This week, in honor of John Calvin's 500th birthday, I am blogging a week-long series for Zondervan at their biblical studies blog, Koinonia. You can go to the blog's homepage here or each of the individual blogs here, here and here.



For those unfamiliar with John Calvin, he lived during the 16th century and was one of the key reformers of the church. He is also considered one of the greatest theologians in the history of the church. He lived much of his life in Switzerland, was French by birth, and was a pastor by trade. His theological emphasis was the majesty and glory of God.

Today is July 4th in the US—Independence Day, a day Americans celebrate and remember our freedoms, most specifically the freedoms we gained from the British during our War of Independence. I’ve been watching the so-far most excellent John Adams mini-series this week, and it’s a great reminder that when we use the words freedom and independence in America, that those words are not abstract ideals; they are ideals rooted in a specific time and place. All things considered, this fact is something the Founding Fathers of the US probably understood very well.

In the same way, our society talks today a great deal about freedom but freedom in and of itself is not a neutral, abstract ideal that modern secular culture often makes it out to be. Today, many people see freedom as more of a license for any person to do almost anything that person sees fit to do, an idea that would have been foreign to all of the Founding Fathers (whether Christian, Deist or other), and very foreign to the Bible.

The Bible complicates terribly our modern understanding of freedom. The Merriam-Webster English dictionary defines freedom first as “the absence of constraint in action” (the modern idea), but then second as the “liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another” (the classical idea—and far closer to the biblical sense). In its best and most classic sense, freedom is not the absence of oppression or tyranny; freedom is the removal of a tyrannical power over our lives generally by or for a different power/ideal. Let me say it another way: There is no such thing in our world as freedom without allegiance to someone or something. When citizens living in an oppressive society flee that nation, they always must flee to another nation. While that other nation may have ‘freedom,’ that ‘freedom’ comes at the cost of allegiance to that new, more ‘free’ nation. Freedom in our world is always liberation and not a complete absence of all constraints.



In the same way, the Bible tells us that all people live under the oppression and tyranny of sin. When we move away from sin in our lives, we have freedom. This freedom is not an abstract place of goodness (or non-sin), but is a liberation and allegiance to God. Without this allegiance to God, we are fooling ourselves to think we are in any way free from our corrupt, self-centered nature. In a biblical sense, freedom is a gift from God to live without oppression but only within God’s sphere of influence.

While there are people in our world who deny God, and his role in our world, it is just that—a denial. Without God, there can be no real freedom, because without God we are oppressed by our own humanity. We cannot become neutral ideals of freedom; either we are in allegiance with ourselves or in allegiance with God. The Bible says we are slaves either way—but a slave to sin only endures slavery, whereas a slave to God is freed, liberated, redeemed by Jesus’ great sacrifice.

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“But whenever someone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. For the Lord is the Spirit, and wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” 2 Corinthians 3:16–17