THE OTHER SIDE OF A CHRISTIAN MIND:

IT’S REALTIONSHIP TO THE SELF

While it is not the recommended way to begin an essay, I am going to begin this one with a confession. Of all the articles on the "being" side of the Christian mind, I find this one most difficult. Here I must come to terms with Jesus’ dictum that to save one’s life one must lose it, and all the inbuilt resistance to really finding life in Him alone that has been in the human heart since the fall rises up in terrifying strength to oppose any such foolish action. Let us, then, undertake to be fools for Christ and see what we can discover.
The problem here is that the moment one makes a list of what our attitude toward ourselves should be, one encounters the risk of positing some new legalism. For example, humility is an obvious quality Christians ought to exhibit, but as soon as we look to see how humble we are, we fall into pride. It’s like pulling up the carrots to see how they are growing. Once pulled, they can’t be replaced to grow again. As Van Ruler puts it, "Anyone who puts forth an extreme effort to be humble and avoid any display of excellence puts on a display of his humility. Pride and vanity protrude everywhere throughout the torn cloak of humility." (A.A. Van Ruler, The Greatest of These Is Love, p. 33)
Two other quotations from Van Ruler seemed to open windows on this problem. In a discussion of God’s love for us and the world, he says, ". . . in our egoism and loneliness, we are separated from the other; we are out of reach of the other and, in a sense, are above him. This is an element in the structure of our humanity that can bring deep suffering to us. Sometimes we can hardly bear the terrible loneliness of our egos.

"The God of the Bible is the only cure for this illness. He is transcendent from us far more radically than we are transcendent from other men. Yet He does explain His transcendence; and He uses it not to separate Himself but to come face to face with us. This suggests the remedy for us. We must accept ourselves fully (saying "Yes" to self also belongs to love) and then, in the forgetfulness of love, we must forget ourselves and turn to the other. But we must forget ourselves because we give ourselves away to the other. The alternative is to refuse to accept ourselves and to waste ourselves in pity for what we are. This alternative is the beginning of hell" ("Ibid", p. 28)

The other quotation comes from the passage in 1 Corinthians 13 that says love is not puffed up.

" . . . On the one hand we must, for God’s sake, develop in all directions in order to be something and mean something in the world. On the other hand, we must not display this too much nor think too much of ourselves in doing it. We must develop within the reality that we already are. But we must not grow in the consciousness of ourselves. We must grow in reality, but not in what we appear to ourselves to be. If we do, we are puffed up.
" . . .There is something divisive within humanity. We not only are, but we know that we are. We not only are real, but we see our own reality. Man is split between reality and consciousness, between actual deed and descriptive consciousness. . .
" . . .Being puffed up is a remarkable expression of this basic problem. Man must develop in excellence within the reality of his existence. But he must not be too aware that he is something excellent. Now, says Paul, the solution of this difficulty is love. Love is not puffed up . . . it is not arrogant. When a man lives in love he accepts the fact that he, on the one hand, is, and, on the other, that he is conscious of being. Both of these facts are terribly serious. To discover that one irrevocably exists, that one’s existence cannot be called back, that even eternity cannot undo it, is something so bewildering and shocking that one cannot grasp it or bear it unless he lives in the love with which God loves him.
"There is a touch of hell in the fact that one must not only live and work, but that he must know and think, ponder and understand. . .
"Living in love, in the love wherewith God loves us, we can bear this with joy. In our thinking we have a share in His thinking. He bears the final responsibility for our existence. We then learn naturally not to look too long at ourselves or to allow ourselves too much self-admiration. At least we can laugh at our own self-approval. We can even laugh at ourselves.
"With the joy of love, we receive the courage to go into the reality of the world and it’s life, there with joy to give all our gift to the service of our neighbor and to the glory of God. This child-like, self imposed oblivion is the opposite of our natural tendency to puff ourselves up." ("Ibid" p. 38-40)

What it means to be me

Let’s begin with the question of what it means to be me, to be a person. Our answer to this question is bound to be heavily clouded by the modern infatuation with the self. Modernity tried to find reality, even with regard to the self, in the sure answers of science. But the science that seemed so reliable in the area of physical things proved helpless to identify the human heart. Science is, purportedly, value free, and the human heart is value laden. Science has concluded that the soul does not exist. But the heart will not be satisfied with such a conclusion. Refusing to turn to the living God for an answer, modern people have turned to an opposite pole from science, to the concept of the autonomous human personality. It is a part of God’s judgement on humans that, if we refuse to listen to God’s word about ourselves, we will set up two antagonistic poles of thought and roam forever lost between them. This is the predicament of modern thought, in which all of us have grown up and by which we are far more deeply influenced than we think. This makes it hard to deal with the question of who we are.
We must, however, make the effort. To begin with, we can be sure that we are involved in a series of relationships. We did not make ourselves, but we found ourselves to be the product of the human love of a father and mother. For the months of gestation we were in the most literal sense dependent on our mothers. When we appeared visibly on the human scene, we were still deeply dependent for a number of years. During that time we were continually involved in relationships to our parent and probably our siblings. Then came school with its widening boundaries of relationships, and finally adult life with more of the same. Perhaps we fell in love, married, and found ourselves enmeshed in relationships with each other and our children. All this time, we were in relation to the created world around us and to God Himself. This last relationship may have eluded us completely, for reasons that we will discuss below. Or it may have, in His great grace, become real to us, and given an entirely different shape to our lives.
So, however we may often have wished it otherwise, we grew up as beings in a relationship. Why should this be the way of human life? The answer probably lies in the mystery of the Holy Trinity. We are created, the Bible tells us, in the image of God. But God, who is one God, is at the same tri-personal. The three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, live in such a perfection of love that they hold nothing back from each other. There is an absolute openness, a complete vulnerability, between them. We find this kind of openness frightening in our human relationships because of the impact of sin on our consciousness. As soon as they had sinned, Adam and Eve tried to hide from each other behind aprons of fig leaves, and we have been doing the same ever since.
Relations within the Trinity are totally different. Jesus’ life gives abundant illustration of this. "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Man, and to accomplish His work." (John 4:34) "I can do nothing on My own initiative. As I hear, I judge. . ." (5:30) "For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me." (6:38) ". . . I do nothing on my own initiative, but I speak these things as the Father taught me. (8:29) It is not I think, sacrilegious to imagine Adam and God sitting together in the Garden of Eden in intimate and unfettered communication. God says to Adam, "I’m going to show you some things, and I want you to tell Me what they mean. Name them." Immediately there appeared a white, bouncy four-legged creature. "Oh," said Adam, "how loveable. I would call that a lamb." Then a lion appeared. "He looks like a king," was Adam’s response. When the conversation ended, Adam had learned one very important lesson. There was no animal that was meant for him. So God put him to sleep, and when he awoke there was Eve. For some time - how long we do not know - the two of them enjoyed the most delightful and life-enlarging fellowship with each other and with God Himself, a relationship renewed daily as the Voice of the Lord walked in the Garden in the cool of the day.

What the fall did to personhood:

The tragic story of the ending of that idyllic, trusting relationship to God and to each other is told in Genesis 3. We are not told the secret of the origin of evil in the world. What we do know is that the idea of declaring independence from God was not original with the first pair; it was suggested to them by a creature, apparently a tree-dwelling snake, speaking as the agent of the Evil One. The suggestion was that life would be better for them if they would give up their childlike dependence on God as their friend and satisfy themselves directly with the creation and not God through creation. As Schmemann points out, there was only one tree in the Garden that was not blessed to them and their use. It was this tree that they were urged to taste of.
The temptation came in three parts. Genesis 3:6 gives the details. "When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate: and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate." One expositor described what was involved in this way: "good for food" = something to enjoy; "a delight to the eyes" = something to possess; "desirable to make one wise" = something to be. The same three elements appear in our Lord’s temptation in the wilderness (Matthew 4) and in St. John’s description of the world in 1 John 2:16, "For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world." There seems to be something thrice evil in the temptation to step out from the charmed circle of God’s fellowship.
There is nothing wrong with pleasure, possessions, or power, at least not in themselves. We were made to enjoy pleasures, to have possessions and to employ power. The problem seems to have arisen in the tension Van Ruler speaks of between being and consciousness. What Adam and Eve attempted was to derive pleasure, possessions and power, not from God through the creation, but from the creation directly and without reference to or dependence on God. But the reason this tree was forbidden was that it is impossible for a human to enjoy those three things directly from the creation without falling into the power of an idolatrous addiction. What the first parents did was to transfer their allegiance from God Himself to a substitute, in this case the fruit of the forbidden tree. They did not realize, apparently, that whatever we look to as the source of pleasure, possessions and power becomes the object of our worship and service. Many years later the Apostle Paul put it this way, "For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen." (Romans 1:25)
They took the step, and their consciousness was altered. Whereas they had thought of God as their friend, he suddenly became a fearful enemy, for He was far more powerful than they were. Whereas they had formerly experienced a perfect and delightful vulnerability toward each other and the pleasure of uncompromised openness, now they became sickeningly conscious of distance from each other. Adam blamed Eve when God came to investigate, and Eve blamed the serpent. They knew shame and attempted to hide it. They became extremely conscious of themselves at the same time as they move increasingly away from the reality for which and in which they had been created.
Modern psychology does not recognize the reality and danger of idolatry. But it does speak volumes on the topic of addiction. Gerald May in Addiction and Grace describes the psychological term "attachment" as an affinity for or a choice of, something which I imagine will satisfy my longing and make me secure. In the fall Adam and Eve became attached to something other than God. Overtly, they became attached to the creation; covertly, to themselves and the Evil One. Any attachment to a created thing is an addiction and, ultimately, an idolatry. The characteristics of addiction, as defined by May, are: tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, self-deception, loss of will power, and distortion of attention. Tolerance means that one requires more and more of the object of attachment to be satisfied. Withdrawal symptoms are the pains experienced on deprivation of the chosen object. Self-deception indicates the addict’s inability to recognize addiction. Loss of willpower describes the difficulty of escaping from the addiction, and distortion of attention means there is no room left for attachment to God when one is attached to something in the creation. May holds that these characteristics, glaringly obvious in alcoholism, are actually present in all addictions and that we are all addicted in one way or another. Born with a deep longing for God, we have displaced that longing by attachment to something in the creation.
Addiction is thus equivalent to idolatry and the two terms describe the nature of human sin. Only God can truly satisfy our longings and make us secure. But in our addiction we are convinced that we are free and independent. Yet we are utterly unable, on our own, to escape the grip of our idolatries. This situation has altered our consciousness and produced the difficulty we have in escaping from our addictions and coming so to a right relationship to ourselves on the being side of Christian mind. That escape is only possible through the grace and in the love of God. (to be continued)

Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College

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