National Independence for the Sake of What Kind of Liberty?
Jul 6, 2023 by David Fowler
William Blackstone, in his famous U.S. Supreme Court “sanctioned” Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), wrote that “the English is the only nation in the world where political or civil liberty is the direct end of its constitution.” Of course, the United States sought to follow in that tradition. But do we know what “political liberty” aka “civil liberty” is?
Before I speak to that question, let me concede that I would not have had an historically correct answer to that question six or seven years ago. What I have come to realize is that too often we confuse political or civil liberty with what Blackstone and our founding fathers would have called natural liberty or, worse yet, personal autonomy.
To them, natural liberty was not such as a hypothetical person would possess in a hypothetical original state of nature that men like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke theorized about. Rather, it was a liberty bounded by a cosmos that God had created and normed in every instance by law, including human nature. It was not a liberty for every person to do what was right in his or her own eyes, which is personal autonomy.
Regarding natural liberties expressed as rights (if they are not rights, then they aren’t really liberties), Blackstone wrote that they “may be reduced to three principal or primary articles; the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right of private property.”[1]
Why these three? “Because as there is no other known method of compulsion, or abridging man’s natural free will, but by an infringement or diminution of one or other of these important rights, the preservation of these, inviolate, may justly be said to include the preservation of our civil immunities in their largest and most extensive sense.”[2]
What are “Civil Immunities”?
Civil immunities are those rights or liberties that neither civil government nor other private persons should willy-nilly impair.
With respect to civil government, it cannot not impair, abridge, or abolish those three rights without due process of law, an idea that set down in Magna Carta in 1215.
With respect to relations between private persons, those three rights could not be intentionally or even negligently impaired or abridged by a person without the injured person having recourse to a remedy in the judicial system.
Given the background cosmology mentioned above, Blackstone was able to say civil liberty meant that “all of us have it in our choice to do every thing that a good man would desire to do; and are restrained from nothing but what would be pernicious either to ourselves or our fellow-citizens.”[3]
Obviously, this implies a standard outside of us by which those choices are “regulated and restrained.”[4] This standard was entailed in a biblically-informed cosmology of natural law.
What is the Relation Between Civil Immunities and Civil Liberty?
The relation between civil immunities and civil liberties is rather straightforward. With the protection by law of their civil immunities (at least the three basic rights named above), persons have liberty, i.e., civil liberty.
How is Liberty Understood Today?
Today we have substituted personal autonomy (everything is a matter of personal choice) for civil liberty. This is effectively the substitution of a principle of chaos for one of ordered liberty under God.
It has come about because of an egalitarianism that recognizes no God-given hierarchies, not even of God-ordained offices, and the law by which God defines the purpose of those offices and constrains them. This humanistic form of egalitarianism flattens everything and, in the name of autonomy, severs even the most obvious ties such as those between husband and wife, parent and child, and magistrate and people.
Thus, today, our insistence on personal autonomy—a freedom from any overarching God-created responsibilities or duties pertaining to our nature and the existence of any God-ordained offices—is the ground for throwing off all restraints, whether they be marital vows (no fault divorce), parental duties (abortion and safe haven baby boxes), dancing half naked in public parks in front of others, including children, and the like.
Sadly, Christians too often acquiesce to this governing principle by voting for laws that deny natural (creational) duties and conformity therewith and deny the necessity of making judgments about whether it is good or bad for persons to deny those duties. With autonomy all forms of judgment die.
Therefore, we should not be surprised that we get more divorces, more unwanted children, and more public displays of sexual license.
The Liberty Needed in Our Humanistic Culture
Those today who demand an autonomous form of liberty will soon tire of those who use Bible verses to justify their exclusion from the demand by civil law that their autonomy be embraced, for example, sexual orientation and gender identity laws. The majority will not forever allow exemptions from civil law to be based on the supposed demands of a God that an increasing majority see as equivalent to imaginary fairies. In a world framed by evolutionary thinking at every turn, such a God can only exist in a person’s mind which is where the world will insist that he, she, or it stay.
If that happens, and the trend is in that direction, Christians may then recognize that the only true liberty assured to them in a society that excludes God from its cosmological and jurisprudential thinking is the liberty to live unto God with a conscience free of guilt; however, the exercise of that liberty may result in being put in jail as happened with Paul and Silas.
Moreover, Christians may then realize what happens when a society’s collective legal judgments are based on a cosmology framed by human autonomy and personal choice instead of God’s creational laws for the ordering of all things: The consequences of God’s judgment against that society will fall on everyone. Those consequences will be just because, above all things, He must be faithful to Himself in his creational and cosmological purposes, even if His people are not (Romans 3:4, 2 Timothy 2:13).
There is only one true liberty offered to any of us, and it is under God. As William Penn rightly said, “If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.”
The choice is laid before us. May God help us choose wisely.
Before I speak to that question, let me concede that I would not have had an historically correct answer to that question six or seven years ago. What I have come to realize is that too often we confuse political or civil liberty with what Blackstone and our founding fathers would have called natural liberty or, worse yet, personal autonomy.
To them, natural liberty was not such as a hypothetical person would possess in a hypothetical original state of nature that men like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke theorized about. Rather, it was a liberty bounded by a cosmos that God had created and normed in every instance by law, including human nature. It was not a liberty for every person to do what was right in his or her own eyes, which is personal autonomy.
Regarding natural liberties expressed as rights (if they are not rights, then they aren’t really liberties), Blackstone wrote that they “may be reduced to three principal or primary articles; the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right of private property.”[1]
Why these three? “Because as there is no other known method of compulsion, or abridging man’s natural free will, but by an infringement or diminution of one or other of these important rights, the preservation of these, inviolate, may justly be said to include the preservation of our civil immunities in their largest and most extensive sense.”[2]
What are “Civil Immunities”?
Civil immunities are those rights or liberties that neither civil government nor other private persons should willy-nilly impair.
With respect to civil government, it cannot not impair, abridge, or abolish those three rights without due process of law, an idea that set down in Magna Carta in 1215.
With respect to relations between private persons, those three rights could not be intentionally or even negligently impaired or abridged by a person without the injured person having recourse to a remedy in the judicial system.
Given the background cosmology mentioned above, Blackstone was able to say civil liberty meant that “all of us have it in our choice to do every thing that a good man would desire to do; and are restrained from nothing but what would be pernicious either to ourselves or our fellow-citizens.”[3]
Obviously, this implies a standard outside of us by which those choices are “regulated and restrained.”[4] This standard was entailed in a biblically-informed cosmology of natural law.
What is the Relation Between Civil Immunities and Civil Liberty?
The relation between civil immunities and civil liberties is rather straightforward. With the protection by law of their civil immunities (at least the three basic rights named above), persons have liberty, i.e., civil liberty.
How is Liberty Understood Today?
Today we have substituted personal autonomy (everything is a matter of personal choice) for civil liberty. This is effectively the substitution of a principle of chaos for one of ordered liberty under God.
It has come about because of an egalitarianism that recognizes no God-given hierarchies, not even of God-ordained offices, and the law by which God defines the purpose of those offices and constrains them. This humanistic form of egalitarianism flattens everything and, in the name of autonomy, severs even the most obvious ties such as those between husband and wife, parent and child, and magistrate and people.
Thus, today, our insistence on personal autonomy—a freedom from any overarching God-created responsibilities or duties pertaining to our nature and the existence of any God-ordained offices—is the ground for throwing off all restraints, whether they be marital vows (no fault divorce), parental duties (abortion and safe haven baby boxes), dancing half naked in public parks in front of others, including children, and the like.
Sadly, Christians too often acquiesce to this governing principle by voting for laws that deny natural (creational) duties and conformity therewith and deny the necessity of making judgments about whether it is good or bad for persons to deny those duties. With autonomy all forms of judgment die.
Therefore, we should not be surprised that we get more divorces, more unwanted children, and more public displays of sexual license.
The Liberty Needed in Our Humanistic Culture
Those today who demand an autonomous form of liberty will soon tire of those who use Bible verses to justify their exclusion from the demand by civil law that their autonomy be embraced, for example, sexual orientation and gender identity laws. The majority will not forever allow exemptions from civil law to be based on the supposed demands of a God that an increasing majority see as equivalent to imaginary fairies. In a world framed by evolutionary thinking at every turn, such a God can only exist in a person’s mind which is where the world will insist that he, she, or it stay.
If that happens, and the trend is in that direction, Christians may then recognize that the only true liberty assured to them in a society that excludes God from its cosmological and jurisprudential thinking is the liberty to live unto God with a conscience free of guilt; however, the exercise of that liberty may result in being put in jail as happened with Paul and Silas.
Moreover, Christians may then realize what happens when a society’s collective legal judgments are based on a cosmology framed by human autonomy and personal choice instead of God’s creational laws for the ordering of all things: The consequences of God’s judgment against that society will fall on everyone. Those consequences will be just because, above all things, He must be faithful to Himself in his creational and cosmological purposes, even if His people are not (Romans 3:4, 2 Timothy 2:13).
There is only one true liberty offered to any of us, and it is under God. As William Penn rightly said, “If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.”
The choice is laid before us. May God help us choose wisely.
[1] 1 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), * 129.
[2] Id. (emphasis added).
[3] Id. at * 144.
[4] The full quote from Blackstone’s Commentaries from which this portion was taken, is as follows:
For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the perpetual direction of that motion, so, when he created man, and endued him with free-will to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that free-will is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws.
Id. at *40. However, Blackstone acknowledged that due to the fallen state of mankind as “in his first ancestor,” reason alone was not sufficient and recourse to Scripture was needed as an auxiliary.
For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the perpetual direction of that motion, so, when he created man, and endued him with free-will to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that free-will is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws.
Id. at *40. However, Blackstone acknowledged that due to the fallen state of mankind as “in his first ancestor,” reason alone was not sufficient and recourse to Scripture was needed as an auxiliary.
