Self-affirmation
Self-affirmation
But we must not overlook another strand in Scripture. Alongside Jesus’ explicit call to self-denial is his implicit call to self-affirmation (which is not at all the same thing as self-love). Nobody who reads the Gospels as a whole could possibly gain the impression that Jesus had a negative attitude to human beings himself, or encouraged one in others. The opposite is the case.
Consider, first, his teaching about people. It is true that he drew attention to the evil and ugly things which issue from the human heart (Mark 7:21–23). He also spoke, however, of the ‘value’ of human beings in God’s sight. They are ‘much more valuable’ than birds or beasts, he said.11 What was the ground of this value judgment? It must have been the doctrine of creation, which Jesus took over from the Old Testament, namely that human beings are the crown of God’s creative activity, and that he made man male and female in his own image. It is the divine image we bear which gives us our distinctive value. In his excellent little book The Christian Looks at Himself Dr Anthony Hoekema quotes a young American black who, rebelling against the inferiority feelings inculcated in him by whites, put up this banner in his room: ‘I’m me and I’m good, ‘cause God don’t make junk’ (p.15). It may have been bad grammar, but it was good theology.
Secondly, there was Jesus’ attitude to people. He despised nobody and disowned nobody. On the contrary, he went out of his way to honour those whom the world dishonoured, and to accept those whom the world rejected. He spoke courteously to women in public. He invited little children to come to him. He spoke words of hope to Samaritans and Gentiles. He allowed leprosy sufferers to approach him, and a prostitute to anoint and kiss his feet. He made friends with the outcasts of society, and ministered to the poor and hungry. In all this diversified ministry his compassionate respect for human beings shone forth. He acknowledged their value and loved them, and by loving them he further increased their value.
Thirdly, and in particular, we must remember Jesus’ mission and death for human beings. He had come to serve, not to be served, he said, and to give his life as a ransom instead of the many. Nothing indicates more clearly the great value Jesus placed on people than his determination to suffer and die for them. He was the Good Shepherd who came into the desert, braving the hardship and risking the peril, in order to seek and to save only one lost sheep. Indeed, he laid down his life for the sheep. It is only when we look at the cross that we see the true worth of human beings. As William Temple expressed it, ‘My worth is what I am worth to God; and that is a marvellous great deal, for Christ died for me.’12
We have seen so far that the cross of Christ is both a proof of the value of the human self and a picture of how to deny or crucify it. How can we resolve this biblical paradox? How is it possible to value ourselves and to deny ourselves simultaneously?
This question arises because we discuss and develop alternative attitudes to ourselves before we have defined the ‘self’ we are talking about. Our ‘self’ is not a simple entity that is either wholly good or wholly evil, and therefore to be either totally valued or totally denied. Instead, our ‘self’ is a complex entity of good and evil, glory and shame, which on that account requires that we develop more subtle attitudes to ourselves.
What we are (our self or personal identity) is partly the result of the creation (the image of God) and partly the result of the Fall (the image defaced). The self we are to deny, disown and crucify is our fallen self, everything within us that is incompatible with Jesus Christ (hence his commands ‘let him deny himself’ and then ‘let him follow me’). The self we are to affirm and value is our created self, everything within us that is compatible with Jesus Christ (hence his statement that if we lose ourselves by self-denial we shall find ourselves). True self-denial (the denial of our false, fallen self) is not the road to self-destruction but the road to self-discovery.
So then, whatever we are by creation we must affirm: our rationality, our sense of moral obligation, our sexuality (whether masculinity or femininity), our family life, our gifts of aesthetic appreciation and artistic creativity, our stewardship of the fruitful earth, our hunger for love and experience of community, our awareness of the transcendent majesty of God, and our inbuilt urge to fall down and worship him. All this (and more) is part of our created humanness. True, it has been tainted and twisted by sin. Yet Christ came to redeem it, not to destroy it. So we must gratefully and positively affirm it.
Whatever we are by the Fall, however, we must deny or repudiate: our irrationality, our moral perversity, our blurring of sexual distinctives and lack of sexual self-control, the selfishness which spoils our family life, our fascination with the ugly, our lazy refusal to develop God’s gifts, our pollution and spoliation of the environment, the anti-social tendencies which inhibit true community, our proud autonomy, and our idolatrous refusal to worship the living and true God. All this (and more) is part of our fallen humanness. Christ came not to redeem this but to destroy it. So we must strenuously deny or repudiate it.
So far I have deliberately oversimplified the contrast between our createdness and our fallenness. The picture needs now to be modified, indeed enriched, in two ways. Both enrichments are due to the introduction into the human scene of the redemption of Christ. Christians can no longer think of themselves only as ‘created and fallen’, but rather as ‘created, fallen and redeemed’. And the injection of this new element gives us both more to affirm and more to deny.
First, we have more to affirm. For we have not only been created in God’s image, but re-created in it. God’s gracious work in us, which is variously portrayed in the New Testament as ‘regeneration’, ‘resurrection’, ‘redemption’, etc., is essentially a re-creation. Our new self has been ‘created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness’, and it ‘is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator’. Indeed, every person who is in Christ ‘is a new creation’.13 This means that our mind, our character and our relationships are all being renewed. We are God’s children, Christ’s disciples and the Holy Spirit’s temple. We belong to the new community which is the family of God. The Holy Spirit enriches us with his fruit and gifts. And we are God’s heirs, looking forward with confidence to the glory which will one day be revealed. Becoming a Christian is a transforming experience. By changing us, it also changes our self-image. We now have much more to affirm, not boastfully but gratefully. Dr Hoekema is right to make this his main emphasis in The Christian Looks at Himself. He mentions the hymn ‘Beneath the Cross of Jesus’, which in many ways is magnificent and moving. But not the end of one verse, which goes like this:
And from my smitten heart, with tears,
Two wonders I confess, –
The wonder of his glorious love,
And my own worthlessness.
No, no, Dr Hoekema objects. We cannot sing that. ‘And my unworthiness’ would express the truth, but not ‘my own worthlessness’ (p.16). How can we declare ‘worthless’ what Jesus Christ has declared of ‘value’? Is it ‘worthless’ to be a child of God, a member of Christ and an heir of the kingdom of heaven? So then, a vital part of our self-affirmation, which in reality is an affirmation of the grace of God our Creator and Redeemer, is what we have become in Christ. ‘The ultimate basis for our positive self-image must be God’s acceptance of us in Christ’ (p.102).
Secondly, Christians have more to deny as well as more to affirm. So far I have included only our fallenness in what needs to be denied. Sometimes, however, God calls us to deny to ourselves things which, though not wrong in themselves or attributable to the Fall, yet stand in the way of our doing his particular will for us. This is why Jesus, whose humanity was perfect and not fallen, still had to deny himself. We are told that he ‘did not consider equality with God something to be grasped’, that is, to be selfishly enjoyed (Phil. 2:6). It was his already. He did not ‘make himself equal with God’ as his critics complained (John 5:18); he was eternally equal with him, so that he and his Father were ‘one’ (John 10:30). Yet he did not cling to the privileges of this status. Instead, he ‘emptied himself’ of his glory. Yet the reason he laid it aside is not that it was not his by right, but that he could not retain it and at the same time fulfil his destiny to be God’s Messiah and Mediator. He went to the cross in self-denial, not of course because he had done anything to deserve death, but because this was his Father’s will for him according to Scripture, and to that will he voluntarily surrendered himself. Throughout his life he resisted the temptation to avoid the cross. In Max Warren’s succinct words, ‘all Christ’s living was a dying’.14 He denied himself in order to give himself for us.
The very same principle is applicable to Christ’s followers. ‘Let this mind be in you’, Paul wrote. For he knew the call to self-denial in his own apostolic experience. He had legitimate rights, for example to marriage and to financial support, which he deliberately denied himself because he believed this was God’s will for him. He also wrote that mature Christians should be willing to renounce their rights and limit their liberties so as not to cause immature brothers and sisters to sin. Still today some Christian people are called to forgo married life, or a secure job, or professional promotion, or a comfortable home in a salubrious suburb, not because any of these things is wrong in itself, but because they are incompatible with a particular call of God to go overseas or live in the inner city or identify more closely with the world’s poor and hungry people.
There is, therefore, a great need for discernment in our self-understanding. Who am I? What is my ‘self’? The answer is that I am a Jekyll and Hyde, a mixed-up kid, having both dignity, because I was created and have been re-created in the image of God, and depravity, because I still have a fallen and rebellious nature. I am both noble and ignoble, beautiful and ugly, good and bad, upright and twisted, image and child of God, and yet sometimes yielding obsequious homage to the devil from whose clutches Christ has rescued me. My true self is what I am by creation, which Christ came to redeem, and by calling. My false self is what I am by the Fall, which Christ came to destroy.
Only when we have discerned which is which within us, shall we know what attitude to adopt towards each. We must be true to our true self and false to our false self. We must be fearless in affirming all that we are by creation, redemption and calling, and ruthless in disowning all that we are by the Fall.
Moreover, the cross of Christ teaches us both attitudes. On the one hand, the cross is the God-given measure of the value of our true self, since Christ loved us and died for us. On the other hand, it is the God-given model for the denial of our false self, since we are to nail it to the cross and so put it to death. Or, more simply, standing before the cross we see simultaneously our worth and our unworthiness, since we perceive both the greatness of his love in dying, and the greatness of our sin in causing him to die.