Choice
We
cannot control the behavior of other people.
One of the things we briefly touched in last week’s A Mirror Darkly webcast was the question of free will and how that
relates to God’s omniscience. In the movie Bruce
Almighty, which is obviously fiction, God, as played by Morgan Freeman
tells Bruce (played by Jim Carrey) that the one thing you can’t do is make
someone love you.
And
yet love—for God and others—is the core of the Bible.
But
God has, at the very least, chosen to limit himself. I’ve pointed out before a shocking truth that
is very clear from the Garden of Eden event between the serpent, Eve and Adam:
God would rather we be free than that we be good.
That’s
shocking for human beings because—thanks to that event in the garden—we are
locked into a binary point of view regarding everything in life: is it good, or
is it bad? By our nature, thanks to the
choice Adam and Eve made, we are constantly concerned with judging right and
wrong. We can’t help it. That’s why we are so obsessed with passing
endless laws. Our very nature has become legalistic.
God
didn’t warn us against eating from a tree of the knowledge of just evil, but of
both good and evil. We weren’t supposed
to think about such matters or even know about them; we were instead simply to
love one another and God. If everyone
focused on bringing happiness to others, on loving others, then we’d always
have everything we ever wanted, always be satisfied, always feel complete. We would be in paradise.
But
it didn’t go down that way.
Instead,
we ate from the cursed tree of the knowledge of good and evil and so we judge
everything. We were never intended to
become the legalistic obsessives that we have turned into.
Nevertheless,
God thought that letting us making a poor choice was better than us being
denied the possibility of making a choice at all. All of human history, all the horrors that it
has produced: the existence of death, murder, rape, slavery, war, suffering,
disease, starvation—every bad and awful thing you can think of—God thought it
was worth it for the sake of freedom.
Freedom trumps everything, even the life of Jesus, his son, who had to
die to fix the mess we made.
The
philosopher Gottfried Leibniz argued that given a God that is both powerful as
well as good—very good—he would necessarily design a world that would be the
best it possibly could be, given the existence of this thing called freedom,
the ability of human beings to make choices.
And
we know that God made a good choice himself, in giving us choice. All you have
to do is ask yourself: would you rather be free, or live in a totalitarian
dictatorship? Is the US preferable to
North Korea? The old Soviet Union? The Nazi Reich?
Ask
your teenager if she wants you to micromanage her life. Can you make your children behave now? How about when they grow up? Can you determine all their choices for them?
What music to listen to, what television to watch, which friends to have? Would they like that? Would you really want to be in charge of
their lives for the rest of your lives?
In
God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and
Ethics, C.S. Lewis wrote:
“Of all tyrannies, a
tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most
oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under
omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep,
his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our
own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their
own conscience.”
Those
who would limit freedom always argue that it is for the greater good: to
protect us and to ensure our happiness.
And
we know better. We know it won’t work
out like that.
The
movie The Giver, which came out in
2014 (and is based on a novel of the same name by Lois Lowry), presents a
seemingly perfect community without war, pain, or suffering. But it’s not as wonderful as it seems, and a
young boy, chosen to learn from an elderly man about the pain and pleasure of
the “real” world winds up rebelling against this “paradise.”
Later,
as the boy’s friend and love interest is about to be euthanized in order to
prevent the contagion of freedom spreading, the Chief Elder, played by Meryl
Streep has a conversation with the Giver, played by Jeff Bridges:
The Giver: With love
comes faith, with it comes hope.
Chief Elder: Love is just
passion that can turn.
The Giver: We can do
better.
Chief Elder: It turns
into contempt and murder.
The Giver: We could
choose better.
Chief Elder: People are
weak. People are selfish. When people have the freedom to choose, they choose
wrong. Every single time.
God
knows that we choose wrong. Every single time.
But he’d rather that, and the world we now inhabit—than that we should
be something other than free.
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