Faith Venture

I have a paper laying dormant that would have been a Master’s thesis on freedom. I think of it at times. It’s why I like the Letter to the Galatians above all of Paul’s writing. It’s about freedom.

Some people (many?) think freedom means to be without restraint. That may be a definition, but it’s not an attitude that will take you very far in life.

Ryan Holliday has carved a career as the premier writer on Stoicism today. These thoughts came from his newsletter, The Daily Stoic.

In Rome at the time, many people believed that only free people were capable of being educated. But the indisputable truth that Epictetus saw every day in the moral disorder and dysfunction of Nero’s court, where his master served as a high-profile secretary, was that it was in fact the opposite. Only the educated, he said, were free. 

This is something Seneca points out about that same period in Rome—how profoundly unfree many of the richest and most powerful people are. This is true twenty odd centuries later too: Most people are enslaved and controlled and directed by their ignorance. Their impulses. Their temper. Their desires and delusions.

People think they are free when in reality they are slaves to something not of their choosing—power, money, stuff, alcohol, sex, all of the above.

Epictetus’s definition of education would be different from ours. The point remains. Being educated in philosophy, theology, literature, psychology can inculcate an understanding and sympathy to live a life of freedom within our constraints. Like what Paul was trying to express.

We were members of a congregation affiliated with the American Baptist Churches, USA, for about a dozen years. One of the classes I taught focused on Roger Williams, the 17^th Century Baptist preacher who was so upset with the Puritans in Massachusetts combining their church and the government, that he founded a new colony (now state) Rhode Island. He wanted a place for religious liberty.

The founders of the USA were likewise suspicious of state-sanctioned churches. The English government levied taxes on everyone to support the Church of England. The founders didn’t like their tax dollars going there. Religious liberty with no state-sanctioned church was baked into the Constitution.

But back to religious liberty and Roger Williams. That man had a lot of courage. And he determined a direction.

I studied the political concept of liberty (freedom) in graduate school. As my focus turned increasingly spiritual, I appreciated Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. It’s all about how we, you and I, can be free. 

When we live in the spirit, we are free. Not of all constraints, of course. That’s nonsense. But free to live with the fruit of the spirit: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,  gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23)

Let us not take our eye off the goal. Don’t go down rabbit holes. Follow Jesus, live in the Spirit, enjoy the fruit.