Can Freedom Last Forever?

Freedom is at the very heart and soul of the modern world, especially in the West. With our free-thought, free-speech, free-choice, free-vote, free-market societies, freedom is today’s highest virtue, its grandest possibility, its last absolute, its most potent myth, and – with the power of love limited to the private world – one of its only self-evident public truths. How else are modern people to be themselves other than to be free? Yet in fact free societies are rare and fleeting, though few people have given any thought to what freedom is, why it never lasts, and why the greatest enemy of freedom is so often freedom. Ironically, we Christians have long been attacked as the enemies of freedom, but once again we may end up as its last great defenders. This talk analyses freedom, its complexities, its stern demands, and above all the challenge of how best it is to be sustained.