At church this morning, the pastor was talking about a person who was
born again. This person confessed that there was still darkness within
him, but he said that things are different for him now, and that this
is not due to himself, but rather to Christ.
This story stood out to me because I was thinking yesterday about the
darkness that is inside of me. There are a variety of models of the
atonement. One is the model of penal substitution, which holds that
Christ in dying paid the penalty for sin on our behalf, and we are saved
when we trust in that. Another model is the death and resurrection
model, in which we die and rise with Christ. This model appears in
Romans 6, and the idea is that our old self dies with Christ, and a new
self rises with Christ. The old self is carnal and yielded to sin,
whereas the new self is yielded to righteousness. And yet, many note,
even new selves struggle with sin. But a number of Christians would
come back and say that sin does not dominate within the new self. Yes,
sin and carnality are there, in the same way that a rotting corpse can
still have a negative impact even though it is dead. But they are not
dominant.
My problem is that so much of me is carnality—-sin, selfishness,
cold-heartedness, hatred, etc. This has been the case when my beliefs
have been right-wing evangelical, and also when they have strayed from
that. I tend to like the substitutionary model of the atonement because
it treats me as a passive party: I am inadequate, and yet Jesus—-who is
stronger than I am—-does things on my behalf, resulting in my
salvation. I have a hard time seeing my old self as dead and my new
self as alive, however, because my “old self” appears to me to be alive
and active.
Do I believe that Christ is working within me, producing the fruit of
good attitudes and good deeds? Well, I depend on God, let me tell you
that! I pray to him, for I realize that I need help to live a good
life—-and, even here, I do not set the bar for a “good life”
unrealistically high. But there have been many times when I have felt
as if I was carrying the burden of living a good life all by myself.
I’m turning off the comments because this post was uncomfortable for
me to write, and I am not interested in reading Christian attempts to
prey on my vulnerability.