11 Self-understanding and Self-giving
11
Self-understanding and Self-giving
The cross revolutionizes our attitude to ourselves as well as to God. So the community of the cross, in addition to being a community of celebration, is also a community of self-understanding. This may sound like a reversion to individualism. But it should not be so, since self-understanding is with a view to self-giving. How can one give what one does not know one has? That is why the quest for one’s own identity is essential.
Who are we, then? How should we think of ourselves? What attitude should we adopt towards ourselves? These are questions to which a satisfactory answer cannot be given without reference to the cross.
A low self-image is comparatively common today. Many people have crippling inferiority feelings. Sometimes their origin is in a deprived childhood, sometimes in a more recent tragedy of being unwanted and unloved. The pressures of a competitive society make matters worse. And other modern influences make them worse still. Wherever people are politically or economically oppressed, they feel demeaned. Racial and sexual prejudice, and the trauma of being declared ‘redundant’, can undermine anybody’s self-confidence. Technology demotes persons, as Arnold Toynbee once put it, ‘into serial numbers punched on a card, designed to travel through the entrails of a computer’. Meanwhile, ethologists such as Desmond Morris tell us that we are nothing but animals, and behaviourists such as B. F. Skinner that we are nothing but machines, programmed to make automatic responses to external stimuli. No wonder many people today feel worthless nonentities.
In over-reaction to this set of influences is the popular ‘human potential’ movement in the opposite direction. ‘Be yourself, express yourself, fulfil yourself!’ it cries. It emphasizes ‘the power of positive thinking’, together with the need for ‘possibility thinking’ and ‘positive mental attitudes’. With the laudable desire to build self-esteem, it gives the impression that our potentiality for development is virtually limitless. A whole literature has grown up round this concept, which has been well described and documented by Dr Paul Vitz in his book Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-worship. ‘Psychology has become a religion’, he writes, ‘in particular a form of secular humanism based on worship of the self’ (p.9). He begins by analysing ‘the four most important self-theorists’, namely Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and Rollo May, all of whom, with different twists and turns, teach the intrinsic goodness of human nature, and the consequent need for unconditional self-regard, self-awareness and self-actualization. These self-theories have been popularized by ‘transactional analysis’ (‘I’m OK; you’re OK’) and EST (Erhard Seminar Training) which Dr Vitz rightly calls ‘an amazingly literal self-deification’ (pp.31ff.). He also cites an advertisement in Psychology Today as an illustration of ‘selfist jargon’: ‘I love me. I am not conceited. I’m just a good friend to myself. And I like to do whatever makes me feel good...’ (p.62). This self-absorption has been well captured in a limerick:
There once was a nymph named Narcissus,
Who thought himself very delicious;
So he stared like a fool
At his face in a pool,
And his folly today is still with us.1
Unfortunately, many Christians seem to have allowed themselves to be sucked into this movement, under the false impression that the Mosaic command, endorsed by Jesus, that we love our neighbour as ourselves is a command to love ourselves as well as our neighbour. But it really is not. Three arguments may be adduced.
First, and grammatically, Jesus did not say ‘the first commandment is to love the Lord your God, the second to love your neighbour, and the third to love yourself’. He spoke only of the first great commandment and of the second which was like it. The addition of ‘as yourself’ supplies a rough and ready, practical guide to neighbour-love, because ‘no-one ever hated his own body’ (Eph. 5:29). In this respect it is like the Golden Rule to ‘do to others what you would have them do to you’ (Matt. 7:12). Most of us do love ourselves. So we know how we would like to be treated, and this will tell us how to treat others. Self-love is a fact to be recognized and a rule to be used, not a virtue to be commended.
Secondly, and linguistically, the verb is agapaō, and agapē love means self-sacrifice in the service of others. It cannot therefore be self-directed. The concept of sacrificing ourselves in order to serve ourselves is a nonsense.
Thirdly, and theologically, self-love is the biblical understanding of sin. Sin is being curved in on oneself (as Luther put it). One of the marks of ‘the last days’ is that people will be ‘lovers of self’ instead of ‘lovers of God’ (2 Tim. 3:1–5). Their love will be misdirected from God and neighbour to self.
How then should we regard ourselves? How can we renounce the two extremes of self-hatred and self-love, and neither despise nor flatter ourselves? How can we avoid a self-evaluation which is either too low or too high, and instead obey Paul’s admonition, ‘think of yourself with sober judgment’ (Rom. 12:3)? The cross of Christ supplies the answer, for it calls us both to self-denial and to self-affirmation. But before we are in a position to consider these complementary exhortations, it tells us that we are already new people because we have died and risen with Christ.
It is in this respect that the death of Jesus must rightly be called ‘representative’ as well as ‘substitutionary’.
A ‘substitute’ is one who acts in place of another in such a way as to render the other’s action unnecessary.
A ‘representative’ is one who acts on behalf of another, in such a way as to involve the other in his action.
Thus, a person who in former days served in the army (for pay) instead of a conscript was a ‘substitute’. So is the footballer who plays instead of another who has sustained an injury. The conscript and the injured player are now inactive; they have been replaced.
An agent, however, who serves as the ‘representative’ of his firm, is deputed to act on its behalf. He does not speak instead of the firm, but for it. The firm is committed to what he says and does.
Just so, as our substitute Christ did for us what we could never do for ourselves: he bore our sin and judgment. But as our representative he did what we by being united to him have also done: we have died and risen with him.
Paul’s most extensive exposition of this extraordinary yet wonderful theme comes at the beginning of Romans 6.2 It was occasioned by the evil suggestion that since, when sin increased, grace increased all the more, we might just as well go on sinning, so that grace may increase still further (5:20 – 6:1). Paul indignantly repudiates the idea, for the simple reason that ‘we died to sin’ and therefore can live in it no longer (6:2). When did that death take place? At our baptism: ‘don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life’ (6:3–4). So then baptism visibly dramatizes our participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus. That is why we may be said to have ‘died to sin’, so that we should live in it no longer.
The missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle is that Christ’s death (in which we have shared by faith inwardly and by baptism outwardly) was a death to sin: ‘the death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God’ (v. 10). There is only one sense in which it may be said that Jesus ‘died to sin’, and that is that he bore its penalty, since ‘the wages of sin is death’ (v. 23). Having paid sin’s wage (or borne its penalty) by dying, he has risen to a new life. So have we, by union with him. We too have died to sin, not in the sense that we have personally paid its penalty (Christ has done that in our place, instead of us), but in the sense that we have shared in the benefit of his death. Since the penalty of sin has been borne, and its debt paid, we are free from the awful burden of guilt and condemnation. And we have risen with Christ to a new life, with the sin question finished behind us. How then can we possibly go on living in the sin to which we have died? It is not impossible, for it is still necessary for us to take precautions against letting sin reign within us (vv. 12–14). But it is inconceivable, because it is incompatible with the fact of our death and resurrection with Jesus. It is death and resurrection which have cut us off from our old life; how can we ever think of returning to it? That is why we have to ‘reckon’ or ‘count’ ourselves ‘dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus’ (v. 11). This does not mean that we are to pretend we have died to sin and risen to God, when we know very well that we have not. On the contrary, we know that, by union with Christ, we have shared in his death and resurrection, and so have ourselves died to sin and risen to God; we must therefore constantly remember this fact and live a life consistent with it. William Tyndale expressed it in characteristically vivid terms at the end of his prologue to his work on Romans:
Now go to, reader, and according to the order of Paul’s writing, even so do thou...Remember that Christ made not this atonement that thou shouldest anger God again; neither died he for thy sins, that thou shouldest live still in them; neither cleansed he thee, that thou shouldest return, as a swine, unto thine old puddle again; but that thou shouldest be a new creature, and live a new life after the will of God, and not of the flesh.3
Barth grasped the radical nature of this teaching and alluded to it in his section on Justification. ‘The sentence which was executed as the divine judgment in the death of Jesus is that...I am the man of sin, and that this man of sin and therefore I myself am nailed to the cross and crucified (in the power of the sacrifice and obedience of Jesus Christ in my place), that I am therefore destroyed and replaced....’ This is the negative side of justification. But ‘in the same judgment in which God accuses and condemns us as sinners, and gives us up to death, he pardons us and places us in a new life before him and with him’. These two belong together, ‘our real death and our real life beyond death’, the destruction by death and the replacement by resurrection, the No and the Yes of God to the same person.4
Granted this fundamental fact about all who are in Christ, namely that we have died and risen with him, so that our old life of sin, guilt and shame has been terminated and an entirely new life of holiness, forgiveness and freedom has begun, what is to be our attitude to our new self? Because our new self, though redeemed, is still fallen, a double attitude will be necessary, namely self-denial and self-affirmation, both illumined by the cross.