The Poor Need a God of Freedom

Perhaps the minority community of slaves and midwives [in Moses' Israel] was able to affirm the freedom of God just because there was no other legitimated way to stand over against static triumphal religion, for every other less-free God had already been co-opted. Perhaps the minority community of slaves is able to affirm the politics of justice and compassion because there is no other social vision in which to stand in protest against the oppression of the situation. As George Mendenhall has urged, the social purpose of a really transcendent God is to have a court of appeal against the highest courts and orders of society around us. Thus a truly free God is essential to marginal people if they are to have a legitimate standing ground against the oppressive orders of the day. But then it follows that for those who regulate and benefit from the order of the day a truly free God is not necessary, desirable, or perhaps even possible.

Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, pg. 22-23

Daymon Smith - Blessings and Agency

We have no reason to assume our blessings have come of our own righteousness. This means there is no compulsion nor bribery which leads to righteousness, and no measuring worth doing; for you’ll find that the wicked are often blessed equally, if not in profusion, should you compare how much rain one has received with that sent upon another. If there is no material reason for righteousness, nor fear of wickedness because God will smite you with a plague, the only reason to do good, it seems to me, is because one prefers that to doing evil. And so we really are free to act.

-Daymon Smith, "Like Unto = Evil"

John Taylor - I Would Not Be a Slave to God!

I was not born a slave!  I cannot, will not be a slave.  I would not be slave to God!...I'd go at His behest; but would not be His slave.  I'd rather be extinct than be a slave.  His friend I feel I am, and He is mine: --a slave!  The manacles would pierce my very bones--the clanking chains would grate upon my soul--a poor, lost, servile, crawling wretch to lick the dust and fawn and smile upon the thing who gave the lash!  Myself--perchance my wives, my children to dig the mud, to mould and tell the tale of brick and funish our own straw!...But stop!  I'm God's free man: I will not, cannot be a slave!  Living, I'll be free here, or free in life above--free with the Gods, for they are free..."

-John Taylor, Life of John Taylor by B.H. Roberts, 424

"The mountains had been a nural field of activity where, playing onthe frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as breath."

This same mountaineer [Maurice Herzog], after nearly losing his life, wrote of "freedom" in a quite different way:

"I saw that it was better to be true than to be strong...I was saved and I had won my freedom. This freedom, which I shall never lose...has given me the rare joy of loving that which I used to despise. A new and splendid life has opened out before me."

-Maurice Herzog, Annapurna (1953)

quoted in Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pgs. 117)