Christianity and Positive Liberty

American politics seems to talk about liberty like music talks about love; all the time, and as if it can solve anything.  But what is liberty, really?  Isaiah Berlin, a recent British political philosopher, divided up liberty into two kinds: negative and positive.  The negative sense, which resonates more closely with our common-sense understanding, emphasizes the absence of external obstacles (“freedom from”).  Positive liberty stresses the freedom to realize oneself (“freedom to”).  In America, most of us seem to prefer the former.  I want to argue that in the Kingdom of God, positive liberty dominates.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that we should embrace positive liberty for our government (I will elaborate on why I actually think this policy would be a mistake in a different post).  But God—omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good—destroys any fears or counterarguments we may have about positive liberty.

The first of these fears is that positive liberty seems to condone totalitarian regimes.  Often described as “forced to be free,” positive freedom depends on achieving one’s essence.  As humans, we have first and second order desires (i.e. we can have desires about our desires).  Our second order, or long term, desires can conflict with our first order, or brute, desires.  Positive liberty seeks to help humans reach our essential second order desires.  Intuitively, this may not seem like true freedom to us.  But God knows perfectly what we should truly desire.   In providing us with the freedom to realize ourselves, God gives us exactly what we need.

Another critique of positive liberty is that it seems to promote value monism, the idea that all humans have a singular essence (as opposed to value pluralism, which conjectures that values may vary by the individual).  In God’s creation, though, we do have a singular essence.  As the Westminster Shorter Catechism states, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”  Mankind’s fallen nature stems from an inability to realize this true essence.  Only when we reject God’s positive liberty do we succumb to our foolish desires.  We think that these fulfill us, but they do not.  We can only realize ourselves and achieve freedom when we recognize God’s positive liberty.  When God is the dictator, totalitarianism doesn’t seem so bad.