"Called to Freedom"... but what does that mean?

Brad Littlejohn. Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2025. $22.99, 192pp.

When one hears the word “freedom”, one might think of “the Freedom Convoy”—an organized protest by some Canadian truckers against vaccine mandates during Covid-19. Or perhaps one thinks of the idea of “bodily freedom” and the many ways that concept is applied and understood. The Bible would also come to mind, which speaks often about “freedom.” Are these kinds of freedom the same, or different? How do they fit together? Do they depend on each other? If so, how? And in what way? What is freedom, anyway?

Anyone seeking answers to these kinds of questions must read Dr. Brad Littlejohn’s new book: Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. My only complaint is that it was not published before the Covid-19 pandemic. I recall emailing the author amidst the fog-of-war, asking what provisions his views had for civil disobedience on the basis of natural law, for which he offered some helpful insights. Such trials obviously put Littejohn’s extensive knowledge of Protestant political theory and theology into a pressure cooker. The result is this superb and mature book. Littlejohn’s critics will find in these pages not so much fresh fodder to lob but weighty boulders—quarried out of that great and glorious mountain of Greco-Roman, Christian, and more specifically Protestant intellectual history—to outrun.

As someone who also writes on freedom, specializing in authority, submission, and slavery in early Christian theology and philosophy, it is clear to me that Littlejohn has mastered the contours of the subject in all its dimensions. Only one who has can so judiciously distill his arguments into 152 pages of text. The reader is not bogged down by trivialities, rabbit holes, or anecdotes. I had just recently finished another book by a prominent thinker on the topic, and found their reasoning and definitions, and grasp of the issues, muddle-headed at best. Littlejohn’s book, in contrast, is both clearly written and wise in application. Pastors and laity must read it for the clarity of their own thinking about freedom. His analysis of the human condition also brings conviction of sin around politics, technology, and economics.

Littlejohn contends throughout that we must rightly distinguish spiritual freedom in relation to God from moral freedom in relation to ourselves and political freedom in relation to others. The right ordering of the trifecta of spiritual, moral, and political freedom forms the great stool upon which we, as individuals and societies, sit. Error in one leg harms the others, bringing us down with a thump. For Littlejohn, freedom is “the capacity to act meaningfully.” In arguing so he aligns himself with the Augustinian, Thomistic, and Reformed traditions. Many may be tempted to skip to the more controversial chapters. This would be a mistake. Chapter 2, 3, and 4 are medicine that must be consumed sequentially, as the pharmacist ordered. 

After a general introduction in chapter one, chapter two outlines spiritual freedom as understood by the Protestant Reformers, Luther and Calvin. Sin leads to fear, futility, and forgetfulness—all bound up in slavery—but true Christian freedom rescues us from these . He distinguishes spiritual and moral freedom, and on the basis of this highlights four threats to Christian liberty: legalism, antinomianism, anarchism, and biblicism. Spiritual freedom is inner freedom before God that is made possible through justification by faith alone. After identifying spiritual freedom as justification, he turns to moral freedom as sanctification. 

Chapter three addresses moral freedom as sanctification through the work of the Holy Spirit in conforming and well-ordering our reason, appetites, and passions. He outlines the role of the law in aiding moral freedom, distinguishing between laws that bind the conscience and positive laws in “matters indifferent” which do not (p.36-38). He incisively surveys the best and brightest contributions of pagan speculation but notes their ultimate inability to provide an account of self-mastery or freedom that does not curve in oneself. 

Chapter four moves onto the final leg of the freedom trifecta: political freedom. We often confuse—or at least are tempted to confuse—political freedom with spiritual or moral freedom, identifying matters of conscience with those that are not, and vice versa. He also helpfully outlines the differences and history of what he calls the “politics of right” which shaped traditional societies and the “politics of rights”, and how the best configuring of these two was in the ideals of the American Founders, as seen, for example, in the philosophy of John Locke. 

He here tips his hat to the debate over Locke by liberals and post-liberals, joining the ranks of Dr. John Dunn and, most recently, Dr. Graedon Zorzi who maintain his position within an older tradition of law unlike that of Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This original vision was undone in time, Littlejohn argues, by the ideas of thinkers, like John Stuart Mill and Oscar Wilde, who argued that objective moral standards and natural law had no relationship to ‘freedom.’ This led to a kind of modern libertine view of freedom as doing whatever one wishes. The solution to the anarchy of a strict “politics of rights,” he suggests, is that we must pursue the tradition of the American Founders in which freedom is “self-government” both in a “communal and individual” sense and in which there is the “exercise of liberty through the purposeful ordering of laws.” We find a most incisive analysis of three kinds of freedom when Littlejohn writes,

Although spiritual freedom may provide the unshakeable foundation for any ultimately stable moral freedom, the walls and pillars are made of laws. Moral freedom will be unsuitable without a proper understanding and practice of political freedom, the third member of our triad. Indeed, there is a reciprocal relationship, for moral freedom is at once the prerequisite of political freedom (a free government, as America’s Founders well understood, depends on a virtuous people) and also the fruit of it. A healthy society of healthy individuals will depend on a positive feedback loop of free people and free laws, while a decadent society is one in which the feedback loop has gone into reverse, with slavish people creating and demanding ever more slavish institutions, which in turn feed worse and worse forms of moral bondage. Such is our crisis of civilization today. To find our way out of it, a revival of faith alone will not suffice; we also need a renewal of political imagination. 

The distinctly Protestant understanding of freedom and the insights of the American Founders are precisely the prudent “political imagination” he speaks of.

Freedom of religion, he argues, is inseparable from right religion. But he goes at lengths to clarify the nature of religious freedom and the principles necessary for thinking through the prudent use of compulsion, based on a distinctly Protestant understanding of spiritual freedom. It was a result of the Reformers’ emphasis on education and literacy for all to read the Scriptures that eventually led to the “rethinking of the boundaries of political liberty.” In the wake of Protestantism’s recasting of religion as something “personal and interior,” thinkers and statesmen recognized that individuals must be given “the right to choose their own religious communities and practices” while maintaining “public religious conformity.” Even if one is unpersuaded by Littlejohn’s defence of a distinctly Protestant understanding of freedom as most prudently articulated by the American Founders, one will still find much of value in later chapters.

In chapters five through seven, he addresses pitfalls or hazards to spiritual, moral, and political freedom. Throughout the book Littlejohn weaves together the threads of the role of technology and modern political notions and how they shape our notion of freedom as irreducibly libertine. But in chapter five, he addresses the issue head on. Littlejohn joins a chorus of ever-increasing calls for concern over the harms of our technoculture. Yet his is not a mere rehashing. Teeming with new insights, for example, he states, “we learn again the hard way that freedom is actually constituted by limits, limits that technology relentlessly devours.” Notably the author refrains from giving specific recommendations for each new technology, wisely recognizing that what is needed is not a set of prescriptions but governing theological and philosophical principles that will enable us to prudently deal with new technology as it arrives. It is to these principles helpfully elucidated that everyone must attend to as we responsibly make use of technology in our respective stations as parents, civil authorities, and etc. Our spiritual, moral, and even political freedoms hang in the balance. At the heart of the solution is both reigniting “our love for God by worship, prayer, reading, and meditation” while mastering our technologies, ensuring they are proportionately ordered unto the service of God in our “daily vocations,” lest they master us. 

Littlejohn’s goal in chapter six is to think through what is involved in “a truly free market” that coheres with the more inner notions of freedom--the spiritual and moral. He takes as his guide the definition of freedom as “the capacity for meaningful action” which entails that more and more economic “choices may not mean more freedom.” The author is willing to shrewdly engage the idols of the left and the right that all too often, as he shows, are operating on the same faulty notion of freedom. Free markets, he concludes, depend on truly free people. Rather than “punching left” or “punching right”, as we tend to now speak about disagreement, the author exhibits the precise theological, philosophical, political, and anthropological principles he wishes to inculcate in the reader. This insight informs, in part, chapter seven on religious freedom. At the outset of the discussion, Littlejohn once again reminds the reader to distinguish between freedom understood as “negative and positive, inward and outward, individual and corporate,” which he elucidates in respect to religious freedom. Here the author offers a compelling and coherent case for religious liberty that avoids “moral anarchy” and gives a robust account of “what it might mean to have a right to believe and do what is wrong, and to what extent such a right deserves protection by law.”

Perhaps one area of the book I would have wished to see greater clarity is in his engagement with ancient pagan philosophers on the subject of freedom. One is left with the impression that philosophers from Plato, through Aristotle, and the Stoics all associated freedom with “self-mastery” and in the case of the Stoics “the transcendence of desire.” But that isn’t quite accurate. 

First of all, freedom as self-mastery is only one account of freedom among several seen in Plato’s writings and Greco-Roman philosophy. It's not quite clear which Plato prefers and whether and how they all fit together. As far as I can tell, Aristotle reserves “freedom” (ελευθερία) and the adjective “free” (ελεύθερος) to describe the politically freemen “who is able to act for what is common” in such a way that is favourable to the polis, rather than self-mastery or “doing what a man wishes” (Politics 1310a3-2).

This is a critique of Plato’s notion of “freedom” (ἐλευθερίας) as “the power for each to do as he wishes” (Republic 557b). This was taken up by the Stoics and Neo-Platonists, like Plotinus. This notion of freedom is not ambivalent to the good. Rather, since “virtue is without master”, as Plato writes in the (Republic 617e3), they saw freedom as in fact wishing the good. With this doctrine, the Stoics thought freedom and happiness was found in doing what one wishes, rather than transcending desire, as Littlejohn suggests. Diogenes Laertius reports that the Stoics define freedom as “the power to do one’s own” (ἐξουσία αὐτοπραγίας) and slavery as “the privation of doing one’s own” (στέρησις αὐτοπργίας) (DL 7.121-2). By doing “one’s own”, one is not simply wishing for anything at all. Rather, the sage’s tranquility and freedom comes from wishing only those things that are in accordance with divine providence. In Stoic psychology, desires, volitions, and emotions are kinds of beliefs. So the sage does not need to master his desires–as is the case in Plato’s and Aristotle’s psychology–but have the right desires. That is, if they rightly judge their impressions, they will have good desires and true beliefs. This is freedom. 

The failure to form right beliefs entails that one is disturbed by the passions which are nothing other than false beliefs. One cannot achieve what one truly desires, namely the good, if one has false beliefs. Since this seemed to them to be a near impossible task, some thought Socrates was the only person in history to achieve sagacious freedom. So the idea of freedom in Stoicism is not so much about transcending desires as it is about transcending the passions (false beliefs) by rightly judging our impressions and forming right beliefs in accordance with divine providence. Working with the view of freedom as perfection, like the Stoics, Plotinus does seem to think we need to transcend non-rational desires for intellectual desires in order to be truly free. We have an entirely different account of freedom from the peripatetic philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias, in On Fate, who entirely decouples freedom from wishing the good and couples it with radically indeterminate self-determination. Freedom in this view has nothing to do with mastering one’s desires nor says anything about one’s moral goodness or badness but is strictly concerned with the capacity to choose otherwise. 

What this means is that the Greco-Roman tradition contains various competing accounts of freedom, some which are coordinated with self-mastery and self-sufficiency, and others which are not. What is ubiquitous across the various philosophical schools, as Littlejohn aptly points out, is an idolatrous and inadequate account of freedom and self-mastery, and the means of achieving them. Littlejohn rightly concludes that, despite utilizing key pagan insights, only the Christian tradition contains the philosophical and theological keys of promise to achieving and sustaining true freedom.

For those who have been reading and listening to Littlejohn for some time, we finally have a book where he puts all his ideas together in one coherent vision. This book would make an ideal study for an adult Sunday school series, or a textbook for an undergraduate course on theology or ethics. Indeed, though it is only January I doubt there will be many more significant releases in evangelical media in 2025.