Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

Only if you see him doing this all for you—does that begin to change your heart.

“for Americans . . . freedom was perhaps the most important value.”

Charles Taylor

“Let each person do their own thing, and . . . one shouldn’t criticize the others’ values, because they have a right to live their own life as you do. The [only] sin which is not tolerated is intolerance.”

How did freedom become not just one valuable thing among many but the ultimate good?

It was believed that a society could be cohesive only if it was built on the basis of commonly held moral and religious beliefs.

they wanted a government whose laws were not tied to one Christian church or type of orthodoxy.

based not on divine law but on the consent of the governed.

In this conception of society, the only ethic required was “the ethic of freedom and mutual benefit.”

Both global capitalism and state socialism began to be seen as bringing about dehumanization and oppression, each in its own distinct way.

This led many philosophers and thinkers to move toward making freedom the animating ideal and standard by which to judge all cultural organizations.

So in late-modern secularism (sometimes called postmodernism), we are no longer seen as free because we are God’s creation, nor because of our rationality and free will, nor because of unfolding historical processes moving the human race toward inevitable progress.

We are considered to be free because there is no cosmic order, there is no essential human nature, and there are no truths or moral absolutes that we must kneel to.

Nothing, then, has any rightful claim on us, and we may live as we see fit.

Today we hold to a new, unqualified kind of freedom (only and exclusively excepting the impingement on others’ freedom). We understand freedom as the right of the individual to choose his or her own values altogether, something neither Locke nor his compatriots ever envisioned.12

Today as a culture we believe freedom is the highest good, that becoming free is the only heroic story we have left, and that giving individuals freedom is the main role of any institution and of society itself.

In much of our society Christianity is seen as the archenemy of freedom.

Do we have to choose between freedom and faith in God?

yes but no.

True—the ideal of individual freedom in Western society has done incalculable good. It has led to a far more just and fair society for minorities and women.

But false. Freedom has come to be defined as the absence of any limitations or constraints on us. By this definition, the fewer boundaries

I want to argue that the narrative has gone wrong and is doing damage.

Modern freedom is the freedom of self-assertion. I am free if I may do whatever I want. But defining freedom this way—as the absence of constraint on choices—is unworkable because it is an impossibility.

not just one thing called “freedom” that we either have or do not have. At the level of lived life there are numerous freedoms, and no one can have them all.

The proper question is: Which freedom is the more important, the more truly liberating?

Real freedom comes from a strategic loss of some freedoms in order to gain others.

You don’t really freely choose most of these necessary limitations in life.

You don’t choose them, you submit to them.

Unless you honor the givens and limits of human relationships, you will never know the freedom of love and social peace.

You get the best freedoms only if you are willing to submit your choices to various realities, if you honor your own design.

absolute individual autonomy, is not only unworkable. It is also unfair because it denies what we owe others.

we don’t really belong only to ourselves.

We unavoidably, to some degree, belong to one another. “No man is an island. . . . Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”18

we should agree on just one thing, that everyone should be free to live as they desire as long as they do not harm anyone else.19

This “harm principle” appears to make freedom of choice into a self-correcting absolute that gives us guidance for life together without the need for value judgments of any kind.

Today, it is said, the only moral absolute should be freedom and the only sin should ...

the harm principle is useless and even disingenuous as a guide. It works only if we are all agreed on...

any decision about what harms others will be rooted in (generally unacknowledged) views of human nature and purpose.

These are beliefs—they are not self-evident, nor can they be proven empirically.

It is hypocritical to claim that today we grant people so much more freedom when we are actually all fighting to press our moral beliefs about harm on everyone.20

We need some kind of moral norms and constraints on our actions if we are to live together.

We are an “ultrasocial species,”21

Tocqueville saw a conundrum at the heart of American society. We are committed to individual freedom, but it can grow “cancerous” and so undermine the ties of family, neighborhood, and citizenship that it ironically “threatens the survival of freedom itself.”

The more personal individual freedom is emphasized, the more all these democratic institutions erode. This necessitates the “soft despotism” of a growing bureaucratic state, before which individuals are powerless. So ironically, the growth of freedom would lead to the loss of freedom.

much of the health of a society depends on voluntarily unselfish behavior.

you will never know the freedom of love unless you limit your choices in significant ways.

There is no greater feeling of liberation than to feel and be loved well.

love is liberating—perhaps the most liberating thing.

you also have to give up your independence.

This mutual sacrifice of autonomy leads to the variegated, wonderful kind of liberation that only love can bring.