The latest issue of Christian Reflection, published by the Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University, is now available, this one devoted to the topic of freedom. The whole issue is available as a 5.0 MB pdf here, and an accompanying Study Guide is available here. The main articles are as follows:
Robert B. Kruschwitz
Introduction
Beyond popular notions of political and moral freedom – as freedom from others’ control or freedom of choice – is the deeper freedom for loving God, people, and the created order. How do resources in Scripture and Christian tradition teach us this freedom of living with God?
Richard Bauckham
Freedom and Belonging
Freedom is such a potent – even a magic – word that it can become dangerous. Indeed, some ways of understanding and practicing freedom make it destructive of community. How can resources in the Bible and Christian tradition help us construct a positive relationship between freedom and belonging?
Bruce W. Longenecker
Paul’s Assessment of Christian Freedom
In an awkward but memorable phrase, Paul declares: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” The story of Jesus Christ, as it comes to life in his followers, is a story of freedom, to be sure, but a freedom constrained by the Cross and deeply at odds with individualistic notions of liberty.
Scott Bader-Saye
Authority, Autonomy, and the Freedom to Love
We should be critical of the modern idolatry of autonomy even as we continue to be skeptical about unchecked authority. But if freedom as detachment does not produce real freedom and if authority as coercion only feeds resentment, what alternative vision can the Church offer?
Jason D. Whitt
The Baptist Contribution to Liberty
Any contemporary view of religious freedom that isolates and internalizes faith is contrary to the freedom envisioned by the early Baptists who called for religious liberty. They aimed to create a distinct people whose lives were disciplined by and bound to God and one another.
Heather Hughes
Deepening the Mystery of Freedom
As freedom becomes the single ambition that possesses Hazel Motes – the protagonist in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood – its competing definitions dramatically play out through plot twists and turns. “Freedom cannot be conceived simply,” O’Connor notes. “It is a mystery and one which a novel… can only be asked to deepen.”
William H. Willimon
Freedom
The freedom of American, democratic, popular, capitalist culture is based on the fiction of a self-constructed self. Thus, the heart of the Christian life seems a holy paradox: the more securely we are tethered to Christ, obedient to his way rather than the world’s ways, the more free we become.
Matt Cook
A Picture of Freedom
In a wilderness devoid of bread, but full of stones, we learn a powerful lesson from Christ. True freedom comes not when we can do whatever we want, when we want to do it. True freedom is not in-dependence, but in dependence.
Philip D. Kenneson
The Nature of Christian Freedom
In our “freedom”-saturated culture, we rarely consider that what Scripture and tradition mean by “freedom” may be seriously at odds with many assumptions that underwrite everyday American usage and practice. Three fine books offer insight into critical issues regarding the nature of Christian freedom.
Coleman Fannin
Being Christian in a Democratic State
Moving beyond polarizing political positions, the three books reviewed here uncouple democracy from the violent and commodifying machinery of the modern nation-state. They point toward a rich shared life in families, communities, and cities oriented toward the common good.
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