Freedom? Or bondage masquerading as freedom?

Finally, as regards positive freedom, a word about capacitation or enablement. In the thrall of sin and death, we are not free to love God, to love creation, to love others, or even to love ourselves rightly. We are dead in the condition of sin, and only God’g Word and God’s Spirit can raise us to life and fulsome agency. Resurrection, I have said, is exclusively God’s business, so it is only in the Spirit that we are freed for love in all its forms and directions. Through Word and Spirit, we are enabled and given the capacity to love.

Consider an alcoholic turned loose in a liquor store and given free rein to drink whatever and as much as he would like. He has full, but only negative, freedom, in that he is not forbidden any bottle in the store. But he is a slave to his impulses or compulsion. As Alcoholics Anonymous would have it, he needs a “higher power” for true freedom, the freedom not to drink but to live free of bondage and addiction.

Likewise, we are all addicted to sin. It is the Holy Spirit that can give us the capacity not to sin. Our final and fullest freedom, as Augustine would have it, is the freedom not even to be able to sin, but only to love. This is freedom for—freedom for love of God, of creation, of others, and truly of ourselves. Such freedom is what the apocalyptic gospel promises.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 85