We Need to Preach Freedom

At the foundation of Christianity is a simple but revolutionary idea: humans should be free to choose who they are and whose they are. And they can be free because Christ sets us free. From the baptisms of John the Baptist to Jesus’ call to faith the assumption is that there is more to being human than one’s birthright identity. The conscious encounter with the living Christ, in whatever form it takes, becomes the occasion on which the pre-conscious working of the Spirit of Christ that makes us aware of our bondage to sin and death leads us to freely choose our selves, our God, and our destiny. 

So of course non-Jews could join Jesus’ movement. It wasn’t based on parentage or ethnicity but choice. 

It is this possibility of freedom to choose, long suppressed by the institutional churches of Christendom, that Martin Luther and the reformers re-discovered in its religious form. It is no accident that this understanding of human freedom would compliment the work of the early Enlightenment thinkers concerned about establishing political freedom long suppressed by the system of hereditary kingship. 

Reformers both religious and political would rightly conclude that only when thought is set free from all forms of dogma can people freely choose their personal and collective destinies. When religious or political identity and loyalty is an unquestioned given there is no true freedom. 

It is also this possibility of freedom that allowed and animated the great evangelical revivals, not least the Wesleyan revival. The fundamental message is that because you are free to choose you should choose Christ who has set you free. And it was, was a potent combination of freedom of thought and freedom of conscience that created the culture of freedom still working itself out (however falteringly) in the United States and the world. 

That potent combination is now desperately endangered, and with it both our faith and our political freedom. Christians are choosing to be enslaved by adopting partisan religious and political identities. Polls and studies show that our fellow Christians, our congregation members if we are pastors, so strongly identify with either the Republican or the Democratic Party that there is nothing that would persuade them to vote for a candidate of the other party. And in the same way they identify so strongly with either Evangelical or Progressive theology that there are no arguments that would persuade them to change their stance on on the key issues identified with these religious parties. 

And in any case Christians are studiously avoiding gathering information for themselves, reasoning for themselves, and then making choices for themselves. What the apostles and martyrs of the early church died for, what the reformers fought and died for, and what the founders of our modern democracies fought and died for modern American Christians are thoughtlessly abandoning, quite frequently with the complicit approval of their religious and political leaders. 

So what do we need to preach? “For freedom you have been set free.” We need to announce to our congregations the good news that they are not bound to a political ideology or a religious ideology. 

• We need to preach the good news that they are free to evaluate the teaching of scripture and the preaching in the church and reject it if their intellect and conscience tells them they should. 
• We need to announce to our congregations the good news that they can seek information from a many sources, evaluate it with their minds and hearts and make up their own mind about which policies and politicians best serve the God whom they serve. 
• We need to preach the good news that they can walk out of our sanctuaries and turn off the cable news shows if they hear the faintest hint of dogmatic demands for allegiance to anything other than God and their own freedom in Christ.

If a thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand Christians walked out of our churches because they had rationally considered our doctrine and polity and decided it wasn’t in accordance with their understanding of the gospel and the nature of reality it would be a greater testament to preaching of that same gospel than if we baptized a hundred thousand unknowing children of long time members.

As it stands the loyalty of our members to our American churches, our American denominations, and our American political parties, and yes to our American Jesus is worthless if it hasn’t been freely chosen. Which makes it at this point in our history worthless indeed. So we who preach should preach that before there is faith, there must be freedom, and without freedom there is no faith.