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THE CHLLDRBN OP GOD AND THEIR LlBERTY IN THB CHURCH*
The Most Rev. Msgr. Anthony Bloom
Metropolitan - Archbishop of Sourozh and Exarch of Western Europe for the Patriarch of Moscow.
As those who have already heard me know, and those who will hear me today will easily discover, I am not a theologian. I am a Christian who tries to think and to understand his faith. My intention, therefore, is not to give a theological lecture, but to provide you with a background of understanding concerning the meaning of "freedom", that of the expression "the Sons of God" and the meaning of the expression "in the Holy Spirit". We live in a world that is fallen and spoiled, in which all our knowledge of God, our living and our thinking are, therefore, distorted. It is not strange, therefore, that notions of particular importance like that of freedom should be largely and widely misunderstood and misrepresented. When we ask what freedom means, we almost always get the answer that freedom is the capacity which a person has to make choices unhindered. This freedom of uncertainty, this freedom of indétermination, which was already analyzed and castigated by Descartes, and later by Gabriel Marcel, is a sign of our fallen
* At Salamanca: 22-29, august, 1970: III Conference of the I.E.F.
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