[cornelis]

The Christian gospel is not about ethical culture

As a very specific statement, this could make sense, if you delete "ethical." The life promised by this gospel is eternal, not ephemeral, but it does begin here. We live, as Plato discerned, in a metaxy, in between. Or, as C.S. Lewis had it, in the Shadowlands. Or, perhaps even Tolkien, in Middle Earth.

[Romulus]

I am not suggesting that ethics is irrelevant to Christianity; only that they are its fruit, not its raison d'être. Christianity's great break with Judaism was in the way law-abidingness is seen to spring from holiness, not vice versa, and the observation that man is called to a spiritual union with God who's love not in conformity to a Law but because it's integral to His existence.

To a Christian, freedom means the very opposite of alienated autonomy -- it means heirship in the Kingdom, entering into a living, mystical union with the sovereign King who's no longer subject but Master. To paint such a union as merely ethical is to miss the point entirely.