Canter Bridge

Novelty is not often praised in the Bible. Yet a different newish thing—fresh vigor—is a deeply respected asset, sometimes placed before its readers as a goal and frequently celebrated as a gift recently given.

The apostle Paul’s discussion of freedom could hardly contrast more sharply with modern and post-modern understandings of autonomy. The modern soul stands independently and makes its choices. Its post-modern sister stands in community and, similarly, chooses with that community (or so it flatters itself) a way of interpreting its world.

Paul knows no such solitary, clinical independence. In his version of biblical realism, the human person is not offered the solitary autonomies that appear on the menus of our day. Rather, the human individual is subject, bound to a tradition, anchored to a community, contracted to serve a master more powerful than itself.

The apostle deplores servitude and celebrates liberty within this matrix and no other. Liberty comes when the human individual—within his community or heroically alone and against it—finds herself set free by God’s power from service to a malignant master whose only design for her is destruction. In this liberation, she comes to serve a benign master whose purpose is the full realization of the deep, rich vocation of life.

Just so does Paul come up with the delightful phrase, ‘newness of life’:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

Paul’s rhetoric may contain a faint echo of the Hebraic notion of a ‘new song’, that jubilant, melodic cocktail of joy that bursts forth when YHWH has exercised his salvific habit yet again, against all odds and in the face of memory’s incapacity to recall that this is his recurrent passion.

For Paul, we walk in newness of life. It becomes the m.o. of liberated hostages, the gait of the redeemed. We limp, we stumble, yet we walk this way. We no longer shuffle into darkness but stride purposefully in dawn’s fresh light.