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Home/Biblical and Theological/Ingrown Autonomy

Ingrown Autonomy

“My, Myself, and I”

Written by Ben Zornes | Sunday, August 6, 2023

Our sinful attitude throughout history has been to think that God is disposable, ignorable, or irrelevant. Yet the Scriptures and nature itself compels us to come face to face with the awesome truth that He is God the creator of heaven & earth, of all things visible & invisible. This demands our worship. This demands our praise. This demands our faith & obedience.

 

The affliction of modern man is what should be ridiculed as “ingrown autonomy”. Man views himself as totally independent. He is authorized by whatever impulse stimulates him at the moment to act accordingly. It is his subjective truth that dictates his moral framework, and his moral framework is guided by that great humanist trinity: “my, myself, and I.”

In contrast, the early Christian creeds begin with a statement which offends man’s self-centeredness by confessing that God the Father is the maker of heaven and earth. As one writer notes, “the creed is simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive. This means that if God is the creator and we are His creatures we owe Him all the honor, obedience, and most importantly worship that is due to Him as the Almighty Creator.”

When Christians recite the creeds, it isn’t a robotic recitation of syllogisms. Rather, our confession of faith in who God is as revealed by scripture, obliges us at the outset to bend our knee to worship. As the 95th Psalm reminds us, “It is He who made us, and not we ourselves.”

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