From my favorite new blog, Reboot Christianity, a quick quote from the first chapter of Calvin’s Insitutes:
“Without knowledge of self, there is no knowledge of God. Our wisdom, insofar as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.”
p.s. I highly, highly recommend their series on Cognitive Biases in Christians.
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6 responses to “John Calvin on Self-Knowledge”
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Oh my gosh. Reboot Christianity is rocking my world! Thanks for the tip.
Margaret, thank you. Glad to have you as a reader. I am honored to get a mention on Mockingbird…these guys are my idols as bloggers! I can't ever remember a day that their blog wasn't great. I hope I can keep things even close to that interesting.
rebootchristianity.blogspot.com
Michael, your blog is terrific, too! Just discovered it here, and couldn't stop reading. Posted a link on my Facebook page, and got a lot of positive feedback. Keep the good stuff coming! (And yes, Mockingbird is always phenomenal… )
The problem with "self-knowledge" is that we are such great and inveterate liars. Much better to listen to the Word of God and to be told the truth about ourselves and God. That is, when we look to ourselves to "know" ourselves, our capacity for self-deception knows no bounds. But, when we look to the Word, both knowledge of self and knowledge of God are given to us.
Of course knowing that the self is an inveterate liar is an important part of self-knowledge. 🙂 In Ecclesiastes we are warned not to be overly righteous and not to be overly wise while being told that no one is righteous and without sin and that some good die before their time. It is good to hold on to one and not let go of the other for the godly person will avoid all extremes. While I have been told in the past the "overly righteous" means not being overly righteous that the Preacher says no one IS righteous makes that interpretation unlikely. It seems more likely, given the Preacher's propensity to weigh one proverb against another to find both wanting in the wake of human sin, that we are being warned to recognize that we are not either as good or as evil as we frequently tell ourselves we are.