The human mind is not only, as Calvin has said, a permanent factory of idols, it is also a permanent factory of fears the first in order to escape God, the second in order to escape anxiety; and there is a relation between the two. For facing the God who is really God means facing also the absolute threat of nonbeing. The “naked absolute” (to use a phrase of Luther’s) produces “naked anxiety”; for it is the extinction of every finite self-affirmation, and not a possible object of fear and courage….But ultimately the attempts to transform anxiety into fear are vain. The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself.
–Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1st edition 1952, 2nd edition 2000), p.39
Tillich is more influenced by Martin Heidegger than by Biblical teaching. Genesis indicates that both fear and the feeling of nakedness follow directly from disobedience and self-gratification. Then comes murder (Gen. 4) and anxiety about shed blood. The Priesthood is enacted when God sacrificed animals to cover human nakedness.
Ms. Linsley’s comment is certainly applicable and worthy of consideration, but it is clearly addressed to those [i]within[/i] the Church.
For those outside the Church (capitalization deliberate), self-deception is a much more nuanced and multi-edged matter. I am thinking of Festinger’s [u]When Prophecy Fails[/u], here. Bottom line: if you emotionally invest in a concept, you’ll stick with it even if it doesnt’ make [i]any[/i] rational sense, for a period of time anyway. So.
How does one correct for/calibrate for [b][i]self-[/i][/b]deception? Interesting epistomological question. One can, of course, just assign the problem to another authority (as some converts to the Latin Rite seem to do), but even [u]that[/u] is a decision.
Just sayin’ (as the kidz say).
regards,
JPP
Self-calibrate to the Truth.
Hi Just Passing By — good to see you over here again. Hope all is well with you.
You ask a question that really has challenged me over the years, due to some of my own personal history, not to mention simple observation.
I think one thing that it took me a while to learn is that Christians essentially believe that sanctification [which has to do with your question “how does one correct for/calibrate for *self*-deception”] is supernatural. For the purposes of this statement, by sanctification I mean the gradual taking over of the “flesh” [old man] with the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Lewis writes about this process as a becoming *more* of who we were meant to be. Till We Have Faces beautifully describes the end result . . . you might enjoy that book just for the literary pleasure of it.
But at any rate, Christians believe that the Spirit of Christ supernaturally endwells the believer, and that the person thus changes and grows, not necessarily through dint of white-knuckled effort, but by the work of that Holy Spirit within him, from the inside out.
Once I grasped that — and it wasn’t until my late 20s — I understood much better about the whole issue of *self*-deception. That is why, in part, Scripture speaks so much about drawing near to Jesus. At the end of the day, my prayer has to be not so much “help me not to sin” as “help me to see you more clearly and love you more dearly” [to quote the old song] and “please let me be close to you.”
Those are just some thoughts . . . it’s a good question and one about which I think many books of sad disgrace and questioning could be written.