Magna Carta

Freedom is a strangely elusive idea.  Instinctively we want it, value it, demand it, yet it is much less clear what it really is.  

Take the striking opening of the Magna Carta, and one of the only four of its clauses that remain in contemporary English Law:

• I. FIRST, We have granted to God, and by this our present Charter have confirmed, for Us and our Heirs for ever, that the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable. 

This might warm the heart, one would think, of any Christian. Yet strangely it did not work out quite as this reads.  After all, it was the Monarchy that effectively changed the Church of England (on account of Henry VIII's marital woes) into a non-Roman Church.  That seems some way short of the Church being free of the monarch as the Charter indicated.

Then there have been the times when, whatever freedoms the Church did enjoy it used against other expressions of church and religion.  You would have to look very hard to find any other longstanding expressions of Church on the actual City of London (which is a double irony as the freedoms of the City of London are also contained as a remaining Law from Magna Carta).

Then there is the irony that the institutional Church of England (which Magna Carta most obviously references) is, in fact, the least free of all expressions of Church with a multitude of things it can't do, must do, must have and may not have.

On the bright side, it offers an early trend toward freedom of religion in a broader sense, and one which is happily still respected (though losing ground through the double whammy of militant Islam and rampant secular Humanism).

What it most confirms - and this I think is truly frightening - is that the basis of what old King John did was under the watchful eye of God - We have granted to God.  A society that no longer believes it is answerable to God and where pockets of it believe in a God of vengeance and violence is not likely for too long to hold dear the idea of freedom.  Oppression is so much more human (as Cain effectively said).