On Christian Freedom and American Freedom

My latest Plough piece

I was thrilled to get the chance to write once again for Plough for their Autumn 2024 issue, on a question near and dear to my heart: how to think rightly about Christian freedom in a cultural and political environment saturated by American conceptions of freedom.

You can read the piece here. In it, I draw heavily upon Luther’s 1520 The Freedom of a Christian, which has become crucial to my understanding of the Christian life over the past few years. I argue for a sharp distinction between the freedom in the world that American freedom promises (both in its genuinely salutary and less healthy forms) and the freedom we are given before God in Christ.

Here is the meat of the argument:

What does all this have to do with the danger of confusing Christian and American freedom? Luther’s argument bears upon this problem in two ways.

First of all, Luther shows that freedom in Christ and freedom in the world are very different things. Freedom before God is about Christ’s gift of salvation, which liberates us from seeking it through our own efforts and makes us children of God and heirs of eternal life. This freedom, Luther holds, is far more important than any merely earthly liberty.

This need not mean, of course, that God does not care or that we should not care about earthly conditions of oppression. (Luther is rightly criticized for saying things like this in some of his more intemperate comments.) But addressing such conditions becomes a matter of the Christian life of service coram mundo, not of Christian freedom proper. That is, Christians can and should respond to the free gift of salvation God has given us by striving for a just and free social order for our neighbors to enjoy. Arguably, the undeserved grace that is the foundation of our freedom coram Deo should have implications for how we order our common life. Luther himself, after all, calls us to emulate Christ in loving and doing good for our neighbors regardless of how much they deserve it. But such a social order is not the precondition of Christian freedom, which is available to all regardless of political conditions. The earthly progress for which proponents of the Social Gospel strove might well be a good thing, but Luther insists that it is not the kingdom of God. Christian freedom and American freedom (or, for that matter, what one thinks American freedom should be) must be kept precisely and carefully distinct.

Secondly, Luther shows that the most important kind of freedom is found not in untrammeled self-expression, but rather in a sort of self-forgetfulness in God and our neighbor. True freedom for the Christian isn’t about making our own will or desires the measure of our reality; it isn’t really about exercising agency at all. Rather, it is about embracing the truth that our standing before God rests not on who we are but who God is, and what God has done for us in Christ. And then it is about responding to that glorious good news with gratitude, embracing our freedom from earning salvation by living for our neighbors with Christlike love and service.

In this light, American-style individualism is revealed as not freedom but in fact a perverse form of unfreedom, a bondage of the self to itself, to its own fleeting whims and desires. To “define” my “own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” is not something that interests me very much. I would much rather embrace both my creation and my salvation as a gift given from God, and (by God’s grace) to respond to these great gifts by loving those whom God has placed around me.

It is meet and right to thank God for the blessings of worldly freedom many of us enjoy in the world, and to serve our neighbors by seeking to extend these blessings where they are not enjoyed. But as Luther shows, this is not the same as Christian freedom at all – and of the two, the Christian freedom that makes us both lords and servants, setting us free before God so that we can serve our neighbor, is by far the better. Let us pray that God pour out this gift all the more!

This is unmistakably a sort of Zwei-Regimente-Lehre, a ‘two kingdoms’ theology. It is somewhat to my surprise that I have found myself embracing it, because in my late teens I was rather keen to reject any talk of the two kingdoms as representing a surrender of the church’s duty to seek justice in the world. But I have found myself convinced by it all the same.

First of all, I think it necessarily follows from the doctrine of justification by faith. That is, I’m not sure you can make sense of Protestant (and, I would argue, biblical!) soteriology without a distinction between our immediate relation to God in which we are justified by faith alone and our life in the world in which, in response to that free gift of justification, we love and serve our neighbor by the power of the Spirit. Action in the world involves human agency (in cooperation, one hopes, with divine agency); if salvation is wholly a matter of divine agency — as I, with the Reformers, confess — there must be a distinction between the two.

And I have also seen the bitter fruits of confusing freedom in the world (however construed) and freedom in Christ, the dangers of — as the Barmen Declaration puts it — “the church in human arrogance…plac[ing] the Word and Work of the Lord at the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.” This is perhaps most publicly and obviously so on parts of the Christian right, where a close identification between the defense of American values (as embodied by Donald Trump) and God’s work in the world has led people into conspiratorial madness or where (as I have written) certain Christian nationalists want a crossless Christianity of worldly power and success.

But if anything, the collapse of the difference between the saving work of God and human projects of freedom and liberation is even starker in certain parts of the mainline world. To be sure, it is much less politically significant simply because of the mainline’s lack of numbers and power, and it is a political vision that I generally find more congenial than that of shofar-blowing Trumpists. But there’s a reason that I included quotes from some of the early twentieth century Social Gospellers in my Plough piece; they really did identify God’s Kingdom with the spread of education, capitalism, and the American way! And I have heard far too many sermons that suggest that Jesus was incarnate, died, and rose to support our efforts to establish midcentury European social democracy. This says, it seems to me, both far too too much and far too little: it simultaneously tragicomically reduces the cosmic scope of salvation that Christ won to a matter of public policy optimization while also putting the onus of achieving that salvation on our efforts. As I’ve written before for Earth & Altar, it was precisely my experience of working in the trenches of the labor movement that helped me see the danger of this collapsing of Christian notions of freedom and broadly left-wing American notions of freedom. I needed salvation from outside myself, salvation that righted wrongs that even winning a union at my workplace (good as that may be!) was powerless to achieve.

The point is not that the church or Scripture or Christianity has nothing to say about how we order our political life. But it is to say that we must resist the impulse to reduce the promise of Christianity to the American vision of liberty as total self-determination, world without end. It is to say that the liberty Christ freely gives us must always be distinguished from our response to it, including the response of seeking liberty for our neighbor. Even our worthiest political projects simply are not the Gospel, but at best are our faltering and imperfect attempts to love our neighbor in response to the love we have freely received.

I want to close with a passage from Karl Barth’s first edition of the Römerbrief which makes the point about the separation between human political projects and the Kingdom of God with remarkable rhetorical force. With the early Barth’s characteristic dialectical bravado, he sharply differentiates between one’s life as a citizen and one’s life before God. To be honest, he might put it a bit more starkly than I would want to. But it is a bracing tonic for a church addicted to confusing the freedom God gives us in Christ coram deo and our life coram mundo — as much for the liberal Swiss Reformed of the late 1910s as for our church today:

Fulfil your duties without illusion, but no compromising of God! Payment of tax, but no incense to Caesar! Citizens initiative and obedience but no combination of throne and altar, no Christian Patriotism, no democratic crusading. Strike and general strike, and streetfighting if needs be, but no religious justification and glorification of it! Military service as soldier or officer if needs be but under no circumstances army chaplain! Socialdemocratic but not religious socialist! The betrayal of the gospel is not part of your political duty.