We are co-creators with God: freedom is a gift, not to be rejected

Any flight from freedom denies our God-given personhood.

We fear freedom like the nestling fears flight. So, we flee from our God-given freedom in various ways. We have already discussed the temptation to declare every event the will of God, a declaration that is neither healthy nor biblical. Another way is to render ourselves automata by subjecting every decision to a divine mandate. In this way, we need not decide because God has already decided for us. The controlling God tells us how to worship, what to wear, what to eat, what to read, whom to marry, and where to live.

Such automaticity meets certain needs: fearing accountability, we avoid all decision. Fearing the expanse, we stay on the narrowest of narrow paths. The retreat into automatized activity frees us from the terrifying responsibility of choice, but this retreat is a tactical failure. No flow chart, no matter how ancient or intricate, can negotiate this infinite universe.

Our cosmos purposefully overflows all efforts at intellectual control. We cannot be an automaton within an algorithm, or a puppet under a puppeteer, because God doesn’t want us to. God wants us to think, choose, act, and accept responsibility for our actions. God wants us to be persons to whom our personal God can relate. And for us to be persons, God must deny us any automatic decision-making process within which we could hide our personhood. God must deny us certainty and grant us ambiguity.

Without complexity and freedom we would not possess consciousness.

The algorithm-defying infinity of the cosmos also forbids us any resort to pure instinct—reflexive, predetermined, unexamined responses to situations. Instinct works for ants but not for people. The world simply presents our brain with too much information to immediately know the most profitable course of action. Instead, we must deliberate: gather missing information, consider our principles, imagine different outcomes, evaluate which outcomes are desirable, solicit the advice and insight of others, and finally, always prematurely, decide.

So complex is this process that our brains have evolved the best tool for such analysis: consciousness. Recognizing the danger of simplistic instinct in a hypercomplex world, consciousness interrupts our automaticity. It allows us to survey an expanse of options and think before we act. Through this demanding process we can make the better decision, which is almost never the first instinct.

There is no freedom with certainty, and no freedom without ambiguity. The reflexive certainty provided by strict legalism or brute instinct may free us from self-doubt, but would deprive us of both freedom and consciousness. Tragically, our thirst for certainty is a thirst for escape from our God-given condition, the ability to create freely, which was always intended as a gift.

We find evidence for this gift in the very directability of the universe, our capacity to co-create the future, with God. The present is contingent—it need not be, it could have been otherwise, had persons in the past made different decisions. The worst historical tragedies could have been prevented by more noble human efforts. And the future is unwritten because we coauthor the cosmic drama with God. We are both the playwrights and the actors, and we perform best when we understand that God is love. (Adapted from The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology by Jon Paul Sydnor, pages 117-118)

For further reading, please see:

Erich Fromm. Escape from Freedom. New York: Holt, 1994.