The journey to self-consciousness

Our history confirms that there is a continuum from early cruelty and heartlessness to our time in which many of our soldiers are haunted by those they killed. Our armed forces are confronted by the terrible psychological scaring produced by being in action as witnessed by the number of suicides that outnumber casualties in combat. As self-consciousness spreads throughout the world it may become impossible to wage war or murder.

It is apparent that self-consciousness can stifle inherited mechanisms that produce disgust or fear that have been adopted by the purity laws of, for example, Hinduism that divides society along lines to do with purity. We may understand prohibitions concerning the touching or corpses or faeces or bodily fluids or the sick on the basis of mechanisms that protect us from contamination. But where does the prohibition from, for example, the eating of pork or crustacea as well as other animals listed in Leviticus?

It can be concluded that these lists have nothing to do with inherited systems that evolved in order to avoid contagion but have cultural origins long lost to us or invented in order to trace a boundary between us and the infidel.

While the health sciences have rationally ordered the boundaries of contagion, the most powerful cultural phenomenon that extinguished the force of natural mechanisms concerning purity and the power of coalitions is found in early Christianity. Against all religious propriety, Jesus touched the lepers and the sick and ate with the outcast. There are many biblical verses that carry this understanding but one of the most forceful is the following.

He said to them, 'Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?' (Thus, he declared all foods clean.)And he said, 'It is what comes out of a person that defiles.For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder,adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.' (Mark 7:18ff)

This remarkable passage undercuts all of the purity laws of Israel and locates human brokenness within, in the self. Their cure can only come from self-consciousness and remorse. The individual arises from such understanding who stands free of inherited neural mechanism that would separate us from each other. This is the person who is free of natural religion. No wonder early Christians were seen as blasphemous and immoral!

The selfhood of God appears early in Old Testament texts, in his creation of the world by command in the first creation story (Let there be.. and it was) to the willed making of the garden of Eden and the creation of men and women who met God face to face in the Garden. The self-consciousness of Adam is seen in his exclamation when he is presented with the woman; "This, at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh…Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife" (Gen.2:23-24). Adam is a creature unlike the animals who knows his deepest needs. As the story unfolds, he also knows that he is bound to death to return to the dust from whence he came.

The identity of God as "I" is confirmed when Moses in Exodus 3:13ff asks the name of the one who speaks to him out of the burning bush and receives the answer "I am". He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites "I am" sent me to you." "I am" is translated from four Hebrew consonants (YHWH). This name is unpronounceable and when it is read; "The Lord" is substituted.

The name of God indicates an existing self. Jaynes would call this the analogical "I" that can only be known via the existence of a self that inhabits an analogical model of the world. We are reminded that God made humanity in His own image, ie as inhabiting this analogical world built with language. Self-consciousness is entirely built on language. As God is a self-conscious identity so too is his creature.

There are shadows of this in the gospel according to John in the many "I am" statements that are found there; "I am..the bread of life, the light of the world, from above, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life, the way the truth and the life, the true vine". As the only son of the Father Jesus personifies the divine self-consciousness that he shares with his disciples.

The main force of discipleship, as strongly expressed in the gospel, is the indwelling presence of Christ in the believer that makes that believer also an "I am", a self, free of inherited urges that distance us from other selves. We are all one in Christ against the forces that would separate us, whether that be sex, nationality, social position, ill or healthy. This is nonother than the healing of all humanity and the end of all evil and violence. As Jesus said "Be of good cheer, I have (proleptically) overcome the world."

This world longs for another country, it lives in prolepsis, we see it shimmering on the horizon and fragments of its presence in our time. Its completion in the eschaton is assured. So we do not live from the past, even though the events of the ministry, death and resurrection of Christ are in the past, we live by a vision of the future of a time when a kingdom of justice and truth will come into existence. Christians live by a future vision not a morality that we search for in the past.