One of the benefits of having New Testament scholar Robert Gagnon as a friend is that in 2 Corinthians 6, the apostle Paul mentions 10 difficult situations and then goes on to describe certain difficult scenarios.9 I got a text where he casually pointed out that there were two phrases in a row. Paul shows patience. Next, he identifies eight demonstrations of a Spirit-empowered life, three contradictions, and seven paradoxes of interrelated polarity: negative experiences in the physical dimension and opposites in the spiritual dimension. Indicates a positive experience.
“The most important of these polarities is the one in the middle,” Gagnon added. It tells the reader to pay special attention: “Even in death, we are still alive.” This is a typical paradox or polarity expressed in this letter, emphasizing that one cannot live in Christ without dying to self. ”
life and death.
There seems to be a principle at work in our fallen world. Tim Keller writes about this. Cancer cells may need to be destroyed to save lives. In order to save the world, Christ had to die. And in order to live as we are meant to live, we must die to ourselves.
Messages like this are highly unpopular in our cultural moment, but this gives believers the perfect opportunity to send out a countercultural message. But more importantly, it gives believers an opportunity to share the words of the Bible.
Today's Code of Professional Ethics for Psychologists is an attempt to summarize the values that guide psychologists, including autonomy, non-misconduct, benevolence, justice, loyalty, truthfulness, integrity, respect for rights and dignity, etc. . Unique to modernism in this list is the notion of autonomy and that this is something that should be categorically promoted.
“Satan uses personal autonomy as a ruse to disguise submission to himself.”
Now, something like self-love is definitely a perfectly appropriate created quality. After all, the Bible teaches us to love our neighbor as ourselves. But improper self-love arises because what is healthy and ordained has been distorted and distorted by sin.
This dichotomy provides a clear example of where biblical values and secular values can and do diverge. Privileging autonomy and “self-legislation”—treating everything as negotiable, flexible, fluid, etc.—can easily lead to an idolatrous self-deification, a death to the self to which we are called. It becomes the antithesis of
I see this in my own field of expertise. A well-known objection to theistic ethics is the autonomy objection, an example of which is that if we leave it to God to tell us what to do, we sacrifice our moral autonomy.
Sometimes the situation even escalates to such a laughable state. Some have used appeals to autonomy to challenge moral objectivity itself. That is, the relentless audacity of morality to tell us what we should do, contrary to our wishes.
Some trace their opposition to autonomy back to Immanuel Kant. Kant had quite a lot to say about autonomy, and in fact he is often misunderstood on this point. Kant encouraged those who adhere to moral truths to use them for their own benefit, rather than seeing them merely as imposed from the outside. Autonomy means self-imposition of moral law, and we are not its creators.
But a more modern and cruder variant of autonomy involves people defining for themselves what is right and wrong, good and bad, vice and virtue. Based on this perspective, they are empowered to decide the best path forward, rather than having to live up to certain desires and die. Therapists, bound by such worldly notions, can only challenge views that are out of step with the prevailing secular paradigm and what the patient's general desires dictate. could easily begin to perform a mirror-like function, reflecting anything.
Incidentally, this shows that even codes of ethics in professional organizations can be misleading. They often tend to hold onto popular views that are at odds with Biblical truth. Kiss Custodiet Ipsos Custodes: Who will protect the guards themselves? Who will monitor the guards? (This is a relevant question in many areas, including the emergence of AI technology.)
In any case, the Christian perspective is quite different from this modern variant of self-government.
Dennis Kinlaw, former president of Asbury College (now Asbury University) and Old Testament scholar, made the most poignant point: God never asks us to be His servants. The serpent never said to Eve, “I want to be your master.'' A devotional change is never from Christ to evil. It is always from Christ to himself. And instead of His will, self-interest reigned, and what I want became dominant. And that is the essence of sin. ”
This is a powerful truth that we should definitely remember. However, there is one point I might disagree with that brings our conversation full circle. By “self-interest” here, Kinlaw probably meant something like “self-interest” instead, but it differs in important ways. Exercising right and eating right are in our interests, but they are not inherently selfish.
Similarly, our true selfishness is never something we as Christians must sacrifice. Serving God and doing what is right is never contrary to our ultimate self-interest. In contrast, rejecting God and goodness is never in our ultimate self-interest. We serve a God whose providential care guarantees the ultimate hermetic union between holiness and our deepest joys.
In this sense, we are often not selfish enough.
In a series of sermons, 18thThe God of the Century, Joseph Butler, made this very point: Human beings tend not to act with an overly high emphasis on self-interest, but rather to act in the enlightened, expansive, and long-term ways that are needed. He argued that people often lack self-interest. . In The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis expertly explores the psychology of temptation, stubborn resistance to salvation, and pleasure by providing colorful examples of this recurring dynamic and rich thought experiments. and attempts to answer why. Humans act irrationally, contrary to what is ultimately in their own interests.
Remember this paradox? By dying to ourselves, we are made most alive in Christ. By submitting to God's kingship, we are most free. By losing life, we find it.
This article is adapted from the following posts: originally appeared in Worldview News Substack.
