A Theology of Human Freedom - Stephen Neill
Christian Faith & Other Faiths
Stephen Neill
InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 1984.
(pp. 22-24, 26-27)
…All this should prepare us to recognize that man is extremely important in the Christian scheme of things. It is an exaggeration, but perhaps a helpful exaggeration, to say that Christian doctrine can be reduced to a doctrine of man. But, of course, this means man in dependence on God, and no sense at all can be made of Christian thought unless full attention is paid to both poles of the ellipse.
More perhaps than any other form of religion or philosophy Christian faith takes the human situation seriously. It never doubts for a moment that it is a great and glorious thing to be a human being. Faith can find a place, though not without criticism, for all the wonderful achievements of the human race in society, in culture, in art, even in the somewhat tarnished glories of technical civilization. But at the same time it looks with wide-open and dispassionate
eyes on the squalor, the contradictions, the self-destroying absurdity of human existence. By our ingenuity we have built up a brave new world of our own invention, and now, like a child tired of its toys, we seem to be set on destroying it, and with it the whole race of which we are a part. In vision and aspiration man's head touches the heavens, but his feet still stand firmly in the ooze and slime of primeval chaos. As Pascal saw clearly, we cannot understand man unless
we consider him in both his greatness and his misery. But, having made an exhaustive inventory of the misery, Christian faith still affirms that it is a good thing to be a human being.
This being so, it should come as no surprise that Christianity is the religion of a Man. We shall encounter other religions which have historical founders, but in none of them is the relation between the adherent of that religion and its founder similar to that which the Christian believer supposes to exist between himself and Christ. The old saying 'Christianity is Christ' is almost exactly true. The historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth is the criterion by which every Christian affirmation has to be judged, and in the light of which it stands or falls.
Jesus came to show what human life really is. The characteristic dimension of human existence is freedom. On this narrow sand-bank between existence and non-existence, between coercion and chaos, God has withdrawn his hand so far as to make a space in which we can be really, though not unconditionally, free. In Jesus we see what a free man looks like. We could hardly have guessed in advance that this is what the picture would be.
The first paradox in this freedom is that it means complete acceptance of a situation as it is given without man's own choice, the situation into which man is thrown without his knowledge or consent. Jesus was born a Jew and lived under Roman oppression. At no point does he show resentment against this situation or regard it as a hindrance to the fulfillment of his task. These are the raw materials given him by God; with these materials and no others is he to work out the perfect pattern of human liberty. What is true of him is true also of us all. Within the limits of the given material a great variety of choice is open to us, but there are certain unalterable structures of our life; if we resent these or kick against them, we merely reduce our capacity to make the best of what may in itself be a rather unpromising situation.
The second paradox is that this freedom can be lived out only in a state of total dependence upon God. This element in the life of Jesus is made plain in all the Gospels. At first sight, surprisingly, it is more deeply stressed in the fourth Gospel, the Gospel of the glory of Christ, than in the other three. Again and again in this Gospel Jesus affirms that of himself he can do nothing, that he does only what he sees the Father doing, that he speaks only the words that the Father has given him to speak. He cannot act until his hour has come — and this means always the *kairos, the moment appointed by the Father. To the lusty spirit of independence which is characteristic of our highly independent age, such dependence might seem to resemble slavery rather than freedom. It is not immediately self-evident that the richest freedom is enjoyed in perfect co-operation, as when pianist and violinist each finds his perfect complement in the playing of the other.
In the world as it is, this freedom can be exercised only in suffering. This is true of all who would live the life of freedom. It is perfectly exemplified in the life of Jesus. He did live as a Jew. But he could never identify himself completely with any standards other than those which he himself set; his attitude was one of critical loyalty. This independent attitude was bound to draw down on him, as it will on others who live as he lived, the hostility of those who are committed to the status quo, and who through laziness or self-interest are unwilling to listen to a new and challenging voice. But such hostility can never take away from the free man his inner liberty. When as in the case of Jesus it is carried to the extreme limit, has nailed him to a cross and taken away the last vestige of his outward liberty, he still remains sovereign in his inner freedom; he is master of the situation and not they. Across the ages he has affirmed the paradox of his mastery.
The purpose of this exemplary life of freedom was to restore to all men the possibility of true human life as from the beginning it was intended to be. Life as we know it is full of contradictions, and contradictions lead to frustration and weakness. The life of Jesus is life without inner contradiction, and therefore peerless in its strength…
…Christian theology has at times gone astray by taking as the basis for our understanding of the nature of God other sources — Greek philosophy, natural knowledge — and failing to take as seriously as it should the tremendous assertion of the New Testament that it is in Jesus that we see God. If this assertion is true, then any idea we may previously have had of God must undergo a reconstruction which amounts to rebuilding from the basement to the coping-stone. We need not deny the value of the Old Testament and of all that we can learn from it in order to
recognize that even the Old Testament is a preface that gives only hints and glimpses of the glory that is to follow. For, if we see God in Jesus Christ, what is the principal thing that we learn about him? It is that God is a servant, and that, when he most fully makes himself the servant of all, the glory of his power finds its fullest self-expression.
No other interpretation of the being of God is possible, if we take seriously what has been said about freedom as the indispensable dimension of the true life of man. One who respects the freedom of another in a very real sense makes himself the servant of that other. And God respects the freedom of man. He exercises no coercion. When men reject and repudiate his good purposes, apparently he allows himself to be frustrated; he gives himself, as it were, helpless into their hands, just as Jesus suffered himself to be helpless in the hands of those who could do him the utmost wrong. How else can we explain the age-long history of wrong and sorrow on the earth?
For it is a mistake to imagine that this aspect of the being of God dates only from the coming of Jesus into the world. It is true that the Son of God took upon himself the form of a servant. It is true that, though he was rich, for our sakes he became poor. But this could come about only because what was seen in Jesus was there in God from the beginning. The greatest act of God's self-emptying was the creation of a universe on which he would confer existence in a measure independent of himself. God was, and nothing else was. He was unrelated to anything except himself. And then of his own free will he chose to be related to a world existing in space and time. He exchanged his liberty for the servitude of being bound to the created world that he had brought into being. Having made the world he would not forsake it; he had committed himself to the world, to the world including its sorrow and its sin.
All too often the coming of God into the world in Jesus Christ is spoken of almost as though it were a kind of trick, a desperate remedy adopted to put right an almost desperate situation. This travesty of theology can be avoided if we take seriously the revelation that Jesus has given of the Father. The incarnation was inevitable because God is what he is. Love leads to redemptive action. Love entered into time and redeemed time. Love entered into the human race as one of us, and by doing so made all things new.
Jesus Christ is a figure of history. In him is seen the action of God at a particular point of space and in a particular epoch of time. But the writers of the New Testament were right in seeing that this action in history cannot be understood, unless we look both before and after it.
'The same was in the beginning with God.' The doctrine of the pre-existence of Christ is not a theological puzzle intended to make faith difficult: it is our assurance that the mercy which was manifest in Jesus was there from the beginning. What we touch in him is the unchanging love of God our servant.