From a previous post, the writings of Timothy Keller * The Meaning of Sin.
. . . .This is exactly Kierkegaard’s point. Every person must find some way to “justify their existence,” and to stave off the universal fear that they’re “a bum.” In more traditional cultures, the sense of worth and identity comes from fulfilling duties to family and giving service to society. In our contemporary individualistic culture, we tend to look to our achievements, our social status, our talents, or our love relationships. There are an infinite variety of identity bases. Some get their sense of “self” from gaining and wielding power, others from human approval, others from self discipline and control. But everyone is building their identity on something.8 ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New Your, N.Y., Penguin Books, 2016,2018), 168-70 Continuing. . . .
The Personal Consequences of Sin
Defining sin in this way, we can see several ways that sin destroys us personally. Identity, apart from God is inherently unstable. Without God our sense of worth may seem solid on the surface, but it never is—it can desert you in a moment. For example, if I build my identity on being a good parent, I have no true “self”—I am just a parent, nothing more. If something goes wrong with my children or my parenting, there is no “me” left. Theologian Thomas Oden writes:
Suppose my god is sex or my physical health or the Democratic Party. If I experience any of these under threat, then I feel shaken to the depths. Guilt becomes neurotically intensified to the degree that I have idolized finite values. . . . Suppose I value my ability to teach and communicate clearly. . . . If clear communication has become an absolute value for me, a center of value that makes all my other values valuable . . . then if I [fail in teaching well] I am stricken with neurotic guilt. Bitterness becomes neurotically intensified when someone or something stands between me and something that is my ultimate value.9
If anything threatens your identity you will not just be anxious but terrified with fear. If you lose your identity through the failings of someone else you will not just be resentful, but locked into bitterness. If you lose it through your own failings, you will hate or despise yourself as a failure as long as you live. Only if your identity is built upon God and his love, says Kierkegaard, can you have a self that can venture anything, face anything.
There is no way to avoid this insecurity outside of God. Even if you say, “I will not build my happiness or significance on anyone or thing,” you will actually be building your identity on your personal freedom and independence. If anything threatens that, you will again be without a self.
An identity not based on God also leads inevitably to deep forms of addiction. When we turn our good things into ultimate things, we are, as it were, spiritually addicted. If we take our meaning in life from our family, our work, a cause, or some achievement other than God, they enslave us. We have to have them. St. Augustine said that “our loves are not rightly ordered.” He famously said to God, “Our hearts are restless until we find their rest in Thee!” If we try to find our ultimate rest in anything else, our hearts become dislocated, “out of joint.” The good things that enslave us are good things that deserve to be loved. But when our heart loves become inordinate, then we fall into patterns of life that are not unlike substance addiction. As in all addiction, we are in denial about the degree to which we are controlled by our god-substitutes. And inordinate love creates inordinate, uncontrollable anguish if anything goes wrong with the object of our greatest hopes.~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New Your, N.Y., Penguin Books, 2016,2018), 170-72 . . . continued * . . .but also if we do. . .
(Posts with a preamble asterisk are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
