Randy Alcorn has done the world a favour again and encouraged us to have a look at an interview Os Guinness to the Acton Institute some years ago. You can of course go straight to the interview. Yet I would still encourage you to check Randy’s three-part blog covering No Freedom Without Truth in part one, The Call to Follow Christ in part two and ending with Morality, Markets and the Audience of One in part three.
Os Guiness is one of my favourite writers and thinkers. I had the privilege of reading The Call some years ago and it has been a hugely influential book in me own spiritual development.
So go ahead read the articles and then the article itself.
I want to bring your attention to a question asked in part one about whether it’s a case of freedom from or freedom to and applaud Guinness’ reference to a paraphrase of Lord Acton. The whole quote reads as follows:
Paraphrasing Lord Acton, “Freedom is not the permission to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.” The trouble is that, today, freedom is purely negative: freedom from parents, from teachers, from the police, and so on. We have lost sight of it as freedom to be that which we can be or ought to be. We need to recover the idea that, as Lord Acton stressed wisely and as the present pope has written of so well, freedom is the power to do what we ought. That assumes, however, we know the truth of who we are and what we ought to do. That is the freedom the modern secular liberal tends to forget.
The world would be a radically different place if those who upheld the value of liverty and freedom used this as their definition. Of course the individual human autonomous independent spirit prefers the negative perspective of freedom because then it reinforces the ‘you can’t tell me what to do’ mentality that informs many people’s concept of freedom. That’s unfortunate, but at least there is a better version of freedom that is far more informative and life enhancing.
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
dmcd
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