Freedom in Christ is crucial to being a Christian. To be free in Christ is to take off the mask that we inherit from the world. The pretentious and competitive spirit that is given to us by modern culture is to be ripped off, regardless of the pain. The longer we live with the mask the more we grow into it, and of course, the more painful it is to rip off. But it is an experience that must take place in every Christian: Refuse the world’s manipulative and pretentious ways and “risk it all.” Risk being sinful because this is what true freedom is about: Not trying and acting but submitting and living! We live in the spirit and submit to the spiritual experiences, and not the ethics or social norms the world wants us to home in on.
Freedom in Christ was a pivotal topic for early Christians. Set against the backdrop of the early Greco-Roman culture, the Church was hard-pressed to answer to the public regarding the subject of personhood and how people are to “become free.” The philosophers of the era were posing these questions to the people. They felt like man was trapped, and in need of some sort of liberation. The theatre became an outlet for many, indulging in masks so as to escape the world they thought they were trapped in.
This theatrical era has resurfaced into our modern era (the west actually brags about being a product of ancient Greco-Roman culture), with “Hollywood” as a new avenue. With Protestantism at the helm of America, a major gap in spiritual communion is begging to be filled. Protestants do not believe in the communion of saints, what we Orthodox hold to dearly as the very core of the body of Christ. In other words, instead of saints, America has Hollywood actors, including those within televised sports.
All of these modern hero’s become antithetical to the Gospel narrative. We begin living vicariously with them, as if we know them and have personalized relationships with them. It’s quite baffling if you really think about it. Why do we do this? Could it be that we are desperately chasing after the freedom that the early Romans sought after? Is this Hollywood culture an appeasement of true liberation and freedom?
This is the question of all humanity of all time! What is freedom? What does it mean to be free? Many fathers spoke of freedom, but with the backdrop of their particular culture, since it is an effective way of communicating to people. We can do this in our day!
Western man often describes freedom against the backdrop of communism, etc. This is an easy target, especially since we see so much propaganda on our screens. But is it the backdrop that we really need? Is our freedom in Christ based on national organization of community? If it is, why do we not teach the historical model of Orthodox monarchy? The answer is relatively simple. Not even monarchy gives us freedom in Christ. Monarchy is a fruit of freedom, not a cause. The Pre-Nicene Christians fully understood this matter. Their freedom expressed itself in such a powerful way that the current emperor (Constantine) began converting, ushering back in the monarchy in a whole new way.
Christian freedom is largely about being released from “the bondage of sin,” but what does being released from sin look like in real life? Freedom in Christ is freedom to be “foolish to the world,” as the Apostle says. It is to become “childlike,” as Christ says. When we are baptized in Christ our past is washed away and “all things are new” for us to live this life of freedom from sin (from its way of governing us…guilt and condemnation, leading to legalism, etc).
To be free from the condemnation of all laws, including nature itself, is to live in a way that is not in subjection to modernity itself. Modernity is “nature without incarnation”, without Christ, as found prior to Christ’s incarnation when life radically different in many ways, even natural ways with the earth. To live and thrive without modernity guiding a person is what it means to be free in Christ. We do not have to conform to the ways of the world…the world that is outside of the New Covenant and Christ’s change that took place. The devil and his angels continue to keep the old world alive to prevent souls from being influenced and sealed by the incarnate power of Christ. The devil offered his world to Christ, and Christ rejected it on the mountain, knowing that the power of the Resurrection would be sufficient.
In Christ we live without the magnetic and overwhelming guidance of the devil’s modernity…the reliance of man, telling us that the only way to make it through life is through technocratic and psychological advancements of sort. From the history of Genesis we see the example of Lamech’s sons embracing innovative ways of casting iron, etc. We can see that modernity itself has been around since these beginnings. Now that the devil has been released, as several fathers explain, in this modern age, the devil capitalizes on modernity to the point of being unstoppable only to Christ’s prophecies of apocalypse and the Second Coming.
The Psalmist says, “Some will trust in horses and chariots, but I will trust in the Lord my God.” The creation of convenient items is not a sin in and of itself, rather, it is how they are capitalized on. This is how we can identify modernity itself. When man creates culture and community that is governed by innovation and progress we can be sure that modernity is on the move, so to speak.
The above is not to suggest that we have to somehow reverse the modern, more industrial age of society. What is done is done. But what is not done is simply not done, and so now we have these false freedoms to resist. We are not to be led by utopian ideals brought upon us by modern man, to liberate us from personhood, even to the point of rejecting our own sex. This is not true liberation and freedom. This is the false freedom of the world, of modernity itself.
Freedom from sin means not that we are somehow judicially free, as the Protestants suggest (saved in an instant). We are not free from being judged. We will be judged, but not by law. We will be judged, “each according to our deeds,” as the Apostle John states in his book of Revelation.When a person is under the law of nature…when he is being judged by nature, as St Paul explains in Romans, he is not free! He is feeling guilty about many things, depending on his upbringing and surroundings. He is a “product of his environment.” To be a product of one's environment is to be manipulated!
Freedom in Christ delivers us from this “bondage of sin,” this manipulative and magnetic pull of the spiritual and even natural (in part) world. The question is begged: Can a person escape the magnetic pull of the devil and his modernity without Christ, and merely by his own intellectual pursuits? In theory, he can, since the world is constructed in a corporeal manner with spiritual patterns. But this leads to insanity, because the devil is a deceiver and he will (he does) lead these people to their demise. He gives them knowledge about how the universe operates, and he will even give them how some of the spiritual elements are involved, but he will withhold what is needed to keep this person in his web of guilt and chaos.
To “beat the devil” is to be loosed from sin, his tools…his retaining walls of his world. We have broken through these walls of retention. We live a life of freedom outside of his manipulation maze. We no longer have to worry and stress over how the world is “falling into place for us” because we are not a part of its system. We have become “fools for Christ,” as the Apostle Paul states. The world sees us as foolish because we do not choose their paths! The Apostle confirms this by saying that prior to baptism, we were in “bondage to the elements of the world.
”Freedom in Christ is a “Way” of life. This is why the early Christians called themselves, “The Way.” In the industrialized, western, society, where this very concept has been trampled upon for centuries, we come to a crossroad. How do we live in Christ’s freedom when we are taught from birth to live in political and other worldly “freedoms?”
This is the struggle! At certain points in the lives of Orthodox people in America awaits these crossroads. Will the illumined travel down the political and worldly path or will they travel in the new “Way” of freedom in Christ, where their faith is to be put into much of the unseen, but rooted in the Communion of Saints and our local Church where we can see with spiritual eyes. This will eventually turn into physical community, and perhaps nationhood, but within America we must first learn the basics of what true freedom is, and what it is not.
Thank you,
Rdr. Michael
