We were talking about the problem of evil. I always get excited when I think about that. I hope it's obvious that I'm not excited by evil itself. What excites me, though, is how belief in Christianity talks about the problem, and offers a reasonable, transformative, wonderful solution.
So why is freedom linked in my mind to evil? Good question. I have always thought that free will, as I've understood it, meant the freedom to choose between right and wrong. But, if you haven't noticed, it's impossible to choose good all the time. If you believe in any sort of morality, you admit there is a standard by which you live by. And if I gave you any length of time, you, just like I, would fail to live up to your standard--even the one you've created, even if you lowered it just about as low as you could without violating a basic conscience.
The Bible gives an explanation. It, claiming to be God's truth revealed, says that this is the problem of a bent will and nature--because, in the beginning, humans deliberately chose "the knowledge of good and evil" over obedient worship of their Creator. It was a grasp at autonomy, an attempt to be gods, which led to the promised distortion and corruption of everything created. Humanity went from being free to choose between good and evil, to being only able to choose evil. Even when we try to do good, it's for the wrong reasons, or it's not out of love for God, because with our bent wills and minds we cannot choose to love God.
The interesting thing is, we think we are free! It's the lie the serpent told Adam and Eve in the garden: that if we claimed autonomy, we would be free to be like God, to know both good and evil. The truth in that statement is that we do know both good and evil now, but it is a curse, not a liberation. We are free--yes--but only to do evil, with evil intents and self-aggrandizing motives. We suppress knowledge of the truth, and keep trying to work our way out of the mess.
So then we ask, "Why is there so much evil in the world? Why are there wars? Why do people rape innocent children? Why do families break apart? Why are people consumed by addictions? Why do wonderful old women lose their power to remember and reason through terrible diseases like Alzheimer's?" We long then, to be free of evil! We'd hate to think that we had any role in its corruption of creation. We curse God, but we don't see that even we are enslaved to evil, through a human's free choice.
The Judeo-Christian Scriptures acknowledge the suffering and the longing for a "restoration" of "the way things were supposed to be," but they go even further. They claim that there is a plan to make things even better than it was in the beginning. That there will come a day when there will no longer be sickness and sorrow, no more wars or famines or droughts or tsunamis or earthquakes or mudslides or Alzheimer's, no more divorce or alcoholism, no more rape, no more massacres--in a word, no more evil.
The promise is, because God has defeated evil through Jesus' voluntary submission to punishment for all of our guilt, and rose from the dead, even defeating death, we can once again be free: to choose between good and evil, between being who we were created to be, in right relationship with the Creator, and that autonomous grasp that leaves us with fists of air and hearts of stone.
But better than that, the promise is that when we accept Jesus' payment for our guilt and corruption, we are identified with him, and will also defeat death with him. And on that day, we will experience a different freedom: a freedom to choose from any range of good, but only good, without any stain of evil or injustice or corruption or sickness or death.
We think we are free because we can make choices, to obey or disobey, but we don't realize that we are slaves to our corrupt nature. We think we are free because we know good and evil; on that day, we will be free from everything that causes us sorrow, all our longings will be set free in actuality.
That's a kind of freedom I can get excited about.
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