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Return to Home Page Return to Book Contents & Summary LIVING BELIEF - CHAPTER 4 THE
TRUE SELF-IMAGE: INCARNATION
The traveller has been offered the help he needs, yet
he is still unable to make his way. The child may receive love from his parents as he
grows, yet he may still not go on to fulfil his potential as a human being.
He may instead lose himself on the way in over-ambition, in poor
relationships, or in the pursuit of inappropriate goals.
Why? The human race
received God’s loving support in its development through the centuries,
according to the Old Testament’s history of his dealings with his people
Israel, yet we still did not establish the kind of relationship with him which
would allow us to develop our true potential.
We were not ‘saved’. But
why? What did we lack?
What do we need?
If a psychologist were to see this kind of blockage in
the development of a person he might well suspect that he was seeing someone
who does not believe that he is valuable and loved. He does not have a sense of his own self-worth, a proper
self-image. How this might come
about can be very complex. Parents
must be a part of the picture, since they are the first and among the most
important people to contribute to our self-image; it may be that they gave
that person a good start which was then damaged by his later experiences, or
it may be that they themselves did not make him feel sure that he was loved.
And if he lacks self esteem because of what happened when he was with
them, it may be because of the circumstances of poverty or ignorance in which
the family lived, or because the parents had a poor image of themselves.
In this way the damage would be passed on from one generation to the
next, as was suggested when we looked at the doctrine of Original Sin. As that doctrine illustrates, and as we may know from
our experience, it is harder to get a good self-image than one that is
inadequate. Most of us
underestimate our true value and goodness, and do not really believe that we are
loveable, even when we hide this doubt from others and from ourselves with an
air of self-confidence. But if we
cannot truly believe that we are good, valuable and loveable, then we cannot
love and value ourselves in the way that we should.
2. HOW DO WE GET OUR SELF-IMAGE? The great difficulty is that we don’t get our image
from ourselves: others give it to us. We
see ourselves as we are reflected in others’ eyes.
An influential early theory in this area of psychology was Cooley’s
theory of the ‘looking glass self’ (1902), which maintained that the self
is reflected in the reactions of other people, who are the ‘looking glass’
for oneself. In order to
understand what we are like we need to see how others see us, and this is how
children gradually build up an impression of what they are like.
If we are lucky enough to be loved we will see ourselves reflected in
the other person’s eyes as someone who is loved, and will begin to build a
picture of ourselves as loveable. We have said that parents begin to give their child his
self-image, and it has been suggested that even in the womb the foetus can
sense whether his mother is happy and contented, or angry and resentful, as
she carries him. Immediately
after birth midwives will encourage parents to hold and bond with their child,
giving him a sense of his value from the first moments of his life.
It is not difficult to imagine that any coldness or rejection at this
point could leave a damaging impression.
In the early months of his life the baby begins to form the idea that
he is a self. He gets this idea
from seeing that his body is different from the other objects in his world
and, most importantly, from seeing his mother as a separate being.
He will begin to picture himself as loveable, good and valuable if that
is what his mother’s eyes, her voice, her touch, are telling him. In the years that follow, the
child continues to sense what his parents think of him. If they tell him that he is good and clever, he will believe
that and will develop a good self-image. But if he is constantly told he is
bad or useless that is how he will see himself. In the previous chapter we looked at how parents give
love to their child as he grows, first in supplying all his needs, and then in
supporting and guiding him as he learns to live in his world.
Now we may recognise that the love they were giving him was not just
nurturing and guiding him while his self was growing: it was actually growing
that self. As he felt their love
and care the child grew in the belief that he must be valuable and loveable;
he was gaining a true self-image. But
if he was neglected, despised or abused he could only grow in the belief that
he was worthless and unloveable. Some
of the most tragic cases of depression, anxiety or eating disorder seen by
psychiatrists are manifestations of self-doubt or self-hatred brought about by
this kind of love-starvation in childhood.
It is difficult to forget the image, in a television programme on
anorexia, of a twenty-nine year old woman weighing three and a half stone,
crouched over the pile of food she was devouring, only to rid herself of it
immediately afterwards in an effort to purge away her hated self, and all the
while longing for the mother who had starved and abused her throughout her
childhood. Faced with this sort of tragedy, or even with the more
ordinary damage caused to the self-image by difficult circumstances, it is
encouraging to realise that the self as described by psychologists is not a
static object but a process. Whatever
we are can be changed, for better or worse, as a result of our later
experiences and the way we deal with them.
We have to accept, however, that damage done in the crucial formative
years is not easily healed. The
child who reaches adolescence with a poor self-image may have a long, perhaps
a life-long, struggle to change this. And
even those of us, hopefully the majority, who reach that stage with an
adequate or good self-image, will still need the love of others to affirm and
develop this as we go through life.
3. ADOLESCENCE: A VITAL TRANSITION FOR THE SELF The period of adolescence is a very important one in
this process of development, as it is the beginning of the move away from our
family, from whom we more naturally receive love, to the outside world of
those who may not be so willing to affirm our self-worth. If a young person is asked what he believes happens in
adolescence he will probably say that the person becomes independent, and to
some extent this is true, though as we shall see, it is not the whole story.
In the years between thirteen and the early twenties the adolescent
gradually separates himself from his family socially, emotionally,
economically, mentally, and in his tastes and attitudes, as he begins to find
his own way in the world. This is not unlike the way in which every young bird or
animal is allowed to leave, or is even pushed out of, the nest or pack, so
that it can become an adult on its own account. But in the case of a human being this describes only a little
of what happens. Having received
care and support from his family the young person must now stand on his own
feet and care for himself. Just
as importantly, having received love and approval from his family, he must now
win these from others if he is to continue to develop a good self-image.
In setting out the theory of development to which we have already
referred, Erik Erikson says that the optimum time for achieving a sense of
identity is during adolescence. He describes the sense of identity as a ‘feeling of being
at home in one’s body, a sense of knowing where one is going and an inner
assurance of anticipated recognition from those who count’.
(Erikson, ‘Identity: Youth
and crisis’ p.165) The young person completes his education and goes on to
make a career, or at least a living, and his success or failure in this will
affect the way he is regarded by others.
When we meet people and they ask ‘What do you do?’, it isn’t
difficult to see their estimation of us rise or fall in accordance with our
answer. And even before speaking
to someone, judgements are made about them on the basis of the quality of
their clothes, on where they live and on the kind of car they drive. Of course we know that a person’s value cannot and should
not be judged in this way, but it is, and we are affected by it.
So a young person tries to achieve the respect which success brings,
and if this becomes impossible he may turn to crime or to the kind of
anti-social, even violent, behaviour which will earn him respect ‘on the
street’. The young man looks for approval in the eyes of his
friends. If he is lucky enough to
have friends who have grown up with a good image of themselves he will be
approved by them for actions which are positive and good for people.
But if his friends have poor self-esteem, resulting from a lack of love
in their environment, then it is more likely that he will gain their respect
only for his power to get what he wants, whatever the harm to others.
One obvious instance of this will be in the area of sex: in the
circumstances we are describing he is much less likely to be admired for
having a caring and loving relationship than for collecting more ‘conquests’
than anyone else. We have of course used the pronoun ‘he’ only for
convenience, as we said at the start of this work; everything that has been
said applies to both sexes, though perhaps with different emphases.
A girl will gain approval in the same way as a boy for her success in
school and in her career, and will suffer a similar loss of self-esteem if she
fails. It may be suggested,
however, that even more of her self image will be bound up with the success of
her relationships than might be the case for a young man.
Studies have shown that from a very early age girls are primarily
interested in other people, while boys are more interested in objects and
activities. Girls and young women
attach a great deal of importance to their friendships, and some of their
popularity will have to do with how attractive they are, in their
personalities and to the opposite sex. Some
may try to impress their friends by the number of their conquests as the boys
do, but most find that their friends look down on a girl who is promiscuous.
It is much more likely that a young woman will impress others by having
and holding a steady boy-friend, especially if he is good-looking, has a good
job, money to spend, and so on.
4. THE ROOT OF SIN: THE UNLOVED SELF HARMS ITSELF AND OTHERS We have described sin as a lack of love, and here we
are seeing this portrayed perhaps more vividly than at any other stage of
human life. The adolescent is
particularly vulnerable as he tries to find the good self-image not given to
him by an unloving family, or even as he tries to confirm and build on the
good beginnings given him in a loving home.
He has to expose himself to the cold winds of the world and to the
critical gaze of others, in order to get the affirmation of his worth which he
must have to build his self-image. But
in doing so he risks the hurts and rebuffs which will drive him back into his
shell and cause him to hide his real feelings behind a mask of aggressive
self-confidence, thus making it even harder for him to be approached, or to
risk himself in another encounter. After
each hurt he will form a thicker shell, put on a more impenetrable mask, and
from behind these defences he will seem ever more sure of himself, more
arrogant and destructive, someone to be reckoned with.
Instead of trusting himself to others, to love and be loved by them, he
will use others to protect and demonstrate his own self-sufficiency. Here we are at the very heart of the meaning of sin: we
are meant to love people, never to use them, for whatever purpose.
Sin, the use of people for our own ends, is the opposite of love.
But it is a defence, a substitute for the love we want and need. Sin and evil have been portrayed in human cultures as
powerful, awesome, and of course we may well feel that when we see the results
in the destruction of human lives. Auschwitz
was a terrible event, but it is the suffering which overwhelms us with horror,
and not the sordid crimes which caused it.
Sin is not, as it is so often portrayed, a powerful
shout of defiance; it is the pitiful cry of the child, lost in the dark.
Animals lash out when they are in pain, even at those who mean them
well. When we are in pain, unable
to find and love our real selves, we hurt and damage those around us: we ‘sin’.
In a world where everyone felt that they were loveable, valuable and
good, there could be no sin. If
we have received our true self-image from the love in other people’s eyes we
will not have to hide within shells or behind masks, or use people to get
substitutes for real happiness.
5. THE ONLY ESCAPE: TRUST IN ANOTHER’S LOVE We all need to achieve a sense of ourselves which will
allow us to love and not use ourselves and others, and we see the struggle for
this most clearly in the uncertainty, the shyness, the mistakes and the hopes
of the adolescent boy or girl. Few
of us emerge unscathed from that difficult and important stage of our growth;
how do we then escape from the masks and defences we have put up as a result
of the hurts we have received? The
only way is to trust ourselves to someone again, even knowing that we risk
further hurt. We should of course
use our experience and understanding to find someone who will not let us down,
but in the end we will have to take the risk, because if we stay behind the
mask our real self must eventually wither and die.
But it is a sad fact, noted in recent studies on divorce, that those
who have been hurt will very often marry someone like the person who hurt
them, or else will drive away a loving partner by their mistrust and their
constant need for reassurance. As we have said earlier, it is thought that the fairy
tales we tell our children, like our adult religious myths, have depths of
meaning which could not be understood through ordinary language but which can
be absorbed through the medium of the story.
In ‘Beauty and the Beast’, a child feels the truth that we must
look past appearances and masks to see and love the person behind them.
And the old story of Rapunzel is a fine example, illuminating as it
does the urgent need at the centre of human life to be granted one’s true
self-image. In the story the
wicked sorceress had told the beautiful Rapunzel that she was hideously ugly,
and had said that she must be shut up in a tower so that no one should see
her. But one day Rapunzel peeped
out from her window and saw a handsome prince passing by.
She was so taken by him that she forgot herself and leaned out to look
at him. He saw her, and fell in
love. The prince asked Rapunzel
to let down her long golden hair so that he might climb up on it to her.
She could not believe that he found her beautiful, but she trusted him
and let down her hair. And
eventually they lived happily ever after. This great tale tells us much about the essential human
quest: it is so difficult for us
to believe that we are truly valuable and loveable that it does not take a
great deal of hurt and rejection to persuade us to hide ourselves behind hard
walls of apparent indifference, so that no one will see what we are really
like and be able to hurt us again. The
only way out of our tower is to trust someone when they show that they love
us, to ‘let down our hair’ and allow them to approach us. So the hurt and vulnerable peer out from the cracks in their
walls, hoping to glimpse someone who might free them, while those who have
fewer defences go in search of that love which alone can remove any masks they
may wear and reveal their true self-image.
And yet even that very search can drive away the thing which we are
seeking if we pursue it in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons.
As Scott Peck tells us; ‘If being loved is your goal, you will fail
to achieve it. The only way to be
assured of being loved is to be a person worthy of love, and you cannot be a
person worthy of love when your primary goal in life is to passively be loved.’
(p.102) The adolescent sets out on his quest, needing to have
his identity confirmed and accepted by others who will see him and love him as
he is. He will look for friends,
and for an intimate relationship with a sexual partner. For Erik Erikson, ‘intimacy’ is one of the criteria of
having attained adulthood. By
this he means not only sexual intimacy but also the closeness between friends
which allows them to share all that is important to them.
If we cannot achieve that intimacy, usually in our twenties, Erikson
suggests that the result will be a sense of isolation.
Intimacy may not necessarily involve sexuality, but the
two are often closely related, and this brings us to a subject which has
caused considerable difficulties for Christians over the years, the question
of sexual morality. It has been
said in recent times that this is the only area of morality in which the
Church is interested, to the neglect of much more important matters such as
poverty, violence and injustice. No
one should doubt that these are vital areas of concern, and it may indeed be
true that they have not received the attention that they merit. But we have indicated that these sins of abuse and neglect
can only be the actions of individuals who have a warped sense of their own
worth, and therefore of the worth of others.
Sin, we have said, is the opposite of love. When we do not love people
we harm them, by abusing or neglecting them.
The second of the two great commandments tells us that we must ‘love
our neighbours as ourselves’. But
if we do not love ourselves we cannot love our neighbour. The emphasis of the present work on the development of the
self could appear to be an invitation to selfishness if this were to be
understood as an end in itself. The
result of being known and loved is to know and love oneself; and the purpose
of knowing and loving oneself is to know and love others.
We will be dealing with this more fully at a later stage, but it is
necessary to have it in mind now if we are to make sense of the Christian
emphasis on sexual morality. In the human species, sex is not just something we do,
whether for procreation or pleasure: it is an integral element of our whole
being, and an essential part of our self image and self esteem.
Sexuality is linked to gender, and when we talk of the growth of a
person we are not talking of an abstract being but of a male or a female
person. A human being develops
his or her selfhood as a male or as a female.
Our physique, our gestures, our mental make-up, are characteristically
male or female. Certainly it is said that the well balanced person should
incorporate a proportion of the qualities of their opposite gender, male
tenderness and female strength being now increasingly appreciated, but in
general terms a person is a male or a female self.
Our gender and its attendant sexuality are essential to what we are.
Anything which harms us sexually or damages us as a male or female
harms our very self. It is painful to think of a little child opening its
arms to its mother only to be pushed away and rejected, and we can understand
how such cold and harsh treatment would in time stunt and stifle the growing
self of that child. We can also
understand how much hurt there must be for someone who reaches out in
friendship only to be refused, or worse still, to be first accepted and then
discarded. But if we believe that
this must be damaging, what do we think will happen to someone who offers
themselves to another in the total openness of sex, and is then used in the
same way? Nakedness in the act of
sex has been said to illustrate the dropping of all barriers as two people
reveal themselves wholly to each other. In
this action the self, at its deepest level, is at its most vulnerable. Any indication that the person is being used and not loved
must undermine their sense of self-worth, perhaps more than in any other form
of human relationship, even if they are not conscious that this is happening.
And if this hurt is received at the time of adolescence, when the young
person is struggling to find his or her identity, we have to imagine that the
damage done can only have a deeper and more lasting effect. But such depth of meaning and such possibility of harm
are not part of the picture of sex which we see everywhere around us in our
society. It is common for
magazines, books, television, to portray sex as a leisure activity, as a
pleasant gesture of friendship on meeting someone, or as the natural
conclusion to an evening out. It
is becoming difficult now to get past the credits of a film before finding
ourselves watching the sheets heave and twist, to the accompaniment of soft
and charming music. In most
sitcom episodes the situation which is intended to be comic is usually a
sexual one. These are, perhaps, relatively innocent examples of the
portrayal of sex in entertainment, something like the rude postcards and bawdy
tales of the past. It would be
strange if we couldn’t laugh about this human activity as at any other, and
sex between two people who love each other can often be very funny. Sex is serious but not solemn.
The comic and vulgar treatment of sex has been with us throughout
history and is unlikely to disappear. But
what must be damaging is the relentless and insidious trivialisation of it to
which people, and especially young people, are now subjected.
This, and the wide availability of explicit pornography and sexually
violent images as entertainment, must distort the way people regard sex, and
themselves as sexual beings. Sex can be the best way of giving and receiving love,
or it can be the worst way of using and abusing others. And as such it has
great importance for the growth of the human person. The person who has lost a sense of his own and other peoples’
worth because of the sexual attitudes and behaviour prevalent in our society
is not likely to be sensitive to the wrongs and injustices inflicted by
himself and by that society. That
is why the Church is right to emphasise the importance of this area of
morality, although it has not always done so in a way which would make clear
why it is so important. It would
surely be helpful to emphasise that if we do not treat ourselves and others
with care and dignity in the area of sexuality which is so essential to our
personhood, then we are unlikely to give that care and dignity to others which
would protect them from poverty, injustice and abuse.
We look for affirmation of our identity from others,
and we look for it most surely from those with whom we form our closest
relationships. We need them to
love us and, as we have said in looking at childhood, the love they give us
must be unconditional. A person
cannot grow from love which is given because he is rich, or of good family, or
good-looking. To some extent he
should not even be loved for his qualities and characteristics, as there may
be circumstances in which these could change.
A cheerful, friendly man could become withdrawn and morose as a result
of long-term unemployment; a courageous woman could become fearful as a result
of some traumatic experience; a man full of life and intelligence could lose
all semblance of the person he was in the long process of Alzheimer’s
disease. Love should always be unconditional, but in the case of
the closest of relationships and the fullest commitment such as marriage
indicates, love should also be exclusive and permanent.
A person cannot be offered love in this relationship on the
understanding that he must share his partner with someone else; and he cannot
be offered love just until someone better comes along, or until feelings or
circumstances change. This
relationship is what we are aiming at in our lives, a relationship in which we
can make the full leap of faith, giving ourselves totally to another and
receiving that other totally into our care.
Here sex can achieve its real potential, in the security of the
unconditional, exclusive and permanent love which it expresses.
Of course we know that such a demanding love can fail, and when it does
the damage to the people involved is great because they have so greatly
trusted themselves to each other. It
is not surprising to know that of all the events which cause us stress,
psychological tables have shown divorce to be the most traumatic.
This is not a question of blaming or accusing those who find that they
have to divorce, but of understanding the damage that it can cause.
And if a person goes into marriage with the thought of divorce as a
possible way out, then he cannot be making that full commitment which marriage
requires, and which is the ideal we must pursue for our ultimate growth.
8. WHEN A PERSON LOVES HIMSELF, THEN HE CAN LOVE OTHERS From adolescence and on into adult life we look for
acceptance and approval from others; we try to find someone in whose eyes we
will see ourselves reflected as good and valuable and loveable.
Only when we have begun to believe this can we accept ourselves and
forget ourselves in order to look towards other people and care about them.
While we are still trying to establish this proper sense of self it is
rather like being in pain, in that it turns us inwards and we are unable to
attend to anything or anyone else. Once
we have gained a good self-image from receiving and accepting love we can then
turn outward to love others. We
can then love our neighbour as ourself.
9. WE NEED LOVE TO GROW TO OUR FULL POTENTIAL This is the situation for the human race and for each
of its individual members: we need to love ourselves so that we can love
others and thus grow to fulfil our potential.
In Christian belief that means that we must grow into the likeness of
God. To do this we need to see
our real self in the eyes of someone who truly knows us and truly loves us
unconditionally and without limits. The
lucky ones among us see something of this in the eyes of family, friends,
partners. But even the closest of
these cannot know us fully as we really are.
Many of us have felt that someone might stop loving us if they really
knew what we were like. Then of
course the people who love us are themselves not perfect, and that must affect
the value we place on their opinion of us.
We need to see ourselves as loveable in the eyes of someone who knows
and loves us absolutely, and whose judgement is not distorted by their own
damaged self-image. How can this be possible? Only God can know us fully, judge us truly, and give us the
infinite love that we need to reach our infinite potential.
Only in the eyes of God can we see our own true value.
But where will we see those eyes?
How can we know what is our true value?
We have now come to look at the doctrine which most
surely defines Christian believing, the doctrine of the Incarnation.
While all of the doctrines have been the subject of misunderstanding,
this one which is the very essence of Christian believing has been the most
controversial, the most misunderstood, and the most often diluted or rejected.
Here is the point at which Christianity separates itself from the other
religions, from Islam which claims a common ancestry, and even from the Jewish
faith from which Christianity sprang. Christians
themselves have often been unwilling or unable to accept what it implies, and
among young people it is often so little understood that it is even confused
with the popular and completely non-Christian idea of reincarnation or
rebirth. A technical description of this doctrine would be that
God became man in the person of Jesus. Jesus
is fully God and fully man; he is God ‘incarnate’, ‘en-fleshed’.
This belief is unique to Christianity.
There are, of course, beliefs in other religious traditions which speak
of a god who comes to earth in human form to help his people.
The ancient Egyptians saw the pharaoh as the embodiment of their god,
and in the Hindu tradition the saviour god Vishnu appeared on earth as Rama
and as Krishna. But the doctrine
of the Incarnation means to tell us something different from these other
religious beliefs. They propose
that God may be represented on earth by a particular human being, as his
vice-regent, or that God may temporarily assume human form in order to appear
among his people in time of need. Indeed
in Hinduism, as in the beliefs of ancient Greece and Rome, God may be said to
assume the form of an animal, or any other shape which will fit his purpose.
The Christian doctrine does not propose that God acted through a human
being. The Incarnation states
that, in Jesus, God became and is a human being.
In that human being we have seen all that God is. This unique teaching is difficult enough to grasp in
its relation to Jesus, but we know that a doctrine is meant to tell us
something about ourselves, and it has been even more difficult for Christians
to see what the Incarnation means for them.
11.
BY JESUS WE ARE SEEN AS WE TRULY
ARE: If we look at Jesus, and at his life, we can see
salvation being offered to mankind, and to each of us, in a way which relates
to the human needs we have been examining.
In everything that he was and did and said Jesus showed people that
God, who is love, is here with us, loving us unconditionally.
Those who saw the truth of this and could believe and accept it were
‘saved’. Think of the story
of Mary Magdalene, supposedly a prostitute; what image of her self-worth could
she have had? But once Jesus
looked at her with all the love God has for her, she became the person she
really was, able then to give her real self and her real love to others.
The same picture meets us in the story of Zacchaeus, the little tax
collector – a profession as low as prostitution in Jewish eyes.
When Zacchaeus had accepted his true stature from the respect that
Jesus gave him, Jesus could say, “Salvation has come to this house today.”
(Luke 19: 1-10)
The same salvation was offered to the many who came to be healed by
Jesus or to hear him teach. Once
they had seen and felt in him the love of God for them, they lost their
sicknesses, their masks and defences, and began to be whole selves, ready to
give to others the love they now embodied. Of course, as we have said earlier, our hold on our
real self-image is not once-for-all and permanent: it is a process which
continues throughout life, always with the possibility of gain or loss.
At the crucifixion many of those who had been assured by Jesus of their
true worth now wavered, doubting what they had believed.
If he did not have the authority to assure them of God’s love for
them, if he was deluded or an impostor, as his ignominious death seemed to
indicate, then their belief in themselves must crumble with their belief in
him. But then came the morning of
the Resurrection, and all those who believed that they had experienced the
risen Christ were more sure than they had ever been that in him God was now
with them forever, assuring them of his love and of their value, for which he
had given his life. Those who
believed in the risen Jesus knew that now nothing could ever destroy God’s
love for them or the value he placed on them.
They knew that even death could not destroy the true self which he had
created and revealed in each of them.
12. HOW CAN WE SEE OURSELVES IN JESUS TODAY? How can this salvation come to people today when we can
no longer see Jesus in person and experience in his eyes, his voice and his
touch the unconditional love of God which assures each of us that we are of
absolute value and essentially good and loveable? Even if we can accept that those who saw Jesus in the flesh,
followed him through Galilee and into Jerusalem, and experienced his death and
resurrection, received the salvation of their true self-image, how can we
suppose that this can happen for people of our own times who cannot know him
in this way? We may get some clue to this if we recall that not
everyone who came into contact with Jesus was thereby saved and healed.
There was nothing automatic about it.
The gospels tell us that the leaders of the people rejected him, and
that when he went home to his own part of the country the people saw him only
as the son of the local carpenter and could not believe in him.
Jesus was unable to perform many miracles there among them ‘because
of their unbelief’. (Matthew
13: 54-58) Here is the key to answering our question: it is not
seeing Jesus which saves a person; it is believing in him.
You could see him without believing in him and nothing in you would be
changed: but you could believe in him without seeing him and be saved in that
moment. He himself said to
Thomas: “Have you believed because you have seen me?
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”
(John 20: 29)
And we should remember here what was said earlier when we were
discussing what faith and beliefs mean: this is not a matter of knowing facts
or propositions about Jesus and giving them intellectual assent; it is a
matter of experiencing this person and believing in him, trusting him, putting
our faith in him. It is the same
movement of trust as that which a child makes towards his mother and father;
if his faith in them is confirmed it will set him free to grow as his real
self. Perhaps we can understand
from this what Jesus meant when he said: “Truly, I say to you, unless you
turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
(Matthew 18: 3) Unless we can
make that movement of belief in God’s love for us, offered in the person of
Jesus, we can never know fullness of life.
Only if we believe in him can we truly believe in ourselves. Yet we are still left with the same problem; we may not
have to see Jesus as did the people of his own time in Galilee, but we cannot
put our faith in a person unless we know or experience him in some way.
If we could have known of God’s love for us without some human,
tangible experience of it, there would have been no need for the Incarnation.
We have said that the Christian teaching on God shows him acting always
in and through our realties of matter, space and time, events, objects and
people. We have to experience the
risen Christ in these, just as his followers did after his resurrection.
They encountered him in a garden, in an upper room, on a road, at the
seashore where he ate with them. Where
and how can the people of our time meet him?
13. THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT There is a strange and vital episode in the New
Testament accounts which offers a way of answering this.
The followers of Jesus had walked with him in his life and been with
him after his resurrection, yet still they remained in hiding, without
confidence in themselves and unable to move towards others.
Very suddenly this changed: even secular historians have recognised
that there was some event which transformed the followers of Jesus from a
group of frightened people, in hiding after the death of their leader, to a
community boldly and publicly proclaiming him as the saviour of mankind.
It is said in the Christian tradition that this happened because the
disciples had ‘received the Holy Spirit’. We will be looking for an understanding of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, in his relationship with the Father and the Son, when we study the doctrine of the Trinity. But it is necessary to say something here of his ‘nature’ and of his ‘function’ in relation to the Father and Jesus in order to approach this question of how we can experience Jesus in our present age. Jesus received his selfhood from the love of his Father; he was ‘begotten’ by that love, it formed his self-image, and he could then pour that life-giving, saving love out upon others. This is what we have described in speaking about love and persons: they come into existence through love; they form their true self-image through love; they then give that love which has formed them for the life and growth of others. But we have spoken of that love, which originates in
God and flows into and through persons, as ‘it’, when in fact it would be
better to say ‘He’. The
Christian tradition does not say that ‘God has love’.
It has long said simply that ‘God is love’. That of course must mean that the Father is love and the Son
is love, since each is God, but the tradition most particularly describes the
Holy Spirit as the love of God personified.
He is the Love between the Father and the Son; the Father creates all
things through his Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of Love,
which as we have said, is the only power he has.
Jesus received his human existence by the power of the Holy Spirit.
When the love of God had been fulfilled in the death and resurrection
of Jesus, that Holy Spirit of love could then be poured out on others so that
they too could embody and express the Love of God for all around them. This may sound quite abstract, but it lies at the heart
of all that we are saying in this work about love growing persons.
That love which is expressed and given by us does not only come from
God: it is God. When we give our
friend, our partner, our child, the love which will help him or her to grow,
we are showing them and giving them the Holy Spirit, the Love of God himself.
The Holy Spirit is the Love of God, revealed to us in Jesus and now
present in all who believe in him. If we go back to that day when the disciples were
hiding in a room in Jerusalem we may now understand that they received the
full revelation of the Spirit of God’s love in Jesus, and received the gift
of that Spirit into themselves to share with others.
How this happened to them cannot be described in any language but that
of poetry, in which the images of fire and a great wind must stand for the
overwhelming and indescribable experience of revelation.
The Spirit of God’s love has always been present in the world, but it
was only at that moment in man’s history that men saw him to be the Spirit
of the Father’s love in Jesus. Only
then were the disciples at last fully aware of the Love of God for them in
Jesus, and they rushed out from their hiding-place to proclaim to everyone the
Good News that in Jesus we had seen God’s love for each of us, and that
anyone who would accept that love in faith would have the Spirit of his love
given to them to share with others. Hundreds
believed in God’s love for them as they experienced it in those men; in them
they met Jesus and received his loving Spirit, assuring them of their real
worth and giving them their true self-image. Here is the way in which each person can receive that
absolute love he needs in order to see himself as he is, and to grow towards
his full potential. We receive
human love, which is the image of God’s love, from our parents, friends and
partners if they have it to give us, and from it we can grow towards maturity.
This is how humans have grown since our race began.
Bu if we meet someone who has the Spirit of God’s love in them,
whether that person is Jesus himself or any of those who have followed him, we
can receive that absolute love from them and be enabled to grow to our full
stature as the image of God. This
is the fullness of the Incarnation: God became incarnate in Jesus, and now God’s
Spirit becomes ‘incarnate’, ‘embodied’, in every person who is willing
to embody that love for others. Each Christian, the whole Christian community, the
tradition, sacraments and works of that community, each of these is meant to
be an incarnation of God’s love, bringing its salvation to our world.
We will be looking at this more fully when we turn to the doctrine of
‘Church’. At the moment we
are only trying to answer the question of how we can see the love of God in
the eyes of Jesus when he is not living among us as before.
In answer to a very similar question Jesus said: ‘He who has seen me
has seen the Father’. (John 14: 9) If
we meet someone who has the Spirit of God in them we have seen Jesus and we
have seen the Father. This is not
something mystical or theoretical, any more than it was in the time of Jesus.
It is a matter of meeting, in ordinary times and places, a person with
whom we walk and talk, eat and drink, laugh and be serious.
For me it was firstly my mother, remembered with love by many in her
later years as a stout old lady in a beret, stumping on swollen legs to and
from the shops. In her and in
other members of my family, in friends, and now supremely in my husband, I
have experienced the incarnate love of God and have begun to see my real self
as he sees me, reflected in their eyes.
14. IN JESUS WE SEE WHAT IT IS TO BE TRULY HUMAN We have mentioned the fact that when people begin to
consider this idea that we must believe ourselves to be good and loveable, and
must love ourselves, they may sometimes feel that what is suggested implies
conceit and selfishness – the very opposite of goodness in a person.
This is absolutely not the case, as we see when we consider the full
implications for us of the doctrine of the Incarnation.
As Jesus is God, we see the love of God for us in his eyes.
As he is man, we see in him ourselves as we really are and are meant to
be. Much has been said about his
humility, but not always in ways which have allowed people to appreciate the
real meaning of that priceless quality. Somehow
it has become associated in people’s minds with self-denigration, a kind of
grovelling abasement. Nothing
could be further from the truth. True
humility lies in seeing yourself truly, at your full worth, and knowing that
this is a gift given by others, not for your own glorification but to be given
in valuing others. By
understanding my own value I am able to know and give you yours.
Jesus had a true understanding of his value in his Father’s eyes and,
far from taking pride in this as Lucifer was said to have done, he put his
value, his goodness at the service of others.
He instructed his followers to do the same, and gave them a most
graphic illustration of what he meant when at the Last Supper he washed their
feet and told them to serve others as he did.
(John 13: 1-17) A
person who knows his real worth will be glad, not proud, to have that to share
with others.
15.
TO
BE HUMAN IS TO BE AS GOD IS The doctrine of the Incarnation shows us clearly what
it is to be human. Jesus is what
it is to be human. It is not true
that we are ‘only human’ and that he is somehow superhuman. Jesus is the pattern of all human beings: he is ordinary and
real, flesh and blood, subject to pain and pleasure, happiness and grief.
The cells and structures in his body and brain were inherited from his
earlier ancestors, from the hominids and from the long line of animal species
stretching back to the dawn of life. And
this man is what God is, uniquely by his nature, although still as a gift from
another: he is ‘begotten of the Father’.
We are ‘adopted of the Father’, and our self, which is the image of
God, has been given as a gift beyond our nature: it is in no way ours by
right, and yet it is fully and truly what we are.
We have been made as Jesus is, to be as God is. Most of us hide this from ourselves and others behind
the masks and defences we have fashioned to cover our hurts.
And the harmful actions, the ‘sins’ we commit because of our lack
of self-belief, hide and warp, perhaps in some even destroy, the divine
self-image in us. But we can no
longer claim that we do not know what we are really supposed to be, or that it
is impossible for us to achieve it, because we have seen what we are and we
have seen how we can be like that, in a human being like ourselves. The doctrine of the Incarnation is essential and
central in Christian belief, and we can see how damaging are the notions,
often quite popularly and innocently held, which misinterpret it.
If Jesus is not God but just a very good man, as some have said, we
have not seen the absolute and unconditional love of God reflected to us in
his eyes; we have not seen our infinite value proclaimed in his willingness to
live and die for us. If Jesus is
not truly man, but only God pretending to be a man, then we still do not know
what it is to be human or how we can achieve it. Once again, we are not looking at a matter of theory:
there have been countless people in every age and place who have become their
true selves through seeing and accepting God’s love for them, and have
fulfilled their humanity, as Jesus fulfilled his, in giving God’s love to
others. Most of these have been
ordinary people, of every character type, culture and race, whose lives have
passed unnoticed by the world; but when such people are publicly known for
their heroic goodness we have called them ‘saints’. Like them, like Jesus, we are meant to be as God is in our
particular way, and nothing less will give us our full self-hood.
How must we live, to be really ourselves?
As God lives. How much
must we love to fulfil our potential? As
much as God loves. What will we
be if we live and love as God does? We
will be as God is. This is the startling truth that Jesus reveals, and
that the Incarnation doctrine sets before us, and that many Christians find so
difficult to accept. They see God
as great and man as little. But
this is to underestimate the full implication of the doctrine. Not only is God a man but a man is God. If we doubt that we can be as God we must look again at
Jesus: he was a human being like us in every way except that he was undamaged,
‘sinless’, and we have seen that if we are loved we can have our damage
healed and can have no need to sin. When
we saw God in all his power and glory we saw an ordinary human person.
That is not how small he is: it is how great we are made to be. In resisting this awe-inspiring view of themselves
people have said that they cannot be God-like because they cannot create a
universe or perform miracles. In
fact, according to some scientific and philosophic views, we do something very
like creating when we perceive, know and describe the universe.
There is a sense in which the universe does not exist until it is known
as existing in minds such as ours. And
on the question of miracles, Jesus himself said: ‘Truly, I say to you, he
who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than
these will he do’. (John 14:
12) In his own time and to this day countless extraordinary
events have been brought about through ordinary people’s faith and God’s
love. A dramatic healing, the creation of the universe, the
turning of a person’s life, (surely the greatest of all miracles), these are
just particular instances of God’s power – the only power he has, the
power of love. And we share with
him his power to love people, and our fellow animals, and the earth itself,
into life. That is all that God
can do and that is what each of us is created to do as fully as we can. In doing this you are God-like, and you will see each of us
as God-like, and will treat yourself and us accordingly. If you believed this you could not despise yourself or any
other; you could not tolerate violence or obscenity, poverty or injustice.
If we believed this, and therefore believed that our world is, as Jesus
proclaimed it, the Kingdom of God, then we might see with the eyes of one like
Mother Theresa who, when she looked at an abandoned child, recognised in him
the face of God.
16.
ALL CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES RELATE TO THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY, In this work we are looking at the five major Christian
doctrines as they may give meaning to people’s lives, but there are of
course other beliefs in the tradition which we have not considered.
At the heart of all Christian beliefs is the doctrine of the Trinity,
as it is revealed in the Incarnation, and every other doctrine is related to
and dependent upon these. We have yet to examine the Trinity and the understanding of
ourselves which it offers, but for now we can set out a sketch of how each of
the other doctrines relates to it:
:- Incarnation is, as we have said, the key to all
Christian beliefs because it reveals God as Trinity, and man as he is meant to
be. Creation demonstrates the relationship between the
Persons of God: all things were made by the Father through the Son as an
expression of his love for him, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Man was made in the image of the Persons of God in their relationship. Salvation shows us the love-in-action which is that
relationship. The doctrine of the
Church proposes the belief we have just been considering, that the Holy Spirit
is God’s love active now in our world, in the worship, beliefs and work of
those who embody that love and offer it to others. The scope of the present work does not allow us to
examine all the Christian beliefs in their relationship to the major
doctrines, but there are some which we should consider, since they have been
given a particular importance for many Christians, and because that very
emphasis on them has given rise to much misunderstanding, and even to bitter
confrontation.
17.
BELIEFS
ABOUT MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS The rift between the Protestant and Catholic traditions
resulted to some extent from abuses and corruption in the Church, but it was
also a protest against what were seen as exaggerations in the beliefs and
devotions presented to and practised by the faithful.
In particular the Protestants objected to the doctrinal and devotional
prominence given to Mary, seeing it as a form of idolatry.
The Roman, parts of the Anglican, and the Eastern traditions have
retained their devotion to the mother of Jesus, but in these days they do not
give her the prominence they once did, and the doctrines concerning her are
less frequently taught and are still widely misunderstood. We have said that all doctrines are meant to tell us
truth about ourselves, and to help us make sense of our lives.
If a doctrine has given that help in one age it cannot cease to do so
in a later age, since people do not alter fundamentally, however great may be
the cultural changes which sweep over them.
But we have already seen that even the principal doctrines can become
obscure and remote from people’s lives when there is inadequate
interpretation of them to illustrate the truth they are offering.
If the main doctrines can lose their force through unfamiliarity or
ritualization, then the meaning of their dependent beliefs must also become
blurred or distorted. The three doctrines connected with Mary which appear to
have suffered most in this way are those of the Immaculate Conception, the
Virgin Birth, and the Assumption. Many
Christians would now find it quite difficult to state what they say, let alone
what they are supposed to mean. If,
for instance, they are ever referred to in the media it is as likely as not
that the Immaculate Conception will be confused with the Virgin Birth. The beliefs relating to Mary are like all religious
beliefs, in that they do not tell us so much about her as about ourselves.
And like other dependent doctrines, they are a further expression of
one of the central beliefs. The doctrines of Mary can be understood only in relation to
the Incarnation; they have evolved over the last two thousand years as the
Church has tried to express its belief in Jesus as truly God and truly man.
This belief does not, as is so often supposed, refer to
the conception of Jesus but to the conception of Mary, and it states that she
was not conceived in Original Sin. We
have said that all our race is born in a state of desperate need for God’s
love, and with a fatal tendency to reject or misuse it.
This doctrine declares that in Mary that need was fulfilled from the
first moment of her existence, and that she never had the destructive
inclination to act against love. The Catholic tradition of the Christian community came
to this belief from their attempts to guard the truth of the Incarnation.
Early in its history the Church had declared that Mary was the ‘Mother
of God’ – a statement astonishing and controversial in itself.
It was then felt by many that God could not have been born of someone
who was subject to sin. And in
accepting that Mary was the mother of Jesus, the real and complete human
being, they would have to question whether that total humanity could emerge
from the womb and the care of a flawed woman.
Mary could not be thought to have been conceived in the state of
Original Sin. Of course this raises as many questions as it is meant
to answer. How did Mary escape
the damaged condition of the human race when her parents did not?
Once we get into this sort of difficulty in looking at a doctrine, the
sort of difficulty often caricatured as a ‘how many angels can you get on a
head of a pin’ argument, then it is time to step back and remember what we
are doing. Christian doctrines,
we need to remind ourselves, are not objective descriptions of facts about
supernatural matters: they are attempts, couched in symbolic religious
language, to express what we believe that Jesus has revealed about ourselves.
It is not so much that they set out what we should believe, as that
they give us indications of what it would make no sense to believe if we
believe in him. What we believe
about Mary is a necessary implication and expression of what we believe about
Jesus. The Church has declared
that Mary was ‘immaculate’, sinless, from her conception because it makes
no religious sense to say that she was conceived in Original Sin.
We need to keep the description of what doctrine is and
is meant to do very much in mind as we approach this next example, since
belief in the Virgin Birth is now widely rejected, even by leaders in the
Christian churches. The doctrine
states that Many conceived Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, and that he
had no earthly father. Since this doctrine appears to deny the laws of nature
which are the province of science, people have taken exception to and even
ridiculed it on these grounds. But
we have already suggested that this would be to misunderstand the separate
roles of religious and scientific language.
As a matter of fact it is possible for a woman to conceive a child
without fertilisation by a male. The
process is called ‘parthenogenesis’, and is a matter of the cloning of a
woman’s cells to produce the new being.
Medical history suggests that such an event has occurred, but extremely
rarely, and it must of course always result in the birth of a female, since
the child is a clone of her mother. It is worth mentioning this only to show that the very
idea of a virgin birth is not so preposterous as it has been said to be.
We are wise never to say ‘never’ when looking at what is possible
in our world. This does not,
however, have a direct bearing on the belief in the virgin birth of Jesus, and
not only because he was a male. The
doctrine is not a statement or description of an event which is available to
scientific examination. Is the doctrine, then, the description of a miracle?
Many religious people are able to accept the idea of a miracle, and it
is no way irrational for them to do since there are so many happenings and
events, whether of a religious or a simply unusual nature, which have not yet
been explained by science. And
since there are records, in places such as Lourdes, of the regeneration of
diseased organs, it is not unreasonable that someone should accept the
possibility of a miraculous virgin conception. But this is not the best way to approach this doctrine,
since such a miracle would of itself have little meaning for the lives of
anyone not immediately affected by it. The doctrine came about as an attempt to express and
emphasise the Incarnation belief that Jesus is truly God and truly man.
It developed from, and gave rise to, traditions about unusual signs and
events surrounding his birth, such as those we read of in the gospels of
Matthew and Luke. In his account,
(Matthew 1: 23) Matthew refers back to the passage in Isaiah (Isaiah 7: 14)
which says that '‘a virgin shall conceive and shall bring forth a son’.
But in both Isaiah and Matthew the word used really has the meaning of
‘young woman’. Even if
Matthew were suggesting an actual virgin birth, that and the attendant signs
and wonders he describes could still be seen as a literary device used by him
to emphasise the divinity of Jesus. As
such his account would resemble stories in other religions which have
described the birth of a divine being from a virgin. In either case what the events, or the story portraying
them, are telling us is that Jesus is the Son of God, having no other father.
The Incarnation doctrine describes the coming to humanity of the Father’s
son. The manner in which his birth is described is not the flowery
embellishment of a divine appearance: it is the setting out of our belief in
the birth of God’s son. He is
the Son begotten of his Father and no one has two natural fathers.
But the logic of the Incarnation doctrine also indicates that Jesus
could not be set on earth in some way unconnected with human birth.
He must be fully human, and he must therefore be born of a woman,
inheriting all his human characteristics from her, through her, from the
generations of his ancestors. This difficult doctrine is a prime example of how the
Church has to struggle to express its beliefs in a way which will protect our
faith. It indicates that whatever
we may say about the circumstances of Jesus’ birth, we cannot say anything
which would show him to be other than the Son of his Father and of Mary, if we
are not to deny our faith in the Incarnation and its effect on our lives.
The doctrine of the Assumption has caused less
controversy because it has seemed to most outside the Catholic Christian
tradition to be simply absurd and irrelevant – if they have heard of it at
all. The belief it states is that
Mary was taken up, ‘assumed’, ‘body and soul into heavenly glory’.
Like her son, she has no grave. This
belief has been held in the tradition since earliest times, but it was
pronounced formally as a doctrine only in 1950. It is obvious that there could be no objective external
evidence that Mary was conceived without Original Sin, and none available to
us now that Jesus was born of a virgin. But in the case of the Assumption there is one indication
that might be seen to support its being an historical event.
Mary, as we have said, has no grave.
We know how eagerly the local people in every place have treasured and
proclaimed each location associated with the events of the life of Jesus or of
the saints. We can hardly doubt
that the tomb of Our Lady would have been sought and revered beyond any place
of pilgrimage, short of the Holy Sepulchre itself. The absence of such an obvious focus for the cult of
Mary is an interesting fact, but as with all doctrines, the historicity of the
event is not the point being made. Like
the other Marian doctrines, the Assumption is not so much expressing a belief
about Mary as about God and about ourselves.
Once again it is a doctrine derived from and pointing to the
Incarnation. In the Incarnation we saw ourselves reflected for the
first time in our full glory as the images of God. The Father made all things to be good, but he made us to be
as he himself is. But where in us
do we see that image? There has
been in Christianity a long history of the use of the word ‘soul’.
We have spoken of a person as ‘having a body and a soul’, and have
seen the soul as the higher spiritual part.
Considered in this way it would seem clear that it must be the soul
that is the image of God, since our bodies are all different from each other,
and are made of gross material. This notion of ourselves borders dangerously on the
destructive belief called ‘dualism’ which was dismissed very early by the
Church as heretical. As a
religious idea dualism has had a long history and a wide influence, extending
from ancient times to the modern religions of the East. It suggests that only the spiritual is holy, whereas all that
is material is inessential or even evil.
The proper aim of man is to get away from the world and the body in
order to live as a pure being. In
such beliefs a person is a soul temporarily encased, even entrapped, in a
body. The Jewish tradition evolved an entirely different view
of man, a view which Christianity has inherited. For the Jews a person is essentially an embodied soul. To be
disembodied is unthinkable, a horrible fate.
As a result the belief developed, in the centuries just before Christ’s
birth, that in heaven the dead exist bodily.
This is the orthodox Christian belief, declared in the creeds, yet many
Christians have from their childhood the idea that their soul goes to heaven.
It would seem that over the centuries the word ‘soul’ has gradually
been understood in a more dualist sense, in spite of the Church’s
declaration against this, and that it is now thought of by many as the spirit
‘inside’ them – a kind of ghost which can detach itself without loss
from the body, leaving it behind as an unwanted shell. The Greek word which has been translated as ‘soul’
is ‘psyche’, the basis of words such as ‘psychology’, and in that
context it refers to the mind. In
the gospels and elsewhere, ‘psyche’ is translated as ‘life’, and this
is the word now used in the passage in which Jesus asks: ‘For what will it
profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?’
(Matthew 16: 26 RSV), whereas in the past this was translated as ‘soul’.
It is difficult to think of your life, or even your mind, as something
separate, able to detach itself and ‘go to heaven’.
You are a living, thinking person, and it is therefore most helpful to
think of ‘psyche’ as denoting the living, conscious self, and to think of
the body not as a separate and dispensable thing but as the presence of that
self. We are essentially embodied selves.
Individual personhood evolves and is expressed in a particular type and
shape of body, in those eyes, that colour and hair, those habits and gestures.
These are not incidental to the ‘real’ self, to be cast aside when
it no longer needs them: they are the way that self has developed and the way
it exists. Persons are embodied
selves, and each individual presents a unique image of God in his world.
The world is good, not evil, and the bodily expression of the human
being is neither evil nor disposable: it is sacred. This
is the truth which is proclaimed in the Incarnation, and it is the truth which
is emphasised and glorified again in the doctrine of Mary’s Assumption.
21. THE DOCTRINE OF THE INCARNATION OFFERS US THE TRUTH OF OURSELVES The doctrine of the Incarnation offers us the chance to
know, believe in and value ourselves and others as we truly are.
In doing this it shows us what God really is.
All other doctrines are reflections of this light in our lives. ***************************************************************************************************************** We
believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the
only son of God, eternally begotten of
the Father, *****************************************************************************************************************
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