Berlin defines positive liberty, on the other hand, as the freedom of self-determination or self-mastery. It's a freedom to—"to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for my choices and able to explain them by reference to my own ideas and purposes."[4]

He concedes that these may not sound too different, but the key is to recognize that negative freedom focuses on what's external: is anything hindering our freedom from the outside? If not, we are free. Positive freedom focuses on what's internal: are we able to act in accordance with our reason, principle, and truth? The positive conception of freedom brings with it an implicit appeal to an internal reason, principle, law, or truth.[5] 

The Real Danger of Positive Freedom  

The danger of positive freedom, says Berlin, writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust and at the height of the Cold War, is that some larger social conception of the self, reason, and truth will be adopted as the individual's own. Someone living in a Fascist, Communist, or Roman Catholic nation will begin to think he is "free" when he acts in accordance with the Fascist, Communist, or Roman Catholic truths he's imbibed from the priests of propaganda. Berlin's essay, really, is a critique of the whole tradition of positive freedom and its promulgators, such as Rousseau, Herder, Kant, Hegel, and Marx.

Meanwhile, Berlin presents negative freedom and its advocates positively. Thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Mill, or Tocqueville, who are probably a little more familiar to British and American students, focused less on persuading their readers about the grand truths of history and more on securing some minimum area in which the individual can act unimpeded.

Berlin's preference for negative freedom over positive makes perfect sense. The history of politics and political philosophy, I would propose, can be summarized in humanity's embracing of one form of positive liberty after another—one new messianic ruler, system, ideology, or utopia that they hope will set them free. Yet all of these prove to be idols in the end (see Daniel 2). Some of those idols are more demanding than others, such as the idols of communism and fascism, but every form of positive freedom—every idol—relies upon a system of truth that opposes God. Unique about postmodernism and contemporary forms of philosophical liberalism is the correct insight that every form of positive freedom is in fact an idol that will eventually lead to oppression and enslavement. Therefore, those who hold to these contemporary views have opted for what seems like the least threatening of solutions—negative liberty. Negative liberty, in so far as it's able, makes no claim on truth except the so-called thin truth of agreeing to disagree. It only asks not to be bothered. Don't hinder me and I won't hinder you, just so long as we agree not to step on one another's toes.

I've taken a little time to get into the weeds of Berlin's essay here, because I think his distinction helps to illumine the difference between our understanding of freedom in the postmodern West and the Bible's understanding of freedom. I didn't use the language of negative freedom in chapter 1, but that's where we eventually landed: "Don't tell me what to think; just stay out of my way." Being free, finally, doesn't mean acting in accordance with the truth. It means not being restrained by parent, teacher, or pastor. In the West today, we then lay our definition of love directly on top of this negative conception of freedom. To love someone is to set them free—it's to remove all constrains and judgments: "If you love me with conditions or judgments, you don't love me because you're not letting me be free." Anthony Giddens called this the "pure relationship," one that is pure or uncontaminated by any moral obligation, any sense of duty or responsibility, any long-term commitment, any call to serve or care for the other. Right in line with the culture at large, post-fundamentalist evangelicals are often some of the first to shout "legalism" and "unloving" at the slightest whiff of pastoral authority or congregational constraint. Like Papa says in The Shack, "It is the nature of love to open the way." Remove those restraints.