What does it mean to be free?
- Logan Dunn
- Jun 30
- 7 min read
Galatians 5:1, 13-25
1 For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
13 For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become enslaved to one another. 14 For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 15 If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.
16 Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. 18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. 19 Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, 20 idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, 21 envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
22 By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. 24 And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.
Does freedom look more like having all the doors open? Or more like just having one door to walk through? One of the most stressful moments in my life, I kid you not, was when I decided to paint an apartment, and I went to the store and discovered that there were 10,000 colors to choose from. I was free to choose whatever color I desired, but I didn’t really know what I wanted, or what I should want, so the abundance of options overwhelmed me. I knew I would inevitably make the wrong choice. And I did.
What does it mean to be free? In our age we conceive of freedom primarily in terms of self-expression, as the ability be who we are (or who we want to be) without interference - so one of our dominant cultural narratives is that progress requires resisting and dismantling all those forces and institutions which in the past prevented people from pursuing their own desires. Human history is one long tale of throwing off the powers that oppress us so that we can be true to ourselves.
And, of course, one of the things that stands in the way of such progress is religion generally and the church in particular. For freedom Christ has set us free,” says the church, but to folks today what the church is offering looks more like oppression. And those making that judgment on the church often have not been wrong.
Even so, I am convinced that, if we really are going to be try to be Christians, that one of our most crucial tasks, for both ourselves and for others, is to reimagine what it means to be free. And I realize that this might make me a kind of eccentric, but I’m also convinced that we need to shed our modern understanding of freedom and return to a premodern understanding.
The modern understanding is that our identity, our life’s purpose, arises primarily - even exclusively - from within, that it is our own desires that determine our life’s aim, that your own personal truth, however you come to it, is the only truth that matters. There is no universal other than that each person should be free to pursue their own desires and goals. There is no ultimate good beyond what we decide is the good for us. What matters most is not what you choose but that you chose it.
The premodern conception - which predates Christianity - is that life itself has a telos, a goal, which is not determined by us but which is determined for us, which we do not form ourselves but to which we conform, if we are to flourish. To be truly free means orienting your life, not to whatever you desire, but to what is truly desirable, to the good itself, to God. Pursuing your own desires might create the illusion of freedom, but is really a sort of prison, enslaving you to yourself, making you your own god.
The classic illustration of this older view of freedom is to consider the seed of an oak tree. What would it mean for that seed to be “free”? Freedom looks like finding itself in the place where it can flourish according to its nature. A seed that falls in fertile soil, which has access to water and sunlight, is free to become the tree that is the goal of its existence. The telos of a seed is to become a tree.
But, you might be thinking, it’s much easier to conceptualize the goal of an oak seed than the goal of a human life. A seed has no desire or agency, whereas human desires are infinite. Even if you’re sympathetic with the idea that life has goal, you might be wary of narrowly prescribing what a human life should look like. And you would be right. One way the church has erred over and over again is to specify precisely the form a Christian life ought to take, which more often than not has little to do with Christ and more to do with codifying particular cultural assumptions and prejudices.
When we encounter a passage like this one in Galatians, with its naughty list and blessed list, we tend to assume that the point is to tell us what we should and should not do, and thus who is to be praised and who is to be condemned. And by all means we should not do the bad stuff and we should do the good stuff, but the point of the passage is not so much a moral exhortation but a way of soberly assessing whether or not our lives are oriented where they should be, whether or not we are actually led by the Spirit. Paul’s argument undermines the natural proclivity to locate our righteousness in our obedience to certain rules and expectations, to make faithfulness about conformity to some culturally-conditioned ideal. Rather than taking on an old law, or even a new law, Paul instead teaches us to judge according to the fruit we bear.
A life that produces “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” is a life oriented to its ultimate goal, which is realizing the potential for which it was created. On the other hand, a life which does not produce these fruits, is a misdirected life, whatever else it says or does.
Paul famously wrote about the “sinful flesh”, and there’s no denying that he takes quite a negative view of the human condition, though it seems to me that this Christian anthropology tracks closely with our lived experience. Left to our own devices we tend toward self-destruction not self-actualization. The fundamental problem is that our desires are disordered; we do not seek what brings life. Paul wrote to a church where this old problem, rather than being eliminated, simply took a new form. Despite having ostensibly adopted the Christian faith they were still living according to their sinful desires, using the declaration of freedom in Christ to provide cover for carrying on with business as usual, seeking to bite and devour one another. Though the message of freedom had been proclaimed to them they were still captive as ever.
Rather than pursuing self-indulgence, Paul told them, they should instead, “through love become enslaved to one another.” To our modern ears this statement sounds counterintuitive - or worse - but it flows from the apparent paradox at the heart of Christianity, that we find our lives only when we lose them, that we truly live only when we die, that we are truly free only when we bind ourselves to others. Rather than the good for us being something we come up with on our own, our faith, to our continuing surprise, names Christ as the good toward which our lives should be oriented, Christlikeness as our one true goal. We were made in the image of God, and it is Christ who reveals and restores that image, who shows us what we ought to look like, and it is through him that we find the freedom to realize who were made to be. Jesus is the telos of every human life, of humanity itself.
Still, modern people that we are, we cannot help but assert our freedom by resisting any authority that would presume to tell us who we ought to be. But for Christians in this secular age, the image of the seed that becomes a tree might help reconcile our competing conceptions of freedom. On the one hand, it illustrates that every creature has a nature, and to flourish necessarily means growing growing into its potential as a tree. Likewise, human flourishing requires recognizing that there is a goal for our lives, that our direction is provided not by looking within but orienting ourselves to the good, to God. Jesus told us, and Jesus showed us, that a seed does not bear fruit unless it falls to the ground and dies. This is the very nature of life.
At the same time, while there is an essential resemblance among all healthy trees, it is also the case that each one is unique in its particularity, that there are countless places it might be planted, literally infinite ways its branches might grow, all depending upon the conditions where it finds itself.
To be Christian, always and forever - but perhaps in this time and place especially - is to be one who finds freedom when we can say (as Paul does earlier in Galatians), “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me”, that freedom is found not by following our heart but by following Christ.
But we also must refuse to prescribe what this looks like (which is almost necessarily a form of self-justification) and instead to measure a life in the same way we judge a tree: by the fruit that it bears. “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.”
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