Following a theme of June 5, 2021, * What Can Put it Right? by Timothy Keller (from his book ‘The Reason for God):
At the very moment of that vain-glorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most dreadful shuddering . . . I looked down . . . I was once more Edward Hide. —Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Christianity teaches that our main problem is sin. What then is the solution? Even if you accept the Christian diagnosis of the problem, there doesn’t seem to be any particular reason why one must look only to Christianity for the solution. You may say, “Fine, I understand that if you build your identity on anything but God, it leads you to breakdown. Why must the solution be Jesus and Christianity? Why can’t some other religion do as well, or just my own personal faith in God?”
The answer to that is that there is a profound and fundamental difference between the way that other religions tell us to seek salvation and the way described in the gospel of Jesus. All other major faiths have founders who are teachers that show the way to salvation. Only Jesus claimed to be the way of salvation himself. This difference is so great that, even though Christianity can be called a religion in the broader sense, for purpose of discussion we will use the term “religion” in this chapter to refer to “salvation through moral effort” and gospel to refer to “salvation through grace.”1
Two Forms of Self-Centeredness
In Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll comes to realize that he is “an incongruous compound of good and evil.” His bad nature is holding his good nature back, he believes. He can aspire to do things, but cannot follow through on them. Therefore he comes up with a potion that can separate out his two natures. His hope is that his good self, which will come out during the day, will be free from the influence of evil and will be able to realize his goals. However, when he takes the potion one night and his bad side comes out, he is far more evil than he expected. He describes his evil self using classic Christian categories:
I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. . . . [Edward Hyde’s] every act and thought centered on self.
Edward Hyde is so named not just because he is hideous but because he is hidden. He thinks solely of his own desires; he doesn’t care in the slightest who he hurts in order to gratify himself. He kills if someone gets in his way. Stevenson is saying that even the best of people hide from themselves what is within—an enormous capacity for egotism, self-absorption, and regard for your own interests over those of all others. Self-aggrandizement is at the foundation of so much misery of the world. It is the reason that the powerful and the rich are indifferent to the plight of the poor. It is the reason for most of the violence, crime, and warfare in the world. It is at the heart of most cases of family disintegration. We hide from ourselves our self-centered capacity for acts of evil, but situations arise that act as a “potion,” and out they come.
Once Jekyll realizes that he has this capacity for evil acts, he decides to clamp down heavily on this terrible self-centeredness and pride at the core of his being. In a sense, he “gets religion.”
He solemnly resolves not to take the potion anymore. He devotes himself to charity and good works, partially as atonement for what Edward Hyde has done, and partially as an effort to simply smother his selfish nature with acts of unselfishness.
However, one day Dr. Jekyll is sitting on a bench in Regents Park, thinking about all the good he has been doing, and how much better a man he was, despite Edward Hyde, than the great majority of people.
I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can say with honesty that my resolve was fruitful and of some good. You know how earnestly, in the last months of the last year, I labored to relieve suffering; you know that much was done for others. . . . [But as] I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my acts of goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect . . . at the very moment of that vain, glorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most dreadful shuddering. . . . I looked down. . . . I was once more Edward Hyde.
This was a deadly turn of events. For the first time Jekyll becomes Hyde involuntarily. . . . ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 2016, 2018),
. . . . continued,
