66 Global Ethics for Leadership
death. We are born into a concrete historical situation and into concrete
socio-economic circumstances. We are confronted with the elementary
task to distinguish between circumstances that can be changed and oth-
ers that cannot. We are confronted with conditions we want to over-
come. That provokes our wish to become liberated and to contribute to
liberation and transformation. But a struggle to overcome injustice does
not mean t it overcomes the concrete conditions of our exercise of free-
dom as such. Only within the contingent conditions of time and space,
of bodily existence and social interdependence are we able to exert our
freedom. A first dimension of the boundaries of freedom has to do with
our creatureliness.
For people of faith there is a specific chance to understand those
boundaries of freedom. They see their life as a part of God’s creation
and therefore as a gift entrusted to them and not simply as a project to be
realised by them. Therefore, faith can help to accept the limited charac-
ter of freedom and to live with it. It takes into account the boundaries of
freedom even from another side. In human life there is no freedom with-
out guilt. In using our freedom, we misuse it, we fail to properly exer-
cise it, our freedom is distorted by sin. There are not only mistakes on
the side of other people who misuse their power, oppress other people or
accumulate wealth in a selfish and unjust way. Nobody uses his or her
freedom without guilt. We are responsible for the use of our freedom
before God and find no way to justify ourselves. Human sin and selfish-
ness sets not boundaries to freedom, but distorts it. We need to be liber-
ated from this distortion of freedom in Christ. In him our freedom is
renewed and we are called to stay in the freedom to which Christ has
liberated us (Gal 5:1). The boundaries of freedom have to do with failing
and renewing the gift of freedom. A second dimension of boundaries of
freedom has to do with sin and redemption, with our being in Christ.
In the light of Christian faith, we find a third dimension of the
boundaries of freedom. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.