Becoming Our True Self-in-Christ

Pennington suggests that Christ’s temptations in the wilderness were temptations to live out of such a false center. First the tempter invited him to turn stones into bread. But Jesus said no to the invitation to establish himself on the basis of his doing. Then the tempter invited him to throw himself from the top of the temple into the crowds below, so they would immediately recognize him as the Messiah. Again Jesus rejected the temptation. He chose not to base his identity on the acclaim of others. Finally the tempter offered him all the kingdoms of the world. But once again Jesus rejected the offer, refusing to find his identity in possessions or power.

Jesus knew who he was before God and in God. He could therefore resist temptations to live his life out of a false center based on possessions, actions or the esteem of others.

Merton suggests that at the core of our false ways of being there is always a sinful refusal to surrender to God’s will.

My reluctance to find my identity and fulfillment in Christ leaves me vulnerable to living out of a false center. It leaves me no alternative but to create a self of my own making. This is where the problem begins. The self I am called from eternity to be has meaning only in relation to Christ. The unique self that I am called to be is never a self I simply dream up and decide I’d like to be. It is always and only the self that I actually am in Christ. This is my eternal self. This is the self I am intended to be. This is the only self that will allow me to be truly whole and holy.

- David G. Benner, Sacred Companions: The Gift of Spiritual Friendship Direction, 2009.

 

Becoming Whole and Holy

The purpose of salvation is to make whole that which is broken. The Christian spiritual journey settles for nothing less than such wholeness. But genuine wholeness cannot occur apart from holiness. In The Holiness of God, R. C. Sproul notes that the pattern of God’s transforming encounters with humans is always the same. God appears; humans respond with fear because of their sin; God forgives our sins and heals us (holiness and wholeness); God then sends us out to serve him. This means that holiness and wholeness are the interrelated goals of the Christian spiritual journey. Holiness is the goal of the spiritual journey because God is holy and commands that we be holy (Leviticus 11:44).

Holiness involves taking on the life and character of a holy God by means of a restored relationship to him. This relationship heals our most fundamental disease—our separation from our Source, our Redeemer, the Great Lover of our soul. This relationship is therefore simultaneously the source of our holiness and of our wholeness.

Human beings were designed for intimate relationship with God and cannot find fulfillment of their true and deepest self apart from that relationship. Holiness does not involve the annihilation of our identity with a simple transplant of God’s identity. Rather, it involves the transformation of our self, made possible by the work of God’s Spirit within us. Holiness is becoming like the God with whom we live in intimate relationship. It is acquiring his Spirit and allowing spirit to be transformed by Spirit. It is finding and living our life in Christ, and then discovering that Christ’s life and Spirit are our life and spirit. This is the journey of Christian spiritual transformation. This is the process of becoming whole and holy.

 - David G. Benner, Sacred Companions: The Gift of Spiritual Friendship Direction, 2009.

We Are Rebels

You see, in our time we have over-emphasized the psychology of the sinner’s condition. We spend much time describing the woe of the sinner, the grief of the sinner and the great burden he carries. He does have all of these, but we have over-emphasized them until we forget the principal fact—that the sinner is actually a rebel against properly constituted authority! 

That is what makes sin, sin. We are rebels. We are sons of disobedience. Sin is the breaking of the law and we are in rebellion and we are fugitives from the just laws of God while we are sinners.
 
So it is with sinners. Certainly they are heartbroken and they carry a heavy load. Certainly they labor and are heavy-laden. The Bible takes full account of these things; but they are incidental to the fact that the reason the sinner is what he is, is because he has rebelled against the laws of God and he is a fugitive from divine judgement.

- Tozer, A. W., I Call It Heresy

Understanding Sin

Another way to calculate the importance of a biblical understanding of sin is through the use of a series of theological continua. For example, a high view of humanity (humans are basically good morally) and our capacity for good typically maintains a low view of sin’s serious effects upon humanity. Alternately, a heightened view of sin (humans are radically depraved) will result in a reduced view of human capacity for spiritual good.

The theological understanding of Christ’s work is also impacted by one’s view of sin. A milder view of sin tends to parallel a nonpunitive view of the atonement. When the cross is viewed as an answer to the wrath of God, a clearly heightened view of sin (human helplessness before a holy God) is the presupposition.

God’s grace is another area directly impacted by one’s view of sin. The more sinful we appear to ourselves, the more we recognize the strategic nature of God’s grace. In the matter of soteriology, a positive view of human ability coupled with an optimistic view of the human condition depreciates the need for salvation and opens the door for alternate interpretations of the nature of our deliverance from sin (e.g., liberationist definitions of salvation as deliverance from political, sexual, or racial exploitation). In terms of conversion, repentance and faith are directly related to the nature of sin. Thus, do we have the capacity to repent and believe, or are these capacities granted to us at conversion?

Finally, as became clear to Augustine, one’s view of predestination is impacted by one’s view of sin. A more severe view of sin prompts a more pronounced understanding of predestination and election. Alternately, modifications to God’s free unconditional election (conditional election, for example) are supported by a less stringent view of human depravity.
 

- John W. Mahony, “A Theology of Sin for Today,” in Fallen: 

A Theology of Sin, eds.  Christopher. W. Morgan & Robert A. Peterson, 2013.

The Reality of Sins

The strategic importance of sin theologically and practically prompts us to ask about the nature of sin itself. Typically, post-fall definitions of sin (that is, those that reflect our fallen condition) come from either lexical analyses of the biblical words or from the various biblical images for sin (such as disease, defilement, or debt). Christian confessional statements, articles of faith, and systematic theologies contain definitions that have been coalesced from biblical usage and historical precedents. 

More recent efforts to define sin, however, reflect the existential and realist contexts of the last century: “[Sin] is universal, tragic estrangement, based on freedom and destiny in all human beings, and shall never be used in the plural. Sin is separation, estrangement from one’s essential being.” Existentially, sin is a deep sense of dread or anxiety, the tension that arises from our finitude and the openness of the future.

The trend away from more objective statements about sin tends to cloud the issue of sin’s essence. Compared to the existential, man-centered approach to sin, classic doctrinal statements such as the Westminster Larger Catechism defined sin with a clear reference to God and his law: “Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, any law of God, given as a rule to the reasonable creature.” Within the Roman Catholic tradition, Thomas Aquinas defined sin as “a word, deed, or desire which is against the eternal law.” John Calvin defined sin as “unfaithfulness.”10 James Arminius claimed that sin is “something thought, spoken, or done against the law of God, or the omission of something which has been commanded by that law to be thought, spoken or done.”

Each of these definitions captures the essential meaning of sin as a violation of God’s law, covenant, or will. They also reflect a traditional understanding of the historicity of Adam and interpret the account of the fall in Genesis 3 quite literally. Consequently, sin is viewed more in relation to God. The perspective, however, is still post-fall.

A. H. Strong defined sin as the “lack of conformity to the moral law of God, either in act, disposition, or state.” In a subsequent clarification of the definition, he declared: “It therefore considers lack of conformity to the divine holiness in disposition or state as a violation of law, equally with the outward act of transgression.”

 “Lack of conformity,” however, is only true of humankind after the fall of Adam; the expression cannot be applied either to Adam before the fall or to the incarnate Son of God. From a pre-fall perspective, the essential nature of sin is expressed in a single act of rebellion; from a post-fall perspective, the violation of God’s law is only one component among innumerable others.

In regard to the post-fall perspective, then, sin possesses many different facets and expressions. The Scripture also uses an array of terms for sin and describes it in many different ways. The following is a summary of the biblical usage and serves as an exposition of the post-fall reality.

 

 - John W. Mahony, “A Theology of Sin for Today,” in Fallen: 

A Theology of Sin, eds.  Christopher. W. Morgan & Robert A. Peterson, 2013.

 

Four Fundamental Principles of Science

Christopher Kaiser, in his book Creation and the History of Science, has shown how the Cappadocian theologians developed four fundamental principles that were to shape the development of science through the centuries and up to the present day. The important point to note here is that these principles were formulated on the basis of belief in the divine revelation given in Scripture and supremely in the work of Christ. In brief, these principles were as follows:

 

1. Because the cosmos is the creation of a rational God who has also made us in his image, it follows that the cosmos is in principle comprehensible by the human mind. It is a coherent cosmos, not a chaos of random events. Therefore, (in contrast to important strands in Indian thought) there are no ultimate self-contradictions. It is not to be understood in terms of a yin-yang duality as in Far Eastern thought. It has an ultimate coherence, a coherence of which the central secret is made known in the Incarnation.

 

2. Because the cosmos is a creation by God as a free act of his will and not an emanation of God (as in some elements in Indian thought), the cosmos has a relative autonomy. Not everything that happens is the direct will of God. It follows, then, that the way to knowledge of the cosmos is not opening the mind to ultimate reality through mystical contemplation. To discover how the cosmos works, we must investigate the empirical facts by careful observation.

 

3. Because Scripture says that God created the heavens and the earth, it follows that the “heavenly bodies” are not (as Aristotle said) made of a substance different from the elements that comprise the earth, but are, on the contrary, of the same substance. (It is one of the many ironies in the history of the later conflicts between science and religion that when Galileo, as a result of his use of a telescope, decided that the moon was made of the same substance as the earth, he was condemned by the church because the church had meanwhile co-opted Aristotelian philosophy into its doctrine.)

 

4. Because of the work of Christ in the incarnation, we may use material means for the advancement of human salvation. The implication of this was that the church did not have to follow the Hebrew tradition of rejecting Greek medicine; instead, it could use Greek medicine in the development of the healing ministry which was to be such an important part of its work in succeeding centuries.

 

These four principles, which were to provide the foundation for the subsequent development of science in Europe (a science which was destined to outstrip the far more brilliant thinking of India, China, and the Arab world), were based on faith in the biblical revelation. They were part of the whole reconstitution of thought necessitated by the new fact, the action of God, the incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ.

 

--- Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship. 1995.

Christianity and the Making of a Distinct Europe

What has made Europe a distinct cultural and spiritual entity is the fact that, for a thousand years, the barbarian tribes who had found their home there were schooled in both the biblical story and the learning of classical antiquity, the legacy of Greece and Rome. These tribes, or at least their intellectual leaders, were taught to think in Greek and Latin, but the story that shaped their thinking was the Bible. Therefore, from the beginning of what we now call “Europe,” there was a tension between historical and philosophical streams, one flowing from Greece and Rome and the other from Israel.

 

The Jews, whose synagogues were in every major city, were a people apart. One could admire their high moral standards and perhaps their noble monotheism, but their religion was outside the main currents of philosophical investigation.

 

Christianity presented itself to the classical world as a development of this Jewish faith, but—unlike Judaism—it reached out in vigorous propaganda among all sectors of the people. Its scriptures were also offered in Greek, but more significantly, commentary and interpretation were available in Greek, not the Aramaic of the emerging rabbinic tradition…… 

 

At the heart of the Christian message was a new fact: God had acted—and let us remember that the original meaning of “fact” is the Latin factum, “something done.” God had acted in a way that, if believed, must henceforth determine all our ways of thinking. It could not merely fit into existing ways of understanding the world without fundamentally changing them.

 

--- Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship. 1995