RECOVERING A LOST WORLD - III
This series began with the idea that modernity has impoverished us. We have gained the
creation in ways that earlier people have hardly dreamed of. We can travel faster and
farther, communicate almost instantaneously all around the world in pictures as well as
words, and enjoy comfortable amenities for living, working, or recreation that they could
not have imagined. Yet in the process we have lost the creation as God intended it to be
ours. We no longer see it as revelatory of Him. Our use of it is rarely influenced by the
concept of giving it back to Him in a glad, priestly service. And, even worse, our mastery
of the world has turned into our being mastered by the world. We have not only objectified
a creation which is completely interpreted by the living power of the Word of God
(Colossians 1:17; Hebrews 1:3, etc.), but we have "thingified each other. We
manipulate and are manipulated. We do not think we have souls anymore, only a stream of
consciousness. Western culture is like a church in Revelation 3 to which the Lord said,
"Because thou sayest, I am rich, and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing;
and knowest not that thou art the wretched one and miserable and poor and blind and naked:
I counsel thee to buy of me gold refined by fire, that thou mayest become rich; and white
garments that thou mayest clothe thyself; and that the shame of thy nakedness be not made
manifest; and eyesalve to anoint thine eyes, that thou mayest see." (Revelation
3:17-18) To a frightening extent, the Western church has bought into the delusive dream of
modernity and agreed to the imitation of its witness to the "spiritual" area of
life. The consequence has been that the nerve of its vital life and witness in the
twentieth century has been cut.
We talked in the first article about the loss of the creation that forms our environment.
In the second we discussed the loss of the "holy" or sacred in our relationships
with other humans. Since the great commandment covering our relation to others is to love
them as ourselves, we are brought now to asking whether in some sense we have not only
lost others but have also lost ourselves. To that topic we turn in this essay.
In approaching this topic, let me say that I am not comfortable. I have been familiar for
a long time with ideas about worldly and godly self-concept, and about dying to self in
order to live to God, but have been able to leave such ideas rather securely on the
"spiritual" side of life. My recent encounter with Gerald May’s Addiction
and Grace has brought them crashing down into the ordinary routines of life in a
threatening yet irresistibly attractive way. What I write will be the way things look to
me, but I urge you to read critically. See if you can find the Bible saying these things.
If you disagree and can show me from the Scriptures where I am off base, I shall be your
debtor. At least I hope to stir you to some careful thought about the way in which you see
yourself.
WORLDLY SELF-CONCEPT
One of the helpful contributions of modern psychology has been a new sensitivity to the
importance of the self-concept in children as well as adults. It is now recognized that if
we think poorly of ourselves, we will show it by thinking and acting poorly toward others.
Another contribution is the awareness that a child’s self-concept is dependent on
what he or she thinks adults think of him or her rather than what the adults think they
think. Admittedly, the Bible has been saying this for a long time. Jesus’ three
admonitions regarding children in His sermon in Matthew 18 show it with startling clarity:
receive them as if you were receiving me, don’t stumble them (by setting an example
that, if followed, will damage them), and don’t despise them. This does not mean
permissiveness, but calls for more careful admixture of leadership and servanthood on the
part of adults than we have realized. The church has tended to come down hard on the side
of parental authority and children’s submission.
There is, however, a fateful flaw in the world’s way of encouraging a good
self-concept, as Dr. Bernie Sachs pointed out to a number of us some years ago. Modern
people hold with childlike faith to the theory of human autonomy. Any suggestion that
there is a god to whom we are accountable and who established some inflexible moral
absolutes is resisted fiercely. Without a transcendent source, the human self is left to
chase its tail. You are a good child because you are a good child! This kind of circular
thinking can only lead to arrogance, and arrogance is inevitably destructive of a good
self-concept. It is an addiction that feeds on itself and resists our best efforts to
control it.
GODLY SELF-CONCEPT
There is an important element of truth in the assertion that people are good. They are
created by God, and, as the saying goes, "God don’t make junk." Paul quoted
with approval the heathen poets’ assertion that " . . . we are also His
offspring," (Acts 17:28). God still breathes into every newborn baby the breath of
life and it becomes a living soul. He visits all people everywhere with an immeasurable
outpouring of goodness every day and every growing season. He must like people. He does,
and they have great worth in his eyes, so much so that He sent His only begotten son to
redeem them. But we have substituted moral worthiness in our own eyes for redeemable worth
in God’s eyes and have read God out of the equation. The result is that human
self-worth always terminates in arrogance unless it altered by God’s grace.
The godly concept of self-worth, on the other hand, proceeds from the principle that we
are made in God’s image and that our value is derived from Him whose image bear. We
cannot boast of worthiness as if it inhered in us. Furthermore, we find in ourselves a
deadly tendency to try to find our satisfaction and fulfillment in the creation instead of
in God through the creation. These two factors are enough to insure that a Christian or
godly self-concept will always lead to and culminate in humility. Humility is an
outstanding characteristic of Christ (Philippians 2:5-9). It is always associated with
love, love for God and our neighbor, as well as ourselves. So a godly self-concept
operates in a way that is 180 degrees distant from a worldly self-concept.
DYING TO SELF
At this point another question rises. If there is a godly self-concept, why does the
Bible talk about dying to self? (2 Corinthians 1:9; Romans 6:11; and many other
references). To answer this question, we must look briefly at the matter of addiction or
psychological attachment. Ever since the Garden of Eden, humans have been perversely
inclined to try to satisfy their hunger for God in the creation itself. Eve and Adam saw
the possibility of pleasure, possession, and being somebody as if those lay in the fruit
of the forbidden tree and not in God. They had, as we do, created a longing for God. This
is what Augustine meant by saying the soul is restless until it rests in God. But they
were free to attempt to satisfy that longing in creation as objective reality and without
reference to God. This was the original sting operation, masterminded by the devil
himself. The sting lay in the fact that they instantly became attached to the fruit. It
was the thing on which they now depended to make life meaningful, and they found that one
bit wasn’t enough. They had to have more and more. They were addicted! What they
thought would be the path to freedom turned out to contain a concealed bear-trap from the
iron grip of which they were now powerless to extricate themselves. The similarity between
their action and alcoholism is evident. Alcohol promises the drinker freedom, but it leads
him into a descending spiral of worse and worse bondage. Every addiction or attachment to
something created does this.
Desire is not wrong. It is a gift from God. As May says, "It is not only necessary
for life; it also lends a rich open endedness to existence, a lack of complete
satisfaction that is powerfully creative and, in many ways, joyful. ("Addiction and
Grace," p. 110) But desiring to use the creation as a means to become godlike
(Genesis 3:5) is something else again; it twists our God-given will into a self-will which
is at unceasing enmity with God (Romans 8:7). May continues the quotation above in these
words, "But the grasping, clinging, possessive quality of attachment is something
very different. It is restrictive, not creative, imperative instead of enjoyable. As
William Blake said ‘rather than binding ourselves to joy, we must kiss it as it
flies.’ " Their addiction was idolatry which immediately began to crush them.
Seen in this light, their expulsion from the Garden was a move to protect God from them.
It was a move to protect for them the possibility of their freely willing, by the grace of
God, to return to Him and find their longing finally fulfilled.
We are all the children of Adam and Eve. Like them, we have our attachments or addictions.
We are not all addicted with the severity of alcoholism or chemical dependence, but we are
all addicted. Our addictions consist in putting something created in the place that only
God should hold in our lives and trying to satisfy our longing that way. We can do it with
work, with food, with sex, even with our concept of God. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day
are a frightening instance of this. They were so addicted to their concept of God that
they were compelled to concur in the death of Jesus rather than to admit that they had a
problem (John 5:38-40). The problems that are so apparent in the alcoholic, growing need
for alcohol, painful consequences of being deprived of it, self-deception as to the
existence of a problem, the loss of willpower to change, and the redirection of interest
from loving God, neighbor and self to loving and seeking the thing to which we are all
addicted - all there are present with any addiction. They are simply not so severely
evident. This is what the Bible means when it says that we have all sinned and come short
of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).
Our self-concept, like anything else in the creation, can also become an addiction and so
an idolatry. Adam and Eve demonstrated this immediately when God talked with them about
what they had done. Eve blamed it on the serpent. Adam blamed it on Eve. He went even
farther, by mentioning that Eve was God’s gift to him, blaming it on God. Hitler,
Stalin, and Mao are monstrous illustrations of addiction to self-concept. But the seed is
all of us, and it produces its deadly fruit in a multitude of differing ways. This is why
pride is such a serious sin. It is also why human relationships are fraught with such
tension and difficulty, even among close friends and lovers.
When the Bible talks about dying to self, it is this idolatrous self-concept which is in
view. It shuts us off from the possibility of loving. It feeds on our efforts to overcome
it, and enmeshes us ever more deeply in its net. There is no way in which we can overcome
it in our own strength.
The only solution to this desperate situation is the grace of God. God loves us and gives
Himself to us in myriad ways every day. That is His grace. Only His grace is powerful
enough to cut the bonds that tie us to our addictions. But for that to happen, we must
come to the end of ourselves. We must admit, not in words merely, but from our very
hearts, that we have a problem that we cannot solve. The self-deception involved in
addiction makes this very hard to do. The biggest problem with alcoholics is that they
don’t think they have a problem. That is true of all addictions. We think that if we
just try a little harder, pray a little more, try to be a little more spiritual, we will
be able to get control of ourselves. That only illustrates the power addiction has over
us. It tells us that we can overcome it and in that very process tightens its grip on us.
Truly, as Jeremiah says, "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately
wicked; who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9). Only Christ can set us free, but having
Him do so is very much like dying. It means giving up our last hope of handling our life
situation by ourselves.
So self-concept is important, but it comes in a way that is difficult and forbidding to
us. The rich young ruler thought he was on the ladder to heaven and almost there. Jesus
told him he was going in the wrong direction. For him the way to heaven was down. He had
to cease being rich and become poor. He had to cease being a leader and become a follower.
This was tantamount to dying in his situation, and, at least at that point, it was too
much for him. The door into God’s grace is through our weakness, not through our
strength (2 Corinthians 12:9). But admitting and accepting that is very much like dying.
That is why baptism is spoken if as dying with Christ.
"TO ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST"
The other side of death with Christ is resurrection with Him. This does not mean that
we stop living and Christ lives instead of us. That would make us mere chessmen on
God’s board, and that isn’t what He is after. It means that we begin to walk
through life, stumbling, limping, but moving forward in simple dependence on the grace of
God. If we really admit our weakness, our addiction, then we have no hope and no help
unless God actively intervenes for us moment in our weakness. And God’s gracious
intervention is not something we can manage, manipulate, control or direct. The wind blows
where it will. We can pray and trust, but we cannot control. That would be addiction
again. Like the manna in the wilderness, God’s grace cannot be stored even overnight
or it will breed worms and stink! We walk through the desert, and every day grace is there
again. But there is no way to insure against its not being there. We can only admit our
helplessness and trust.
This is not an easy way, but Christ didn’t say it would be. He did say, "Come
unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke
upon you and learn of me, and ye shall find rest unto your souls for my yoke is easy and
my burden is light." (Matthew 11:28-30). It is a way of peace and comfort beyond
anything even imaginable in this addicted world. Christ does not push us out of the way
and live our lives instead of us. It is more like the hymn lines which say, "To all
life thou givest, to both great and small; In all life thou livest, the true life of
all." Christ lived the life we ought to live and don’t. He died the death we
ought to die and can’t without dying forever. And He did that so that He can now
begin to live His human life over again in us as we admit our addiction, lay down our
arms, stop supposing we can get things in hand, and trust Him day by day.
CONCLUSION
This is the Biblical way of recovering the world of the self as God intended it to be.
Like the people in Alcoholics Anonymous, we are recovering addicts and will be until the
Lord comes or we go to be with Him. But we are recovering; that’s the good news. We
aren’t perfect, but we are on the way. We don’t need to go on hating ourselves
and running ourselves down because we fail. Apart from His grace, that’s all we can
do. Now we can pick ourselves up and go on in the strength He gives. Therein lie love,
joy, peace, and hope. This is the path of eternal life!
Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College
