Freedom From Virtue

“Freedom from Virtue leads to slavery to vice”.


This observation was made by someone in our men’s Sunday School class to describe what the cultural revolution of the 60’s and 70’s offered. It reminded me of Romans 6, where the terms Righteousness and Sin are used instead of Virtue and Vice. The worldly wise social liberal so readily offers us “freedom”, and the assumption is that we don’t need to be nearly so concerned about prudish restraints of the previous generation. But when those restraints were there to reflect timeless virtues, there is no freedom in throwing them off. Of course the world will not claim it is throwing off virtues, but it will redefine what is virtue and vice in a way that appeals to the flesh. This was brazenly portrayed on a heterophobic radio broadcast I heard, in which the hosts argued that “debauchery” was in fact a good thing, since it is basically what we all want to do anyway. As the passage in Romans made so clear, we will be servants to something, and it is to whatever we choose to submit ourselves, either to virtue, (to use the current terminology) leading to life, or to vice, leading to slavery and death. –philw