Theology Today - Vol 27, No. 4 - January 1971 - ARTICLE

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The Future as a Source of Freedom
By Carl E. Braaten

"Man is free when he is open beyond himself. . . . By turning in upon himself he may think he is in possession of himself, and therefore free, but in actuality he is imprisoned in what he already is, determined by the sum of his past history. To be free is to be open to the future, to find the reality of one's freedom in the oncoming future of God."

IT was the Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce, who dusted off a page from Hegel's forgotten philosophy of history and told us that "history is the history of liberty" and "liberty is the eternal creator of history and itself the subject of every history." 1 Croce thus designated freedom as the "explanatory principle of the course of history.2 I think he learned that from the Bible, even though he could not see the finger of God in the course of human ,events that give birth to freedom. And he could not see that the liberation process in history is the vehicle of divine promise for still greater freedom-for the eschatological liberty of the children of God (Romans 8: 2 1).

The hermeneutic of liberation cannot merely be a historical pathway into the Bible as a collection of documents reporting the early beginnings and development of freedom in history. It has the broader task of encompassing the question of God. The hermeneutic of liberation is both historical and theological; it is the method of a theology of history as the story of freedom. The renewal of God-language must occur within the horizon of freedom, if such

Carl E. Braaten is Professor of Systematic Theology at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He is the co-editor, with Roy A. Harrisville, of The Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ (1964), and author of History and Hermeneutics (1966) and The Future of God (1969).
1 Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty (New York, 1955), p. 57.
2 Ibid., P. 57.

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language is to make real sense under the conditions of modern subjectivity. 3 For the atheistic criticism of God-language has been motivated not so much by an anti-theism as by a passion for freedom. I do not believe any doctrine of God is viable even for Christians today which does not take up the truth of the atheistic criticism in a dialectical way, that is, without finding a better theological way of sponsoring and augmenting the drive toward freedom which is the positive factor underlying the negativities of modern atheism.4

We cannot forget that atheism was born in the west, on Christian soil, in German universities, and, as Tillich used to remind us, especially in Lutheran parsonages. Atheism has found fertile soil in the guts of preachers' kids. They have had to stage rebellions on behalf of freedom within the authoritarian atmosphere of the parsonage and of the church. So they have had to get rid of the God who was created in their father's image. Now if atheism is the allergy of a faith that hates idolatry because idolatry is the acutest form of slavery, then the only antidote is to picture God as the liberator of mankind, as the very source of freedom itself. That is the picture we can get from the Bible, if we read it as the history of the gospel of freedom.

The entire story of freedom in the Bible is told against the backdrop of the liberation of Israel from slavery in Egypt. The war of liberation was planned and executed by the God of freedom. It was a political act that projected Israel, a tiny slave people, into the openness of world history. There they have been visible and vulnerable, the subjects of pogroms and genocide. The fact that they have survived at all may be the best proof around that God is alive. 5 The blood of freedom has been drawn from their veins to quench the thirst of a long line of tyrants-the Pharaohs, Caesars, Czars, and Hitlers. And sad to say, Christians have often been the most willing oppressors of the children of Abraham.

How did it happen that Israel should be chosen to bear the torch of freedom and thus influence the course of world history? The

3 Cf. Langdon Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language (Indianapolis, 1969), esp. pp. 365-97.
4 Cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg, "Reden von Gott angesichts atheistischer Kritik," Evangelischer Kommentar (August, 1969), pp. 442-446.
5 Whether fact or fiction, there is a story about Napoleon Bonaparte claiming that the existence of the Jews is his reason for believing in God.

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answer, I think, lies in Israel's image-less image of God. All of Jahweh's contemporary rivals in Egypt, Canaan, Babylonia, Persia, and Rome could be replicated in plastic images. An image is static, but Jahweh is dynamic. An image can be manipulated like a dead object, but Jahweh is the living voice of the future. Jahweh's secret to survival was the fact that he had both his freedom and his future in himself. The other gods were decked out with myths about their origins (theogony). But Jahweh was the unoriginated One, coming out of nowhere and out of nothing. He was a new God that appeared to Israel out of the unknown future in an act of preeminent freedom, and he said, "I will be your God, and you will be my people." When people ask who sent you, say, "Jahweh-I will be who I will be," that is, the very Future of Reality and the Source of Freedom "has sent me" (Exodus 3: 14). I believe Pannenberg has drawn out the significance of this utterance, although in language a bit more speculative than the Hebrews were used to. "The very idea of God demands that there be no future beyond himself. He is the ultimate future. This in turn suggests that God should be conceived as pure freedom. For what is freedom but to have future in oneself and out of oneself?" 6

The modern existentialist idea that the heart of freedom is openness to the future has its original ground in Israel's experience of a God whose futurity cancels the finality of every existing image and every past or present apprehension. Historical life is based on promise, on a covenant that is freely initiated and mutually agreed upon. Life is drawn out of the encirclement of a closed cosmos and projected into the openness of an unfinished history. There is no firm foothold in history, for each day the people of God have to touch down in a new situation of events through which God is free to act on the spur of the moment. Israel is never able to pin God down. And as we shall see when we deal with Jesus' radicalization of God's freedom, not even the law which comes from God can usurp the freedom to transcend its boundaries. That is the freedom of grace.

Israel's religion of freedom exercised its power in a negative and in a positive way. Negatively, we see it in the process of demythologizing. If modern men think they find too much myth in the Old Testament, to Israel's pagan contemporaries there was by far not

6 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God (Philadelphia, 1969), p. 63.

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enough. To use current jargon, Israel historicized the myths, so that the battle of the gods in heaven was made internal to the struggle of human affairs in history. While there was no complete demythologizing, the available myths were so bent out of shape as to be made a shambles from the point of view of the surrounding religions. Giving priority to the covenants of history brought liberation from the enslaving power of myth and magic, from astral forces and orgiastic cults.

Positively, the religion of freedom took an ethico-political turn in the preaching of the prophets. A dialectical interpretation of history is Israel's greatest gift to political understanding. The prophet of Israel had a magnificent vision of the future as a realm of peace and justice and truth and fullness. One could say, "So what?" about all this utopianism, but this becomes the trigger mechanism for a one-sided engagement in the course of human events. The prophet attacks those men and structures that are now living in reverse of God's future. He knows that the established rituals of religion and the honored codes of morality have become the chains that kings and priests and rich men use to keep the masses in bondage. The prophet is a theologian of history who sees that it is the little people at the bottom who are God's levers of liberation. So he sides with the revolutionary opposition, using his voice and muscle in behalf of the poor, the oppressed, and the useless little people in the world. The black theologian James Cone has caught the meaning of this dialectical one-sidedness for our time. He has said, "God has made an unqualified identification with the black people. Either God is for the black people in their fight for liberation and against the white oppressors or he is not. He cannot be both for us and for white people at the same time." The church paper reporting this called it "a new theological view.7 I But it's really not so new. It's quite old, not as old as creation, but as old as the prophets.

The paradigm of the prophetic imagination was Israel's own election. A little tribe of Bedouin nomads was chosen to be exalted above all nations. A group of runaway slaves, a bunch of hungry children in the desert, men and women huddling in ghettoes-they were chosen to lead the way of liberation for all men and nations. Jesus said, "Salvation is of the Jews" (John 4: 22).

7 The Lutheran (December 17, 1969), p. 30.

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As Christians we can literally say that salvation is of the Jews, because Jesus was a Jew. The salvation he brings is freedom, and happily this is recognized in the title of Käsemann's latest book, Jesus Means Freedom.8

The freedom which Jesus lived had its source in the kingdom which he brought. The inbreaking of the kingdom takes hold in history by the freeing of slaves. A slave is anyone who is in bondage to powers that stand in the way of the coming of the rule of pure freedom. The power of Jesus' freedom is eschatological, but the place of its realization is history. Käsemann poses the question, "Was Jesus a liberal?" 9 He answers that "the gospels do not leave us in the slightest doubt that Jesus, judged by the standards of his religious environment, was in fact 'liberal.'"10 How far has a tradition not strayed from the freedom of Jesus and that glorious liberty of the children of God when the word "liberal" has become a searing iron to brand the enemy? Jesus had a liberal attitude; his openness to the future of God's kingdom placed him above Moses and the Scriptures themselves. Love broke through the canons of orthodoxy to give some free room to those who couldn't pay the rent to stay inside the current social set-up. Jesus was an extremist for freedom because love would have it no other way. Jesus is God as the incarnation of love, and therefore of pure freedom, seeking nothing else but the enjoyment of free love. Paul, the apostle of Jesus, makes the claim that it was "for freedom Christ has set us free" (Gal. 5: 1).

Freedom is not a means to an end, as in the standard brands of orthodoxy. Freedom is the end itself, because God is pure freedom. Therefore, freedom is not a psychological state that makes it possible to enjoy resubmitting oneself to the law. The law is given only because of sin, but where freedom reigns there is no law, because the law has been absorbed by freedom in such a way that ultimately there is only the "law of liberty" (James 1: 25 and 2: 12). By that we shall be judged, because love will have it no other way. Love is the substance of freedom and freedom the substance of love. They can only be defined in terms of each other. But law trails way

8 Jesus Means Freedom (Philadelphia, 1969).
9 Ibid., P. 17.
10 Ibid.

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behind as merely an emergency measure in case of the backfiring of love and freedom. I like what Käsemann says: "Freedom can never be carried to excess; it can always be inadequately represented."11

The only limit to Christian freedom is Jesus himself. But that is felt as no restriction, because Jesus is the medium of freedom. Jesus means freedom because he is the risen Lord as the man of the cross. The cross is the acid test of freedom. Every humanistic idea of freedom comes up short in front of the cross because it cannot deal with the future of death. Only that man is free who is not hung up on his own dying, who can live as though death itself is dead. If nothing but the future of death can be projected back into existence by the anticipating imagination, then the most a man can have is a "dreadful freedom" that turns his hope to despair. Paradoxically, the man who has come to terms with his death in the dying of Christ has found life, even though he is lying on his death bed. With that statement we have touched the mystery of absolute freedom for which our best symbols (immortality and resurrection) are like sightings of the Spirit too deep for utterance (Romans 8: 26).

III

If the Bible is the story of liberty, why is it that often those who study it the most have the hardest time practicing it? I can not answer that, but I know the answer lies close to the heart of what we call "sin." Paul states, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." And what is sin but striving against the Spirit? Käsemann charges that "freedom is no longer the mighty river, carrying the whole life of the Christian and the church, but just a trickle." 12 At some point in history, perhaps with the beginning of the Constantinian era, the spirit of freedom in Christianity gave way to the spirit of the Grand Inquisitor. The history of Christianity is the tragedy of freedom. The inquisitorial spirit has forced some of the best minds and the purest souls to leave the church to join a company of freer men. How odd that "free-thinking" should become a dirty term in a religion which calls men to freedom (Gal. 5: 13) and teaches that truth alone can make men free (John 8: 32). The very meaning of being in the truth involves being there freely. Whenever truth is coerced, it turns into its exact opposite in human sub-

11 Ibid., P. 59.
12 Ibid., p. 85

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jectivity. Realizing this, Kierkegaard maintained that "subjectivity is truth."

Whenever it happened that the spirit of freedom had to find its patrons outside the church, a wedge was driven between freedom and God. Then God ascended to the pinnacle of all the powers that collaborate to hold freedom down. The dominant picture of God in western orthodoxy, whether Roman or Protestant, has been as the foremost advocate of law and order. Man is a low-down snivelling slave who must carry out the orders of an autocratic ruler sitting on a throne high above. But a sovereign ruler exacting blind obedience to his will and authority can only stir up a strong desire to be rid of such a relationship for the sake of freedom. Faith in freedom is a stronger and a more deserving passion than obedience to authority. A religion of law and order is the cult of Caesar; when it is carried into the church, it becomes the tyranny of the antichrist. But the Spirit of Christ presses on for the triumph of greater love and freedom.

We can understand atheism as a revolution of freedom against the idea of God as the ultimate source of authoritarian relations in society. The slavish mentality among Christians that so nauseated Nietzsche can be traced to the picture of God as absolute legislator. Belief in God as the last sanction of the established world order was diagnosed as the root cause of the pathology of slavish social relations. To accelerate the struggle for freedom, it was necessary to proclaim the "death of God." The positive message of the "death of God" movement since Nietzsche and Jean Paul 13 deals with a new self-understanding of man. If by definition God must be experienced in the depths of human existence, then any change in these depths will bring about a corresponding change in man's experience of God. It is not God who is dead, but only certain modes of apprehending his presence and certain ways of imaging his reality.

The meaning of the word "God" cannot be explored by itself as a naked vocable. To affirm or to deny the existence of God, as well as to reserve one's judgment about the matter, is all quite meaningless apart from the human corollary. Further, what one affirms or denies about God always contains a hidden conviction about man. Luther said that God is where you put your heart. "A god is that to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every

13 Jean Paul was the popular name of the poet, Johann Paul Fredriech Richter (1763-1825).

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time of need. To have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe him with our whole hearts. As I have often said, the trust and the faith of the heart alone make God and an idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is a true God. On the other hand, if your trust is false and wrong, then you have not the true God. For these two belong together, faith and God. That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your God."14 The point of this quotation is to help express something fundamental on the way to a post-atheistic doctrine of God. As the depths of the heart go, so goes the image we have of God. If there are no depths, there is no God. That is, no God appears. Therefore, we should not be surprised at how widespread atheism is.

There is a vulgar sort of atheism-an atheism of vulgar minds who have no depth. They may be among the peasants or the Ph.D.'s; what we usually call "getting an education" has little to do with "spirit" and "soul" and "depth"-with the inner space in man. I do not wish to deal with the problem of vulgar atheism. There is nothing so new and promising about it. The chief difference between now and former times on this score is that today we have statistics and communications to make us aware of the extent of vulgar atheism in the world. However, there is another kind of atheism that reaches its position of anti-theism with great sensitivity to the dimension of depth in human subjectivity. We are using the term "subjectivity" as the modern equivalent of Luther's concept of "heart" which he derived from the Bible.

In the inner dimension of subjectivity man has been in quest of himself. But what does it mean to be in quest of one's self or to search for one's identity? It is hard to say, for we have the story of this quest mostly in negative terms. It is the story of man's freedom from whatever he has experienced as enslaving, negating, or repressive. Every major step towards freedom since the Middle Ages has been mistaken for atheism by people in authority. The rise of modern science was opposed by orthodox churchmen and theologians. But what was happening was that man was freeing himself from cosmocentric metaphysics and authoritarian religion-from life that merely see-sawed between necessity and authority. God as the numinous halo around the world, as a fixed order in which there

14 Martin Luther, The Large Catechism, Book of Concord, ed. by Theodore Tappert (Philadelphia, 1959), p. 365.

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was a ready-made slot for man, had to be denied to make room for freedom and newness.

On another front existentialism ended in atheism in order to give expression to the boundlessness of human freedom. The essences of reality had to be negated because they were clamps that restricted the range of freedom. The slogan "existence precedes essence" meant that even God had to be negated as an objectively existing entity because he would cramp the style of human freedom. This means, I think, that unless we wish to reject the existentialist cry that is born out of freedom, we shall have to show that God is not per definitionem the outside limit of human freedom, but its very ground and meaning.15 Existentialism would not have had to become anti-theistic if theism had not become an absolutist ideology opposing the freedom of man.

Existentialism is a less potent form of atheism than Marxism; however, both of them can be answered only when to speak of God is to speak better of freedom, for Marxism is a cry for liberation.16 Marxism calls for liberation from the alienating forms of life which man has created on top of the world of nature. Atheism does not seem to be a fundamental doctrine of Marxism, except as the antithesis to a God who is pictured as the original creator and guarantor of the social and economic systems that enslave and oppress. Within the context of a theism that has allied itself with capitalism and the so-called "free-world," the Marxist concern for liberation is driven to a posture of anti-theism and revolutionary communism. The tragedy of Marxism is that its concern for one kind of liberation has lured men into other forms of slavery, and it is oblivious of its own captivity to oppressive forms of thinking and acting.

Today's counter-culture, in contrast, is seeking to regain or attain a vision of freedom 17 that goes deeper than Christianity and Marxism and that bears unmistakable likeness to the freedom dreams in the apocalyptic portions of the Bible. The leading spokesmen for a counter-culture believe in the ultimate value of freedom; they have an ontology of freedom and an ethic of freedom; but they renege a theology of freedom and a religion of freedom. The doc-

15 For a similar line of argument, see Traugott Koch, "Gott-der Grund der Freiheit," Pastoral Theologie, Vol. 57, (1968), p. 45 ff.
16 Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, "The Revolution of Freedom: Christians and Marxists Struggle for Freedom," Religion, Revolution and the Future, Tr. by M. Douglas Meeks (New York, 1969).
17 Cf. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (New York, 1969).

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trine of God seems to be not only irrelevant but even obstructive to the works and ways of freedom.

It is a scandal that in the so-called Christian west men should posit the freedom they seek outside the being of God. When a wedge is driven between freedom and God, men must choose freedom rather than God. This is a real dilemma, but a false one. It is real, because in actuality men have been confronted with a God who opposes the freedom they seek. But it is a false one, because the essence of God who is really God is nothing other than that freedom which man is seeking when he is in search for the truth and reality of his own identity. Atheism that has arisen as a protest for freedom can be overcome when the freedom man lacks has its source in God. In going ahead to freedom, man is approaching freedom's source in God. Man is bound to seek freedom because he is not yet free to be. Only God is free to be because the reality he enjoys is underived freedom as such.

Christianity in the west separated the stream of freedom from its source in the Spirit of God when the doctrine of the grace of God was opposed to the freedom of man. The doctrine of God's grace is miserably formulated whenever it is contrasted with the free-will of man. For then free-will is thought of as something man already has in competition with the grace of God. Who wants grace if to gain it one must lose his freedom? Free-will is not a natural attribute of man which exists in competition with grace. Freedom is self-determination in the inner depths of one's being, but this is precisely what man does not have in and of himself. It is a gift of grace.

Freedom is what grace gives, and not what grace meets in man as its rival. Grace is the power of salvation as freedom. Man is free when he is open beyond himself. He is not free when he is sealing himself off from the source of freedom in the power of the future beyond himself. By turning in upon himself he may think he is in possession of himself, and therefore free, but in actuality he is imprisoned in what he already is, determined by the sum total of his past history. To be free is to be open to the future, to find the reality of one's freedom in the oncoming future of God. The real-

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ity of God is the power of the future which opens man to new possibilities and supports him in the very act of his freedom.

Grace is not opposed to freedom, but is its very ground and resource. With this insight it would be necessary to reevaluate the history of grace and of freedom that runs through the great controverseries between Augustine and Pelagius, Luther and Erasmus, the Jansenists and Molinists, etc. One cannot dismiss either side. The problem was so badly put that the defenders of grace sounded like denigrators of human freedom. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that precisely those who denied free-will for the sake of grace, for example, Luther and the Jansenists, were more vigorous in their defense of the liberty of the Christian man over against the church's authority than either Erasmus and the Jesuits. One could generalize even further and say that while Roman Catholic theology has championed free-will more vigorously than Protestantism, considering the latter's emphasis on sola gratia, it has been less arduous in support of the freedom of conscience. What it has given with one hand it has withdrawn with the other. These confusions have been tolerated on both sides because of an underdeveloped and sometimes even erroneous theology of freedom.

The human quest for freedom is infinite, because every condition of life, even at its very best, is experienced as a lack. One of Berdyaev's friends once remarked that Leibniz must have been the world's greatest pessimist; Leibniz thought this was the best of all possible worlds.18 But if this is the best possible world, what would the bad ones look like? Such a pessimism is denied by life itself which goes forward to new and fresh forms of freedom.

The experience of God always includes the dimension of transcendence. Transcendence can be conceptualized in different ways. The experience of reaching out beyond every limit in the present toward a fuller freedom of life is the form under which modern man can experience the transcendence of God today."19 God is experienced. as the power of liberation. If God is pictured as the liberator of mankind, luring men beyond every kind of bondage under an existing set of facts, there is psychologically no longer any need to opt for atheism for the sake of freedom. God is the power

18 Nicholas Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944), p. 89.
19 On the different ways of conceiving transcendence, see J. Moltmann's "The Future as New Paradigm of Transcendence," Religion, Revolution and the Future, pp. 177-199.

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who supports man in the struggle for freedom. He is the sustaining ground of hope for liberation. The transcendence of God is experienced as the �lan vital that opens toward the fullness of life in the mystery of God's personal freedom. The doctrine of the Trinity is an expression of the interior richness of that fullness, infinitely transcending the immobilism of a static unity.

The idea of God as the ground and source of freedom can help the church to take new initiatives in the present struggles of mankind for liberation. It is a shame on Christianity that perhaps the boldest initiatives for freedom today are being taken by atheistic revolutionaries. Christian revolutionaries are few and far between, and some of these are in an identity crisis, unsure of their theological ground. Often they might feel as though they have more in common with their atheistic co-revolutionaries than with their fellow Christians who are more interested in keeping order than in winning new freedoms for others. The essence of the black revolution and student radicalism is the drive toward freedom. Now, the gospel is the promise of liberation.

When Christians show with their lives that the freedom which Jesus means is an invitation to participate in the liberation movements in the world, these movements will be purged of their tendencies toward atheistic thought and violent action. The freedom which is the heart of the Christian vision of the future is the freedom to love, even as God loves. Love is what happens when freedom reigns. If we should ask: What is the freedom which grace gives? we should have to answer: It is the freedom to love, to be like God. In the last analysis, it is love and not logic that will construct the most eloquent response to atheism in our time. It is a love always at work on the vast frontiers of freedom, always on the look-out for new forms of oppression and slavery.