THE PROBLEM WITH AUTONOMY.

Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you….  if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed”.

John 8:34-36

“I will arise and go to my father”

Luke 15:18

The Heart as a Home

Round about 2013 I became obsessed with Dr Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory. He featured heavily in every talk I gave that year. You may recall that there was one particular seat in Sheldon’s apartment that only he could use. “That is my spot” was a recurring motif in the sitcom. He once explained the importance of the seat like this: “That is my spot. In an ever-changing world, it is a simple point of consistency. If my life were expressed as a function in a four-dimensional Cartesian system, that spot, at the moment I first sat upon it, would be [0,0,0,0]”. 

Sheldon’s spot represents an interesting idea. It’s the concept of a core resting place. Perhaps it represents the feeling of being home. I once spent a few days clearing out my study. At the bottom of a pile of old papers, I discovered an ancient love letter which I had written to my wife. Now do not be alarmed. I have no intention of releasing its contents into the public domain. But I will share with you the circumstances in which the letter was written.

I spent a great deal of my adult life travelling in business. I found myself in London nearly every week, or further afield in places like the US, or India. And in April 2004, I had spent the day in Canary Wharf in the east of London. I was due to speak somewhere in Hertfordshire the following day. Ignoring the sound advice of my colleagues, I decided to get a direct train to my destination, using the attractively named Silverlink Metro service to Watford Gap. I left the Docklands, with its trendy apartments, expensively paved walkways and abstract sculptures, and boarded the Silverlink Metro. The train was unspeakably dirty. Cushions had been ripped off, and it was difficult to find a seat not covered in ancient gum. There were 18 stations on the way to my destination. All I could see through the grimy windows was a run-down inner-city landscape. Even the people around me looked tired and hopeless, like figures made from wax. The doors slid shut, and off we lurched in sullen silence through graffiti-ridden tunnels. 

Now I appreciate that this all sounds like the stage directions for a play by Samuel Beckett. But as each station came and went, I found my mind wandering to a very different place. I thought about a specific house in East Belfast. It was the sort of house that you would drive by without a second glance. But it mattered to me because it was my home.

I finally escaped from Hertfordshire. I made the usual journey from Heathrow to Belfast City Airport, paid the extortionate fees to liberate my car from the car park, and drove up to my home. If you had witnessed that scene you would have dismissed it as an unremarkable moment. Just a man lifting suitcases out of his car, standing in the driveway, smiling back at a girl leaning against the door frame. 

Not all of us can regard our home life as a source of security and intimacy. Some homes are filled with anger or coldness. Those who live alone know what it is like to drive home and have to switch on the lights for ourselves. 

But even those who do have a warm home life know that it cannot bear the weight of ultimate meaning. When it comes to the deep questions of life we instinctively know that no human relationship, no matter how precious and intimate, can be our [0,0,0,0]. Human relationships are too fragile and temporal to carry that sort of freight.

Christianity has an answer to the problem. The Bible argues that the human heart was designed to be a home. But who lives in it? Well, one evening the Lord Jesus Christ was having supper with His disciples and he said to them: “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them”. 

When someone becomes a Christian, the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit of God, takes up residence within their personality. And He builds first person, subjective knowledge of God into their hearts. It was always the Creator’s intention that He should live in intimate fellowship with the creatures He had made in His own image. Our sin ruined all that, of course. But Christ came to restore a trusting relationship between God and us. We can become sons and daughters of God. We can know our Father in heaven as the core resting place around which every human life should grow. When the Triune God takes up residence in a human heart, He becomes our [0,0,0,0]. 

How Freedom Develops in our Lives

Well, you are probably thinking, the idea of the heart as a home shared with God is interesting, but it seems completely irrelevant to a discussion about autonomy.

So let’s consider the Christian understanding of freedom. The Bible treats us as morally responsible agents, creatures endowed with the ability to self-reflect and then to choose. (By that, I mean that we have been given the power to do otherwise, within the constraints imposed by a sovereign God). So far, so good. However, the critical insight Christianity brings to this conversation is that the greatest opponents to true freedom are internal. They exist within ourselves. A toddler thinks it is free when a giant bowl of ice cream is left unattended – there is nothing to prevent the child from getting what it wants. But the toddler has not yet developed the internal power to do otherwise. True freedom, says the Bible, comes when we have developed the moral capabilities needed to forge a truly authentic, unique and substantial life. We are only free when there are no internal deficiencies, or external barriers, that prevent us from maximising our ability to flourish as creatures made in God’s image.

That can be a tough concept for the modern mind to grasp, because we instinctively define freedom as the mere absence of external constraints. In Biblical thought, freedom is like a possibility space that grows as our souls develop. A baby is not free to run. It must first develop a whole set of capabilities before the joy of playing football in the park can be experienced. If I want the freedom to play a Mozart piano concerto, I must first develop a whole set of technical skills. When it comes to the business of living, someone with a mature soul has much greater freedom than an immature, petulant teenager who is imprisoned by her own narcissism. 

An obvious question arises: how is a freedom like this achieved? Well, freedom is a bit like a home-baked cake. (I can only apologise to followers of the Equip Project Podcast for resurrecting this appalling metaphor). To make a cake, you need to (a) use the right ingredients, and (b) diligently follow the right recipe. Let’s think about those two success factors in turn.

In Christian thought, no one can build a mature soul on their own (despite what Jordan Peterson preaches). We need the basic ingredients of God’s light and life. One of the most famous paintings ever constructed is by Holman Hunt. He produced a painting called the Light of the World. It pictures the Saviour knocking on the door of someone’s heart. The door is covered in ivy, and there is no handle on the outside. The door of the human heart can only be opened from the inside. Christ will never invade your personality by sheer force. He won’t bang the door or kick it in. All you will hear is a polite knock. “Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me”. That is an invitation to open the heart to the light of truth, to trust it. In that moment, the heart becomes infused with God’s life. So the basic ingredients we need in order to develop freedom are Divine light and Divine life.

However, that is only half the story. God has revealed a design plan for his creatures, a blueprint that maximises human flourishing. Having welcomed the light of Christ into our hearts, the Christian knows that God has her best interests at heart. She knows that God isn’t in the business of coercing or manipulating her. So she makes the free choice to abide by the design plan because the light of Christ has engendered faith in the Designer. (On this point Christianity avoids the mistake made by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who made an extraordinary effort to derive a ‘design plan’ for living purely from Reason. He failed because Reason is not the Light. Its job is to respond with integrity to the Light).

So we are now in a position to define what I’ll call Biblical freedom. We are contingent creatures who have been endowed with personal agency. But that definition, on its own, would leave us as infants who bang a spoon until they get what they want. True freedom is developed in the home of the heart. We have to develop the freedom to live as we ought to live, because only then are we maximising our potential to flourish as creatures. If we follow God’s design plan, then His light and life will develop within us the capacities that allow us to explore the vast possibilities of a truly authentic, unique and substantial life. Our job is to follow the recipe for a mature son or daughter of God. We commit to a long obedience to God’s design plan. It is that truth, says the Lord Jesus, which will set us free. 

How Most Non-Christians Understand Freedom

Christian freedom is a quality which develops in the heart when the heart becomes a home that we share with our Creator and Redeemer. The modern mind is not attracted to that Christian vision. In fact, we can feel threatened by it. A lot of people today, if they were being blunt, would say that they find the Biblical view to be distasteful. Surely there is something more noble, and interesting, in striking out on our own rather than yielding to some cosmic authority figure. The Prodigal Son in Luke 15 certainly thought so; he thought that home birds lacked ambition. In technical language, we have become enthralled by the idea of being autonomous. 

Freedom has come to be regarded in our society as something of ultimate value. Just think about Critical Theory - the big stories it tells about post colonialism, or feminism, or the LGBT community. All those stories follow the same arc. I’m not saying anything about their validity; I’m just making the point that they all follow the same trajectory. Each story starts in the prison house of some repressive social institution. It might be an overt prison like slavery. Or it might be a set of ideas like a heteropatriarchy. But slaves, women and gay people all tell a similar story. It’s the story of an escape into the glories of personal freedom. 

I find it downright weird that our society attributes ultimate value to freedom, because the atheistic scientism on which this culture is founded insists that we live in a deterministic universe. Listen to voices from the hard sciences and you’ll be told that you are just a clump of atoms living in a chemically determined universe. Your sense of personal agency is an illusion. There is no such thing as freedom. 

However, it is the humanities which are driving our culture at the moment. Listen to their voices and you’ll be taught that freedom is the essence of being human. But now freedom is defined as the freedom to create the basic values which give meaning to life. Provided I don’t cause harm to anyone else, then I can do whatever I want to do, because I get to create moral values for myself. I am sovereign over what is right and wrong. Modern philosophy takes this freedom to its inevitable destination: not only can I do whatever I decide to do, I can be whatever I want to be. No one, not even God, is allowed to thwart my right to self-creation. I am a self-sufficient being who doesn’t carry any pre-loaded essence as a created thing. I create my own Self. And no sacred Scripture or metaphysical authority figure can tell me what I ought to do. 

I’m going to call our culture’s dominant view of freedom autonomy. (The concept of autonomy has evolved significantly over the centuries, so I’m using it in the modern sense of the term). 

Contrasting the Worldviews: a story about trees

To help us contrast the two views of freedom, I would ask you to construct a mental image inside your head. Imagine that two pictures are hanging on a wall beside each other. Both pictures are of a tree. The first tree is described in Psalm 1. This tree is planted by streams of water. It yields fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. So that’s the first tree. The second one is described to us by the Apostle Jude. This tree is fruitless and uprooted. It is twice dead, says Jude. Now here’s the question. Which tree has the greater freedom? Is the tree of Psalm 1 more or less free than the tree described by Jude?

Well, you say, that depends on what you mean by freedom. If freedom is simply about having no constraints, if we define it as an escape from manipulative, self-distorting influences, then Jude’s tree is the freer one. But if freedom means living according to a design plan which maximises flourishing then the tree of Psalm 1 has freedom while the uprooted one just has the freedom to rot and die. It is free from the very soil that was intended to nourish it. In Acts 17, the Apostle Paul is addressing an audience of Greek philosophers, and he says that God is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’. That’s an interesting way to describe the relationship between God and one of his creatures. God is seen as the source of spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic nourishment for the human soul. 

Perhaps you think that my analogy is deeply unfair. Well, it is unfair only if, as autonomous beings, we have inside ourselves all the resources we need to live. Our culture gives a triumphant thumbs-up to that idea. But consider the enormous demands that the rejection of contingent creaturehood places on the human heart. 

We are called to Self-create – to imagine, and then fashion, a Self which we present to the world as a piece of performative art. To construct a Self like this, we begin with introspection. Our imaginations then process our deepest desires to produce a vision of ourselves that we then project to the world outside. 

We are called to an even greater task: we must generate our own truth about existence. Truth – in the sense of ultimate reality - must now emerge from within, generated from the deepest convictions I find within my own heart. I then have to take this imaginative construct and project it on to the blank canvass of a materialistic Universe that has no intrinsic value or meaning. I must be the light of the world. 

The pursuit of autonomy is the most daring plan ever devised. It turns out that, once we insist on being the [0,0,0,0] of reality, we end up taking on the role of God. As someone once promised Eve, “you shall be as God”.

The Problem with Autonomy

Well, I don’t know about you, but when I look deep down into my own heart, I don’t find much that could produce a substantial soul. There isn’t much in there from which a morally admirable Self could be built. And any attempt to construct and project truth just feels completely arbitrary. In fact, introspection reveals nothing except a lot of narcissism, deep wells of self-pity, and oceans of downright ignorance. Raw materials like that might allow me to knock up some sort of idolatrous image, but they will never produce anything of real substance. To use a word that seems to have been deleted from public discourse - our inner resources are not sufficient to build character. 

The damage done by autonomy is obvious at both personal and societal levels. A great deal of the current mental health crisis can be explained by the failure of Self creation. Does anyone seriously think that expressive individualism is going to build perseverance, gratitude and kindness into a teenager’s character? But without character, we remain as spoiled infants who howl and stamp their feet when they don’t get instant gratification of their desires.

We find even more narcissistic rage when we enter the political sphere. Just think about the Twitter wars, the virtue signalling, and the cancel culture that infects the lives of young adults today. I suggest that this phenomenon can be partially explained by the failure of Self creation. We have taught a generation that they can be whatever they want to be. All they need do is dream; But then reality bites. So what happens when we discover that we can’t be whatever we want to be? Rather than having a grown-up conversation about life’s real goals, the infantile followers of Autonomy run into the arms of Critical Theory. My dreams are unrealised because I’m trapped within an oppressive social structure. Every single problem I face is laid at the feet of the oppressor group in society. The pernicious victimhood which Critical Theory sells is the drug people use to excuse the failure of their Self creation project.

We have produced a generation that is unconcerned with character. We’ve trained their brains; we’ve told them to listen to their visceral desires; but we’ve poured scorn on the development of a character that can discipline our cerebral and our visceral life. CS Lewis talked about “men without chests”. In his utterly brilliant book called The Abolition of Man, he says: "In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

Coming Home

T S Eliot once wrote a poem called the hollow men. You probably learned it at school. It describes the horror of men who have no centre. They huddle together like scarecrows in a field, unable to interact with anything other than physical stuff.

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

It turns out that autonomy can only build hollow men. As a result, life feels like my train journey on the Silverlink Metro. A collection of childish little gods journey through a blank, meaningless, Universe. We travel alone together, lurching through a long succession of birthdays; one looks pretty much like the last one. And somewhere along the way, the mutuality that lies at the heart of personhood gets lost. All that is left is a wax work image.

One really haunting question remains: where is the train heading? Where does autonomy take a human being, in the long run? The Apostle Jude wrote a much darker poem than Eliot’s. Talking about the ultimate fate of autonomous people, he said: “They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever”.

Jude’s description of autonomy’s destination might seem overblown. It is not. So much of the wickedness in our society has grown out of the worship of autonomy. The unspeakably cruel act called abortion is its most poisonous fruit. Pregnancy is the ultimate act of hospitality. For nine months, a mother offers her unborn child a safe and loving home. But countless millions of healthy unborn children have been sacrificed on the altar of Autonomy. That is just one example of the wickedness spawned by Autonomy. Its sins are legion. And so, when the train reaches its final destination, autonomy’s cruel children will be handed over to experience the consequences of their own choice. They will be eternally free. Doomed to wander like burned-out stars, free from the gravitational pull of love. Free from the orbit of our Father’s loving home. 

In contrast, Christianity offers a view of reality that is attractive and sane. Christians refuse to board a train that leads inevitably to self-destruction. We see no conflict between freedom and being at home. There is no trade-off between ambition and being a son or daughter of God. The Prodigal Son in Luke 15 discovered that his attempt to achieve autonomy led him into slavery. He only discovered true freedom - the freedom of a son - when he returned home.

The Christian’s core resting place, our [0,0,0,0], is not the Self. We have found it in the Triune God who deigns to dwell within the believer’s heart. So we can rest in that mutuality as the Gospel train pulls us to our eternal home. The purpose of our journey is to develop the capabilities, the character of a son or daughter of God, which allows us to enjoy true freedom. And one day, we will get to exercise our freedom in the infinite possibility space of the new heavens and earth. As the Lord Jesus said: “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms…. I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also”. 

When the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

Jim Crookes, July 2020