For freedom Christ has set us free; stand
firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery (Galatians 5:1 English Standard Version).
In his Letter
to the Galatians, the apostle Paul stresses that Jesus Christ is the truth who sets
us free, from the law in this case, to love and leads us into fullness of life.
In that same letter, Paul also says that Jesus frees us from the works of the
flesh (5:19) so that we might freely produce the fruit of the Holy Spirit
(5:22).
So, on one
hand, we have the works of the flesh. We have the labors of our Olympian personality done because enticed or coerced by the Flesh or Unholy Spirit. On
the other hand, we have the fruit of the Spirit. We have the vital words and actions of
our Christian personality made possible only by the Holy Spirit.
In his book, The Ethics of Freedom, Jacques Ellul
elaborates on this theme of freedom from works and for fruitfulness. Speaking
of our Olympian personality, Ellul states, “So long as we are in bondage to the
world and Satan, God’s will can be translated into our lives only by the
constraint of the law” (p. 109). The law, or any moral code, keeps our Olympian
behavior checked by rewarding or punishing us as needed to secure our
conformity to it. That all changes with our Christian personality. “Once we are
freed from this bondage, God’s will is expressed in our freedom” (109). Free
acts are done without hope of reward or fear of punishment.
“The idea of
work suggests an effort of will directed to a goal and building bit by bit.
Fruit, however, suggests the rise of sap, the freedom of nature, the generosity
of gift, effortless expression on the part of the fruit-bearing tree” (109).
Olympian works are done out of a sense of duty, obligation, or necessity. Christian fruits spontaneously express our right relationship with Jesus, others, and creation.
Works and
fruits: how to tell the difference? “Fruit does not have to be concretely and
objectively different from work” (110). A beggar receives money from someone
passing by. Was that a work or a fruit? There’s no quantitative way of knowing.
“Nevertheless, the qualitative rather than the quantitative is what constitutes
the human relation” (110). So freedom “has no incontestable signs…Only the
personal relation can perceive this secret quality” (110). Or as Paul says, it’s
not one’s relationship to a moral code that matters; “the only thing that
counts is faith [one’s relationship with Jesus] made effective through love
[one’s relationship with others]” (Galatians 5:6).
So we may have
words and actions that conform to a biblically-based moral code. “Education,
social pressures, and cultural assimilation can produce acts that conform to
what is regarded as good…We need only refer to the serious Pharisaic
development of the law, the exercises of Ignatius Loyola, and the pastoral use
of psychological techniques such as non-directive pedagogy or group dynamics.
All these aim at good conduct, but unfortunately the result is not Christian since it is not evoked by [110] freedom and does not express it”
(110-111). Instead, our words and actions simply fall “back again into
morality, into dull virtue, into a list, a Decalogue, constraint, and the
computation of merits” (111).
In his Letter
to the Galatians, Paul lists some of the fruit of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control (5:22-23). By the power
of the Holy Spirit, our Christian personality is freed to relate to other human
beings and the rest of God’s good creatures in these fruitful ways. Our
Olympian personality, even when imitating these qualities in conformity to a
moral code, just can’t and won’t relate to others in the same qualitative way.
This is one
reason why our churches are dying. First, we understand discipleship to mean
conformity to a moral code. Ours works in conformity to it matter more than the
quality of our relationships with the other members of our congregations.
Second, in our
minds, we wrongly imagine our moral-code conformity to be greater than that of others
within the congregation let alone the great unwashed outside of it. We then mistakenly feel that this gives
us the right to look down on others and them the obligation to look up to us
and do as we tell them.
Finally, the
moral codes we hurtfully use to measure our relative importance against other members of
our churches are only mediocre variations of our larger society’s Olympian
moral code. Consequently, what do Olympian people living outside of our churches, or Christian witnesses cast out of them, have to gain by joining us? Nothing of qualitative
significance.
(Today we
reflected on The Ethics of Freedom by
Jacques Ellul [translated by Geoffrey Bromiley, published by Eerdmans, 1976,
pp. 108-112]).
Copyright © 2015 by Steven Farsaci.
All rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.
All rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.
