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and “my personality”—were hurting my that peers and superiors implicitly expec-
wife, threatening our oneness in marriage, ted in themselves and others, with a strong
and, though I hated to admit it, were not resistance towards admitting specific wea-
natural or good but a product of my fallen knesses, faults, sins, or even negative emo-
state as a sinner before God. tions, which were usually equated with sin
At the same time in my life, my friend Eric or at least caused by it.
Johnson was pointing me to the writings of Along with these ideals came the most
Thomas Merton, particularly his book New powerful factor, shame. I was ashamed to
Seeds of Contemplation. be less than perfect, less than holy, or less
In light of what was happening in my mar- than joyful. I would not have put it like that;
riage, the following quote hit home deeply: rather, I would have said that I was asha-
“We are not very good at recognizing illusi- med of my sin. If pressed, however, I would
ons, least of all the ones we cherish about not have been able to say very much about
ourselves ... For most of the people in the my sin. I might have said that I wished I
world, there is no greater subjective reali- was bolder in presenting the gospel, more
ty than this false self of theirs ... A life de- knowledgeable in Greek and Hebrew, more
voted to the cult of this shadow is what is skilled or diligent in certain areas of life or
called a life of sin” (Merton 2003). ministry. I could not have begun to see or
This thing that Merton called the “false admit how much of my life was actually
self” was what my wife had identified as the driven by motives of self-protection, self-
part of me that needed to die. I could not advancement, and self-righteousness, all of
deny it. Pretty soon, I was seeing this phe- which was cloaked in self-deception.
nomenon everywhere: in my life, others’ Thankfully, God did not leave me to myself
lives, the teaching of Scripture, the writings but confronted me through people like my
of other Christians, and secular psychology. wife, Eric Johnson, and others, leading me
But why had I not seen this before? Why into a journey of self-examination and dis-
had my years growing up in church and my covery. It also led to me write a dissertation
training in seminary not already exposed and forthcoming book, The True Self and
this reality? I could not lay the blame at False Self: A Christian Perspective.
any particular person, group, or institution. In the book, my aim is to provide a Christi-
There were many factors. an understanding of the true self and false
For one, most of the teaching I had recei- self, based on insights from modern and hi-
ved about the Bible and following Jesus storic sources. To do that, I go to several re-
was heavily influenced by modernism and presentatives from among the biblical au-
its naïve assumption of the unbiased objec- thors, Christian psychologists, and secular
tivity of the observer; granted I was given psychologists, listening to how they answer
the right tools and the right method for ob- (or how I imagine they would answer) four
servation, interpretation, and application, questions: (1) Why do people reflect on
then surely I could make the necessary ad- themselves?; (2) Why do they understand
justments of thinking and behavior to live themselves wrongly (i.e., constructing a
rightly, or so I had thought. false self)?; (3) What does true self-under-
Another factor was less philosophical but standing entail?; and (4) What interventi-
no less consequential: the ideals of perfec- ons can foster true self-understanding? I’ll
tionism, ever-increasing holiness/sancti- offer a brief report of what I found.
fication, and an “everything’s fine” attitude
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