Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 41:1 (Mar 1998)
Article: After Selfhood: Constructing The Religious Self In A Post-Self Age
Author: Terry C. Muck

JETS 41:1 (March 1998) p. 107

After Selfhood:
Constructing The Religious Self
In A Post-Self Age

Terry C. Muck*

* Terry Muck is professor of comparative religion at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, 100 East 27th Street, Austin, TX 78705.

“Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Ps 139:23–24).

“You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:22–24).

“Why can’t we just get along?” Rodney King’s plaintive cry during his national agony several years ago managed to capture both the besetting problem and the pessimistic mood of our age. Oversimplified? Yes. “Just getting along” makes it sound like the divisions we face in our culture—racism, classism, sexism—could be cured if only individuals would just grow up and act like adults. Although acting like adults would be a distinct improvement on much of what we see going on around us, the problems of societal fragmentation go much deeper than that. We are divided in a way that reflects not simple immaturity but a maze of worldviews that cannot cope with the complexity of life today.

In this mélange of fragmentations, religious divisions are among the most pernicious. Most of the world’s peoples are not just religious. They are religious with an attitude. Convinced of the truth of their religious traditions, of their ability to satisfactorily answer life’s ultimate questions, people joyfully proclaim their good news to any and all. Even though this proclamation is most often benign—even loving—in its intent, when it gets wedded to nationalisms, tribalisms and secular ideologies of one sort of another, loving proclamation can turn to manipulative intolerance. Religious people fight, for religious, ethnic and other selfish reasons.

“Why can’t we just get along?” Why—when the most important ordering principles in our lives, our religions, teach love and fellowship and brotherhood and sisterhood—do we fight, using the very teachings designed to promote peace, to promote hatred?

Why indeed? I would like to suggest that at least part of the reason can be traced to our inadequate, almost confused views of what it means to be an individual self. One reason we fight is because the way we view personhood makes it almost inevitable that we bounce against and then quickly off