“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”  Ireneus

Because I have been speaking in so many different cultures and trying to understand what I’m seeing, it inevitably leads me to reflect on my own American culture and identity. This summer I read David McCullough’s book John Adams and George Marsden’s biography Jonathon Edwards. It has been a fascinating glimpse into American culture before, during and after the Revolution.

When Edwards wrote the biography, The Life of David Brainard, about the selfless and passionate missionary to Native Americans, it became one of the most popular American literary works in the 18th century. Edwards hoped it would be received as a basis for understanding what human identity was truly meant to be, from God’s perspective.

However Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which was published later, eventually became the paradigm of the American ideal: self-made, self-defined, self-controlled. Marsden writes that what is essential to the belief of self-definition is the belief in unfettered choice. With the advent of 18th century Enlightenment, moderns ultimately came to believe that exercising their will independently and choosing to do as they please – made them free.

What contrasting views of what it means to be truly human!  One view sees true freedom and identity as coming from joyful obedience and submission to a loving God in a God-ruled Universe.  The other view believes that freedom and identity ultimately came from self-will and self-determination.

What does Jesus reveal about what it means to be human?

Everything Jesus did was in submission and obedience to his father. He did not seek to please himself but to please God. His will was totally surrendered to his Father’s will. Jesus demonstrated that pleasing God is a human being’s greatest joy.  He showed us that it is in radical surrender and obedience to God that we find our ultimate fulfillment and freedom. We discover who we truly are not in opposition to God, but through radical self-surrender to God’s generosity.

Since the Enlightenment, it has been taken for granted that human well-being is tied to independence and self-realization. Immanuel Kant urged us to throw off the shackles of received traditions, especially religious ones, and dare to think unimpeded by any limits except those of human reason. Subjective autonomy became the modern vision of happiness.

But through the Incarnation – when Christ came from Heaven and erased the distance between God and us by becoming one of us, we discover that authentic humanism is based not in radical human autonomy but in loving surrender to God’s gracious will in our lives.

As one author put it:  “It’s not my life that matters, but my life lost and then rediscovered as God’s gift. It is not my freedom that gives me joy, but my freedom transfigured through my surrender to God.”

Issues of identity and freedom are very relevant to postmodern people. Always be thinking about how to creatively reveal to the world the attractiveness of being truly human from God’s perspective! Let me know what is working for you. I will be posting more on these issues after our current ministry trip to South East Asia