Protestantism and the Postmodern Self

Postmodernism has, we are told, “decentered” the modern self, that unified, sovereign, isolated, godlike “thinking thing” discovered by Rene Descartes. The postmodern self is not single but multiple; not sovereign but controlled by external forces; not isolated but “embedded” in the world and in relation; not godlike, but human, all too human; not a thinking mind so much as a desiring body.

Many Christians, laboring under the illusion that the modern view of the self is identical to the Christian view, view the postmodern “decentering” with horror. But it need be no threat. On the contrary, transferred to a theological context, the postmodern self highlights a central Christian, and specifically a Protestant, insight.

Christians, even Protestant ones, have not always grasped the implications of this insight. Theologians have traditionally discussed the “self” by exploring the biblical idea that human beings are created in the “image of God” (Genesis 1:26-28). For much of the Western theological tradition after Augustine, the image of God has been understood as a quality located primarily within the individual, and more specifically in the soul.

Aquinas distinguished between the “image” evident in human beings and the “trace” of Godlikeness found in the rest of the animate creation. As image, humanity represents God “by likeness in species,” while a trace merely “represents something by way of an effect,” as a footprint is a trace of an animal and ashes of a fire. Rational creatures are like God in species because they not only participate in life and being “but also in intelligence,” while “other creatures do not understand, although we observe in them a certain trace of the Intellect that created them.”

Human beings also reflect the Triune processions of Word (Son) and Love (Spirit) – “in rational creatures . . . we find a process of the word in the intellect, and a procession of the love in the will” – and this forms a “certain representation of the species” of the Trinity. For Thomas, these features of the image of God “belong to the mind only” (Summa theoloogiae I, q. 93, art. 6).

Calvin abandoned the philosophical idiom of the scholastics, but agreed that the image of God has its “proper seat” in the soul. He acknowledged that “the external shape” of human beings, “in so far as it distinguishes and separates us from the lower animals, brings us nearer to God,” yet “the image of God which is beheld or made conspicuous by these external marks, is spiritual.”

Calvin reasoned backwards from the New Testament’s teaching about the restoration of the image of God to explain the original character of the image in Adam. Citing Colossians 3:19 and Ephesians 4:24, he concludes “In the first place, [Paul] mentions knowledge; and, in the second, true righteousness and holiness. Hence we infer, that at the beginning the image of God was manifested by the light of intellect, the rectitude of heart, and the soundness of every part” (Institutes 1.15.3-4).

Calvin explicitly rejected the Augustinian notion that the soul bears the imprint of the Trinity, charging that “there is no solidity in Augustine’s speculation.” Nor is the image of God found primarily in mankind’s dominion over the rest of creation. Rather, “The likeness must be within, in himself. It must be something which is not external to him, but is properly the internal good of the soul” (Institutes 1.15.4).

Calvin unfortunately never explains the force of that “must.” Regardless of his reasons, for Calvin man could be fully the image of God, fully himself, standing alone in a barren landscape (even the landscape is strictly unnecessary). Imaging God has nothing fundamentally to do with engagement in the world or with other human beings.

Few today would find Calvin’s discussion of the image adequate either to the biblical evidence or to human experience. For that, we may thank Karl Barth, the great Swiss Protestant who recovered the Augustinian insight that humanity images a Triune God and gave it a fresh, one might almost say, a “de-centering,” twist. Being the image, Barth argued, means that the “us” of the Triune Creator is a “divine and therefore self-grounded prototype to which this being [humanity] can correspond.”

Within God is an I-Thou relation, “a genuine but harmonious self-encounter and self-discovery; a free co-existence and co-operation; an open confrontation and reciprocity.” Humanity as image is “the repetition of this divine form of life; its copy and reflection.” Only in humanity does God create a “true counterpart to God,” a counterpart that can enter into a personal “I-Thou” relationship with God.

In addition, Barth famously suggests, sexual differentiation is an I-Thou within humanity that manifests the differentiation and union that characterizes the life of the Trinity. Animals too are sexually differentiated, but human sexual difference is unique because “in this particular duality (i.e., to the exclusion of all others) he is alone among the beasts and in the rest of creation,” and “it is in this form of life and this alone, as man and woman, that he will continually stand before God, and in the form of his fellow that he will continually stand before himself.”

Barth denied that the image of God might be defined as dominion over the creation. That dominion is instead a “consequence of their divine likeness.” In Barth’s view, the image is not contained within the individual, but is fulfilled only in relation to another. For Barth, the image of God is fundamentally a “decentered” image.

Calvin’s insistence that the image is contained within the soul creates some basic tensions in his theology. Protestant that he was, Calvin preached that a sinner was justified by the “de-centering” act of faith, which joins the self to Christ. Salvation had to do with sharing another’s righteousness, rather than establishing one’s own.

Thus, for Calvin, man as created and man as saved are not merely two stages in the history of one subject, but two different sorts of subject: As created, man’s self is centered “in himself,” but as saved man is centered in another. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is stronger – more Protestant as well as more catholic – when he insists, like Barth, that the image of God is fundamentally ecstatic, an “analogy of relationship” rather than an “analogy of being.” Bonhoeffer even employs the language of justification when he describes the original condition of Adam: The image “is not a human potential or possibility or a structure of human existence; instead it is a given relation, a relation in which human beings are set, a justitia passive [passive righteousness]!” Bonhoeffer closes the gap Calvin opened between created man and saved man; both as image of God and as restored image of God, human beings find their true selves only outside themselves.

Postmodernism is a threat to Christian faith at a number of levels. But the postmodern notion of a self that is not centered in himself is not one of those threats. Far from threatening the Protestant conception of the self, postmodernism opens the possibility that the great Reformation doctrine of justification by faith reveals not only the secret of salvation but unveils the mystery of human existence as such.