Two Contrasting Structures of “The Two Meanings
of Liberty:”
An Essay on Political Theology
Douglas B. Olds
August 2023 (Updated April 2026)
[N.B. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]
Abstract
This essay contrasts two foundational structures of liberty: one grounded in a Christological-conative paradigm, and the other in Isaiah Berlin’s secular-liberal model. Whereas Berlin frames liberty as permissive self-direction within pluralistic toleration, Christology redefines liberty as covenantal boundedness—arising from Trinitarian conation (heart-led intentionality) and enacted through grace-bound care. The moral axis shifts from individual self-regard and procedural neutrality to an ethic of gifted accountability and surrendered power oriented toward the flourishing of others. Metaphysically, Christological liberty displaces agnostic existentialism with a vision of freedom as relational alignment within divine intentionality. Eschatologically, it situates liberty within the revelatory trajectories of Luke 4 and Matthew 26, exposing Berlin’s Cold War proceduralism as ethically insufficient. Culturally, the essay transitions from Berlin’s post-war anxieties to the present crisis of AI-mediated governance, algorithmic coercion, oligarchic extraction, and social precarity—arguing that liberty in our time demands not neutrality, but covenantal repair grounded in Christic conation, ethical immanence, and the Golden Rule.
The civilization of care rather than the
politics of thymic and hegemonic authority recognizes the qualities, needs, and
particularities of citizens—especially those most vulnerable—in order to create
conditions for their flourishing. Thymic politics expressed in rhetorical
allegories of “heroic” rage, contention, control, and status seeking construct
a false metaphysics of human transcendence (Fame, Fortune, Peace though strength, Security through Order,[1]
[“good guys with a gun”]) rather than discover it in the aspirational folk poetics
of common people pursuing loving means. It instead proposes a positive program
of interventions for creating a "natural" order (often framed as negatively
engaging [controlling] ever-loosely identified threats of chaos). In contrast,
the civilization of care begins with people severally and individually to equip
the capacities of all to live fully in their God-graced character and
potentiality. Positive liberty—the ability to choose and enable constructive
and liberative projects that responsibly fulfill one’s gifts and calling (including to duty and responsibility)—is one such condition. A problem of politics arises when the conditions
for care and flourishing become abstracted by hegemonic epistemologies from
concrete, existential needs. For example, by abstracting positive liberty into
“freedom” absent obligation to liberate others. Valorizing negative liberty as
to be left alone to do anything one wishes. Abstractions such as this displace
the caring impulse and change the civilizing social contract of politics and
the collective peoples from seeking the common good of flourishing to that of
enabling and empowering highly individualized and facultative, centrifugal
self-interest that erupts in acute or chronic deprivation and trauma. In these
cases, the political margins of wolfish reactionaries invade the sheepfold’s
core consensus of Christian caring, blighting some churches with thymos,
adversarial culture warriors, and self-aggrandizing and transactional personalities.
By this, the neurosis of agon manifests, lamentable in its false witness
to the Gospel of love, peace, renewal, and restoration.
The dichotomization of liberty into “negative”
and “positive” captivated the thought of Isaiah Berlin’s acolytes, including many
libertarians. Berlin proposed a definition of this dichotomy that inverts the metaphysical
locus of ultimate agency (in the isolative creature rather than the relationally Trinitarian Creator) but
nevertheless are two overlapping aspects of negative responsibility to--failure
of--the duty to care:
The 'negative' sense [of
freedom], is involved in the answer to the question 'What is the area within
which the subject–a person or group of persons–is or should be left to do or be
what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?' The
second, which I shall call the 'positive' sense, is involved in the answer to
the question 'What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can
determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?[2]
Like his “negative liberty,” Berlin’s “positive liberty” sustains the egoism expressed in “heroic rage,” grounded by its limiting virtus and refusal to care in an anthropology of radical and agonistic false self-determination, out of harmony with the metaphysical conation of grace that creates and sustains.
Berlin’s anthropology of liberty depends upon a deeper illusion about willing itself, one exposed by Spinoza’s critique of imagined spontaneity and by Luther’s doctrine of the bondage of the will. The common idea of freedom imagines an aware agent as, at any moment, a spontaneous and uncaused cause of action. Spinoza rejects this as illusion: we feel free because we are ignorant of the causes of our actions, our appetites, and our bound will (Ethics, Part I, Appendix). Yet the Christian account does not end in that demystification. Passing through this ignorance, through what Luther called the sin-bondage of the will, repentance opens a different freedom. Entering time-bearing, the conative will is freed by turning from self-directed appetite toward the other-directed accumulation of care. Here the decisive anthropological distinction appears: awareness is self-prioritizing, recursive, and bounded within the strain of its own appetites, whereas consciousness arises when awareness is torqued outward toward the bearing of others under recollection, repentance, and care. Thence conscious agency develops under entropic strain into living, negentropic agency, filtering entropy and solving problems by dianoia.
Spinoza reframes the ordinary question of freedom from whether one is simply free from interference (negation) to the deeper issue of what kinds of causes positively govern one’s action. In that respect, Berlin’s negative and positive liberties alike remain within the same mistaken anthropology of willing.
See especially Spinoza's Propositions 48 and 49 (Ethics, Part II) that famously equate intellect and will as identical faculties. Spinoza's version of freedom is not escaping causation, but changing its source into a higher intellect (Part III, Props. 1–3), intensifying the anthropological fallacy of his pagan antecedents.
Passive emotions bind the aware agent to outward compulsion, resentment, and reaction. Freedom, for Spinoza, is transformation in the kind of causation through which one lives by the development and qualitative jump state of emergent intellect--the gnostic priority. For the Christian, that source is not intellection’s imagined sovereignty but the heart reordered under the Shema and clarified in Matthew 22:32–37, where dianoia serves the outward-bearing designs of love. Only there does aware agency mature into conscious agency proper. Berlin’s polarity of positive and negative liberty does not resolve this duality, because both poles remain trapped within the same error: the esoteric primacy of intellect--visually-centered theoretical aestheticism--severed from the virtuously buckled heart.
For the Christian, the source of that change of emotional/understanding is the heart. The more visually-centered the pagan, the more he claims intellect is the primary faculty of anthropological transcendence, and the more his inner eye and mysticism is subject to tragic illusions. That he has emplaced consciousness in the earth’s phenomenological witness. So that two freedoms, two historical understandings compete in the secular and metaphysically un(der)grounded. Berlin’s intellectation does not resolve the duality of frozen liberty by positive and negative poles. These are based on the same error of intellection’s esoteric primacy. Only the Christ-follower may move from the buckled heart of the Shema into Matthew 22:32-37's exoteric clarity of dianoia serving the outward-bearing heart’s designs, sowing its seed rather than gather resources into barns.
The Christian understands freedom as bounded by the law of love: the
positive Golden Rule and its own negative constructs in the Decalogue (Exodus
20: 1-21) which Calvin (Institutes II, vii, 12) recognizes as the “third use of
the [moral] law.” Bounded freedom is structured solely by the positive duty to
care, which includes the training to recognize and respond to precarity (Olds
in prep.). Thus, Christological liberty has a positive aspect in the duty to
care (positive because the locus of liberation and material sustenance is realized by the enabling of agency
of others first) and a negative aspect that prohibits the
infliction of harms by individual practice of sin that violates the Decalogue’s
moral law.
Berlin must be aware of some relational
dimension to liberty (as, for example in its negotiations and political settlements by means of deliberative virtues) but primarily presents its structure in terms of
individualized (re)cognition of vectors of power qua negative influence arising
from social orders. Any constructive power of liberty is expressed by a
creature acting individually with “rational self-interest.” In this, an
ideology of power generates a self’s false sense of unboundedness from caring for others with their
own intrinsic value and claims to moral and material goods both private and
public.
In contrast, the Christological power is the laying down of all expressions of hegemony as “false consciousness and praxis” of power qua appropriation.[4] Christological power is constructive as it is supremely other-directed rather than self-interested. In the constructive duty of the Golden Rule is the attributive power of grace structured, shared, and recognized. Only in a civilization of care is agency allowed to flourish. Selfishness pursued as “negative freedom to be left alone” actually binds the practitioner to the limiting powers (divine justice) he attempts to flee.[5] Giving up any expressions of coercion is a ceding of the ensnaring false power (Matthew 13:41). Only in a re-definition of the power of freedom and caring absent hegemonic control and appropriation is Christological power realized as attributive of agency to others. Positive power is caring. Negative (ineffectual, creation-opposing) power is controlling. Positive freedom is the allowance to choose one’s ideology and expression of power. Negative freedom is the responsibility to choose wisely and live with the consequences—to live by the sword is to die by the sword (Matthew 26:52; cf. 7:2). Its locus classicus also found in Plato and Aristotle (and Luther) is that negative human liberty is what frees from irrational desires, such as pursuits that destroy milieux on which positive freedom (as personal agency) abides.
Berlin’s existential confusion about the metaphysics of power revealed by his ironical inversion of negative and positive spaces of agency reveals that these two proposals (Berlin’s and Christological) of freedom’s structure can themselves have these considerations of agency applied to them. Berlin’s systematics of freedom is “negative” in a multiplicity of senses. The very confusion of terms and the misunderstanding of metaphysical duty and allowance ensnare personal agency rather than liberate.
Again in contrast, Christology reveals a “positive” systematics of freedom. It induces allegiance to the reign of God expressed in the Christological virtues free from the necessity of strategizing and control. Freed indeed from the vain practices of hegemony-seeking selfish advantage that will only return the geometric wages of self-limiting justice coercing responsibility for the hegemon and his sins and the return to freedom for his captives (Luke 4:18-19). Liberty for Pharaoh has no sustaining power. It looks into its own mirror, frozen in the hegemon's self-regard sublimating the terror at inexorably slipping control.
But what makes others alive will truly make you alive too. Join in, freely, ceding control to the flow of metaphysical grace. In this--in Christ's virtues--is liberty truly found. This system of bounded liberty (bonded to the creation and its limitless goodness) is profoundly different than the structure of liberty that defines itself negatively by unbondedness from a limiting world.
[POSTSCRIPT: I submitted this essay to the evaluation of ChatGPT 4.0 on August 16-17, 2023. In the process it came up with its own alternative structure, "conditional liberty," machine monitoring of social conditions ("metrics"), constantly adjusting the operation of liberty to a predetermined (by system stakeholders) end and overseen by oligarchic cadres of human circuit breakers. In short, tyranny of appropriated ends.[6] It also proposed another structure for liberty, "Evolutionary Liberty," where the operationalization and definitions of freedom are tethered to a teleological principle, presumably as derived in the TESCREAL complex. [Update January 31, 2025: in short, metaphysical criminality that appropriates even reality itself by way of making perception contingent to algorithmic design.]
Of course the effect on liberty from the virtue ethical approach is how it dispenses with the need to structure or predefine an "ends" for liberty. This is another distinction of the two structures of liberty's meaning proposed by this essay, and another dimension that poses a significant humanistic challenge to ideals of machined liberties of "conditionals" and "evolved:" Because of generational change and different stages of historical and epistemological development, including historicist epistemologies, the application of a predetermined end to these systems of distributing liberty as a public good inevitably involves coercion [if not moral criminality]. Virtue ethics in its Christology is free of concerns with coerced ends.
[1]Herder, Johann Gottfried. Adrastea II.8 (Continuation)(1801-02): Imagery (Bilder), Allegories (Allegorien), and Personifications. English translation.
[2] Berlin, Isaiah. “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In Liberty:
Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty, 166–217 (169). Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002. First published 1958.
[3] Schmitt, Carl.
Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated
by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, chap. 1.
For
a repudiation of putatively Christian warrants of sovereignty and “dominion” through
ontological violence and religious ideologies of “chaoskampf" (violent struggle with chaos) and theomachy (divine
battling), see Douglas B. Olds, Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care:
Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism
(Wipf and Stock, 2023), 72-80.
[4] Matthew Winthrop Barzun,
The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go (New York:
Optimism Press, 2021). See also empirical studies
on leadership power structured on hierarchy and control, e.g. “In his study of brain stimulation,
neuroscientist Sukhvinder Obhi found that powerful people exhibited an
impairment in ‘mirroring.’ Mirroring is a neural process that causes us to
subconsciously mimic another person's non-verbal behavior.” Jerry Useem, “Power
Causes Brain Damage,” The Atlantic, June 18, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/.
Also:
mp2201 [author], “Power Damages Our Capacity for Compassion and Empathy." The
Disability Inclusion Challenge. https://www.thedisabilityinclusionchallenge.com/2022/07/12/power-damages-our-capacity-for-compassion-and-empathy/.
[5] The Golden Rule/duty to care has negative (the Rich man in hell: Luke 16:19f) and positive (the Good Samaritan Luke 10:14f) exemplars. The negative is radically cautionary.
This duty is illustrated in the contexts of individuals in proximity and not of a political or sociological discourse. However, there is a sociological dimension to the duty to care, part of the developmental process of eschatology. The Greek version of Matthew 7:12 has Jesus address the plural of "you" in his imperative, similarly plural in the return flow of grace. It would be coherent for a directive to the individual would not be changed in a collective or historical context.
Finally, these illustrations of bounded liberty involve no considerations or claims of reciprocity. Proximity of precarity triggers the awareness of sociological or humanistic responsibility carried out in the duty of the individual to provide care.
[6] Consistent with social selection for "pure product...a social structurechain] [where a small group is in control, using the broader population as a resource, without needing to justify their actions based on the needs of that population. It also suggests that the best way to achieve this is to avoid expending resources to force people to comply, by simply letting society continue to operate, while focusing the elite's energy on achieving a specific higher goal" https://x.com/davetroy/status/1872715017570648468
Where social rewards are allocated by an elite pursuing its ends.
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