Episode #23 - Field Notes - What is Freedom? Part Three - Biblical Freedom

We go back to Eden and trace a biblical definition of freedom that looks like shalom: wholeness, harmony, and life in proper order with God, others, and creation. We connect that storyline to Exodus, Sabbath, Jesus’ confrontation with the powers, and Luther’s claim that grace frees us from fear-based self-justification.

• Eden as a picture of freedom grounded in shalom, ordered goodness, and meaningful work
• The fall as a turn toward autonomy that makes fear the organizing force
• Exodus as liberation that includes covenant, law, worship, communal responsibility, and rest
• Sabbath as resistance to Pharaoh’s production logic and modern productivity culture
• Modern “pharaohs” selling endless output as virtue and calling it freedom
• Jesus, the cross, and resurrection as exposure and defeat of powers and authorities
• Inner freedom as release from fear that drives preemptive compliance
• Luther on freedom before God and love-motivated service in the world
• Freedom operating inside the soul, between people, and across systems

Freedom is a word we throw around like it’s obvious, but our defaults are often thin: more options, fewer limits, higher status, better control. We wanted to test that instinct by going back to the Bible’s deep storyline and asking what freedom looks like before empires, before modern ideologies, and before hustle culture told us who we’re allowed to be.

We start in the garden, where freedom feels like shalom: harmony, wholeness, and life unfolding in a world that’s “very good.” Work is participation in meaning, not a frantic attempt to prove worth. Then Genesis 3 reframes the problem as a grasp for autonomy that displaces God and lets fear become the new operating system. That fear doesn’t stay personal, it grows into patterns and systems that enslave, which is why the story keeps moving toward Exodus. There, freedom comes with formation: covenant, law, worship, shared responsibility, and the scandal of Sabbath rest.

From there we name today’s “pharaohs” and their brick quotas: the productivity gospel that treats exhaustion like holiness. Finally, we widen the lens to Jesus and the New Testament language of powers and authorities, and we bring in Luther’s insight that grace frees us from self-justification so love can drive our actions. If you’ve ever wondered why rest feels impossible or why fear keeps making your choices, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review with your definition: what would real freedom look like in your life?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

This is the field notes for the subversive orthodoxy podcast. Well, welcome back to Field Notes on the Subversive Orthodoxy podcast. This is Freedom Part 3. So now we're going to go way back to see how the Bible speaks of freedom to get kind of that biblical Judeo-Christian uh view and some of the insights that we might get from there. This would take us back in the in the story, not maybe not when it was actually written, but before chattel slavery, before empires, and before anything we currently think of as an ideology. We're going back to the garden. Eden looks strange to modern eyes, and God is present in the garden as one of the characters in the story. Like this is what they know. Creation is filled with awe and wonder and meaning since the creator is actually present and obvious. Now, whether you take that as mythical or literal or somewhere in between, it kind of doesn't matter. This is like how the Bible is spelling out what freedom an original in the original setting might have been like. So work is framed as participation in that meaning. And the naming of the animals, tending of the ground, enjoying fruit from the trees. There's no room for anxiety about worth or scarcity. All of it was called good and very good, and God is present, and there's harmony. And life is unfolding to them inside of this beauty and trust. And that that word that I just said that we long for is harmony. We don't really get that in our world now. We get cacophony, which is like the opposite. So community is also there from the start. God talking to man, man talking to woman. God looks at the man alone and he's and he says, This is not this is the only thing not good in the garden was that he was alone, so he created the the female. Relationship is going to be the environment where the goodness lives. In this raw goodness, is this the same as freedom or a part of freedom? What stands out to me in Eden is that everything is sitting in an ordered place. There's an accepted order to things. And the home where he has made for them, the home that he has made for them is a lush garden. And we most likely can infer the rivers, waterfalls, mountains, oceans, animals of every kind in their vast array, we're told. Scripture has a word for this condition, this original crin, this original goodness, which is a Hebrew word for peace, shalom. Shalom is loaded with much more nuance than lack of war or strife. It embodies harmony and wholeness and completeness. As we might say these days, you hear we hear you are enough these days as a pop positive pop psychology affirmation. But the truth is, as you were made in God's image and in that goodness, you are enough. Life in alignment. That is shalom. So maybe part of the deepest definition of freedom is living within the proper order of things in harmony. When God is rightly placed, and when relationships are honored, and when creation is received with gratitude and not abused and exploited, life flourishes in its design and intention. And I suspect flourishing and freedom have a lot of similarities in their in their roots and their definitions, just from two different angles. Maybe freedom is more nuanced like shalom, and it includes harmony and wholeness and flourishing. And this is a rich definition, and it's building out freedom as much, much more than from tyranny or to be able to do whatever you want. Humanity was meant for much more, a much more robust freedom than those caricatures. In Genesis 3, we get the fall of mankind or the rebellion, and humanity reaches out for autonomy, his own will to power, as Nietzsche said, his own truth and the coherence of life fractures. When God is displaced, other forces move into that vacuum. Fear starts to become the organizing behavior, and it changed the whole nature of things. Work became toil, which was God's basic consequence that he gave them, along with pain, more pain and childbirth and difficulty to make a way in the world. Power is lurking in the shadows, and the distortion caused by the fall ends up echoing into generations to come, all the way to us. And this spirit of unbelief and the spirit of rebellion takes root in humanity at that point. And this is why the biblical story moves from Eden towards Exodus multiple times through the whole Bible. Disordered systems eventually enslave people, as happened in Exodus, and also happened when God warned the people that they didn't need a king. A king was going to only enslave them at some point, and they rejected that. They rejected God as king and wanted their own king. And it ended up happening over and over. So, and when they do, God has compassion and he intervenes usually in histories. He's helped the Israelites dozens of times through the story. God brings Israel out of Egypt and into covenant, into an agreement, like a formal relationship. He removes the chains and then he forms his people with a law and a Sabbath rest, worship, communal responsibility. And in this story, there are basic ideas of what freedom looks like when it takes shape in a community. God is giving them freedom, but to against our modern American intuition, that in that freedom includes law, responsibility, worship, and rest. The Sabbath is a weekly declaration that your life belongs to God and to the people around your table, and that Pharaoh's production whip has no ultimate claim on you anymore or on yourself. The story of Israel, memory, and obedience keep that freedom alive over time, through their traditions, through their scriptures, through their celebrations, and the people get warned constantly against rebelling and rebuilding the mental slavery of Egypt back into their lives. I keep coming back to how counter-cultural Sabbath still is. Resting one day in seven says out loud that you are more than what you produce in a consumer producer culture. Almost nothing in modern life agrees with that sentence, and the loudest voices in our culture say the opposite on the record. Here are some of the attitudes of our modern-day pharaohs. These are like the people standing over us with whips. Elon Musk tells his followers that nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week and recommends 80 or more. Jack Ma, Chinese founder of Alibaba, called the 996 schedule 9 to 9, 6 days a week, a huge blessing. He puts religious language with working 72 hours per week. At least he only said six days a week. That's something. Marissa Mayer, American business exec and former CEO of Yahoo, credited her rise to 130-hour workweeks and being strategic about when she slept. Grant Cardone teaches people to 10x their life, 10x their business, their income, their whole life, take everything and multiply it times 10. He preaches that success is your duty, your obligation, and your responsibility. He's also a Scientologist, and this message is consistent with the teaching of Scientology. The connection shows up in the doctrine itself. Hubbard built Scientology on the rule that statistics must always rise, which makes rest a moral failure. Cardone repackaged that theology, that theology of endless production as a business motivation concept. And so these represent our modern pharaohs and their brick quotas, making bricks without straw. And to our culture, it just seems neutral. It just seems like the wallpaper because they're they're covered as motivational speakers, motivational posters, motivational YouTube videos. But these voices are not neutral, they have different and contradicting definitions of freedom. The idea of Sabbath answers it with one day in seven that declares that you are already loved at zero production. American culture celebrates workaholics. Sabbath is not celebrating that. A community shaped by that kind of freedom runs on something other than competition and status and rivalry. Jesus also talks about freedom at a scale most modern Christians underestimate, and I include myself in that. His life, death, and resurrection confront forces that operate far beyond individual sin or community dysfunction. Scripture speaks openly about powers and authorities that shape cultures and economics and imaginations. In Ephesians 6 10, it gets mentioned by the Apostle Paul, where he says, Our our struggle is not against flesh and blood, like humanity, but against the rulers and against the authorities and against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in heavenly realms. Speaking of a power that is not visible, that it's it's in the air, it's in the structures. These powers work politically, spiritually, and invisibly. They run on fear and they utilize violence and deception. Lying. Deception is lies. And the cross exposes their logic. Another time Paul the Apostle said in Colossians 2, 13 to 15, When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcis uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness which stood against us and condemned us. He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. Political power gets caught depending on violence and coercion. Religious authority gets caught protecting itself and excluding people. And when Jesus refuses to fight with their weapons, their claim to ultimate authority starts to collapse, and you get a fuller picture of freedom. Leslie Nubigan is one of my favorite theologians, and one of his ideas has stayed with me. He calls the cross the judgment of the world. Every authority that presents itself as ultimate gets exposed there, and its power turns out to be provisional. It has an end date, the power of those authorities. The resurrection then establishes a reality beyond their reach. Death loses its grip on the final shape of history, and fear loses its claim to run on to run things. That is a long way from how I was taught to talk about how what Jesus accomplished. We privatized it and individualized it. He died for my sins, he saved my soul. That is true, and I hold on to that, but the New Testament keeps describing something so much bigger at the at the same time: a confrontation with the forces that run the world and a verdict proclaimed against them. Jesus is crushing the dehumanizing systems through his death and resurrection. It's that's a lot different than you get to go to heaven when you die. Richard Lovelace is another favorite of mine, and he adds a layer here. The powers dominate from the outside, and they can also dominate from the inside through fear that becomes habitual. People learn to organize their whole lives and obey preemptively around avoiding loss, avoiding punishment, or avoiding exclusion. They conform by instinct. The cross interrupts that dynamic. It exposes the injustice of the powers and principalities, and it releases people from their inner submission to those powers. Freedom includes release from fear as the governing force inside the soul. Wow. We think of fear, we think of the the Jesus story or the gospel freeing us from fear of death, but what he's actually saying is that it releases us from our inner fear that makes us submit to the powers. Luther spoke to this from another angle, and he had he had a whole treaty, treatise, is that what you call it? Called On the Freedom of a Christian. Luther distinguished between freedom before God and freedom in the world. Before God, the Christian is freed from the burden of self-justification, not having to earn and not having to make yourself uh approved or loved by God. Because of the grace of God, the love of God enables life to stop being organized around earning worth or securing divine favor. And that internal liberation process reshapes everything outward in a person. Works become love offerings, gifts, gifts offered freely for the sake of others, rather than trying to follow rules. Service starts flowing out of that deep, real and personal freedom. When it comes to Luther, I started wondering how much of what passes for Christian obedience is like what he was talking about, fear-based compliance, and just putting religious language on it. Luther's point is that real freedom before God changes the motivation entirely. Our performance ends when we are unable to participate in actually giving and loving service. So freedom operates at three levels at once. There's the freedom inside a person, whether fear, ego, or disordered desire is running the show. There is the freedom between people, whether a community is shaped by trust and responsibility or by control and resentment. And then there's the freedom at the larger scale among the powers and systems that shape imagination and allegiance and governments and economies in ways most of us never examine. The biblical story addresses all three and it restores order in the cosmos with an ultimate trajectory. It forms a responsible community and it turns the soul back toward love, love back toward God and love and honesty. So that is the older vision of freedom, and it makes modern definitions feel very thin, in my opinion. There's only uh one more layer to this investigation, though, that we're going to do on part four. The thinkers who first unsettled my concept of freedom, Solzhenits and Kierkegaard, Chesterton, and Berdiev. They came at this as writers and philosophers, and they pressed hard on the failures of modern vision of freedom, and they ended up somewhere closer to this older one. In this freedom series, I'm reporting observations and questions I had and correlations I wanted to make. And in this next field notes, it's my report back to you from the culmination from our long conversations doing the podcast, and then kind of putting all this backstory of freedom together. Before I get to them, I want to start where the argument is most embodied and the hardest to dismiss. We're going to start with the martyrs. See you on part four.