True freedom
Yes, life in the Spirit is freedom itself, true freedom! No longer are we slaves to our selfish, sinful desires—it’s a beautiful thing, and the sense of liberation is palpable, exhilarating. But before we get too carried away, there’s a real sense also of coming into a new mode of obedience, submission, even slavery—one that this time, however, in our newfound freedom, we freely choose.
Why am I suddenly using the dreaded S-word, which carries so many alarm-bell connotations? Well, I’m riffing off the famous apostle Paul, who we heard from in the last chapter, from the very same document in fact:
“Do you not know that, if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you who were slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted and that you, having been set free from sin, have become enslaved to righteousness. …. For, just as you once presented [yourselves] as slaves to impurity and lawlessness, leading to even more lawlessness, so now present [yourselves] as slaves to righteousness, leading to sanctification.” [Romans 6:16-19]
All this slavery talk comes naturally to Paul, the dread institution being endemic in the Roman world of his day, so it works as a powerful metaphor for his audience. And for “sanctification” read “Metanoia”: sanctification—becoming more holy, sacred—being the closest thing to Metanoia in Paul’s thinking.
“You gotta serve somebody”, was Bob Dylan’s reflection, possibly on this very passage, in his 1979 song:
“Well, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”
The Devil, our sinful selves, or God, righteousness are the two choices we have of who and what to serve—according to Paul and Bob. The freedom that comes, as we undergo Metanoia, is, in other words, not licence to do exactly what we want when we want—that would just be a return to our original slavery. Rather it is quite the opposite: we are free now to choose humble obedience to selfless service of others, to become “slaves of righteousness”, as Paul puts it—which includes, by the way, serving and taking care of ourselves selflessly, focussing on our genuine needs and wellbeing, rather than just our transient desires.
To understand this radical notion of freedom in the deepest possible way, let’s go right back to the beginning. In Chapter 1, you’ll remember that I speculated about an amazing scenario: the capital G divine parent God giving birth to the universe in the so-called Big Bang at a zero-point in time about 13.8 billion years ago; endowing it, right from the start, with real life and freedom of its own. Freedom—that is, free agency—seems, in fact, to be an intrinsic quality of our universe, of everything in it and everything it becomes. Fast forward about 10 billion years, and this free agency begins to play itself out in a new way, in the emergence of living organisms, which grow, multiply and evolve, until one day, not all that long ago in evolutionary time, a strange little creature called homo sapiens starts to assert itself.
Free agency: genuine freedom, but not yet what you’d call free will. Ah, now we’re connecting back to the end of Chapter 4. Free agency is something we humans possess in common with all living things. In the early days of organic evolution this living agency is nothing more (nor less) than a pure, blind impulse to survive, just as Darwin’s theory describes it. It acts impulsively, purely off its own bat, but everywhere it is constrained and conditioned by hostile environments; which, however, it gradually, through sheer persistence and with the unstinting aid of natural selection, finds ways of adapting to and even exploiting for its survival; thereby surviving long enough, hopefully, to reproduce, effectively sacrificing itself in the process in order to live to fight another day through its offspring. Amazing life!
Through this relentless evolutionary process, life, against all odds, gradually acquires more freedom: individual organisms live longer, reproduce and multiply, have more control over their environments. But still it is just free agency, a blind impulse to survive, purely self-focussed—still, in the language we were using above, slave to its own inner impulsion, even as it gradually masters its environment. Over several billion years, individual organisms and whole species come and go with monotonous regularity, but in spite of the blind undirectedness of it all, a definite ascent occurs, organisms of increasing complexity and sophistication emerge. Finally, along comes a particular type of primate ape, an upright hominid, which evolves over about 6 million years into the strange creature we referred to above: us! Uniquely, for the first time, at long last, it seems we have an organism that is capable of not just free agency, but of—wait for it—free will.
Yes, we humans are indeed the first organism capable of true freedom, of free will as well as free agency. Why? Because we are the first to develop a capacity for full self-consciousness, for being conscious of ourselves as selves, and other selves as selves. We have a self-concept—a “theory of mind”, as philosophers put it—which means that we have the ability to get outside of ourselves and be self-reflective. Certainly, there are other animals, such as some (other) apes, dogs, dolphins, elephants and some birds, that exhibit partial, limited self-conscious behaviour, but we human animals really take it to the next level. We can, in a way no other animal appears to be able to, ask ourselves the $64000 question: is my current, natural-born, self-focussed behaviour, which I am effectively slave to, actually the best thing for me to be acting out, right here in this present situation, in consideration of the genuine welfare both of myself and the others around me? And then, wonder of wonders, we may in fact choose to go against our nature and modify our behaviour accordingly, thereby setting out on the Metanoia road to becoming a better, more selfless person. Ah, free will at last: intentionally going against our natural free agency when we see it is taking us in the wrong direction, reorienting it instead to the real good of ourselves and others—freely choosing to become, as Paul describes it, slaves to righteousness.
We may choose to go against our nature—but it’s the last thing we’re naturally likely to do, as I’ve said repeatedly! Mostly we have done the very opposite: just barrelled along unreflectively with our natural free agency, turbo-charged by our unique self-consciousness, to become, by the 21st century, unrivalled rulers of planet earth, which we’re now in danger of wrecking irreversibly. Self-consciousness has enabled us to develop all the wonders of human culture—language, art, religion, science, technology, civilisation—but it has also helped us become masters of murder, warfare, environmental destruction and self-harm on an industrial scale.
We’ve already discussed this terrifying dilemma which faces us, of course, and we know what it takes for us to make the choice to turn our lives around: outside intervention by the Spirit, infusing us with grace, giving us the courage and faith we need to do just that—go against the normal flow of our natural self-focussed free agency, intentionally re-orienting it to the service of others and the world. This, indeed, is the fundamental, the first act, of human free will, of true freedom: set free finally from hopeless slavery to self, we set ourselves on the road to becoming, as the great Paul puts it, slaves to righteousness instead. Happy days!
Commentary 6
“… For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and lawlessness, leading to even more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, leading to sanctification.” [Verses 16-19]
The key verses of Chapter 6 of Paul’s letter, his account of how living by faith can transform us from slaves of sin into slaves of righteousness. It’s a wonderful insight, even if his use of the word “members” now seems obscure—he’s referring to our physical body parts, like eyes, ears, hands, feet and tongue, through which we act on the world. Chapter 6 is distinctive also as the only place in the letter to the Romans that Paul uses the word “sanctification”—“hagiasmos” in the original Greek. The meaning is self-explanatory—“hagiasmos”, from “hagios”, “holy”, “sacred” or “saint”; so, in English, “being made holy” or “sacred”, “acquiring holiness”, “becoming a saint”; therefore, “sanctification”, or alternatively, “consecration”. The problem is, however, that in the modern scientific world the old religious conceptions of the “holy” or “sacred” Paul is drawing on here no longer have currency.
I prefer the word Jesus used—“metanoia”—anyway, as you’ve probably noticed. Once again, it is remarkable how Paul fails to draw directly on something Jesus would surely have been well-known to have taught about[1]. Instead, Paul is intent, as he is throughout this letter and indeed all his writings, on interpreting Jesus through the lens of the Old Testament Judaism he has been schooled in. In this, and many other religious traditions, sanctification or consecration is a process of setting apart or reserving an ordinary, “profane” object, for example a bowl or other sort of vessel, for use in sacred ritual. People can also be sanctified or consecrated, so that an ordinary person can become, for example, a priest, a process that is now mirrored in many Christian traditions, in the consecration of priests, ministers, pastors, deacons and so on.
Made holy, set apart for divine use: Paul has in mind a generalization of this, sanctification becoming now a process every believer can undergo—“the priesthood of all believers”, as the doctrine has come to be known in Christian theology. Formerly, so the line of thinking goes, the priesthood was an exclusive caste within the believing community; now, through Jesus, it becomes inclusive, potentially, of the whole community. It sounds wonderful, but, yes, Paul persists in couching it in terms of old religious ideas, rather than following Jesus’ lead in focussing on our actual behaviour right here and now: repenting, allowing God, through the Spirit, to turn our lives around, being changed, transformed, setting out on the road to becoming a better, more selfless person—none of which sounds remotely like the establishment of a new consecrated priesthood, no matter how inclusive it might be.
The context does effectively have in it all the real, tangible, rubber-hitting-the-road stuff Jesus talks about, of course, and it is certainly critical to ascribe the primary action in getting it all going to the Spirit; but the connection to the old religious way of thinking now seems entirely artificial, and serves only to obscure and mystify the real process, effectively putting it back in the hands of the religious establishment Jesus spent most of his career trying to wrest it from. Thus, in the new religious tradition that Paul, not so much Jesus, effectively founded, the Christian church, the process of sanctification remains still under the control of religious authority, through, for example, as we noted in Chapter 3, its formalization of so-called sacraments, the primary means through which believers can gain access to grace—baptism and communion being the two of up to seven that are administered by virtually all Christian denominations.
So much for the radical inclusivity Jesus always seems to be calling for! The constant splintering of Christian groupings since the time of Jesus, and especially since the Reformation, has just been one attempt after another to break free of the stranglehold of religious authority over believers’ spiritual development. New emergent groups, if they manage to escape extermination by the established groups they attempt to break away from, typically experience a short, honeymoon period of freedom and growth, before either imploding under the weight of their own excesses, or establishing a new authoritarianism, often even more tyrannical than the first, and invariably still based fairly and squarely on Paul’s original theology, including his notion of sanctification.
When we focus, however, on Jesus’ notion of Metanoia—repentance, conversion, turning your life 180° around—rather than the old religious notion of sanctification, a definite demystification occurs, and we get something that transcends religion, culture, time and place—something that is, potentially, truly universal and inclusive—not a new exclusive priesthood, even if expanded, but a mighty Metanoia Kingdom coming. And that, of course, is the intent of this present letter: to find a way of getting our focus back beyond Paul to Jesus’ core teachings, and in so doing allowing Jesus to, dare I say it, at long last, speak for himself.
