The Role of Christian Freedom in the Light of the Orthodox Church’s Teachings in a Secularized Society
The Role of Christian Freedom in the Light of the Orthodox Church’s Teachings in a Secularized Society

Summary/Abstract: This article is dedicated to the Christian understanding of freedom, its kinds and how does a present-day Orthodox Christian use freedom in his/her life. The first kind of freedom pertains to metaphysical dimension. Here we talk about the free will of a human as an image of God, the freedom which is characterized by the presence of a very limited inner choice between the good and the evil. This freedom from the Christian point of view is the person’s quality, the losing of which can lead to the complete degradation of a human. There is also a different understanding of freedom. It is connected with a possibility of an individual’s actualization in a society, in the social conditions, in a nowadays environment. Here we talk about the freedom of human deeds. One may call it the outer freedom. If we speak of more concrete facet of human life, the social dimension thereof, then it translates into the human rights — the human’s freedom. But this outside freedom is not only restricted to human rights. Every country guarantees its own rights, but the external freedom is more complicated — it represents the human attitude to nature. So the outer freedom is a very broad concept. Christianity points to the third kind of freedom, the most important one from the Christian point of view. This is the spiritual freedom. This third category means the human’s superiority to his/her desires, in other words, the rule of mind’s priority over the heart. In Christianity this ascendancy has a special content because here we first of all talk about the root of all addictions, which is pride.

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