A month or so ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Christian Postgraduate Conference in Dovedale, Derbyshire, at which Edith Reitsma from L’Abri Fellowship England and Alister McGrath, writer of many books including The Dawkins Delusion, were speaking. I’m starting my masters in September, but might as well get started early in thinking about how my faith and my studies will relate!
One of the many fascinating people I met on the conference was Anthony Smith, who is a PhD researcher in Astronomy. He also writes a blog, and just drew attention to a talk entitled “The Sound of Freedom” by Jeremy Begbie on freedom and faith from the Veritas Forum, drawing on the analogy of music. Another talk for my ever-expanding queue to listen to on my mp3 player, then!
Anthony’s introduction to the talk is as follows:
We tend to think that if we allow God into our lives, in the way that the Christian message suggests that we should, then that will make less room for ourselves. That is, there is a certain amount of “space” in my life, and the more God enters that “space”, the more I get shoved out. So to become a Christian is to diminish my freedom.
But this isn’t the only way of looking at things. Drawing heavily on the analogy of music, Begbie presents a much more enriching and appealing perspective on how the presence of God in my life affects my own freedom.
This reminded me of another analogy of how rules bring freedom: God’s will is like good grammar for our lives.
In language, it’s only by having a shared set of grammatical rules that we can communicate to each other. Language free from grammar isn’t really free, it’s nonsense. But the rules of grammar give us a framework through which we have the freedom to express our thoughts; there are virtually no limits to what can be said through language.
Of course, grammar isn’t rigid and unchanging. If you know the rules well, then you can break them in creative ways – for example, the statement that “Verbing weirds language”. But such variations depend on knowing the conventions of grammar, and understanding how they are being departed from. To make sense of the above phrase, you actually need a very sophisticated understanding of grammar; it only works, in fact, because it is still obeys the rules of grammar at a deeper level. And language changes and develops over time, of course, but still relying on shared rules and conventions. In short, you need the structure of grammar to give freedom of speech.
The same principle, that form and freedom go together, has much wider applications. I think it’s helpful to think of God’s will for our lives less like a fixed text, and more like a grammar that governs our lives, but within which we have great freedom and creativity. This grammar for life is what the Bible calls “wisdom”.
Often we think of God’s will as something fixed and monolithic – there is only one right answer. That may be true in some situations, but I think that often we are free to choose between equally valid options. What matters in such cases in not so much what we choose, as how we choose it – do we do so prayerfully, bringing our choices to God, not necessarily to find the One Right Answer, but rather to learn from him the habits of love and humility, passion and commitment, that he wants to develop in us. God’s will does not constrict our freedom and the expression of our humanity, but is their basis and fullness.
Or as the Psalmist put it far more poetically:
How sweet are your words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth!
Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light for my path.