The Christian understands that living for Christ and others is the name of the game. Living for self will be a dead-end and cause all sorts of grief to not only oneself but to everyone else as well. Plenty of biblical exhortations tell us to deny self, to crucify the flesh, and so on.
And yet Christianity does not teach that we can somehow exist without self. Recall the Second Great Commandment: “Love your neighbour as yourself” (found in all three Synoptic gospels). So there is indeed a self that we retain, and we are to love that self – but to love it in light of God and his commands to us. There is a real place for self.
This is unlike in eastern religious thought, where the aim is to fully eradicate self. The goal is to lose self altogether as we merge with the divine (the image often used is of a drop of water disappearing into the ocean). But in biblical Christianity we can have a proper view of self. Yes, we are to “die to self” but only in the sense of dealing with the sinful man within, and not in eliminating our inner self altogether.
Let me deal with one recent social media encounter I had related to this, and then offer some wise words from C. S. Lewis. I recently posted about how some Christian leaders can be full of self while looking down on us mere mortals. They can have an inflated sense of their own importance, and it can show in how they deal with others.
Various folks replied to that post. One person made this comment: “Someone once told me to count how many times a preacher/ person uses the word I…I I I I I I I tells you they are full of PRIDE!” I replied to this person with this remark:
Yes that can be the case, but not always. A person can keep talking about themselves to get attention, because they are proud, and so on. However, some people can talk a lot about themselves, but in relation to God and his goodness to them. For example, I just read 2 Corinthians again. Paul often uses the word “I” as he defends his ministry against the false apostles. In chapter 11 alone, in the 33 verses, I counted 42 “I’s”! So it often depends on the situation and the context.
Or consider Jesus. In just 6 verses (John 6:35-40) Jesus says “I” six times. He was not being proud in doing so of course. So there is a right way and a wrong way – a godly and an ungodly way – to deal with self, and to speak of self. We need to get the full biblical picture on these matters.
Lewis and self
The great Christian apologist and thinker C. S. Lewis spoke much of a proper (that is, a biblical) understanding of self. Simply looking at the closing chapters of his classic work Mere Christianity will give us plenty of his insights and wisdom. (I will be using page numbering from the 1972 Macmillan version here.)
First, a few quotes from the penultimate chapter, “Nice People or New Men”. In it he reminds us that fallen mankind does not need mere improvement, but complete transformation. He writes:
Do not misunderstand me. Of course God regards a nasty nature as a bad and deplorable thing. And, of course, He regards a nice nature as a good thing-good like bread, or sunshine, or water. But these are the good things which He gives and we receive. He created Dick’s sound nerves and good digestion, and there is plenty more where they came from. It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost His crucifixion. And because they are wills they can – in nice people just as much as in nasty ones – refuse His request. And then, because that niceness in Dick was merely part of nature, it will all go to pieces in the end. Nature herself will all pass away. Natural causes come together in Dick to make a pleasant psychological pattern, just as they come together in a sunset to make a pleasant pattern of colours. Presently (for that is how nature works) they will fall apart again and the pattern in both cases will disappear. Dick has had the chance to turn (or rather, to allow God to turn) that momentary pattern into the beauty of an eternal spirit: and he has not taken it.
There is a paradox here. As long as Dick does not turn to God, he thinks his niceness is his own, and just as long as he thinks that, it is not his own. It is when Dick realises that his niceness is not his own but a gift from God, and when he offers it back to God-it is just then that it begins to be really his own. For now Dick is beginning to take a share in his own creation. The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose. (pp. 179-180)
Mere Christianityby C. S. Lewis (Author), Kathleen Norris (Foreword)
Just trying to be nice will not cut it:
“Niceness”- wholesome, integrated personality – is an excellent thing. We must try by every medical, educational, economic, and political means in our power to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up “nice”; just as we must try to produce a world where all have plenty to eat. But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world – and might even be more difficult to save.
For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so: and at that stage the lumps on the shoulders – no one could tell by looking at them that they are going to be wings – may even give it an awkward appearance. (p. 182)
And he begins the book’s very last chapter, “The New Men” this way: “In the last Chapter I compared Christ’s work of making New Men to the process of turning a horse into a winged creature. I used that extreme example in order to emphasise the point that it is not mere improvement but Transformation.” (p. 183)
And he says this about the transformation: “It is not a change from brainy men to brainier men: it is a change that goes off in a totally different direction – a change from being creatures of God to being sons of God.” (p. 185) And as to the true self, Lewis nicely lays it out in the final two pages of the book:
The more we get what we now call “ourselves” out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of “little Christs,” all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented—as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to “be myself” without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call “Myself” becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call “My wishes” become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call `me’ can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.
At the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most “natural” men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away “blindly” so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking at Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. (pp 189-190)
Thank you again C. S. Lewis for your wise and Scripturally-sound words.
