Theological Journal – January 29 Authenticity (2)

I wrote in the last post in this series “from a Christian perspective, any serious search for one’s authentic self has the potential to make contact with the self’s gracious createdness by God.” To that I would add today that our authentic selves are vouchsafed in Christ and we have been graciously included in all he has done for us. Creation is redeemed in Christ and it is there we find our authentic selves, our true identity.


Paying attention to God entails saturating ourselves in this knowledge until it becomes our self-knowledge, until its reality shapes and reshapes us into its image, until we are able to “find the divine in the human, life in suffering, strength in weakness” (Andrew Root). That is, until we are sufficiently conformed to the image of Christ (which is God’s will for us, Rom.8:29) to find in him the God. We can do this in a number of ways I’ll look at in a future post in this series.


The God we pay attention to is the One who comes to us as a minister (the one who rescues his people from slavery in Egypt and raised Jesus from the dead), who meets us in our deathly places and ministers new life to us. This encounter with this God remakes us into his image. That means at least that humans are created and redeemed to be:

Personal – more personal than we can imagine; capable of degrees of relatedness to God, others, and the world more real (C.S. Lewis) than even our deepest experiences of such.

Triune – made for relationship to others and God, others through God, and God through others; The God who is himself “always and at the same time” (A Declaration of Faith, PCUSA) the relationships between Father, Son, and Spirit made us for community; we are only truly ourselves when we are the Me in the We.

Relentlessly gracious – created to extend the care with which we are created to others and the world, our redemption in Christ makes us ministers to others as Christ has come to us in our deathly places and cares for them there.

Restlessly generative – wd do not just find and join others in their deathly places, we minister new life to them there, the very life of Christ we have received from him in our deathly places.

Robustly garrulous – communication is a chief way (not the only one) we share life with each other; God communicates with himself and in his world in a robustly garrulous way, eager and willing to give ourselves to one another in open, honest, transparent sharing with God and each other. Praying to God, praying for and with others are parade examples of such communication.

Paying attention to God, then, has at least these consequences for our transformation and growth into the authentic humanity in God’s image we were created for.