Liberal

To be liberal, in the language of the King James translators, is to give freely and generously. The Latin liberalis first described the conduct and the arts proper to the liber, the citizen unbound by servitude, and only much later acquired the political meanings that dominate the word today. The Hebrew term most often behind the English is nadiv, the “willing” or “noble” one, kin to nedavah, the freewill offering brought to the tabernacle without compulsion. Readers who encounter the word in scripture expecting partisan connotations will encounter instead a description of God’s own disposition, for He “giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not” (James 1:5).

The Liberal and the Churl

Isaiah’s vision of a righteous reign includes a correction of moral vocabulary: “The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful.” The prophet then distinguishes the two by their workmanship. “The instruments also of the churl are evil: he deviseth wicked devices to destroy the poor,” whereas “the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand” (Isaiah 32:5-8). The Hebrew kelim, rendered “instruments,” is a broad term embracing vessels, tools, and weapons, and the churl’s devices are engineered schemes directed against the vulnerable. Isaiah thus measures nobility by what a person designs and for whom, and he locates the stability of the liberal in the very things the liberal has made.

The wisdom literature adds a promise of reciprocity: “The liberal soul shall be made fat: and he that watereth shall be watered also himself” (Proverbs 11:25). The Hebrew reads more literally “the soul of blessing,” nefesh berakah, identifying the generous person with the blessing that person confers. The Apostle Paul, thanking the Corinthians for “your liberal distribution unto them, and unto all men” (2 Corinthians 9:13), employs the Greek haplotēs, whose primary sense is singleness or simplicity. In Paul’s usage, generosity proceeds from an undivided heart, one that gives without reserving a calculating portion for itself, and the gift becomes an occasion of thanksgiving offered to God by those who receive it.

A Liberal God and a Liberal People

The Restoration began with this word. Reading the promise in James that God gives “liberally” to those who lack wisdom, the young Joseph Smith later recalled that “never did any passage of scripture come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this time to mine” (Joseph Smith⁠—History 1:12). The vision that followed answered a boy’s question with an appearance of the Father and the Son, and the revelations that came after it extended that liberality to the promise that the faithful would receive all that the Father has. Within the framework of the Restoration, divine generosity aims at the elevation of its recipients to the giver’s own station.

The Book of Mormon describes a people who imitated that pattern. In the first year of the reign of the judges, the members of the church “did not send away any who were naked, or that were hungry,” and “they were liberal to all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, whether out of the church or in the church” (Alma 1:30). Jacob had earlier stated the purpose of such giving with unusual precision: “be familiar with all and free with your substance, that they may be rich like unto you” (Jacob 2:17). Liberality in this account seeks the equality of giver and receiver, and it ends its work only when the poor have been raised to the condition of their benefactors.

Liberal Things and Dangerous Devices

Transhumanists have inherited the older, Latin sense of the word alongside the scriptural one. Max More and Anders Sandberg have championed “morphological freedom,” the right of persons to modify their own bodies and minds, and advocates of open science and openly released artificial intelligence models argue that the knowledge required for such transformation should be shared as widely as possible. Their arguments resonate with Jacob’s counsel, since knowledge freely distributed can make others rich like unto those who first possessed it, and the history of open-source software shows that such sharing can accelerate both innovation and access.

Isaiah’s distinction, however, complicates any simple equation of openness with liberality. The same instruments that heal can be turned by a churl into devices that destroy the poor, and biosecurity researchers have warned that openly available tools for protein and pathogen design could lower the barriers to catastrophic misuse. Liberality in the scriptural sense is defined by its purpose and its beneficiaries, and its exercise therefore requires judgment about what is devised and for whom. Mormon transhumanists who share the hope of More and Sandberg will be most faithful to the word when they give knowledge as the God of James gives wisdom, abundantly and to all, while declining to furnish the churl with the instruments Isaiah condemned.

See also: Common Consent, Consent, Liberalism, Liberty, Responsibility, Secularism, Social Justice