The Real Scandal of Christianity
You are not free to be whoever you want to be
What if the scandal of Christianity is that you are not free to be whoever you want to be? That you will only ever find out who you are and were meant to be in a relationship with Christ?
Christianity is judged by many as being scandalous and offensive. The indictments against Christianity are many and include perpetuating slavery, extending colonialism, being anti-science, and demeaning women, to name a few.
Christians would and should rightly query those claims. But there are claims that Christians would share with their accusers.
Christianity is meant to be scandalous and cause offence when properly lived and presented to the world. The message of Jesus has always been offensive to some. When Jesus declared himself the ‘bread of life come down from heaven’, many who heard him were offended and walked away.1
What Christians see as beautiful - that God loves us and pursues us through his Son, who died on the cross in order to reconcile us to God - is anathema and unethical to others. Our reconciliation with God is as a created being returned in love to their rightful owner. Changed from being self-possessed - or anything else that holds our identity captive - to being God-possessed. The gospel is a scandal of exclusivity with God's claim upon our lives that is total, including our bodies.
19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20, you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.2
In the midst of all the noise, inanity, and insanity of our news and social media, there is a different message. Something so good, so beautiful, so true, and so real. God loves us deeply and passionately and comes to rescue us from ourselves. To know his love is to be set free from all that would seek to lay claim to and own and control us. And that only in exploring his love, can we find who we really are.
Often this Gospel, that God has pursued us in Christ to eternally restore, redeem, release and recreate us is reduced to praying prayers to go to heaven when we die. As if salvation had nothing to do with who we are and become in this life now. No wonder non-Christians see that as a scandal.
Christianity and Christ himself do make claims about how we enter into an eternal relationship with God and that they are only and uniquely found in Christ.
6 Jesus answered, “I am the way, truth, and life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you really know me, you will know[a] my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”3
But what if, at this moment in time and culture, there is a differnt claim within Christianity that cuts to the heart of the identity crises writ large in our world? A claim that is one of the greatest scandals of our times.
Self-Creation vs. Being Christ-Made
7 No one lives for himself alone. No one dies for himself alone. 8 If we live, it is for the Lord. If we die, it is for the Lord. If we live or die, we belong to the Lord. 9 Christ died and lived again. This is why He is the Lord of the living and of the dead.
A destructive force has been unleashed under the guise of self-love and self-creation, where we have become turned in on ourselves, believing we can find ourselves from within ourselves by ourselves.
What if the scandal of Christianity is that you are not free to be whoever you want to be? That you will only ever find out who you are and were meant to be in a relationship with Christ?
A scandal that dares to claim that we cannot invent ourselves or create ourselves. We are not self-creating and were meant to be God-made.
3For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.4
We are no autopoietic, able to produce and maintain ourselves. Our identities are not something we can hew from the stone of our being into whatever we want it to be as if the us that does not exist can create our existence.
Christianity is a scandal to the modern autopoietic self. We are God-made. There is a giveness to our lives, i.e who and what we are comes from others and from God.
We can make ourselves into many things that may be true to the nature of our own self-creations. But we will only discover who we really are when we submit to the realisation that we are God-made - in and as an expression of his love for us. No one can be true to who they are ultimately and eternally made to be without alignment with God and others.
Yet you, Lord, are our Father.
We are the clay, you are the potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
Our world promulgates an ideology bundled up in stories where we are the potter, the work of our own hands. This is the ongoing lie, self-harming every aspect of our identities, bodies and beings.
It is a story, that is, the story that we should have no story, except the story we chose when we had no story, It is a story that has at its heart the attempt to make us tyrants of our own lives.5
Anxiety is the mark of the self creating identity crisis epidemic we face. We are awash with ‘safetyism’, microaggressions, and identity politics, whilst news and social media attenuate our anxiety with headlines of how every aspect of life is ‘unprecedented’, ‘extreme’ and ‘apocalyptic’. In the midst of this anxiety stew, we double down on our self-creating, producing a feedback loop that amplifies our anxieties.
How did we end up here believing we are self-sustaining and self-creating beings?
Selfies and Life Dysmorphia
Imagine never seeing a photo of yourself or your reflection in a mirror. How would you know what you looked like? How would that affect your sense of who you were?
To know who you were meant having others tell you. ‘You have your father’s ears, mother’s eyes, and grandad’s nose’. I remember my grandmother saying such things to me when I was young, causing me to stare at my parents and grandparents, looking for what they saw to build a sense of myself. I was (rightly it seems) worried that how they appeared (male pattern baldness) would become how I would be.
Ian Mortimer argues that before the invention of mirrors, the notion and idea of individual identity did not exist.
But the development of glass mirrors marks a crucial shift, for they allowed people to see themselves properly for the first time, with all their unique expressions and characteristics.6
Silvered mirrors of the kind we have now were not invented until the 15th Century. And once they were, people could view themselves with their own eyes. Mirrors changed our perception of ourselves. Being able to look at ourselves resulted in many changes. Painters could now paint self-portraits; the dates and times of our birth became more important, and many thing first-person came into being like novels that allowed us to step into the minds of others.
The very act of a person seeing himself in a mirror or being represented in a portrait as the center of attention encouraged him to think of himself in a different way. He began to see himself as unique. Previously the parameters of individual identity had been limited to an individual’s interaction with the people around him and the religious insights he had over the course of his life. Thus individuality as we understand it today did not exist: people only understood their identity in relation to groups—their household, their manor, their town or parish—and in relation to God.7
To be banished in medieval times meant not just the loss of your home and work, but also everything that was your identity and sense of self - your family and community. Cancel culture is our modern version of banishment and identity destruction. It is ironic that self-created expressions of identity often require a presentation of ourselves to others that they will validate.
Now we have nearly 7 billion smartphones out in the world, enabling us to take our self-portraits (selfies) within moments of our lives and instantly share them with a global audience, along with our inner thoughts. We might ask if this is making our self-creation problem better or worse.
If glass mirrors helped bring about such a shift in society, I wonder how society is shifting with the ability, only over the past 10-15 years or so, for people to instantly share their inner thoughts and selfies with friends, family, and even strangers many times every day? Is this more "seeing ourselves clearly" (individualism) or is the ability to allow others to see us clearly so frequently steering us back toward collectivism? Or somewhere else entirely?8
As we look at ourselves looking at ourselves, the curation of what we look like is making things worse. We now have selfie dysmorphia, which links to body dysmorphia. All this results in what we might call life dysmorphia, where we see ourselves wrongly and become more distant from who we really are and could be.
Remembering what we really look like
The book of James describes our life dysmorphia problem well:
23 Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror 24 and, after looking at themselves, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.9
In v24, the Greek behind “themselves” is to prosōpon tēs geneseō.10 If that sounds familiar it is, where geneseo is related to the word genesis, i.e. creation. In other words, this passage means literally to see who God in his Genesis creation intended us to be, to catch a glimpse/hear of who we were meant to be with the image of God and walk away forgetting who we are.
How can we forget what we look like, if God gives us a glimpse of that?
James tells us, it is because we stop looking in the right mirror.
25 But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.11
Here the law is God’s word, his mirror that does not distort but reveals who we really are and were meant to be. His is the mirror that is not distorted like those in the hall of mirrors of the rest of life.
The issue is not whether we look at ourselves to discern who we are, but what mirrors we look into to see ourselves.
Mind Blind: Looking at God, looking at you
“A step or two in front of the place where I am to contemplate or meditate, I will stand for the length of an Our Father, raising my mind above and considering how God our Lord is looking at me, etc., and make an act of reverence or humility.”12
Ignatius had many directions for different moments within the spiritual exercises. But this one, #75, was intended for all and every prayer. Ignatius long before modern psychology, had stumbled upon something in his own experience and those he led in prayer. That when we began our prayer considering how God loos at us we are not only better able to perceive and notice God, we are better able to then see ourselves as we really are.
My youngest daughter is on the autistic spectrum. She has struggled to learn something that most children do after the age of four. That other people exist, with their own thoughts different to her own. Psychologists call this ‘theory of mind’. My daughter’s inability to develop this is called ‘mind blindess’. Some autistic children stay mind blind all their lives.
This autistic ‘mind-blindness’ is a fitting analogy for how many of us are in our prayers.
We think that God knows simply what we know, sees simply what we see; and consequently we rarely stop to ask God what God actually sees or knows or feels. We find it hard to let God enter our prayer as a real living person; instead, we misuse the name ‘God’ to denote a projection of what we think and feel…I am, by nature, mind-blind where God is concerned. I do not really expect God to have a point of view about my inner experience— or about my outer experience for that matter.13
Our modern world has trained us to be individuals, where we initiate prayer alone, broadcasting to God in the hope that he might see us and validate who we are. Instead, Ignatius invites us into an experience of James 1. Where to pray is to notice how God is already looking at us. As we do, we might see that we are loved, accepted, wanted, and desired.
We are not self-made men and women. We receive ourselves, in the eyes of another. In this way, Ignatius defuses our individualism.14
And God is not just looking at me, like someone scrolling social media, ready to click like or move on. He is in the room with us, present to us, choosing to be with us because he chose us - ‘for he chose us in him before the creation of the world’.15 This is not a God to get me stuff, validate my self-creations, or make me feel better. This is the God who made me, knows me, loves me and longs for me to hear what he thinks, desires and has prepared for me in relationship with him.
And as I look at him, I might discover that God is God and I am not.
John 6:55-69.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20, NIV.
John 14:6 NIV.
Colossians 3:3 NIV.
Ian Mortimer. Millennium, 215.
John Kotte, The importance of seeing yourself clearly.
James 1:23-24 NIV.
See Scot McKnight. The Letter of James (p. 150)
James 1:25 NIV.
Ephesians 1:4.