to be 'free' is to be 'free for relation'

Rowan Williams's address to the Church of England General Synod (see http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2752 ) is a helpful and practical overview of the meaning of freedom.

"The freedom claimed, for example, by the Episcopal Church (in the United States) to ordain a partnered homosexual bishop is, simply as a matter of fact, something that has a devastating impact on the freedom of, say, the Malaysian Christian to proclaim the faith without being cast as an enemy of public morality and risking both credibility and personal safety. It hardly needs to be added that the freedom that might be claimed by an African Anglican to support anti-gay legislation likewise has a serious impact on the credibility of the gospel in our setting. And in the Communion we have no supreme executive to make the decisions that might settle how the balance of freedom might be worked out."

He challenges the individualistic understanding of freedom :

"This, you see, is where the Christian understanding of freedom has a distinctive contribution to make to the broader discussion of liberties in society. Christian freedom as St Paul spells it out is always freedom from isolation – from the isolation of sin, separating us from God, and the isolation of competing self-interest that divides us from each other. To be free is to be free for relation; free to contribute what is given to us into the life of the neighbour, for the sake of their formation in Christ's likeness."

And he urges people to resist seeing others in two dimensions rather than three. Reality is more complex. He describes the hard practical work on gun crime that the Episcopal Church in the USA, stereotyped as a liberal talk-shop, is doing in the Bronx and the compassionate work the Church in Uganda - typecast as passionately homophobic and Biblically literalist - is doing in the rehabilitation of child soldiers and the continuing, intensely demanding work with victims of trauma and HIV.