My homily from Ash Wednesday has been published at Seedbed and can be found here. This reflection was born out of reading Douglass Campbell’s work on Romans 6. Here’s the key quote:
Freedom is not a matter of sheer choice…but of an incremental creation of new possibilities for bodily action that must be learned and internalized…Freedom is therefore complex, communally mediated, and embodied. Above all, it is learned and hence taught, much as someone is only free to play a violin beautifully after years of practice and instruction (Four Views on the Apostle Paul, 132).
What a remarkable thing to say. Campbell’s description of freedom cuts against the grain of the way we usually think about freedom as the ability to choose one option or the other. It’s not clear to me that such an approach deals adequately with the biblical insistence that we come into the world as slaves to sin and that we are only freed through the gracious act of God in Christ and on the condition of faith in him. Neither does the typical understanding of freedom deal adequately with activities that require the cultivation of a particular skill through extended training and discipline. I am free to play the guitar, but I am not free to play it as well as those who have instructed me over the years. A student who has just learned to form the C chord is not free to play like Robert Johnson. I wonder if this is not one reason that the Christian life and discipline is so difficult for so many of us. Do we recognize that a relationship with the God who formed us in his image cannot be reduced to single moment of choice? Is not our walk with Christ and the freedom that is found in him something that must be practiced? Something in which we must have ongoing training?
I’m interested to hear from you. Does the Campbell quote challenge the way you think about freedom?