Free Indeed | Pastor Renaud Von Wielligh

Now in June 1909, long before I was born, in a city called Riga in Latvia, there was a little baby born called Isaiah.

Isaiah Berlin was his name.

Now in that part of the world at the time, it was pretty volatile.

There was a lot happening.

There was regime change on the horizon and all sorts of things.

But at the age of six, it was part of the Russian Empire at the time, a conservative Russian Empire.

And at the age of six, Azai and his family, they moved into Russia proper.

But then at the age of 11, they fled after regime change and a whole bunch of political stuff taking place, which we won't get into.

They fled to England, where he grew up, and I think he spent most of the rest of his life there.

But then in 1958, it was, he gave his inaugural speech at Oxford University on a subject that actually his passion for that came from that history of trauma and the challenges that his family faced.

And he was studying and researching this idea of freedom.

What is freedom? And now his focus was more on a political side.

But he wrote and he gave this speech and later it kind of got written into words and published in later years.

This speech was called Two Concepts of Liberty.

And as he studied this concept of freedom, having experienced so much of what that meant and what a lack of having certain freedoms meant, he had this idea that there's kind of two ways to look at freedom.

And he called them negative freedom and positive freedom.

And he didn't mean that like a bad freedom and a good freedom.

He meant like negative freedom in the sense that you have negative freedom if you are free from certain things.

So free from obstacles, from barriers, from constraints, or external interference.

But then he described the other form, positive freedom, as freedom for something.

So he says you have positive freedom if you are free for or free to pursue some good aim freely.

And to illustrate this, that can seem a bit like, what do you mean by this? An illustration that kind of paints it quite clearly is imagine you see a driver.

He's driving through a town and there's no other traffic, there's no pedestrians, there's nothing external stopping him from choosing which way to drive.

And so he comes up to a T-junction and he has a choice.

He can turn left or he can turn right.