We live in what Charles Taylor calls a ‘culture of Authenticity,’ one where the primary values are autonomy, individuality, authenticity, and freedom. Which, since some churches talk about freedom a lot, can be confusing, because I’m not sure we mean the same thing. The freedom our churches talk about is the kind where you get to choose the good, the freedom our culture talks about is the kind where you to choose what the good is.
I wonder if you remember the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ novels that were popular in the 80s? They were a sort of RPG you could play on your own, you would read a page of text and be given a choice, with each choice saying ‘turn to page XX,’ at which point you’d do so and find out the consequences of your choices.
Like every good RPG, ‘rock falls, everybody dies,’ was a valid option. The problem (or perhaps the fun) with choose your own adventure novels was that you kept backtracking to the path that meant you didn’t get covered in rocks.
We live in a choose your own identity culture—for long enough now that it seems cliched to point it out, how else would identity even work?—and it works similarly to the novels, except that we play for keeps. You can’t see the outcomes of your choices beforehand, and you can’t backtrack if the room behind the locked door is filled with goblins armed to the teeth. Deep down we would still rather find a path to the end than find one filled with spikes, but we don’t know which is the right route and we aren’t that interested in guides.
The Christian faith declares this kind of ‘freedom’ to be bondage. It’s slavery to our selves (what the New Testament calls the ‘flesh’), freedom is only found in making your master the Lord God Almighty. Why is that the case? Because that’s the correct moral ordering of the Universe—we were made for rule, but rule under God. We don’t decide on moral order. We are supposed to learn to judge and rule (1 Corinthians 6) and being fitted for these functions it feels natural to us to make choices about what order itself is. It’s mighty presumptuous, but we manage it anyway.
In sum, we talk a good game about freedom, but we don’t experience it. Freedom comes from embracing reality, includes its limits. Freedom comes in filling our natural roles—including those that institutions like the family, the church, and many more give to us. When these are disordered it causes pain, and it’s supposed to; even though we sometimes can’t fix the disordering we do need to acknowledge that it’s disordered.
We are supposed to be constrained, we are supposed to be moulded, we are supposed to conform. These seem like dirty words in our culture—but we need the ideas. We’re broken people who need fixing, we don’t know what the good is until it’s revealed to us in the scriptures—for all I want to acknowledge that vestiges of this exist in both the natural world and our cultures, and can be found without the scriptures, it’s never complete. Even then, we need to mature (1 Corinthians 14, Ephesians 4), which takes a lifetime, so we always need older and wiser saints to direct us towards the good, the true, and the beautiful.
It’s true that plenty of churches and Christians down the ages have attempted to conform people to a distorted image of Christ. That doesn’t invalidate the call for us all to be conformed. The solution isn’t a twenty first century idea of freedom that sounds suspiciously like what the snake says to Eve in the Garden (Genesis 3). Without wanting to reduce the gravity of some of the worse abuses of power that happen in churches, there is no church that perfectly conforms its people to Christ. The sin of even the best leaders gets in the way—which might sound fatalistic or depressing but I find strangely freeing. Do the best you can, build systems that mean you’re constantly corrected by others, and repent frequently and joyfully.
The bottom line is that sometimes we do have to do what we’re told.
Except for me, of course. Because that’s how this works, it’s insidious. I’m happy to talk and preach that you need to conform to the Church as she teaches us to conform to Christ—but I don’t want to. I’m a product of this strange and twisted culture. I naturally bridle at attempts to get me to fit a mould, because of course I’m the exception.
We have to actively fight these tendencies. I’m not the exception, neither are you. We should cultivate practices, cultures, and churches that make it easier to be moulded towards Christ. We need to find freedom from freedom.
If you’re a regular reader you’ll have noticed that the majority of problems I approach have the same solution: get around the table and eat together. This is no exception. Tables level, but they also mould. We learn manners and behaviour—I’ll admit that there are people that don’t, but in a new setting it’s natural to watch how others conduct themselves and then copy them to some extent. This is most obvious when we eat with people from other cultures, but it happens at every meal. Not only are we conformed to the host, but we’re grown into each other as we break bread, share wine, and laugh over bowls of pasta bake.
Perhaps it seems naïve, or even a bit facile, that I keep turning to something so simple as the solution. I’ll keep repeating myself with my central thought: if God has met us at a Table, why would any table ever be the same afterwards? If the world is remade at the communion table then the world is, to some extent, remade at every table. The sharing of food is the sharing of life—the sharing of food with God is the sharing of God’s life—and it fundamentally changes us.
Where do we find freedom from freedom? At the Table.
Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash
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