Free Radical

"You think you're radical. But you're not so radical. In fact, you're fanatical, fanatical" 

As you might have gathered from my lack of creative output, the last few months have taken their toll on me. Al my energy seems to be sucked into planning a wedding, sorting out council tax bills, finding a house to rent, buying flat pack furniture, making a new house for my wife and I to settle down into, along with working as much as possible in order to keep up with my own spending. 

Rarely is there time to stop and contemplate anything significant, let alone have time to write about it. But today as I take a much needed day of doing nothing I am struck by how strong my desire is to this 'stuff' I am accumulating. I love to make a home, to have a well stacked spice drawer, to have a nice looking living room, to get that superficial fuzzy feeling you get when you look at how nice all your books look on that bookshelf. I have recently discovered the euphoria of the John Lewis Wedding List. What happens is that you upload stuff that you really want but could never afford to buy, and people buy it for you. People are so generous and it feels so good. As I build up metaphorical and literal walls around my life I am aware at how consuming it is. 

However, my greatest fear is to get to thirty and be normal. I am terrified of  having a nice house with nice stuff, fairly pleasant children, and an ageing but still beautiful wife, to make little impact, to justify my lack of radicalism on everything else, to be living in the comfortable prison I have built around myself, filled with responsibility and no way out. Maybe it's just a part of growing up. Maybe I need to become a man and face up to my choices. But it scares me. 

I am perpetually plagued by my own desire to be more radical than I am. I know that Ellie would sell everything and move to the other side of the world in an instant if I asked her so I can't even blame her. She is far less attached than I am to this world we are building. She often mocks me for being like this, but the truth that we both know is that I crave the comfort and stability that normality brings, I lack the courage to cut loose and run to the other side of the world. I am haunted by the words of Jesus every time I open my Bible and my own failure to match up: 

 "When Jesus saw the crowd around him, he gave orders to cross to the other side of the lake.Then a teacher of the law came to him and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”Another disciple said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” "

The Son of Man has no place to lay his head. I have Hungarian goose feather pillows from John Lewis. Foxes have dens, birds have nests. I have a leather chair and a bookcase full of books about following Jesus. I sometimes wonder how comfortable 'normality' really is. Maybe one day in a few years I will make the leap into living like this. Western Christians are convinced they can live with all of the nice stuff, nice houses, comfortable living and still be radical in faith. Perhaps others can manage it, I certainly cannot, or at least I haven't worked out how it is done. It is much easier to play down the radicalism of faith, to water it down into palatable chunks.

 Often I wonder how much of a slave to my own life I am. Sartre was convinced that organised religion was a quashing of man's freedom, a restriction and denial of his true self. Perhaps so. However, Jesus only ever seems to whisper to me- "You are freer than this Josh, there is more for you than this Josh. Let go, and trust me instead". The truth is that following Jesus costs everything: my goose feather pillows, my £200 coffee machine, my beautiful Korg, my ambition, my comfort, my stability, my engraved hip flasks and my ego. However, it offers in return a truly free way of living. It is only in abandoning myself totally to something else that I truly know freedom.

The longer I leave it, the harder it seems to be truly radical.

Leaders Of The Free World

I quite wanted an early night on Tuesday night. Turns out I ended up talking about free will with my new housemates until pretty late. I've done quite a lot of that since I've been in York; I wrote my final essay of my degree on the subject. After wrestling with the concept of free will for three years, in the end I became satisfied that free will is only really the presence of a felt choice; it's an illusion of sorts (at least compared to what we might usually think it is).

Christians get pretty worked up and frustrated when it comes to free will. It's not surprising if they want to believe in a creator who is both powerful and knowledgeable and who also intervenes in the course of human history. Free will looks like pretty slim pickings if this is the case; if God knew and created the world exactly as it was, then he surely knew exactly the consequences of his creation, which happen to include every choice I make. A lot of Paul's writing in the New Testament talks about us being 'predestined' and 'elect' by God. That bothers people.

I have a few observations about free will that I've come to accept over the last few years.

The first thing is that no one is in a particularly good position. Whether you're a theist or an atheist, free will is difficult to account for. It's not only God that makes free will difficult, the physical world poses some issues as well. The physical world is a world of causes; all physical events are caused by previous physical events. So if all there are is physical things (which I assume most atheists would want to say), then the laws of nature and the past dictate perfectly the contents of the future. It doesn't look like there's much room for free will there either; your actions are just the consequences of a physical system of causes and effects.

So if you want to maintain that there is 'free will' in the strong sense, you must deny that free agents are part of the physical system of events. And even then, you must also deny that there is a God who knows and controls the universe. As far as I know, there aren't many people whose philosophy of human beings and of the universe would allow free will in this strong sense. No one is in a particularly good position to argue for free will in this strong sense of being 'totally uncaused'. Even if we did come to the conclusion that in actual fact human actions were uncaused, it strikes me as a kind of freedom that I don't really want- actions are merely the consequences of randomness if they are uncaused.

The second thing I've noticed, is that we aren't always on the same page when it comes to talking about free will. When we talk about free will, we usually mean it in this strong sense of being 'uncaused'. But actually we aren't very clear on what we really mean by free will most of the time. I think, if pushed most people would be happy with the kind of free will I endorse. I came to the conclusion that all that we can mean by free will is the feeling of choice. And that is quite enough. It's quite enough for me to decide what I'm going to do next Tuesday, it's quite enough for me to choose what I want for my lunch. It's quite enough for me to choose to follow Jesus. It's my intention that matters rather than what caused it. I could never really know what caused my action after all.

The third thing is that at times we all have to hold in tension that our actions are both caused and free. Sometimes this doesn't make much sense when we try to reconcile it. But maybe we shouldn't try and reconcile it at all. I wonder if the problem is one of perspective. Metaphysically speaking my actions are caused; in other words- zoom out to the level of looking at the universe as a whole, on that level everything causes everything else; the future is just a part of the track that the train of the universe hasn't got onto yet. On that level we're caused. But free will is not something which we can discover on that level at all. Actually free will is something which occurs on a very everyday level; we need to zoom in a lot to get to me at 7 O'clock on a Monday morning choosing which one of my housemates' cereals to steal; I'm perfectly free to choose any of them. Free Will is an everyday thing, it is something that occurs at the level of consciousness and human existence, and not at the metaphysical level. I agree that there is still some sort of tension there, but it's one I'm happy to hold.

The fourth thing I think that is important to think about from a Christian perspective is that at times we have been guilty of constructing human theories around Scripture. When Paul speaks about the things God prepared for us in advance to do, or when he speaks about Christ preordaining our salvation, he firstly and foremost makes a pastoral point. The purpose of most of the New Testament, which is where we get a lot  of our theology on free will from, is primarily to encourage and build the Church. It is to build up leaders and fix people's eyes back onto Jesus. It is a great encouragement when we feel like we are worthless, or that we aren't good enough, to know that actually God has chosen us to be a part of his plans. Of course there are theological consequences of this. But I wonder if it's sometimes risky to take these letters of encouragement, and then take poetic lines from the Psalms, which are beautiful pieces of poetry written to glorify God, and couple them together to make complex metaphysical points about our free will. I'm not saying that these ideas are not there in the Bible, I just sometimes wonder if we're danger of skewing the purpose of some texts in order to build a nice, solid humanly understandable systematic theology which ties all the ends together.

The last thing, and perhaps the most important thing I've observed about free will is that it makes little difference. The causal state of my being makes little difference to which cereal I want tomorrow morning. You see the thing is that tomorrow morning the Calvanist, the humanist, the determinist, the libertarian, the Christian and atheist will all live their lives with perfectly free will. What I mean by that is that as soon as we put down the books, as soon as we stop discussing and debating the level of free will of the human being, we discover that free will is unavoidable. It is right there in front of us as Sartre might say- it is at the heart of our being. On a basic, everyday level, whatever you think about free will has little bearing on what you actually do and how you actually behave. I mean this as an encouragement; sometimes free will is actually not worth worrying about too much, it does not alter how you live, it does not come into play at an everyday level really. I guess we'll never really know how free we are, and it strikes me that we ought to not let it mess with us too much, we ought not to let it cripple us. I don't think anyone actually knows at the end of the day.

I'm free on any sort of level that matters. I find it difficult to dispute that. It's pretty obvious to us that we are free, we're free to choose almost all the time. It's what we do with our freedom that's important, it's how we choose and what we do with our lives. 

Sinnerman

A lot of the time I don’t want to stop sinning. Sometimes it seems to me a bit like there’s a bit of an arbitrary list of rules which I have to follow. And I enjoy sin; it’s much easier than living ‘the good life’. People tell me Jesus offers freedom from the law and freedom from sin. But I don’t really know what that means for me today. I can sympathise with the person that says “if Christ offers forgiveness for sin to anyone and everyone, since I quite enjoying sinning it would be much easier just to repent on my death bed than trying to not sin for my whole life”. Paul says that “the wages of sin are death”, but I’m ok, grace will cover me, I’m not planning to die for a while yet, so why should I stop sinning?

Unless I get the right perspective, this can be my response to sin. I don’t think this is really taking sin very seriously. I hear people talk about sin all the time, but I don’t always understand what they mean. What is sin? Why is it so serious? I’ve heard it defined as ‘selfishness’ or ‘turning away from God’. But why should I avoid it?

I used to think of sin a little bit like this: God made humanity with a list of rights and wrongs which he gave to them. If they chose the right ones they got to live with him forever, if they chose the wrong ones he had to judge them and find them guilty because he is a just God. It went for a long time that man tried to choose the good option, but always ended up choosing the bad one because it was easier, and felt better. Then God decided to sort this out by sending Jesus so that when we choose the bad option, Jesus takes our punishment if we accept it and now we can live with him forever. You might have heard it summarised like this: God loves you, you have sinned, Jesus died for you, what next?

But I’m not convinced that the gospel can be neatly summarised into four points, I don’t think this fully encapsulates what Jesus came to do and I’m not sure it takes sin seriously enough. It makes “the wages of sin are death” seem like an arbitrary choice that God decided to hold certain things against me, I find it difficult to really take sin seriously if this is all it is.

I’m not saying that I don’t think this is all true, but just that I don’t think that is a full enough definition of sin. It captures an important aspect of the seriousness of sin for our eternal destiny. The problem with this definition is not that it isn’t true, but that it focuses only on the eternal significance of sin and not on the seriousness of sin in the present; what difference it makes to my now. And the consequences of this are that if this is my account of sin, then my only account of the gospel is forgiveness of sins and life eternal. My perspective is all on eternity, all that really matters is that I ‘become a Christian’, that I make sure I say sorry when I ‘sin’ and then try and make others do the same. It is a faith focused only on the life to come and very little on the present. It makes sin quite difficult to grasp.

How do we make this kind of Christianity relevant to a generation of people who increasingly don’t believe in life after death? It’s not like we can scare people into Christianity just because they want to avoid hell when most people think that all that will happen after death is that they will rot into the earth. Why would people live by a set of “outdated and arbitrary rules” because a man with the placard tells them they will be judged and punished if they don’t? In order to really take sin seriously people need to see what difference it makes not only to their eternal destiny but to their life on earth. The wages of sin are death in the next life yes, but in this life also. Sin destroys families and relationships, it corrupts hearts. Sin is serious, but if we just ignore the seriousness of it in this life, we aren’t really taking it very seriously at all.

The reason that God tells us to avoid certain actions is because he knows that the consequences of them will be worse for us now. It will harm my character to sin; if I seek after lust I’ll struggle to love appropriately, if I seek after pride I’ll end up falling. The things that the bible talks about as sin are the things that are in my interest not to do. Sin damages us today. The problem is that this isn’t always obvious to us. We can’t ever understand the full consequences of what we do; we can’t see how our actions are destructive immediately. The difference is: God can. The reason it hurts God so much when we sin I don’t think is just because he decided what would be right or wrong and wants us to follow the rules, but that he knows what is best for us, what will make us complete.

The reason that sin is so destructive is because it destroys you. It’s not just that sins stops us from being close to God, but that it stops us being who we really are. Jesus offers real freedom in the present. Not just so we can do the right thing and ‘go to heaven’ but because we were made to live a certain way. Sinning is like using a coffee machine to make toast- it just wasn’t made for that, and it’s going to end up pretty messy if you keep trying. Sin is serious but taking sin seriously is being able to see the dangers of living the wrong way for our lives and for the people our actions effect.

If we start to get more of a perspective on sin we can see real change and real freedom today. This isn’t a list of arbitrary rules; these are the things that lead to death, that lead to destruction that will damage us. When we get this perspective the gospel isn’t just about the change to come but it’s also about the change available now- there’s another way to live and its better. Jesus can transform your character; he can bring freedom where there is entrapment, addiction, and obsession. If we look at sin not as a ‘rule’ which we ought to obey but as a divine foresight in your best interest then we can start to take sin more seriously. And when I get this perspective on it, I want to avoid sin, I want to live in the fullness that God has designed for me, I want to take him seriously.