THE WHOLE AND HOLY YOU OF NOW
18/03/24 13:22
The poet T.S. Eliot wrote of ‘hollow men’, Herbert Marcuse of ‘One Dimensional Man and Jim Taylor in Psychology today describes the artificially, manufactured identities that one can be unwise enough to embrace from the mirror of social media.
BITTY ME
‘Bits and pieces of socialised virtue.’ This brings to mind the fragmented self that we can become when birthed from political correctness, or the culture of the law and its fundamentalisms – the ‘letter of death’ as Paul perceptively named it.
PHANTOM ME
Baptised into this culture we can have a self that is not a real self; a misshapen self that is the product of the knowledge of good and evil and its mirror of public acceptance, rather than The Who of our real ourselves in Christ. To live oneness with Christ – which is already ours is to know who you are and what Christ means you to be doing.
To be alive and know oneself in Christ liberates us from tasks that are not really ours, but someone else’s because we are not trying to pay Christ back or earn points with Jesus. Some forms of mission work are more about us than what Jesus means us to be doing in the fruitfulness of His life expressed as us.
MECHANICAL ME
A more subtle distortion of the self occurs when we are lured into gaining our self-worth from our work. True, there is satisfaction to be had in doing things well. But when we make our sense of self dependent on what others think of our work we make ourselves vulnerable to the ignorant, the unholy, the Martha’s, or the ruthless who may have ingratiated themselves into positions of leadership.
BLIND GUIDES
Leaders who are not spiritual leaders can find a home in religious institutions with a legalistic culture. This can happen when there is an inbuilt need to make appointments to positions of influence of operatives who are not clever enough to see through the fabric of lies that is the institution’s law-hijacked gospel.
THE MIRROR
Francois Du Toit is right to declare the Christ of God as the one true Mirror who is the Mirror of our Father and the Mirror of who we are as the sons and daughters of God. If we are astute enough to embrace Christ as our life and forgo religious Christianity as our life or our inherited legalism as our life, our real self will emerge because we have been born again in the terms of an Easter Rebirth. The real self can be found in a real Gospel and a real Christ. Those who find both become salt and light.
FORM WITH VOID
Writing of the inner lifelessness of a culture in separation from the being of God because it is enclosed in its own narcissism Thomas Torrance observes, “Structure is abstracted from substance and form is cut off from being, so that external organisation and mechanical connection are brought in to replace the inner organisation and natural patterns inherent in the universe.” (1) This is the problem of legalism, Martha-ism and fundamentalism. The letter actually kills as Paul asserts. Even when we try to mend the legalism with a veneer of the anointing and the gifts. Form without substance, activity with our life, movement without agency = all symptoms of fields of tares and a form of godliness without power. Knowledge of good and evil christianity can produce conformity, but it never produces Kingdom Life.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 36). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
BITTY ME
‘Bits and pieces of socialised virtue.’ This brings to mind the fragmented self that we can become when birthed from political correctness, or the culture of the law and its fundamentalisms – the ‘letter of death’ as Paul perceptively named it.
PHANTOM ME
Baptised into this culture we can have a self that is not a real self; a misshapen self that is the product of the knowledge of good and evil and its mirror of public acceptance, rather than The Who of our real ourselves in Christ. To live oneness with Christ – which is already ours is to know who you are and what Christ means you to be doing.
To be alive and know oneself in Christ liberates us from tasks that are not really ours, but someone else’s because we are not trying to pay Christ back or earn points with Jesus. Some forms of mission work are more about us than what Jesus means us to be doing in the fruitfulness of His life expressed as us.
MECHANICAL ME
A more subtle distortion of the self occurs when we are lured into gaining our self-worth from our work. True, there is satisfaction to be had in doing things well. But when we make our sense of self dependent on what others think of our work we make ourselves vulnerable to the ignorant, the unholy, the Martha’s, or the ruthless who may have ingratiated themselves into positions of leadership.
BLIND GUIDES
Leaders who are not spiritual leaders can find a home in religious institutions with a legalistic culture. This can happen when there is an inbuilt need to make appointments to positions of influence of operatives who are not clever enough to see through the fabric of lies that is the institution’s law-hijacked gospel.
THE MIRROR
Francois Du Toit is right to declare the Christ of God as the one true Mirror who is the Mirror of our Father and the Mirror of who we are as the sons and daughters of God. If we are astute enough to embrace Christ as our life and forgo religious Christianity as our life or our inherited legalism as our life, our real self will emerge because we have been born again in the terms of an Easter Rebirth. The real self can be found in a real Gospel and a real Christ. Those who find both become salt and light.
FORM WITH VOID
Writing of the inner lifelessness of a culture in separation from the being of God because it is enclosed in its own narcissism Thomas Torrance observes, “Structure is abstracted from substance and form is cut off from being, so that external organisation and mechanical connection are brought in to replace the inner organisation and natural patterns inherent in the universe.” (1) This is the problem of legalism, Martha-ism and fundamentalism. The letter actually kills as Paul asserts. Even when we try to mend the legalism with a veneer of the anointing and the gifts. Form without substance, activity with our life, movement without agency = all symptoms of fields of tares and a form of godliness without power. Knowledge of good and evil christianity can produce conformity, but it never produces Kingdom Life.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 36). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
