Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
“Though the command to hate oneself in order to follow Christ can be grossly misinterpreted, it makes perfect sense if it is understood as a relinquishment of the biopsychosocial and ethical self who lives autonomously in relation to God”.
-Eric L. Johnson
Through the centuries many pathologically masochistic believers have taken the “die to self” counsel of scripture apart from its true meaning and used it as justification for all kinds of destructive practices. While one might only think of ancient desert hermits and monks scourging and starving themselves as they walk around wearing hair shirts the truth is that many contemporary Christians are still caught up in harmfully inaccurate thinking about what the word “self” means here.
The problem is not with the self per se. Self-consciousness is a gift from our Lord and is integral to being made in His image. As believers we are not to hate ourselves in our totality. Rather we are only to hate the rebellious capital “I” self that continues to dwell in our hearts and resists the One who created and redeemed us. It is this part of our make-up, perhaps most biblically described as “the flesh”, which still tempts us towards functional independence from God. It is this part that we must not only oppose, but actually put to death.
While at one time the flesh controlled us we who are called by the name of Christ are not defined by that flesh anymore. Our deepest, truest heart now belongs to Him. We are “new creatures”, sons and daughters of the Father, and we are certainly not to despise our new self because that self is identified with Him. In a sense to hate ourselves now is to hate the God we have become one with through the cross.
Today many conservative Christians fear the word “self-esteem”, a term that has become the mantra of secular pop psychology. To the degree that the expression has come to mean a sort of self-worship among those who continue to reject God’s sovereignty over their lives this fear is not without some justification. However a sense of self-worth is not out of place in a child of God if that worth is grounded in the imputed worthiness of the Son of God. In fact we are specifically told to “love others as we love ourselves”. If we are simultaneously called to, in some sense, love ourselves and hate ourselves in Scripture then obviously the definition of “self” is different in each case. In the former the definition is our self in Christ, in the latter the self of our past, the “flesh-self” that rejected God’s rightful claim on our lives.
We are not commanded by the Bible to pathologically despise ourselves and do ourselves harm. Instead we are commanded to hate and crucify the dying residue of what we once were, that “old man” who was not instantly wiped out experientially by our conversion to Christ. In the eternal sense we have already been made perfect in God’s sight, but in the temporal sense we still need to progressively root out the remnants of our former rebellious autonomy. This is what it means to “put to death” the flesh and progressively submit every part of our being to the One who has redeemed us. We are to only hate that within us which resists Him.