We are made for transformation: the image of God is an image of self-surpassing

[The Great Open Dance]

God the Trinity gives us free will.

By God’s declaration, we are free (John 8:36). God wants free persons to whom God can relate, not puppets that God can control.

Some people assert that we are not free because we are born with characteristics we did not choose, into an environment we did not create. Since we choose neither our nature or nurture, and we are constructed by both, we are not free. But this argument makes an impossible demand on freedom: to be free, you must be completely uninfluenced. In this view, all influence is control. But such freedom would demand that we be born as a characterless nothingness into an empty expanse, like placing an actor on stage with no set, no cast, no audience, and no script. The actor would be absolutely free of constraint, but also devoid of potential. The actor would have nothing to do, nothing to say, and no decisions to make. The actor could create, but how much? To what end? For which people?

There is no absolute freedom, only relational freedom, even for God. Any thought otherwise is a destructive fantasy. We may find the relationships we are born into cumbersome and the world that we inherit distressing. But what would it be like to be unencumbered? The only way to be unencumbered is to be a vapor in a void.

Our capacity to influence others and be influenced by others gives us moral significance.

There is no effective freedom without moral significance, and no moral significance without inherited context. Catherine Keller observes, “We are indelibly marked by our past. We cannot escape the process of being influenced and of influencing. But we may exercise creative freedom within it.” Hence, context is the gift through which we express our free personhood. To be free is not to be uninfluenced; to be free is to be uncoerced.

Our freedom to influence and be influenced, coupled with freedom from coercion, makes us moral agents. We cannot choose our personal characteristics, family values, or national culture, but we can come to awareness of them and choose our response to them. Jesus, for example, could have joined those who hated Samaritans or he could have joined those who loved across religious difference. He chose the latter. He could have devoted his genius and charisma to personal enrichment, but instead devoted it to the exploited.

Like Jesus, within our personhood and context, we can choose. We can emphasize self or community, power or service, fear or love, greed or generosity. In this Trinitarian view, freedom is not characterized by pure autonomy, or freedom from. Autonomy frees us from external coercion, but this is only a preliminary step on the way to ideal sociality. The next step, which is dependent on but supersedes autonomy, is mutuality. Autonomy grants us freedom from the coercive other, but leaves us in fragmented isolation. The isolation produced by autonomy must become the mutuality produced by interdependence. Thus, freedom from best expresses itself as freedom for.

God makes persons in the image of God, for self-surpassing.

The end of subjection allows the beginning of community. Therefore, the purpose of our own freedom is to maximize the freedom of others. Made in the image of the ever-increasing God, we are capable of self-surpassing. Our actual self is laden with potential selves, so that we are in constant self-creation. But wisdom realizes that fullness of self is only found in the fullness of relation—in love. From love derive meaning, purpose, and joy. The more expansive the love, the greater the joy. Without love, all these godsends shrivel in the claustrophobic space of the self. With love, they flourish and grow along the branches of our relationships.

Since permanence is an illusion, we must seek disillusionment. We are not static; we are dynamic. We are not limited to who we are; we are enabled by who we can become. Our powers of imagination and creation allow self-expansion through time in the image of our infinite God.

Consider Karla Faye Tucker of Houston, Texas. In 1973, Tucker’s mother led her, at age fourteen, into a life of prostitution and drug use. At age twenty-one, in a drug-induced haze, Tucker broke into an apartment with her boyfriend, Danny Garrett, to “case the joint”. Surprised to find the occupants home, they murdered them with a pickaxe. Between committing the crime and her arrest five weeks later, Tucker bragged that each swing of the pickax gave her pleasure.

Tucker was arrested and convicted of murder. While awaiting sentencing, she read the Bible and had a powerful conversion experience. At sentencing, she was sentenced to death. Over the next fourteen years, as her appeals worked their way through the court systems, she became a model prisoner, married her chaplain, Rev. Dana Brown, and refused to commit violence even when attacked.

She sought to have her sentence commuted from execution to life in prison. As her execution date approached, numerous people petitioned for clemency, including Pope John Paul II, the World Council of Churches, and the brother of one of her murder victims. The warden of her prison testified that, based on her long-term behavior, she had in all likelihood been reformed. But all appeals were rejected and, on the order of Governor George W. Bush, Texas executed Karla Faye Tucker on February 3, 1998.

Prior to her execution, Karla Faye appeared on the Larry King Show on CNN, in which they discussed her crimes and her faith:

KING: Let’s go back. You’re a very attractive young girl. You’re smart. What went wrong? What happened 14 years ago?
TUCKER: Bad choices, drugs . . . a lot of drugs, a lot of anger and confusion, no real guidance, I was just out of hand, and had no guidance at a certain point in my life when I was most impressionable and probably could have been steered the right way. There wasn’t anybody there to steer me.
KING: Where were mother and father?
TUCKER: My mother was doing drugs, and she lived a very wild life. My father had tried up to a certain point, but he had no control. My mother had him under a threat that if he laid a hand on us or did anything to us, she’d have him put in jail.
KING: What happened on that terrible day?
TUCKER: The details of what happened that night, I don’t share. I mean, that’s the worst night of my life, and I don’t—with how I feel now, I don’t relive that night.
KING: Do you think it was another person? TUCKER: Yes, it was definitely. KING: How, to yourself, do you explain that? I know you don’t want to—so forgetting the details, how do you explain it to yourself that I was involved in a violent slaying?
TUCKER: I can’t—I can’t make sense out of it. I don’t know how to make sense out of it except that the choices that I made to do drugs, to buckle to peer pressure and everything else—it was inevitable that something like that was going to happen in my life. KING: Did you enjoy the violence?
TUCKER: I said I did. I was—at that time in my life, I was very excited about doing different crazy, violent things, yes. It was a part of me that was used to fit in with the crowd that I was hanging around to be accepted.
KING: How do we know, as a lot of people would ask who don’t know you, that this isn’t a jailhouse conversion?
TUCKER: I don’t try and convince people of that. For me, if you can’t look at me and see it then nothing I can say to you is going to convince you. I just live it every day and I reach out to people and it’s up to them to receive from the Lord the same way I did when somebody came to me. . . . There is evidence, consistent evidence, in a person’s life.

Karla Faye Tucker’s radical change in personality, which was denied by those who celebrated her execution, suggests the impermanence of the self and the potential for transformation that this impermanence confers. Impermanence is not a threat; it is our greatest opportunity, providing us with a redeemability that permanence would deny. Christ saw this divine potential in everyone he met, as should Christians today. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 113-117)

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For further reading, please see:

King, Larry. “Karla Faye Tucker: Born again on death row.” CNN.com. Posted 4:53 p.m. EDT, March 26, 2007. https://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/21/larry.king.tucker/

Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008.

McDougall, Joy Ann. Pilgrimage of Love: Moltmann on the Trinity and Christian Life. AAR Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015.