For some weeks now I have been struggling to find a response to a comment I read on a book selling website which was aimed at the book “Christ the Eternal Tao” by Hieromonk Damascene.
Taoist thought is not based on supernatural dieties [sic] and hope of groveling to some harsh and mythical judemental [sic] diety [sic] in order to get accepted into a fictional after-life.
Ignoring the fact that this person clearly is not actually as smart as they think they are, their underlying sentiment is widely held by non-Christians about Christians. The fact that this reviewer went on to reference the film “Jesus Camp” as being a window into normative Christianity gives you a sense of just how poor a reputation we have in the World at this point. [1]
So, I wanted to post here and write a response to this pervasive notion that Christianity is nothing but groveling in an attempt to avoid been smote by a vengeful god. Because it is not. Christianity is the celebration of free will; the celebration of choosing to do right instead of wrong. But I lacked a really solid way of phrasing this. I just found that solid phrasing in the book “Encountering the Mystery”:
In his Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul describes freedom as the power over death and as the triumph over mortality (see Rom. 8:10-11). This relates freedom to the grace of the Spirit, who is the “treasury of all good things and giver of life,” to quote a favorite prayer of the Orthodox Church to the Holy Spirit, recited at the commencement of almost every service. Satisfying one’s needs or desires is identified not with freedom but with captivity. In Orthodox ascetic terminology, it is in fact identified with submission to the passions.
Sin is not merely making evil choices, but in fact the result of an inability to make rightful — or righteous — choices. It is the state of captivity to compulsions or passions, where one is quite literally passive and not subjective, controlled and not creative, fallen and not free. It is subservience to the force of hardened habit. In contemporary language, it is called addiction. If I eat or drink whatever I want whenever I want, I do not gain my freedom but in fact forfeit my freedom. For, in that case, I am constrained by the tyranny of passion, identified with the instinct of my nature. My “life is held captive; it is enslaved by the fear of death” (Heb. 2:15). ~ His All Holiness the Ecumenical Patriarch BARTHOLOMEW in the chapter “Faith and Freedom” in the section “Freedom to Live”, page 129, emphasis mine
There is a growing movement in our culture which realizes that not all choices are real choices. Zizek speaks often that a real choice is not total choice, but a choice from a very small set of genuine, meaningful options. Cultural figures advocate highly structured meal routines and daily routines which at first may seem “confining” but over time radically reduce stress by eliminating the endless question in our culture of “what should I do now?” for which we rarely have a very good answer if our life lacks any structure at all (the illusion of total freedom). And as we read above, the Church teaches us that total freedom is not liberation, but a complete capitulation to our passions, our appetites. The compulsive need to take advantage of the opportunity to choose at every possible opportunity to choose becomes a prison.
We are slowly but surely realizing that our pig-headed insistence that liberty means that free choices do not have consequences is a load of nonsense. Freedom to choose is not freedom from cause and effect. Freedom just means the choice is not made for you — but you pay the consequences whether you choose freely or whether the choice is made for you. We want to pretend that tyranny is the insistence on consequences, but we are wrong. Cause and effect are the fabric of the universe.
And so this is really what it boils down to, for me. I look at my life, and I see the truth of it. Certain liberties I have given myself in the past and in which I have allowed myself to indulge whenever I chose, have become addictions, habitual choices, with which I now struggle to choose to put aside the pretense of liberty and to become truly free by choosing righteousness.
This is something I do not think people can be convinced of via argument. I think you have to reach a point in your life where you can examine yourself and realize that your liberty is not making you happy the way you thought it would, and that you, in fact, find yourself trapped in the routine, the habit, the addiction of liberty.
I have rarely been a fan of the NIV or TNIV translations, but for 1 Corinthians 10:23 they have Saint Paul’s words as these:
“I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but not everything is constructive.
And so there it is. Christianity is not the abdication of free will, groveling beneath the lash and under the yoke. Christianity is the celebration of freedom with the knowledge that choices always have consequences, and some consequences are simply not worth paying.
[1] As an aside, if you have not seen this film, it is actually really excellent and is a great window into American Evangelicalism, although certainly not a window into Orthodoxy. The reviewer apparently didn’t realize that Evangelicals don’t have Hieromonks and thus the author of the book has more or less nothing to do with the people in the film.



