As the father of a teenager about to head off for her freshman year of college, I can scarcely think of worse counsel I might give than, “whatever you do, just be yourself.” My daughter is a lovely and gracious person who has never given her parents any serious trouble and about whom I could scarcely be more proud or love more dearly. But she is a human being like I am. And I know that it would not be a pretty sight if my default position in every situation were to be “true” to myself. It is God’s image to which I should seek to conform, not my own.

 

So the advice I will likely give my daughter as we leave her behind at her freshman dormitory in a few weeks will be something like this: “Be the young woman we tried to raise you to be?”  Or better still, “be the person Christ has created you to be?” 

 

I have spent much time in the last few years trying to learn more about how foundational assumptions in the western mind have evolved over the past five centuries or so.  What factors led us from viewing the world through “theo-centric” lenses (a world that God made and reigns over) to “geo-centric” lenses (a world in which the laws of science are sovereign) to more recently an “anthropocentric” worldview, i.e. looking at the world through the lens of the autonomous self? 

 

My hope for the occasional entries I offer on this website is to deepen exploration of such questions in order to enhance Christian engagement with and witness to the world in which we find ourselves today, a cultural milieu very different from William Shakespeare but one whose philosophical antecedents are present in his own.

 

Fortunately, I am hardly the only Christian attempting to make sense of the fundamental philosophical assumptions that undergird much contemporary western culture. I was reminded of Polonius’s bad advice in a recent article on this very subject by Houston Baptist University English Professor, Louis Markos. His essay entitled “Polonius’s Lie” is found in the always-thoughtfully provocative magazine, Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity (http://www.touchstonemag.com/). 

 

Markos writes:

 

How shall we know that true self? Not by indulging the sinful nature, but by resisting it, by denying it, by laying it at the foot of the Cross. Michelangelo was wont to say that his job as a sculptor was to release the true image hidden within the marble. The Holy Spirit, too, is a sculptor, and if we let him, he will carve away at our sinful nature until the true self is revealed.

 

Many of us have come increasingly to define ourselves by our phobias, our brokenness, our perversions, our sins. We have lost the language of teleology, of purpose. Instead of asking what our true and final end is (“to glorify God and enjoy him forever,” as one of the great catechisms defines it), we are concerned only with what we are now, in this present moment. And so we allow ourselves to be guided by the impulses and desires that we felt five seconds ago, rather than looking ahead to the purpose for which we were fashioned.

 

I encourage you to read the entirety of Markos’s excellent piece here: