Freedom and Boundary
Further Thoughts on Life and Limit
What does it mean to be human? This broad question is one we must wrestle with again and again as we seek to faithfully live this incredible gift of life we’ve been given. This, and not stale questions of material origin, are the intention of the first few chapters of the Bible. This matters not for heady theological reasons (even if heady theology is involved), but to understand how to “live the questions of our lives”1 before our Creator, which is to say, learn how to be the humans we were created to be in the joy, mess and muddle of our short days. Revisiting this question through the Biblical lens of creation is also important because the answers we find are not only different, but often in direct conflict with the daily cultural waters we swim in.
In the last post I wrote about limit and middle-age. Here I want to dig in a little deeper theologically and insist, with the help of others (not least Bonhoeffer), that limit stands not merely as a category on the periphery we must deal with, but is in fact, fundamental to the anthropological question posed above.
I recently read Bonhoeffer’s Creation and Fall. In this wonderful book Bonhoeffer centers human existence in two central realities. The first is freedom. For Bonhoeffer, freedom is a fundamental, perhaps the fundamental lens through which to view the human creature created in the image of God.
“To say that in humankind God creates God’s own image on earth means that humankind is like the Creator in that it is free.”2
But what does it mean for the human to be free? Bonhoeffer states what it doesn’t mean and why we can’t actually perceive this freedom in a person if we were to go searching for it:
Freedom is not a quality a human being has; it is not an ability, a capacity, an attribute of being that may be deeply hidden in a person but can somehow be uncovered. Anyone who scrutinizes human beings in order to find freedom finds nothing of it. Why? Because freedom is not a quality that can be uncovered…Being free means ‘being-free-for-the-other’, because I am bound to the other. Only by being in relation with the other am I free. (63)
This, of course, stands in stark contrast to the freedom we hear so much about in America which is a counter-freedom – the freedom of choice rooted in individualism. In Bonhoeffer’s reading, this is no freedom at all and stands in opposition to what it means to be human since the human creature made in the image of God is bound to the other, both to God and other creatures:
“God, the brother and sister, and the earth belong together.” (67)
Only in this co-belonging and freedom-for-the-other do we grasp one side of what it means to be human. The other side? Limit. The two trees in the Garden represent “Limit and life,” which “constitute the inviolable, inaccessible center of paradise around which Adam’s life circles” (98).
It is tempting here to view life as gift (and freedom) but limit as the thing which we unfortunately have to deal with, the thing that gets in the way of our humanity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just as freedom has been misconstrued and misplaced in our culture, so too has limit been assigned wrongly to the category of obstacle. Some limits are obstacles, of course. But the limitation that is innate to being a creature is the limit that is central to our humanity and is gift.
The forbidden tree that denotes the human being’s boundary stands at the centre. The human beings limit is at the center of human existence, not on margin; the limit or constraint that people look for on the margin of humankind is the limit of the human condition, the limit of human technology, the limit of what is possible for humanity. The boundary that is at the center is the limit of human reality, of human existence as such. (86)
One of the fascinating moves that Bonhoeffer makes here is to insist that the knowledge tree should not be understood as a temptation:
“Thus not a word in the story up to this point hints at the possibility of understanding the prohibition differently, say as temptation. The prohibition in paradise is the grace of the Creator toward the creature. God tempts no one.” (87)
The tree is not temptation but grace(!), and,
“Adam knows it as the given grace that belongs to his creatureliness and freedom. Adam also knows, therefore, that life is possible only because of the limit; Adam lives from this boundary that is at the center.” (87)
Freedom and limit, then, are bound together. Adam is free precisely in Adam’s limitation which is to say Adam’s creatureliness. And it is here that we begin to see why the negation of limit results in loneliness. Limit allows for us to exist as creatures, allows us to be human instead of dwelling in the lonely space of pretending to be God. It is a great and terrible irony that the human created in the image and likeness of God (Gen.1:26) then sought to be…like God, or in Latin, “sicut deus.”3 In seeking to be “like God” by transgressing the boundary of grace rather than embracing our creaturely freedom-for-the-other, we have fallen into a desperate loneliness. Rather than living from the center represented by the two trees (gift and limit), we now live in the “middle.”
Now humankind stands in the middle, with no limit. Standing in the middle means living from its own resources and no longer from the center. Having no limit means being alone. To be in the center and to be alone means to be sicut deus. Humankind is now sicut deus. It now lives out of its own resources, creates its own life, is its own creator; it no longer needs the Creator, it has itself become creator, inasmuch as it creates its own life. Thereby its creatureliness is eliminated, destroyed. Adam is no longer a creature. Adam has torn himself away from his creatureliness. Adam is sicut deus, and this “is” is meant with complete seriousness – not that Adam feels this, but that Adam is this. Losing the limit Adam lost creatureliness. Adam as limitless or boundless can no longer be addressed with regard to Adam’s creatureliness. (115)
Here we begin to see why limit is grace and why the rejection of limit is so disastrous. Limit means not having to live from our “own resources” or our our “center” where we find ourselves alone having to fend for ourselves. This is the tragedy of limitlessness.
In response to the 2008 financial upending, Rowan Williams said,
“Maximised choice is a form of maximised control.”4
And what happens when we lose limit and have life with no restriction?
“Without that restriction, nothing is solid: we should face a world in which everything flows, melts, dissolves, in a world of constantly shifting and spectral valuations.”5
Without limit we have nothing to hold onto, only ourselves, which is of no help at all when you are sinking. It strikes me that in an age which praises the freedom of the individual over ‘being-free-for-the-other,’ and simultaneously upholds limitlessness as the basis for the good life, it is no surprise that we are experiencing, as anyone paying attention knows, a crisis of loneliness. There are certainly many factors involved in the crisis of loneliness that was the pandemic before the pandemic, but we must pay careful attention here. When we work against what it means to be human, work against our creatureliness, we are left with nothing solid to hold onto.
All of this (along with the previous post) to say that it is a counter-cultural and faithful thing to view limit as grace instead of obstacle. We are loved as the creatures we are, not as the non-creatures we imagine we can become. Our planet and our souls are sick because we still seek to be sicut deus instead of loved and dependent creatures. Of course, many of us wonder if we can achieve contentment with our creaturely limitation, if we’ll ever be able to see this as grace. In an age so determined to live beyond limit I’m not certain we can get there by ourselves. I am certain this is exactly the point.
*Artwork: Olena Smal | Garden of Eden.
Henri Nouwen with Michael J. Christensen and Rebecca J. Laird, Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2006), 4.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3, Trans. Douglas Stephen Bax, German Ed. Martin Rüter and Ilse Tödt, English Ed. John W. De Gruchy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1937, this ed. 2004), 62. All subsequent quotes from this work will be noted by page number in the post.
Bonhoeffer has a chapter devoted to the concept of “Sicut Deus.”
R. D. Williams, ‘Ethics, Economics and Global Justice’, lecture given in Cardiff, 7 March 2009, www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2323. Quoted in Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 231.
ibid.