to the surprising action of God in their future.
The heart of religion, in this context at least, may be thought of as hope for an “absolute future.” Such hope is not a renunciation of the reality principle if it turns out that the substance of reality lies in the future rather than in the present or the past. There is no evidence that the present and the past exhaust the limits of reality. It may be that the “really real” lies up ahead and that our historical existence is only a fragmentary and inadequate anticipation of this future. Our anticipation of the fullness of reality would then take the form of imagining the future in such a way as to allow for its entrance into the present. A certain kind of adventurous dreaming would be the way in which we would follow the Freudian imperative to “face reality.” A failure to construct creative visions that motivate us to action and usher in the future would be a refusal to be realistic. And if the fullness of God’s being is essentially future, then realistic religion consists in the hopeful and imaginative quest for this future.
25. The following text is an excerpt. Previously published in Haught, What is God?, 25–46. Reprinted with permission.
26. Haught paraphrases Tillich, substituting the term “future” for depth. The expression “absolute future” comes from Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, 59–68
27. See Moltmann, Theology of Hope.
28. See Williams, True Resurrection, 178–79.
29. See Williams, True Resurrection, 178–79.
30. See Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 19–36.
31. See Freud, Future of an Illusion.
3: Freedom32
Very few words evoke as much positive sentiment as “freedom.” At the same time, few words are more difficult to define. Politicians, philosophers, psychologists, and theologians have all discussed the term. And yet, after hearing what they have to say about it, we are still left with the question: what exactly is freedom? One is tempted to paraphrase Saint Augustine’s famous lament about his inability to spell out the meaning of time: if no one asks me what freedom is, then I know what it is; but if someone asks me, then I do not know. Freedom can be rendered intuitively vivid through symbols, myths, and stories of heroic struggles for “emancipation” or “liberation.” And the sense of freedom is concretized in actually living and acting rather than by reading or writing a book. Any conceptual or theoretical attempt to say what freedom is risks becoming shallow and abstract, and there is a good chance it will partially warp our immediate grasp of the meaning of the term. Nonetheless, perhaps some insight can be gained from a theoretical study of the idea of freedom. After all, just as Augustine could not refrain from telling us what time is, so it is forgivable if we also attempt to speak conceptually about freedom. We know the extent to which ideas have contributed to the formation of our history. Certainly, our experience of freedom in the Western world has been shaped significantly by bold ideas that, in turn, motivated people to work for liberation from various forms of oppression. It is not entirely out of place, therefore, to discuss the idea of freedom in a theoretical way.
What, then, is freedom? As with our intuition of time, we all have an immediate or “naive” grasp of the meaning of “freedom.” The same is true of our experience of depth and futurity. We feel them, we dwell in them, and we sense their presence or absence in various degrees. But we cannot objectify them. We cannot hold them out before us in a controlling fashion such as science attempts to do with the objects of its study. We know them more in the mode of being grasped by them than by actually grasping them ourselves. Or we know them in the mode of fleeing from them. The same is also true of our understanding of freedom. We know what it is only if we have been grasped by it—or, in a negative sense, if we have fled from it. If we try to lay hold of it ourselves, it slips away from us. Our approach to it must therefore be somewhat indirect; we should not ever expect to have a perfectly clear intellectual grasp of what it is.
There are three ways in which philosophers have typically dealt with the notion of freedom. One way is to understand freedom as something we have, another as something we are, and yet another as something that has us. The first approach views freedom as one of our faculties, the one whereby we make “free choices” among various alternatives that are offered to us. The ability to make free choices is certainly an important aspect of freedom, but free choice is not coextensive with freedom as we shall understand it here. The second approach, exemplified in an extreme way by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, views freedom as the very essence of human existence. In this view, human reality is freedom in the negative sense, as not being determined by anything beyond itself and, in the positive sense of the creative source of our very identities.33 This position that we are freedom would be acceptable if we understood freedom as finite and not as absolute in the sense given by Sartre. To say that we are finite freedom is one important way to understand our nature. However, even this second meaning does not give us the depth toward which the word freedom points. For that reason, I shall dwell hereafter on a third meaning of the term. Freedom, in the deepest sense, is something that takes hold of us, not something that we can manipulate ourselves. Moreover, we owe our freedom to choose (freedom in the first sense) as well as the freedom of our finite existence (freedom in the second sense) to our participating in the encompassing freedom (in the third sense) of which I shall speak in the present chapter. Freedom in the third and most substantive sense is the “ground” of freedom in the first two instances.
If we reflect on some very obvious aspects of our experience, as we have done in the previous two chapters, we shall observe that freedom is most appropriately understood as the comprehensive horizon of our existence, rather than as something we possess or, as Jean-Paul Sartre has proposed, something that coincides with our individual existence. As in the case of depth and futurity, freedom, in the sense of something that grasps us, is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. We shrink from it in fear that we will be lost in its embrace and, at the same time, we long for it passionately, intuiting that our personal fulfillment consists of our eventually surrendering to it. We long for the freedom that coincides with our absolute future, but, at the same time, we are reluctant to allow it into our present life.
In order to illustrate concretely the ambivalence of our relationship to freedom, let us look especially at the experience of coming to grips with our own personal identities. Have there been times when we came up to the point of knowing that we really are not fully definable in terms of our immediate surroundings? Have we, on some occasions, realized that the opinion others have of us simply does not adequately indicate what we know ourselves to be? Such moments hold open to us the possibility of our entering into a whole new way of existing; and yet, we usually revert to the typical routine of allowing past patterns of others’ expectations to determine how we view ourselves. Psychoanalysis, though controversial in many respects, at least deserves our admiration for showing us how our early family life unconsciously accompanies us and shapes our attitudes throughout our lives. Many of us can go through an entire lifetime without ever questioning the familial patterns of expectation that gave us our earliest orientation in the world. Because of the power and authority of these familial patterns, any attempt we make at an alternative self-definition may be accompanied by an agonizing sense of guilt and betrayal.
It is instructive to examine the sense of uneasiness that often accompanies the act of departing from the expectations that we think others have imposed upon us. At
