After Selfhood: Constructing the Religious Self in a Post-Self Age

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Mar 1998 by Muck, Terry C

TERRY C. MUCK*

"Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting" (Ps 139:23-24).

"You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness" (Eph 4:22-24).

"Why can't we just get along?" Rodney King's plaintive cry during his national agony several years ago managed to capture both the besetting problem and the pessimistic mood of our age. Oversimplified? Yes. "Just getting along" makes it sound like the divisions we face in our culture-racism, classism, sexism-could be cured if only individuals would just grow up and act like adults. Although acting like adults would be a distinct improvement on much of what we see going on around us, the problems of societal fragmentation go much deeper than that. We are divided in a way that reflects not simple immaturity but a maze of worldviews that cannot cope with the complexity of life today.

In this melange of fragmentations, religious divisions are among the most pernicious. Most of the world's peoples are not just religious. They are religious with an attitude. Convinced of the truth of their religious traditions, of their ability to satisfactorily answer life's ultimate questions, people joyfully proclaim their good news to any and all. Even though this proclamation is most often benign-even loving-in its intent, when it gets wedded to nationalisms, tribalisms and secular ideologies of one sort of another, loving proclamation can turn to manipulative intolerance. Religious people fight, for religious, ethnic and other selfish reasons.

"Why can't we just get along?" Why-when the most important ordering principles in our lives, our religions, teach love and fellowship and brotherhood and sisterhood-do we fight, using the very teachings designed to promote peace, to promote hatred?

Why indeed? I would like to suggest that at least part of the reason can be traced to our inadequate, almost confused views of what it means to be an individual self. One reason we fight is because the way we view personhood makes it almost inevitable that we bounce against and then quickly off one another like billiard balls. "Why can't we just get along?" Because we see ourselves as atomistic units propelled over the green felt of life by historical and cultural forces beyond our control, bumpered by physical, psychological, and political limitations, incapable of having any kind of relationship with other selves other than the momentary collisions of events, collisions that simply send us careening off again in different directions.

Is it possible to see our selves in different ways so that true relationships are possible? I think so. Do our religions provide us with any help to do this? I think they do. But in order to show how they do, we need first to examine the developing ways the self has been viewed historically in western culture. We will deal in particular with three elements of self: the self's relationship to transcendence, the dynamic nature of self (its journey), and the nature of individual choice.

I. THE RESPONDING SELF

The attempt to find something corresponding to our modern conception of the self in the Bible is filled with the dangers of anachronistic thinking.l If the modern self is atomistic, a self-contained billiard ball bouncing to and fro in the game of life, the Biblical self is only identifiable as it responds to God's or the gods' commands, entreaties and creative designs. Without the gods there is no self. God has searched us and known us in a way that defines us.2 Before we speak, God knows what we are about to say. Each of us is on a journey toward God, to be sure, but this journey's timetable is set by God, not by us. God has chosen the journey through creative acts and has wonderfully and fearfully designed our bodies to transport us on this journey. His nature and being are the standard against which we measure all that we think, speak and do. God searches us, and only then do we take the divine tests of righteousness (taking a test, remember, is a responsive act) and then choose to live accordingly. This self that we find in the Bible is a self, to be sure.3 But it is a responding self. It exists only because God creates us, chooses us, guides us.

It is true that in my description of this responding, Biblical self I have used the modern language of journey and choice-accurately, I think. Throughout the Bible it is clear that we are on a journey to put off the old and put on the new.4 The first human beings moved and migrated in and out of the Garden of Eden, the Hebrews hungrily searched out Egypt and then the promised land, the scattered Jews became freedom-seeking Jews and Gentiles-all journeys of prime importance. But the movements of Biblical peoples were more than physical, political and psychological: They were journeys in the deepest sense from the old and unsatisfactory to the new and transformed. They were journeys that had the trappings of the material but the substance of the spiritual. Both the journeys and the journeyers were chosen by God as part of a plan. Journey and choice are crucial to the Biblical view of the self.