Romans 12 and the autonomous self

I don’t know how many times I’ve read Paul’s letter to the Romans, but the slightly worn and discoloured edges of its pages in my bible give the game away. And yet I can’t say it’s my ‘favourite’ New Testament book. If pressed, I’d opt for 2 Corinthians, but that’s a subject for another day.

This morning, after I’d slogged round a 10K run, showered, recovered with a cuppa and a bowl of cereal, I sat down at my desk to read Romans chapter 12 – I’ve been reading through the New Testament more or less a chapter a day, and R12 happens to be the next one up.

Morning routine

So I read its familiar verses. And then saw something I hadn’t before. That’s what this short sketch will attempt to explore.

Paul’s route to writing Romans 12 is strangely different from the route the average Westerner in 21st Century has taken before reading Romans 12.

The aim of this post is a little like the spider in the bath. Can we climb out of our own cultural/philosophical bath to have a peek over the rim into Paul’s world…and thereby ‘see’ Romans 12 from a new perspective?

If we accept for the moment that what we perceive as the Universe came about many billions of years ago as a result of the Big Bang, we can equally propose that our Western culture has arisen from a Big Bang of Greek philosophical thinking, upgraded in the Enlightenment via its apostles such as Descartes (1596 – 1650) and Locke (1632 – 1704), and their philosophical offspring or disciples Voltaire (1694 – 1778), and Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804).

Just as we occupy the space-time continuum after-glow of the Big Bang, so we are we living in the after-glow of the Enlightenment Big Bang…despite the efforts of post-modern deconstruction.

Central tenets of the Enlightenment include Rationalism, Empiricism, the Autonomous self, self-respect, and self-love. Famous quotes may help bridge the gap between these vague assertions and the reality of our daily lives and influences upon our thinking.

Descartes – ‘I think therefore I am’

Locke – ‘Every man has a property in his own person. This, nobody has a right to but himself’

Voltaire – ‘The pursuit of pleasure must be the goal of every rational person’

Kant – ‘Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment’

From this era came the French Revolution (‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité ) and the War of Independence resulting in the creation of the United States whose tagline in the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. The difference between the France that emerged from the Revolution was largely atheistic but tolerant of Catholic and Protestant Christianity, America was a Christian nation but tolerant towards other faiths and none. Nevertheless, all Western nations have been moulded by the creeds proposed in the Enlightenment, its light falling full square on individual liberty and individual autonomy.

‘No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind’

We are fooling ourselves if we believe we have arrived in 2025 without the past three or four centuries of philosophical thought influencing what we take for granted. Or worse, we think this generation has not been derived from the past.

St Paul, in the First Century, knew nothing about Rationalism or Empiricism, and the ideas of an independent self were as alien to him as they are to the most basic biblical world-views.

For Paul, the existence of an independent self is an illusion, and to pursue such an aim is to court trouble in the form of anxiety, anguish, and mental health as we end up fighting against our true nature…which is not to be independent. John Donne, the poet and priest, was a critic of the Enlightenment’s more extreme exponents: ‘No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.’

If Donne could see that we are involved in mankind, St Paul goes further and asks a more searching question; a question that makes no sense to us, so imbued are we with rational thought and the cult of the individual. The question St Paul asks is ‘Who are you in?’

And Paul is not alone. Jesus also.

It takes some mental re-engineering to even understand what being ‘in’ someone means. If we want to be generous towards the Enlightenment, we can certainly say it represented an improvement over the forms of authority that had become authoritarian by nature. Concepts such as the divine right of kings, absolute monarchy, papacy, aristocracy, and superstition were overturned and replaced by empirical data and observation as the basis of knowledge, and the exaltation of faith in reason over faith in God.

‘I am in the Father, and the Father in Me’ John 14v11

‘I am the vine and you are the branches. He who abides in Me and I in him, bears much fruit’ John 15v5

‘I do not pray for these alone, but also for those that will believe in Me through their word…that they may be one just as We are one: I in them and You in Me’ John 17v20f

‘It is because of God that you are in Christ Jesus…’ 1 Cor 1v30

‘As in Adam all die, so in Christ all are made alive’ 1 Cor 15v22

‘…our fathers were…all baptised into Moses in the cloud and he sea’ 1 Cor 10v1,2

‘…baptised into Christ Jesus…’ Rom 6v3

The human body is made up of trillions upon trillions of individual cells, each of whom are entirely unique, having their own function and contribution to the body. Imagine interviewing one cell and asking, ‘Are you alive?’ The answer would be a definite ‘Yes’. Ask, Whose life are you alive with?’, and despite their unique individual contribution to the body, the true answer is the name of the person in whom they live. So all the cells in my body are alive, not with their own life but with mine. And my life is a composite of all the life in each of my cells. Every cell in me is in John Stevens and John Stevens is in every cell.

So, when we say we are ‘in Christ’ it means that we are (a) not living an independent life (b) our life is the life of Christ (c) we are living in a community with others (d) therefore we share and participate in the history of the person in whom we are ‘in’.

This explains why Paul can say ‘I was crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me, the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’ Gal 2v20

To Romans 12.

This morning the familiar words of Romans 12 were as they had always been, but it struck me with fresh force that this chapter is both autobiographical and entirely as a result of the transformation that occurred in and through Paul by being placed in Christ.

True doctrine cannot be separated from the person in whom the source of the doctrine has taken root i.e. Christ himself.

Listen to the drama in Paul’s words:

‘Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse’ v 14

I can only imagine the emotion Paul experienced as he felt compelled by the Spirit of Christ to write those words; apostolic words from the great persecutor of the church. And maybe, when the risen Jesus confronted Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus and said ‘you are kicking against the goads’ the goads that pierced Paul over and over again were the verbal or material blessings he received from those Christians he cruelly dragged off to prison or worse, were killed at his command.

‘If your enemy is hungry feed him, if he is thirsty give him a drink for in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head’ v 20

This was Paul’s experience in his pre-Christian days as the persecutor and his experience as a persecuted apostle of Christ, sharing in His sufferings.

‘Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good’ v 21

If one verse sums up Paul’s autobiography it is this.

To use the current vogue, Romans 12 is Paul’s ‘lived experience’ rather than a cobbled-together list of theoretical statements.

The point, though, of Romans 12 is that all believers, Jews or Gentiles, are in their own after-glow from the Big Bang of conversion to Christ, or, as the bible puts it, being placed ‘in Christ’.

To conclude, there is no autonomous self. It’s an illusion. We are either ‘in Adam’ and still hooked up to the liar in the long grass, saturated in an Enlightenment deception, and trying to achieve something that will wear us ragged, or, through the love of God in Christ, we can be reconnected with God, who places us in Christ, and begin to live His life, as characterised by Paul’s revolutionary statements in Romans 12.