom, to say that we “rebel against God” is synonymous with saying that we misuse our freedom. The second question under consideration today, while it adds important details about the character of our misuse of freedom and our propensity toward self-centeredness and idolatry, does not actually offer any further insight into the origins of that misuse—as I think is perfectly in line with the tradition of seeing the origins of Sin, both individually and corporately, as divine mysteries or perhaps even unanswerable absurdities.
You can read more about my reading of Coleridge on Sin in my The Evangelical Party and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Return to the Church of England, 99-139. You can read about Coleridge’s own views in both the Opus Maximum and Aids to Reflection. Kierkegaard offers a very helpful analysis of what I’m calling Original Corruption germane to Coleridge’s in The Concept of Anxiety.
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