Dying to Self, Living in Christ

By David Baggett

One of the advantages of having New Testament scholar Robert Gagnon as a friend is getting a text in which he casually points out that, in 2 Corinthians 6, the apostle Paul mentions ten difficult circumstances, followed by nine phrases describing a kind of challenging scenario in which Paul shows endurance. Then eight demonstrations of the Spirit-empowered life, three antinomies, and seven paradoxes with correlating polarities: a negative experience in the fleshly dimension and an opposite positive experience in the spiritual dimension.

“The most important of these polarities is the middle one,” Gagnon added, “the only one with the interjection ‘look!’ telling the reader to pay special attention: ‘dying and yet we live.’ This is the quintessential paradox or polarity expressed in the letter, underscoring that there is no living in Christ apart from dying to self” (emphasis added, and a few technicalities trimmed).

Life and death.

In our fallen world, there appears to be an operative principle at work; Tim Keller wrote about this. To save a life, cancer cells may need to be destroyed. To redeem the world, Christ had to die. And for us to live as we were meant to live, we have to die to self.

Such a message is eminently unpopular in our cultural moment, but this gives believers a golden opportunity to sound a countercultural message. But more importantly, a biblical one.

The professional ethics codes of psychologists nowadays are an attempt to encapsulate their guiding values, including autonomy, non-malfeasance, beneficence, justice, fidelity, veracity, integrity, respect for rights and dignity, and the like. Unique to modernism in this list is autonomy and the notion that this is something that should be categorically promoted.

Now, something like self-love is arguably a created disposition altogether appropriate. The Bible tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves, after all. But inappropriate self-love comes about because what’s healthy and ordained has been twisted and warped by sin.

This dichotomy furnishes a crystal clear example of where biblical and worldly values can and do diverge. Privileging autonomy and “self-legislation”—treating everything as negotiable, malleable, fluid, etc.—easily becomes idolatrous self-apotheosis, the antithesis of the death to self to which we’re called.

I see this in my own area of specialization. A well-known objection to theistic ethics is the autonomy objection, one version of which is that if we let God tell us what to do, we have sacrificed our moral autonomy.