Freedom in Five Minutes

-
For many years I struggled to understand what we Christians mean by freedom. We talk about how Jesus sets you free, that faith brings freedom and yet we also talk about obedience to God’s law, or submission to his will which doesn’t sound much like freedom. At the same time I was aware of how much our culture values freedom, yet its ideas of personal freedom often clash with a longing for our societies to be a bit more cohesive and integrated, which would presumably require a certain limiting of personal freedom.

I suspected I wasn't alone in thinking about all this, and so a few years ago decided to think more deeply about the theme. What I discovered was that the Christian idea of freedom is so much richer, positive, and constructive than secular ideas of freedom, even though they sound superficially more attractive and liberating. The result was a book - Bound to be Free: The Paradox of Freedom, which was published by Bloomsbury last year.

A little while ago I gave a summary of the book in lecture form at a conference. Someone came up to me afterwards and said it would be a great idea to summarise the main ideas in a very short video as a bit of a taster for the full document. So that’s exactly what I’ve done. You’ll find the video here. It lasts only around five minutes, and hopefully gives you an idea of the basics of the argument and why Christian ideas of freedom work so much better than secular ones. Hope you enjoy it. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Wounded Realist - Guest Blog by Denis Adide

-
Image
In recent days we have become aware of the pervasive presence of racism in our own hearts, our church and society. I asked Denis Adide, one of the younger clergy in the Kensington Area to offer a Guest Blog piece reflecting on his experience.  Perhaps it was the collective awareness of our mortality brought about by the global pandemic. The world was made sensitive to the simplicity of life ’ s light and how easy it is to extinguish. The numbers of those lost to Covid-19 being read out in the daily briefings starkly reminding us all of just how vulnerable we each are.  Perhaps, in addition, the stripping away of all the normal distractions gave some of us - for the first time - a long sight of the mirror. We were forced to confront who we were - apart from the normal  ‘ what we do for a living ’  answer.  Perhaps, the recently developed culture/habit of long, YouTube and TikTok spirals with videos linked to videos meant that the sight of something  ‘ viral ’  was inevitable. 
Read more
-
Image
A Sermon in a service of Commemoration for Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for Richmond Borough Council, at St Mary's Twickenham We gather here today at the end of an extraordinary week. So many words have been said, so many pictures taken, so many comments posted, so many hours spent queuing and waiting for a glimpse of the coffin.  Our reading this evening from the epistle to the Hebrews gives us this advice; “Remember your leaders... Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.” I want to take that advice this evening and offer a few brief reflections on the life of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth, to discern what we learned from her example as we seek to consider the “outcome of her way of life and imitate her faith.” The first thing we might usefully learn from her is her understanding of leadership as service. She held the highest office in the land and yet she understood that calling not primarily to privilege, to wealth, or power over others, but
Read more

The Stark Choice that COVID sets before us

-
Image
In the old days they would have seen this as a judgment. With a global death toll that has now passed 1 million, this plague would have been interpreted by our forebears as divine punishment or a sign of the end times. Not many people are seeing it that way these days, but maybe our elders had a point. The Greek word for judgment is Krisis – crisis. The great book of judgment in the Bible is called the Apocalypse – the book of Revelation. Judgment was not only seen as punishment, but more as a moment of crisis, a revelation of where we are heading, impressing the stakes of a crucial decision upon us. At the start of lockdown, in towns, villages and cities across the country, people of all faiths and none volunteered time and money, neighbours knocked on the door of elderly people to offer to do their shopping, family members arranged Zoom calls to keep up the spirits of isolated relatives. One of the churches in my patch began to think about how to respond to the needs that were quickl
Read more