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The source of true self

By Peter Sellick - posted Thursday, 13 April 2006


As Jesus was a Jew, and could not have been who he was if Israel had not existed, the theology of the church lives and breathes from both the Old and the New Testaments.  Thus the doctrine of the Trinity will have already been foreshadowed in the Old Testament if not explicitly stated. We may say that the history of the experience of Israel takes the form, or person, of the Son being a particular history in time. When Israel reflects on what has happened to it and when the church reflects on the person of Jesus, they both come into contact with the grain of the universe. In other words, the object of faith exists as a reality outside of us.

Christian faith is not based on ideology but on how things really are in truth. That is why natural science cannot escape from the realms of faith because, like faith, it seeks the real. When natural science gets it wrong, that is, when ideology is interposed, science no longer describes what is real. This is observed in totalitarian regimes in which the dictator dictates what is true and what is not. Likewise, if we get the theology wrong, we get everything wrong and we pay the price of losing our grip on reality. In western culture we have had two disastrous instances of what it means to get the theology wrong, national socialism in Germany and communism in Russia.

It is crucial to get the theology right. Getting the theology wrong means creating distorted selves that are out of contact with how the world and we in it are. The consequence is that our hold on life will be tenuous. The existence of Israel in our time and the success of the western mind in producing life-nurturing cultures bears witness to the truth of God. The fact that our birth rate has dropped below replacement level and key institutions like marriage are increasingly under threat bears witness to the loss of the resilient self that is created in the meeting with God.

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It is this meeting with God, this rubbing up against the real, that raises us up from the valley of dry bones and gives us sinews and muscle and breath to be a living nation.

It is all about saving souls after all. But not the soul defined by the Greeks, detached from the body and surviving death, but the soul that is at once psyche and spirit. We are nothing more that the souls of our bodies. In Christ we are saved from being non-selves, created from our own idols for which there is no resurrection and no freedom.

Idolatry is nothing more than an attempt at authentic selfhood made on our own terms. We are seeing now the rise of a whole generation of selves based on the idols of the times and we wonder why our society is fraying at the edges.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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Related Links
International Dietrich Bonhoeffer Society
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Philosopher's Magazine

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