The Christian Century reviews Glenn Tinder’s recent book on liberty. I haven’t read the book, but I’m a big fan of Tinder’s earlier work, The Political Meaning of Christianity, which has been aptly characterized as combining the insights of both Niebuhrs: H. Richard and Reinhold.

From the review:

What makes Tinder’s discussion so refreshing and timely is not merely his resistance to simplistic answers, but his willingness to explore these supremely philosophical issues from an explicitly Christian point of view. Tinder believes that arguments about liberty take on new resonance when they are voiced from within the Christian context. While the dignity of the individual can be grounded in humanistic principles, for example, those principles do not provide its best defense. For Christians, the dignity of an individual reflects the creative act of a God who made humanity in God’s own image.

If Christ is the Logos and humans are given reason by God, then an unreasoning Christianity is a self-contradiction. Christians are by nature not dogmatic but rather “Socratic,” Tinder tells us. They fulfill their religious character through free engagement with and respect for others. “A strong faith would not recoil from dialogue” but would promote it. Thus individual liberty is an essential component of the Christian life. Protecting individual liberties is a Christian value.

The irony here, Tinder explains, is that the positive goods of the Christian life are perhaps best realized through the Christian’s support of negative liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from constraint—from limitations imposed by the state, society, corporations and, yes, religion. It is the freedom to do what one wishes to do, and this negative liberty is reflected in the political and legal apparatus through which individuals gain license to worship freely as well as to engage in all kinds of “non-Christian” acts: premarital sex, substance abuse, adultery.

This is timely as there seem to be a lot of Christians afoot these days disparaging “mere” negative freedom as a bourgeois, individualistic, modernist snare. “True” freedom is freedom for, they say–freedom to obey God’s will.

Undoubtedly, obedience to God’s will can be said to be a “higher” freedom. But two qualifications need to be registered. First, negative freedom, or freedom from constaint, seems to be a necessary condition for the higher form of freedom. Obedience that is compelled isn’t obedience worthy of the gospel. Second, when people talk about true freedom being found in obedience to God, they often elide the thorny issue of how we discern God’s will and who has the authority to interpret it. All too often in the church’s history, the freedom of obedience to God has been the “freedom” to obey some particular group of people who’ve set themselves up as God’s official spokesmen.