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The Self-Relation, Narcissism and the Gospel of Grace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Alan J. Torrance
Alan J. Torrance
Affiliation:
Knox CollegeUniversity of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
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Extract

If it is the case, as John Macmurray suggests, that ‘any way of life implies a philosophy’, or further, that ‘there is a necessary relation between philosophy and social practice’, then an essential dimension of the task of the philosophical theologian must be to engage with the philosophy inherent in and underlying the social practice manifest in the society in which he or she operates. This would imply that the theologian should work in cooperation and in dialogue with the sociologist. But it is clear from theological literature that this course rarely appeals to the theologian who would rather not risk the charge of being unequally yoked with those inhabiting other domains or of deserting his academic or spiritual ‘kingdom’ in pursuit of what is often seen to be the fashionable or the popular!

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , November 1987 , pp. 481 - 510
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1987

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References

1 The Self as Agent, London, 1957, p. 24Google Scholar. Macmurray continues, ‘For if it is a way of life at all it must be a relatively satisfactory adjustment to Reality, exhibiting a systematic structure, and, to a considerable degree, a consistency of direction’.

2 Ibid., p. 26.

3 Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York: W. W. Norton, 1979, p. 29.Google Scholar

4 An ‘in depth’ treatment of the ‘survival mentality’ is to be found in Lasch's sequel book, The Minimal Self — Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, London, 1985Google Scholar. He argues that the ‘doomsday mentality’ creates the phenomenon of the ‘everyday survivalist’ who ‘has deliberately lowered his sights from history to the immediacies of face-to-face relationships. He takes one day at a time. He pays a heavy price for this radical restriction of perspective, which precludes moral judgment and intelligent political activity almost as effectively as the apocalyptic attitude he rightly rejects. It allows him to remain human … But it prevents him from exercising any influence over the course of public events … Long-term commitments and emotional attachments carry certain risks under the best of circumstances; in an unstable, unpredictable world they carry risks that people find it increasingly difficult to accept’ (pp. 93–94).

5 Lasch, , The Culture of Narcissism, p. 31.Google Scholar

6 Marin, Peter, ‘The New Narcissism’, Harper's, October 1975, p. 46Google Scholar [quoted in Lasch, Ibid., pp. 32–33].

7 Lasch, Ibid., pp. 71–74.

8 This is the phrase used by Luther to denote the orientation of sinful man.

9 Lasch describes the narcissist who is reduced to the status of a psychiatric patient as ‘a prime candidate for interminable analysis. He seeks in analysis a religion or way of life and hopes to find in the therapeutic relationship external support for his fantasies of omnipotence and eternal youth. The strength of his defenses, however, make him resistant to successful analysis’ (Ibid., p. 86).

10 Heron, A. I. C., A Century of Protestant Theology, Guildford: Lutterworth, 1980, p. 11.Google Scholar

11 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by Macnabb, D. G. C., 1962, p. 328.Google Scholar

12 Hume writing of himself in the Abstract of his Treatise, Ibid., p. 340.

13 Ibid., p. 331.

14 Ibid., p. 328.

15 Walsh, W. H., Kant's Criticism of Metaphysics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975, p. 56.Google Scholar

16 Kant himself openly refers to this problem when he comments ‘the whole difficulty is as to how a subject can inwardly intuit itself’. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, B 68.

17 Ibid., B 68.

18 Ibid., B 69. He also states the same point later, ‘I have no knowledge of myself as I am but merely as I appear to myself’. B 158. Walsh writes of Kant in this regard, ‘Only if he makes consciousness of mental activity continuous with mental activity itself will he be able to avoid awkward questions about what self it is that I know when I know what I am about.’ Op. cit., p. 187.

19 Kant, op. cit., B 158.

20 Cf. The Origins of Demythologising: Philosophy and Historiography in the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann, Leiden: Brill, 1974.Google Scholar

21 Bultmann, Rudolf, Jesus Christ and Mythology, London: SCM, 1960, p. 53.Google Scholar

22 For an important critical evaluation (in the light of Wittgenstein's philosophy of language) of Bultmann's ‘esoteric’ conception of meaning let me refer the reader to Thiselton's, A. C. excellent book, The Two Horizons, Exeter: Paternoster, 1980.Google Scholar

23 In talking of the paradox of faith he comments that he sees ‘worldly events as linked by cause and effect not only as a scientific observer but also in my daily living’ in such a way that ‘there remains no room for God's working’. Op. cit., p. 65.

24 Bultmann, op. cit., p. 16.

25 It is worth noting here that this is precisely the motivating force which Lasch designates as lying behind the contemporary concern for self-fulfilment and the new religion of self-analysis and therapy.

26 Ibid., p. 39.

27 Ibid., p. 29.

28 Ibid., p. 36.

29 Ibid., p. 40.

30 Op. cit., Note 17.

31 Luthardt's, C. E. book, Ethik Luthers in ihren Grundzügen (1867Google Scholar) exemplifies the attempt to combine Luther's doctrine of the Two Kingdoms (or, more accurately, his zwei Regimente Lehre as opposed to a zwei Reiche Lehre) with the Neo-Kantian system thought. E. P. Sanders offers a devastating critique of the attempt to read this Lutheran faith-works dualism into Paul's conception of the relation between law and grace in his book, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, London: SCM, 1977.Google Scholar

32 Op. cit., p. 49.

33 Here one discerns the influence of Wilhelm Dilthey's philosophy of history. Cf. Ibid., p. 51.

34 Ibid., p. 53.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., p. 55.

37 Heidegger, writes of Dasein, that ‘It is peculiar to this entity that with and through its being this Being is disclosed to it’. Being and Time (trans. Macquarrie, and Robinson, ), London: SCM, 1962, p. 12Google Scholar. Heidegger's method was fundamentally influenced by the Cartesian Meditations of Edmund Husserl, to whom Being and Time was dedicated, and it was the underlying Cartesianism in Heidegger's approach which Gilbert Ryle was to go on to criticise. I would suggest that this feature in Heidegger has echoes in Bultmann and that there is therefore some ground for Thielicke's description of Bultmann's theology as ‘Cartesian’.

38 Op. cit., p. 56.

39 Ibid., p. 57.

40 Ibid., p. 51.

41 ‘For the Time Being’, in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden, New York, 1945, p. 447Google Scholar. Eberhard Jüngel is making a similar point when he writes, ‘In der Liebe begegnen sich ein Ich und ein anderes Ich so daβ sie einander gegenseitig zum geliebten Du werden’. (In love an ‘I’ and another ‘I’ encounter each other in such a manner that each becomes for the other a beloved ‘thou’). Gott als Geheimnis der Welt, Tübingen, 1977, p. 437.Google Scholar

42 As Moltmann, Jürgen comments, ‘Love cannot be consummated by a single subject’. The Trinity and the Kingdom of God (Eng. trans.), London: SCM, 1981, p. 57.Google Scholar

43 Lasch, , The Culture of Narcissism, pp. 42–43.Google Scholar

44 Jüngel, op. cit., p. 437.

45 Here again I must remind the reader of Thiselton's critique of Bultmann's ‘esoteric’ conception of meaning. Thiselton appeals here to Wittgenstein's critique of ‘private language’: meaning is by its very nature public in so far as a word's meaning is its use. Any conception of a private language must therefore be incoherent. This applies similarly to any form of interpretation which appeals to deeper levels of meaning discerned within the private realm of ‘my own’ particular existence and selfunderstanding. Thiselton writes, ‘if with Bultmann we substitute an emphasis on the other-worldly and “my” existential experience in place of the public tradition of Old Testament history, the problem of hermeneutics becomes insoluble' (op. cit., p. 382).

46 Ibid., p. 165. Cf. also The Minimal Self – Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, where he writes, ‘Identity has become uncertain and problematical not because people no longer occupy fixed social stations – a commonplace explanation that unthinkingly incorporates the modern equation of identity and social rôle – but because they no longer inhabit a world that exists independently of themselves.’ (p. 32).

47 Bultmann quotes here I Cor. 7.29–31 precisely to bring out the ‘as if’ character of faith's freedom.

48 It is interesting to note that Kant has also been described as an ‘as if’ philosopher in the light of the irreconcilability of his two realms – between his ‘scientific’ and ‘moral’ perspectives on man. The ‘as if’ character of Kantian moral philosophy received systematic presentation from the philosopher, Vaihinger, Hans, in his book Die Philosophic des Ah Ob, Berlin, 1911 (trans, by Ogden, C. K. as The Philosophy of ‘As If’, New York, 1924).Google Scholar

49 Jesus Christ and Mythology, p. 53.

50 It is worth mentioning here that Paul Vitz uses Alasdair Maclntyre's discussion of existentialism which traces the existentialist understanding of the self back to its Cartesian roots in order to point to the European origins of the contemporary conception of self in society (Vitz, Paul C., Psychology as Religion – The Cult of Self-worship, Grand Rapids, 1977, p. 52)Google Scholar. Vitz writes as an academic psychologist but his conclusions, offering a sociological critique of the outworkings of a Cartesian conception of self in society, serve to confirm the point I made earlier concerning the importance of the philosophical theologian's working in constructive dialogue with the sociologist/psychologist if a coherent and holistic vision for society is to emerge from his approach.

51 Moltmann, op. cit., p. 5.

52 The following quotations are taken from Chapter 6, section 7, ‘The Systematic Elusiveness of “I”’, pp. 186–189.

53 Professor John Macquarrie offers further useful discussion of this problem in the chapter entitled ‘Egoity’ in his book, In Search of Humanity, London: SCM, 1982.Google Scholar

54 Allgemeine Psychologic nach kritischer Methode, Tübingen, 1912, p. 30Google Scholar (Translation taken from Johnson, op. cit.).

55 Mounier, Emmanuel comments, ‘From whatever standpoint we attempt an objective study of the self, whether we subordinate its spiritual reality to its physical determinants, or its physical reality to its physical determinants, or its physical reality to its spiritual character, the one thing we can never demonstrate is the act by which it calls itselfI,’ Personalism (Eng. trans.), Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1952, p. 50Google Scholar. In another but related vein, Lewis, H. D. comments in his essay, ‘The Elusive Self and Practice’, ‘the self … is elusive in the sense that it cannot be described in the finality of its distinctness’. The Personal Universe, edited by Wren, Thomas E., New Jersey, 1975, p. 65.Google Scholar

56 The person desiring to be moral thus finds himself helplessly echoing Paul in Romans 7.15, ‘I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do but what I hate I do.’

57 And he adds, ‘Here the sense of the absolute loses itself in dubious psychic complications’. Op. cit., p. 92.

58 It is a similar point that I find Professor MacKinnon making when he says that obedience can be one of the most insidious temptations as a self-initiated mode of being, even a ‘strenuous heroism’ instead of a ‘total self-abandonment to the Father’. Quoting Barth he points to Jesus as ‘the man for others whose life was one of loving self-abandon to his Father’. ‘The Relation of the Doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity’ in Creation, Christ and Culture, ed. Mackinney, R. W. A., 1976, p. 97.Google Scholar

59 Moltmann expresses this form of experience, properly understood, when he writes, ‘From time immemorial, experience has been bound up with wonder or with pain. In wonder the subject opens himself for a counterpart and gives himself up to the overwhelming impression. In pain the subject perceives the difference of the other, the contradiction in conflict and the alteration of his own self. In both modes of experience the subject enters entirely into his counterpart' (my italics). The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, p. 5.

60 Unfortunately, space means that I can only refer the reader to that immensely important essay by Zizioulas, John, ‘On Human Capacity and Incapacity’ (Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 28 (1975), No. 5, pp. 401–407)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where he defines a person as having his/her hypostasis in ec-stasis and where agape thereby denotes the form of the personal conceived in these terms. On this account persons can never be defined as being complete in themselves or self-contained and can never therefore be understood as analogous in this respect to objects, since a person is defined as an essentially uncircumscribable being, since it has its being in and through its very ‘going forth from itself’ in love.

61 In discussing the ‘dilemma of existential narcissism’, Paul C. Vitz refers to the object's revenge on the self resulting from the ‘terrible distance and consequent alienation from the objectified others’ [op. cit., p. 120]. This resulting ‘trap’ which ‘follows the fundamental logic of self-actualization, with its aim of developing the existential, autonomous self’ is ‘the psychological death (in some cases the physical death as well) of the self. Death may come from greater and greater devotion to sensation (sex, violence, or drugs) or from retreat into the isolated, machine-like world of the careerist ego – cold, calculating, often fueled by amphetamines. In either case there is an ever-tightening, self-inflicted solitary confinement based on continually repressing the need for love. One other out is obviously suicide. It is not too much to suggest that the 250% increase in the suicide rate for college youth over the last twenty years is a symptom of the spread of the existentialist selfist ideology. Whatever the method of death, there is no escape from the conclusion that the modern self is intrinsically selfdestructive’ [pp. 125–126].

62 Persons in Relation, London, 1961, p. 150Google Scholar. There is a centuries old African proverb which expresses this succinctly in the following way: ‘A person is a person only because of others and on behalf of others’. Quoted in Boesak, Allan, Black and Reformed, p. 19.Google Scholar

63 Anderson, Ray S., On Being Human: Essays in Theological Anthropology, Grand Rapids, 1982, p. 168.Google Scholar

64 Ibid.

65 Herein lies the fallacy of decision-pressing evangelism of the type which, infiltrated by secular ‘narcissistic’ methods of persuasion, offers the reward of Christian selffulfilment conditional upon the subject's first making a decision to put his/her faith in Christ. Such a Gospel only turns people back upon themselves, encouraging them to act upon themselves with all the circularity and incoherence this involves. There is a radical distinction to be made between proclaiming the unconditional Good News of the Gospel grounded in nothing other than the love and grace of God, and proclaiming a conditional ‘Good News’ of conditional acceptance which trades on guilt, fear and general self-interest while manipulating a ‘person’ into a distorted state of incurvatus in se inauthenticity – a subtle but widespread perversion of true ‘evangelism’ as the proclamation of the Eu-angelion.

66 It is worth noting also that when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the Testimony we are told that ‘he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord’ (Ex. 34.29).

67 Op. cit., p. 4.

68 At the psychological level this approach further offsets, indeed confounds, the loneliness and the ‘isolation of self’ which Lasch analyses and to which we find Bonhoeffer making reference in the final verse of his poem, ‘Who am I?’.

Who am I? This or the other?

Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?

Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,

and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?

Or is something within me still like a beaten army,

fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.

69 Frankl, Viktor is making the same point from the perspective of his humanistic psychology when he writes, ‘Self-actualization is not a possible aim at all; for the simple reason that the more a man would strive for it, the more he would miss it … selfactualization cannot be attained if it is made an end in itself.’ Man's Search for Meaning, London, 1964, pp. 112–113.Google Scholar

70 An anthropology grounded in a theology of response is advocated by Walter, Tony, in his book, All You Love is Need (London, 1985)Google Scholar. After posing the question, ‘Is it possible to work, to play, to marry, to be creative, out of joyful, free, exploration – or only in response to some need; either my own or someone else's?’ he goes on to comment (in a section entitled ‘Respondeo, ergo sum’), ‘Most philosophies since the Enlightenment have started with the individual. Descartes' famous “Cogito, ergo sum” has this in common with Locke's “I desire therefore I am” and with the modern “I need, therefore I am”. All originate in something within the individual: his or her reason, desires or needs. They all suppose a universe where there is nothing, or nothing of significance, outside of the individual. …A less lonely starting point would be “I respond, therefore I am” (pp. 154–55). His book concludes with the comment, ‘The gospel's real offence against human pride is its claim that God does not love us because he needs our burnt offerings, but simply because of who he is. This God reveals a new way in which to live and love, not to fulfil our need to be needed but in response to being loved unconditionally. A life led in response to love not as a search for love. A life based on abundance, not lack. A life liberated from need’ (p. 164). Cf. note 73.

71 For further discussion of this distinction see the article by Torrance, James B., ‘The Covenant Concept in Scottish Theology and its Legacy”, Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 34 (1981), pp. 225–243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

72 See also I John 4.11, 12, 15, 16 and I John 5.1.

73 II Cor. 5.14–15.

74 The so-called ‘parable of the prodigal son’ is often interpreted as a paradigm of conversion, but if it is to be so, the moment of conversion clearly does not lie (as is so often thought) in any decision which the son conjured up within himself and which brought him home to his father. The son ‘came to himself’ and returned home to his father compelled by the most self-interested motivation – he was tired of eating pigfood! But the father threw his arms around him in love without stopping to ask questions and if any metanoia took place on the son's part one would imagine it was here that conversion began to take place in response, a metanoia of which the older son, living perhaps the ‘heroic’ life of ‘strenuous obedience’, might not yet fully have known – and yet whom the father also loved unconditionally.

75 Ephesians 2.8.

76 Romans 3.31.

77 In few places in the New Testament is this expressed more clearly than in our Lord's ‘High Priestly’ prayer. Here we find spelt out 1) the trinitarian structure of our love of God and knowledge of God as initiated from within the interpersonal relations of the Godhead, 2) the triune structure of Christian unity and community as stemming from the ‘oneness’ of the Father and the Son and 3) the trinitarian ground and grammar of true mission as deriving from the mission of the Son.

78 ‘Prayer’, (trans. Littledale, A. V.), London, 1961, p. 51.Google Scholar

79 Ibid., p. 57.

80 Christopher Lasch, writing as a secular sociologist, describes the ‘ideology of personal growth’, as ‘superficially optimistic” and adds that it ‘radiates a profound despair and resignation. It is the faith of those without faith.’ The Culture of Narcissism, p. 103.

81 Ibid., p. 49.

82 Cf. Colossians 2.9–10. It is worth also drawing attention here to Barth's, Hans-Martin interesting book, Fulfilment (Eng. trans.) London, 1980Google Scholar, where he writes, ‘man's real self is not something that man can realise by himself… it is a gift, the transempirical basis to which the empirical self can constantly relate, the trans-moral presupposition from which all our morality continually derives its force and its power’ (p. 46). Quoting Luther's statement that ‘Christ takes our birth from us and sinks it in his birth’ he comments, ‘The success of our life is not in question, but is already fulfilled, already assured, in advance of ourselves… we do not have to “realize” ourselves, create our own reality and increase it, heighten it and intensify it…” (p. 47).

83 Accordingly we must say with Colin Gunton, that ‘the eternal relatedness of God gives form and meaning to our human reality as beings in relation to each other. It is here that God can be understood as the ground of our acting according to the laws of our being’. Enlightenment and Alienation, Basingstoke, 1985, p. 107.Google Scholar

84 Cf. DrWigglesworth's, Christopher article, ‘Koinonia and Kapital’ in Third Way, Sept. 1983.Google Scholar

85 For a profound and inspiring exposition of an ontology of communion and trinitarian understanding of personhood I must refer the reader to Professor Zizioulas's, John recent book, Being as Communion, London, 1985.Google Scholar