Parousia, Second Coming of Jesus Christ: What is the Modern Self?

Is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ imminent?

Let’s dive in and start with a series of questions penned by Carl Trueman, PhD from his book Strange New World.

• Am I to be understood primarily in terms of my obligations toward and dependence upon others?
• Does education consist in training me in the demands and expectations of the wider culture and forming me shaping me into that which will serve the community at large?
• Is growing up a process by which I learned to control my feelings to act my restraint and sacrifice my desires to those of the community around me?
• Am I to understand myself as born free and able to create my own identity?
• Does education consist in enabling me to express outwardly that which I feel inwardly?
• Is growing up a process not of learning restraint but rather of capitalizing on opportunities to perform?

The modern self assumes the authority of inner feelings and sees authenticity as defined by the ability to give social expression to the same. The modern self also assumes that society at large will recognize and affirm this behavior. Such a self is defined by what we call expressive individualism.

Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.

Charles Taylor the Canadian philosopher, states that expressive individualism can also be seen as the culture of authenticity where each one of us has his or her own way of realizing our humanity and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed upon us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.

In short, the modern self is one where authenticity is achieved by acting outwardly in accordance with one’s feelings.

Many of us are indeed particularly disturbed by the radical changes in society’s sexual norms over recent decades, and even more so by the rise of the transgender movement. It is the belief of Carl Trueman, PhD, that these elements of what we call the sexual revolution are symptoms of a wider turn to expressive individualism in the West. The priority that the LGBTQ + movement places on sexual desire and inner feelings relative to personal identity, as part of this broader accent on the inner psychological life of western people that shapes us all. It is the contention of Trueman that expressive individualism provides the broad backdrop to these aspects of what is commonly called the sexual revolution.

Trueman continues that it would be a mistake to see the sexual revolution merely in terms of a loosening of moral boundaries to include more forms of sexual expression. What marks the modern sexual revolution as distinctive is the way it has normalized sexual phenomena such as homosexuality and promiscuity and even come to celebrate them. It is not therefore the fact that modern people engage in gay sex or look at sexually explicit material, while earlier generations did not, that constitutes the sexual revolution. It is that gay sex and the use of pornography no longer involve the shame and social stigma they once did. They have even come to be regarded as a normal part of mainstream culture.

If the individual’s identity is defined by sexual desire, then he or she must be allowed to act out on that desire in order to be an authentic person.

The sexual revolution has brought us to the point where sexual acts in themselves are seen as having no intrinsic moral significance; it is the consent or not of those engaging them that provides the moral framework.

The dramatic changes and flux we witness and experience in society today are related to the rise to cultural normativity of the expressive individual self, particularly as expressed through the idioms of the sexual revolution. The reasons for this are so deeply embedded in all aspects of our culture and this means that we all are to some extent complicit in what we see happening around us. We all share the same social imaginary: through the pill that made it cheap and easy to separate sex from procreation, the rise of no-fault divorce which reduced marriage to a sentimental bond, the rhetoric of feminism which asserted women’s control over their own bodies and sexuality and the Internet which massively expanded the accessibility of pornography. Soap operas, sitcoms and even commercials presented sex as a cost-free pastime.

The picture is clear, a complex set of factors from philosophy to technology to pop culture shape the way we intuitively think about sex. They shape the way we think about the world in general and our place within it.

Older Christians can no longer assume that biblical ethics make sense to younger Christians because the social imaginary in which they operate is so different to the one many of us grew up in. That means we need to work harder at explaining not simply the content but also the rationale of Christian morality. It is therefore helpful not simply to point to what the Bible teaches in a few texts but also to show that those texts make sense within the larger picture.

This larger picture has both a broad biblical side, where sex is a function of what the Bible teaches about human personhood, and the “natural law” side, where the sexual and complementarity of male and female bodies is relevant, as is the evidence of damage done to the physical body by certain sexual practices. It is not that nature here offers a decisive argument it assists us in showing that God’s commands make sense, given the world the way the world is.

The church needs to respond to this present age by avoiding the temptations of despair and optimism. Christian hope is realistic. It understands that the world is a veil of tears, that things here are not as they should be, and all life does end. This world is not the Christians home and so we should not expect it to provide us with home comforts.

The calling of all Christians is to

• live faithfully in the time and place that we have been set in.

When things in this world go awry or when we are faced with changes that bring suffering to us or society at large, we must not be in despair. Suffering here and now may at times be terrible, even unbearable, but it is never meaningless. It finds meaning in the life death resurrection ascension and return of the lord Jesus Christ.

The world in which we live seems to be set to be entering a new chaotic unchartered and dark era. But we should not despair.

We need to:

• Prepare ourselves!
• Be informed!
• Know what we believe and why we believe it!
• Worship God in a manner that forms us as true disciples and pilgrims, intellectually and intuitively, and
• Keep before our eyes the unbreakable promises that the Lord has made and confirmed in Jesus Christ and His Word.

This is not a time for hopeless despair nor naive optimism.

Let us sharpen our identity as the people of God and hunger for the great consummation that awaits at the marriage feast of the Lamb.

Parousia, Second Coming of Jesus Christ: What is the Modern Self?

What is the Modern Self ?