Episode #24 - Field Notes - What is Freedom? Part Four - The Martyrs Freedom

Freedom is one of those words everyone loves until you ask what it costs and what it’s for. We’re chasing a kind of freedom that doesn’t look like victory in a movie: a freedom that does not fight back, cannot be threatened into compliance, and refuses to let evil pass through the self.

We start with Jesus’ sharp exchange in John 8, where “the truth will set you free” collides with people who are sure they don’t need freeing. From there we move freedom inward, toward the soul and the “unlosable” center an empire can’t reach. Solzhenitsyn’s prison logic makes it plain: power works by leverage, by threatening to take something away, and it panics when it meets a person who can’t be bought or frightened.

Then we look at the martyrs and why their stories keep unsettling the normal scoreboard. Ignatius writes with joy on the road to execution. Perpetua records calm in a Carthage prison cell. We also sit with the haunting image of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, whose stillness in flames raises a question most of us avoid: what kind of interior life could make that possible?

From there we connect the dots to Martin Luther King Jr and the claim beneath nonviolence: absorbing violence without retaliation reveals a deeper freedom than the one swinging the club. Finally, we bring it into the present, where most of us face not an emperor but Kierkegaard’s crowd, carried around in our pockets through social media, AI, headlines, envy, and status.

If this reframes freedom for you, subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review with the line that challenged you most.

We follow a line from John 8 to the martyrs and modern public life, arguing that the deepest freedom is interior and cannot be seized by empires, systems, or the crowd. We wrestle with why non-retaliation and surrendering outcomes to God can expose the limits of power and reframe what “winning” even means.  

• Jesus’ freedom claim in John 8 and why confident people miss it  
• Slavery to sin as an internal captivity beneath status and citizenship  
• Adoption and belonging as an unrevokable foundation for freedom  
• Solzhenitsyn’s insight that power depends on leverage and fear  
• Martyr stories that invert the usual picture of defeat and victory  
• Thich Quang Duc and the question of stillness under suffering  
• Ignatius and Perpetua as witnesses to fearlessness before execution  
• Martin Luther King Jr’s nonviolence as a claim about real power  
• Kierkegaard’s warning about the crowd and the comfort of compliance  
• Chesterton, Berdyaev, and the role of limits, habits, and inner life  
• Social media and modern pressure to consume, conform, and perform  

Transcript

A Different Definition Of Freedom

SPEAKER_00 0:06

This is field notes. So this is the first of orthodoxy podcast. Welcome back to part four of Field Notes. Freedom. Part four. This is about a freedom that does not fight back.

John 8 And Slavery Within

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Before I get to the martyrs, I wanted us to look at a scene from the Gospel of John, chapter 8, because it holds this whole argument so far in just a few sentences from Jesus' own mouth. Jesus makes the most direct freedom claim in the Gospels here. He says, You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. And he makes it to people who are sure that they don't need it. They answer that they are children of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. Now, these are Jewish leaders of Jesus' day, and a people, as we know, whose founding story is an escape from slavery in Egypt. It's like they've forgotten that they were slaves in Egypt and then they were captives in Babylon and Assyria. And they're now under Roman occup occupation, as they say this. Their pedigree as children of Abraham has convinced them that they are already free. And that certainty is the deepest part of their and that certainty is the deepest part of their captivity. Jesus responds by moving slavery inside. Everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. This is everything part three was describing. The bondage that that matters that runs deeper than status or citizenship, and it can thrive in a person who would swear they are free. Then Jesus uses a household metaphor. A slave has no permanent place in the house, but a saw a son belongs forever. And then he says, If the son sets you free, you will be free indeed. The freedom he's referring to here is adoption, a place in the household that wasn't earned and cannot be revoked. A belonging that holds you before you produce anything or prove anything. So Eden was this. The covenants with Abraham and Moses were this, and that explains why the powers lose their leverage over such a person. Every tool the Empire owns works by threatening to take something away. And this person's one unlosable thing is held somewhere the Empire cannot go inside them.

When Power Loses Its Leverage

SPEAKER_00 2:57

This is this is a quote from Dostoevsky. I mean uh sorry, this is a quote from Solsenitsyn from the mouth of a character named Bobanin, who is a prisoner, addressing the Minister of State Security in his book In the First Circle. He says, You are a strong you are strong only as long as you don't take everything away from the people. Well when you robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power. He's free again. You took my freedom away long ago, and you can't give it back to me because you don't have it yourself. So he's kind of saying the same thing here that the powers lose their leverage over a person who already has what they need. Every tool the Empire owns works by threatening to take something away. And once they take everything away, you're back to free again. So the the unlosable thing in us is our soul or our interior self. And this does sound good, you know, generally to our to our ears, like, oh yeah, that sounds good. Like, or if you're in a Bible study or something. But the question is if that would survive when an empire or power is actually trying to kill you or about to kill you. The historical record contains an answer and it has been repeated for 2,000 years.

Martyrs And The Freedom To Not Fight

SPEAKER_00 4:18

I want to start with an image that most Americans, including myself, would instinctively read as the opposite of freedom. A person is arrested and given the opportunity to comply, to recant their message, to apologize, to say the words the empire wants them to say. They refuse, so they are imprisoned, sometimes tortured, brought before a crowd, and killed or executed. They never retaliate, yell, argue, or curse. They never raise a fist, let alone a weapon. And in many of these accounts they are singing praises to God. In others they are praying for the people killing them. They die having changed nothing politically, having secured nothing legally, and have won nothing from external measurements. They die as a total abject failure according to the Empire and business economics. So if our concept of freedom is only defined by the braveheart definition of freedom, then these are all a bunch of failures, catastrophes. The Empire won and the individual lost. And faith did not win, freedom was extinguished. Yet two thousand years later we still know many of their names. Something in the testimony of the martyrs keeps unsettling the assumption that the person holding the sword was the free one. We may have the image backwards. What looks like the defeat of freedom may be the fullest expression of it on we have on record. It's the seed dying and going into the ground, only later to produce a fruitful crop. Before I follow that into my tradition of faith of the general Christian tradition, but I want to mention an image that many people carry from the Buddhist world. I was first exposed to it on the cover of a Rage Against the Machine album back in 1992. And it was of a man in 1963, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk named Thick Quang Duck sat down in a busy Saigon intersection. He was doused with gasoline and set himself on fire to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. The photograph of him sitting motionless in the flames became one of the most recognizable images of the 20th century. What stopped people in their tracks was his stillness. He did not move, and he made no sound. I don't know much about him. I don't know his interior state, I don't know his theology or his motives. His act has been read as protest, as spiritual offering, or as both and as neither. I have no idea what he felt or knew, but the image itself, the image itself stirs up that reality. What does a person have to be internally to sit still in that moment? Whatever the answer is, it involves some kind of intense interior freedom. And that is why we all look at that image with some form of respect. The Christian martyr accounts give us more to work with, but we have no photos. They're much older. There are ones that have happened in the last 50 to 100 years, but we don't really get pictures of those scenes because the people perpetrating them aren't exactly documenting their atrocities. And they make a very specific claim about what was happening in those deaths. The early church watched its members go to execution with a quality of interior life that baffled their executioners. Ignatius of Antioch, being led to Rome to be killed, wrote letters along the way that read as almost embarrassingly joyful. He asked the Roman church to let it happen. He described his coming death as his true birth. Perpetua, a young North African woman martyred in 203, 203, kept a diary in prison, and it is one of the most extraordinary documents in Christian history. She describes visions and peace and a complete absence of the fear of the Roman system that was about to execute her. The night before her death, she was apparently more composed than her jailers. Her composure points at what the Roman system was actually built on. It ran on the premise that fear of death is the ultimate leverage. Threaten a person with enough suffering and enough finality and they will comply. The martyr's freedom is the discovery or the gift that this premise is false. When a person has found something worth dying for, or has found someone in whom their life is already held, the threat of death loses its organizing power, and the Empire's primary tool stops working.

MLK And Nonviolent Power

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Martin Luther King Jr. was operating from this tradition and he knew it. His nonviolence had a strategy in it. Underneath that strategy sat a theological claim. The person who absorbs violence without retaliating is demonstrating a freedom that the person swinging the club does not possess. I'm gonna say that again. It's an incredible logic. The person who absorbs violence without retaliation is demonstrating a freedom that the person swinging the club does not possess. The marchers walking into fire hoses and police batons in Birmingham were making a statement about the nature of power that no speech could have made as clearly. King understood where braveheart freedom leads. Meet force with force, and the winter the winner ends up running the same kind of empire he just tore down. The martyr's freedom breaks that cycle by refusing to operate on its terms. It meets force with a quality of interior life that force cannot touch. Obviously, this is very uncomfortable for the American imagination, including my own. Nearly every movie and song and any part of culture we have contradicts it. Everything in our formation says freedom requires the capacity to defend one, defend oneself, assert itself, and win. The martyrs point to something else. Their freedom had already surrendered the outcomes into the hands of God. It had already placed its life in hands larger than its own. So the martyr freedom earns an invisible win through faithfulness. This is the freedom that Paul is describing when he writes from prison with evident joy. This is a freedom that confused the Romans who observed the early Christian communities, and this is the freedom of the cross itself. And Jesus in Gethsemane feels real fear the night before he's about to be executed. And the gospel accounts are honest about that. He makes a choice that the martyr tradition has been trying to embody ever since. He surrenders the outcome to his father and trusts his father with what he cannot control. And in doing so, he demonstrates a freedom that all political and military power arrayed against him cannot understand.

Four Thinkers Find The Same Freedom

SPEAKER_00 11:33

Here's where this investigation took a turn I did not expect. When I went back through what I have been struck by on the podcast from Soltsanitzen and Kierkegaard, Chesterton, and Berdiev, I started noticing that all four were circling this similar concept of freedom that the martyrs had lived. Some of them knew it, maybe consciously, and some of them were kind of feeling their way to it. The shape of what they describe matches what Perpetua wrote from her prison cell and what Ignatius wrote on the road to Rome. Sulsenitsyn in the labor camp discovered that the system's primary tool, the threat of suffering, loses its power over a person who has stopped fearing it. His not through me is the same interior act the martyrs were performing. Like I will not retaliate and take up the sword. This evil is not going to come through me. Lies are not going to come through me. The gulag could take everything external, but it could not take the refusal. And that refusal he found existed in a place a system could not touch within himself. My my sense that Sultanistson arrived at his conclusions inside the same crucible that the martyrs described, the interior life, rooted in truth, that it outlasts systems that are trying to destroy it. And in the process, the system of power gets exposed for what they are, bully systems. The willingness to die without complying and without retaliation is the very thing that disarms the powers. He rarely used the language of martyrdom for this. From what I can tell, it's the same structure. Kierkegaard was writing, you know, a hundred years earlier, in a comfortable place of Copenhagen, and he was alarmed by something the martyrs would have recognized immediately. He watched people disappear into the crowd, drowning in their need for social approval, into the comfortable avoidance of any inward choice that might challenge them. He was describing the slow, painless version of the same capitulation Rome tried to extract with threats and violence. The emperor and the crowd asked for the same thing. Surrender your interior life, comply, become what we need you to be. The martyr refused the emperor's version, and Kierkegaard was calling people to refuse the crowd's version, which he considered in some ways more dangerous because it was so much more comfortable. The way I understand it, Kierkegaard's inward self, the one that stands before God alone, is the interior condition that made martyrdom possible in the first place. A martyr is an ordinary person who practiced in ordinary life exactly what Kierkegaard was describing. When the moment of ultimate pressure arrived, they already knew who they were before God, raw and with no pretense. Their center of gravity had already moved down deep into the bunker of the aligned, honest self with God alone. Chesterton's thinking was that limits and structure enable freedom. The martyr in his argument taken to its clarifying extreme. The martyr accepts the ultimate limit, which is death, and in that acceptance finds that death cannot contain the life that they have found. The structure of Christian discipleship, the habits of prayer and community and obedience built over years, turns out to be exactly the formation that holds under pressure. Heroic willpower arriving at the last moment plays no part in it. The composure is the fruit of a life shaped by the right things over a long time. And to Burdiv, who liked to talk about freedom. He claimed that it preceded being, that the interior life of a person can never be fully reached or destroyed by external systems. And his claim gets its strongest demonstration in the gladiator arena. The martyr is Burdiv's argument made flesh. The Empire reaches for its deepest lever, the deepest lever it has, the threat of annihilation, and finds that the interior life of this person is already located outside of that jurisdiction. It's almost like a rightly aligned human soul says to the president or the emperor, sorry, you have no authority in here. That testimony has repeated across the centuries, and political systems have been shocked by it every time. So were these four consciously drawing on the martyr tradition? I don't know. Solsenitsyn was rooted in Russian Orthodoxy and he knew the martyr tradition from the inside. As he understood it, the gulag placed him in a long line of witnesses who had discovered the same thing under similar conditions. He most likely knew what he was standing in. Berdiev was also formed by the Russian Orthodox Church, engaged the martyr tradition directly, and from what I can understand, his philosophy of freedom was partly an attempt to articulate in formal terms what the martyrs had demonstrated in practice. Kierkegaard, more complicated. I will not pretend to have him fully understood at all. He was often in deep and English dialogue with his own tradition, and he knew the martyr accounts. His main concern was the interior life of the ordinary person in comfortable modernity. He took the same logic and applied it in psychology and normal life. Chesterton is the one who makes it fun. He converted to Catholicism and knew the martyr tradition well, and his writing on freedom comes at it through joy and structure, and many times with humor and laughter. And he was describing the same interior condition the others are, but usually from a sunnier side of things. So if we step back far enough, what we have here is four independent witnesses arriving at the same place from different directions. So that convergence is kind of what I was feeling in the podcast, recognizing them talking about a different depth or dimension of freedom that I wasn't really seeing. So that convergence itself is kind of a certain type of evidence. We have a Soviet prisoner, a Danish philosopher, an English journalist, and a Russian exile all pressing hard on the failures of modern freedom or the modern conception of freedom. And all four of them are describing something that sounds like a what a young woman wrote from a Carthage prison cell in the year 203. So the martyrs never wrote a theory on freedom, they just had a life of faith and community. They had a practice of prayer and scripture and a shared table that had formed them over years towards something the empire couldn't get at. And when it came for them, they found out what they had what they had could not be taken. That is the freedom this whole series has been moving towards, the freedom of a person whose interior life is already held beyond the jurisdiction of any system, empire, or crowd.

Escaping The Crowd In Your Pocket

SPEAKER_00 18:32

And the crowd is the version most of us will face currently, at least in America. No emperor is currently demanding that we recant. The pressure in our day arrives through Kierkegaard's crowd, carrying it in our carrying carrying it in our pockets. Social media, AI, political headlines, pressure to consume, the endless envy and status of it all. Asking all day for the same surrender the Emperor wanted. Consume, comply, conform. Become what the system needs you to be. An interior life held beyond all that has become the rare thing. The necessary one. From the outside, freedom can look like hiding, obscurity, or going off the grid. Maybe we have to venture out digitally, financially, politically, culturally, out of the crowd. The people who lived it showed there was another way. And some of them singing all the way to the end.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

No cruise yet conveyed to leave the dream.