How the Fall Makes You Feel

I've been reading David Brooks wonderful book The Social Animal recently and found interesting parallels between his explanation of early child development and life before the fall. I wondered as he described the minds of children if Jesus invitation to come to him like Children doesn't involve some absence of self and interdependence that we only find in children.

Children are so in need of intimacy they feel they don't exist unless  in relationship to another person. Not unlike the Trinity, they lose their identity outside of community.

Brooks quotes Colreidge's lines "Ere yet a conscious self exists, the love begins; and the first love is love of another. The Babe acknowledges a self in the Mother's form years before it can recognize a self in its own." Brooks goes on to say Coleridge described how his own child, then three years old, awoke during the night and called out to his mother. "Touch me, only touch me with your finger," the young boy pleaded. The child's mother was astonished. "Why?" she asked. "I'm not here," the boy cried. "Touch me, Mother, so I may be here."

Often when I consider the ramifications of the fall and how narrowly we define and reduce those complicated dynamics, how we reduce them to lust and greed and petty vices, I realize something much greater has happened. Essentially, we are all calling out for God to touch us that we may know we are here, and yet he waits, and we go untouched and seek out the knowing we exist in a thousand other ways.

Chesterton said sin nature is the only bit of Christian theology we can actually prove. I certainly think this longing we have for somebody to touch us, to let us know we are here, points to a few ideas:

1. That we are relational, that we have no identity outside relationships. This is why a sunset is more beautiful when it's shared.

2. That we are designed to be in relationship with each other, but that we are also to be in relationship with God. And we have a promise we will be at some point in the future.

3. That propositional theology reducing the relational dynamics of the gospel are hogwash. They are born out of a desire to control and understand rather than a desire to relate.

4. That God has all the agency with which to complete us, and we have none.

5. That our faith should not be lived or understood in independence.

Can you think of any other theological ramifications of our intensely relational design?

How the Fall Makes You Feel is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog