THE CHRISTIAN SELF SERIESPart I: Individuality, Identity, Submission

I. INDIVIDUALITY

Foundational Knowledge of Individuality

Experience

Individual Instinct

Descartes – “I think therefore I am.”

Foundational Knowledge of Submission Paul – A “bondslave” for Christ

Christ – “take up your cross”/The Narrow Gate

C.S. Lewis – “Christ- ‘I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it.”

THE TRINITY

In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal—something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it because if fits in so well with all the things we know already.

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

CREATION

…the Christian power is like some giant who in a strange generosity should cut off his right hand, so that it might of its own accord shake hands with him. We come back to the same tireless note touching the nature of Christianity; all modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls. But according to orthodox Christianity this separation between God and man is sacred, because this is eternal. That a man may love God it is necessary that there should be not only a God to be loved, but a man to love him.

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

MARRIAGE VS. CO-DEPENDENCE

Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is also the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless. So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

-Ephesians 6:22-31

SALVATION

Again, some people think that after this life, or perhaps after several lives, human souls will be ‘absorbed’ into God. But when they try to explain what they mean, they seem to be thinking of our being absorbed into God as one material thing is absorbed into another. They say it is like a drop of water slipping into the sea. But of course that is the end of the drop. If that is what happens to us, then being absorbed is the same as ceasing to exist. It is only the Christians who have any idea how human souls can be taken into the life of God and yet remain themselves—in fact, be very much more themselves than they were before.

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

II. IDENTITY

NATURE VS. NURTURE

Fundamental Aspects of the Self

Nature (God-Given)

Nurture (Experience)

Free Will (Self-Fashioning and Chosen Identity)

How the World Wants You to Define Yourself

Profession

Success

Conformity

Rolling Stones - Satisfaction

Paul: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—His good, pleasing, and perfect will.”

-Romans 12:2

Christ: “If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.”

-John 15:19

THE “WORLD” = Κόσμος (KOSMOS)

Biblical Sources of Identity

In God’s Image

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

With Purpose

Relationships

Being and Doing

The Importance of Free Will to God’s Plan

III. SUBMISSION

My “First Folly”

Christ on the Cross

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?

-Luke 9:23-27

Take the case of courage…It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it, is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers…This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea my save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a coward and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

My Thoughts