Freedom Without a Floor

A man who can do anything is a man who is master of nothing

Ask a hundred people what freedom is, and most of them will describe an absence. Freedom is when nobody is telling me what to do. It’s the government off my back and the boss out of my inbox on Saturday. “I do what I want, when I want, in the way I want, and you should leave me alone.” I get it. If I have to classify myself politically, I am as libertarian as a Christian can be. But freedom from government and freedom from first principles and immortal standards are two different things. Freedom from anything and everything produces only people who are anxious, lonely, and exhausted, with too many options and no way to discern what’s best.

In 1958, Isaiah Berlin called this negative liberty. It is freedom understood as the absence of interference. He set it against positive liberty, which is the idea that to be free is to be master of yourself, governed by your higher nature instead of your appetites. Berlin preferred the negative kind. Positive liberty, he warned, is the one tyrants abuse when they claim to be freeing you from your own worse self, usually at gunpoint. True enough. As a limit on what the state may do to you, negative liberty is good and necessary. But if all of life is governed by negative liberty, you will knock out enough walls that you eventually remove the floor.

Plato’s Warning

Plato had watched Athenian democracy execute his teacher Socrates, and in the Republic he traced how a city that loves freedom above everything else eventually eats itself. Such a city comes to treat every desire as equal and every restraint as tyranny. Fathers defer to sons. Teachers flatter students. The old copy the young because they’re afraid of sounding harsh. Socrates describes the appetites entering a young man’s soul when he believes negative freedom is the highest good. He explains, “insolence they term breeding, and anarchy liberty, and waste magnificence, and impudence courage.” Once that happens, a man no longer has a way to sort out his own desires. “His life has neither law nor order, and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom.” Plato calls him the democratic man, and the democratic man becomes the tyrant.

The tyrant has abandoned restraints so he can do whatever he pleases, and Plato calls him the least free human being alive. “He has to be master of others when he is not master of himself: he is like a diseased or paralytic man who is compelled to pass his life, not in retirement, but fighting and combating with other men.” Socrates said, “He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real slave, and is obliged to practice the greatest adulation and servility, and to be the flatterer of the vilest of mankind. He has desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor.”

Plato argued the same thing in the Gorgias, through a young aristocrat named Callicles who told Socrates weakness dresses itself up as virtue. A strong man throws off every convention so he can take whatever he wants. “Luxury and intemperance and license, if they be provided with means, are virtue and happiness; all the rest is a mere bauble, agreements contrary to nature, foolish talk of men, nothing worth.” Socrates responds by describing two men, each of whom owns a set of casks. The first man’s casks are sound, so once he has filled them he is finished and can go do something else. The second man’s “vessels are leaky and unsound, and night and day he is compelled to be filling them, and if he pauses for a moment, he is in an agony of pain.” A man organized entirely around appetite has signed up for the second set of casks.

Plato’s subject is one man’s soul. He is describing what happens inside a person once the absence of restraint becomes the whole of what he wants.

License is the real want

In the 1640s, John Milton published tracts arguing for the loosening of England’s divorce law and for printing without a license, and the pamphlet war that came back at him treated him as a man dissolving public morals. His answer, in a sonnet, was that he and his critics were using one word for two different things:

That bawle for freedom in their sencelesse mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
Licence they mean when they cry libertie;
For who loves that, must first be wise and good.

Milton was wrong about divorce, and his later theology drifted well outside Christian orthodoxy. But he understood the difference between liberty and license. In Paradise Lost he explains the mechanism Plato described. In the last book, the angel Michael explains to Adam why men end up under tyrants:

Since thy original lapse, true Libertie
Is lost, which alwayes with right Reason dwells
Twinn’d, and from her hath no dividual being:
Reason in man obscur’d, or not obeyd,
Immediately inordinate desires
And upstart Passions catch the Government
From Reason, and to servitude reduce
Man till then free.

Liberty and reason are twins, and they die together. Let the appetites take reason from inside a man, and he is a slave before any tyrant has come within a hundred miles of him. The political bondage follows, and Milton says it is a judgment. God “Subjects him from without to violent Lords.” A people can lose its outward liberty only after inward liberty was discarded.

Milton also shuts the door on the obvious overcorrection of answering the license with more rules. In Areopagitica he asked what would be left of goodness in a country where every decision had been made for you in advance. “If every action, which is good or evil in man at ripe years, were to be under pittance and prescription and compulsion, what were virtue but a name, what praise could be then due to well-doing, what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent?” He wrote, “When God gave [Adam] reason, He gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing.”

The Answer to License is Not Law

If license is the problem, the great need is not to tighten the rules, rebuild the fences, and teach people to say no. It’s a natural instinct (just ask any parent of a teenager), but it’s a trap. Sinclair Ferguson explains, “Antinomianism and legalism are not so much antithetical to each other as they are both antithetical to grace. This is why Scripture never prescribes one as the antidote for the other. Rather grace, God’s grace in Christ in our union with Christ, is the antidote to both.”

Ferguson’s diagnosis of man is that “everyone is a legalist at heart. Indeed, if anything, that is the more evident in antinomians.” He traces the root all the way back to Eden, where the serpent worked “a divorce between God’s revealed will and his gracious, generous character,” so that “God thus became to her ‘He-whose-favor-has-to-be-earned.’” The libertine and the Pharisee both view God through that same lens. One of them runs from God and the other tries to pay Him. The result is that neither one of them is free, and both of them are alone.

When Paul was writing to churches under pressure to return to the Old Covenant law as a condition of acceptance, he could have told them to add rules for their own protection. Instead, he said, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1). Herman Ridderbos comments, “Christ did not set us free for slavery but for freedom!”

Christian freedom begins as a negative. It is a freedom from. Samuel Bolton describes how a believer is cut loose from the bondage of sin and Satan, the law as a covenant of works, hell itself, and the wrath of God. “This is no imaginary freedom,” Bolton writes; “it is a freedom indeed, a true and real freedom. Whom the son makes free are free indeed.” The way to that freedom is far more significant than clearing obstacles out of your own path. G. W. Hansen explains, “Our freedom is not the result of our decisions or our actions. God acted in history on the cross and through the resurrection to set us free.”

What Freedom is For

If Paul stopped there, he would only have handed us a holier version of Berlin’s conclusion. Paul identifies the believer’s freedom, but he also assigns a responsibility. “For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another” (Gal. 5:13). You were set free for a purpose. The verb Paul uses, translated as “serve one another,” is one used to describe a slave’s labor. The man Christ liberated is told to enslave himself, in love, to his brothers. He has been freed from every master so that he can take up the one kind of service that suits a free man. What Plato wanted, he was unable to produce, but Paul says that man really does exist. Socrates ends the Republic’s long argument by declaring that the happiest man is “the most royal man and king over himself.” Paul says only Christ makes men like that.

This is the positive liberty Berlin was nervous about, the higher self governing the lower. For two centuries the “higher self” has been whatever the state or the party or the age decided you ought to want, and men have been marched toward it in chains. But the Christian answer is that the higher self must look to Christ. A freedom mastered by him is the one kind of self-government no tyrant can imitate. For a tyrant to be successful, he would first have to unseat Christ, and he can’t. Christian freedom has the one thing negative liberty can never supply. It has a floor called God’s law, which for the Christian has stopped being a ladder he climbs toward acceptance. Paul wrote, “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Gal. 5:14). Ferguson points out that the legalist and the antinomian have both identified the wrong culprit. Paul’s whole argument in Romans 7 is that indwelling sin is the real trouble, but the law is “good” and “righteous” and “spiritual” and “holy.” “To abolish the law, then, would be to execute the innocent.” The law says, “do this and live,” but the gospel says, “live, and then you will do this.” The law demands holiness; the gospel produces it.

The 1689 London Baptist Confession says, “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in any thing contrary to his word, or not contained in it.” Then it says what Milton described: “the requiring of an implicit faith, an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience and reason also” (2LBC 21.2). Liberty and reason, side-by-side, standing or falling together. The confession frees the conscience from every human tyrant, the fence-builder, the guilt-peddler, the manipulator with an agenda, but at the same time binds it to God. The conscience is freed from men because it belongs to God.

Devouring One Another

Paul describes a community that defines freedom as uninterrupted appetite. He warns, “But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another” (Gal. 5:15). Life without any restraint at all turns a people into savage beasts. Plato called it anarchy.

In 1954, Russell Kirk was invited to speak at the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, and he declined in a letter writing,

If you will forgive such an answer to your courteous letter, I am afraid I scarcely see eye to eye with you people. On particular issues we are very close; on philosophical postulates, a great gulf is fixed between us. I never call myself an individualist; and I wish that you people hadn’t clutched that dreary ideology to your bosom. Politically, it ends in anarchy; spiritually it is a hideous solitude. I do not even call myself an “individual”; I hope I am a person. I am all in favor of individuality, and all against individualism.

Kirk’s point was that people have unlimited options and almost no obligations. Marriages end because somebody stopped feeling “in love.” A man can live anywhere, stay single or get married, believe whatever he wants, set his schedule, and tour the world, but has no idea why he should get out of bed in the morning. Call it freedom if you’d like, but that doesn’t seem very free. The man who can do “anything” is Callicles with his leaking casks, filling them night and day. He’s Plato’s tyrant, master of a city and slave to whatever appetite is loudest that day. He’s Kirk’s individualist, alone in the world without a meaningful destination. Christ offers a freedom he paid for, built on a foundation of a good and righteous law. If your idea of freedom is that nothing should ever stop you, you’ve stepped into a bottomless pit and didn’t bring a ladder.