Freedom Under The Word

Winner of the PROSE Award An NRC Handelsblad Best Book of the Year “Ambitious and impressive...At a time when the very survival of both freedom and democracy seems uncertain, books like this are more important than ever.” —The Nation “Helps explain how partisans on both the right and the left can claim to be protectors of liberty, yet hold radically different understandings of its meaning...This deeply informed history of an idea has the potential to combat political polarization.” —Publishers Weekly “Ambitious and bold, this book will have an enormous impact on how we think about the place of freedom in the Western tradition.” —Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough “Brings remarkable clarity to a big and messy subject...New insights and hard-hitting conclusions about the resistance to democracy make this essential reading for anyone interested in the roots of our current dilemmas.” —Lynn Hunt, author of History: Why It Matters For centuries people in the West identified freedom with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. The equation of liberty with restraints on state power—what most people today associate with freedom—was a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking. So what triggered this fateful reversal? In a masterful and surprising reappraisal of more than two thousand years of Western thinking about freedom, Annelien de Dijn argues that this was not the natural outcome of such secular trends as the growth of religious tolerance or the creation of market societies. Rather, it was propelled by an antidemocratic backlash following the French and American Revolutions. The notion that freedom is best preserved by shrinking the sphere of government was not invented by the revolutionaries who created our modern democracies—it was first conceived by their critics and opponents. De Dijn shows that far from following in the path of early American patriots, today’s critics of “big government” owe more to the counterrevolutionaries who tried to undo their work.

Introduces the reader to the views of the most outstanding theologians in the history of Christianity. The book's three sections deal with Patristic Theology, Medieval and Reformation Theology, and Modern Theology.

Top-tier scholars offer critical engagements with Barth's exegesis and explore its implications for contemporary hermeneutics and biblical interpretation.

Distinguished scholar Paul Molnar adds to his previous work, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity, to help us think more accurately about the economic Trinity, about divine and human interaction in the sphere of faith and knowledge within history. Exploring why it is imperative to begin and end theology from within faith, Molnar relies on the thinking of Karl Barth and of Thomas F. Torrance in dialogue with other contemporary theologians (Catholic and Protestant) about divine and human freedom. Powerfully argued and meticulously documented, Molnar's magisterial study begins with an extensive discussion of the role of faith in knowing God and in relating to God in and through his incarnate Word and thus through the Holy Spirit. From there he proceeds to consider the divine freedom once again as the basis for true human freedom, discussing how and why a properly functioning pneumatology will lead to an appropriately theological understanding of God?s actions within the economy. He considers perils of embracing a historicized Christology, proposing an alternative way of understanding the connection between time and eternity that is christologically focused and pneumatologically informed. And finally, he discusses at length how the doctrine of justification by faith relates to living the Christian life in the power of the Holy Spirit and the economy of grace.

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The United States is in a crisis of freedom. Influenced by neoliberal economics, the concept of freedom has become identified with an abstract, radical individualism disdainful of responsibility to others and to the past. Signs of this crisis crop up everywhere. Some invoke freedom as justification for refusing to wear a mask in a pandemic. Others argue that freedom is an empty word if it's celebrated apart from an honest engagement with the country's history of racism. Created Freedom under the Sign of the Cross offers a Catholic theological response to this crisis of freedom. Catholic social ethics may be better known for its emphasis on social principles like the common good and solidarity. But developments in Catholic theologies of freedom in the last decades provide fertile ground from which to develop a bold, creative response to this American crisis of freedom. In this book, theologian David DeCosse draws on thinkers ranging from philosopher Amartya Sen to Black Catholic theologian Shawn Copeland to twentieth-century theological giant Karl Rahner in order to reimagine American freedom in light of classic Catholic emphases on embodiment, relationship, history, the good, and God. The result is a Catholic public theology that provides a redemptive path forward in an age of crisis.