The Desire for Autonomy

In my video/article entitled “What motivated the Fall” I outlined the basic concepts of our desire for knowledge, perfection and autonomy. In this video I want to take a much deeper look at the issue of autonomy, independence and rebellion which is inherent in human nature. Understanding the root and desire to rebel is essential in how we present the gospel message. In this video we will examine the following questions:

1. What do we mean by a ‘sinful nature’?

2. Are we driven by biological animal instincts which contribute to our demand for autonomy?

3. Is the demand to rule ourselves a natural consequence of being made in God’s image?

4. What was the purpose of God in allowing human rebellion?

To our first question: What do we mean by a ‘sinful nature’? 

The doctrine of sin and all its implications is a quite complex topic and discussed in depth in chapter 10 of my Practical Systematic Theology textbook.

Although there are slight variations, the basic understandings of ‘sinful nature’ are as follows.

1. The Augustinian/Reformed view of total depravity in which we inherit the sin/guilt and God’s wrath from Adam and Eve, which has fundamentally destroyed the image of God in humanity. All children are conceived spiritually dead, and in Calvin’s words, are a ‘seed-bed of sin, odious and an abomination to God’. This view dictates that human beings are incapable of seeking or desiring God in any way without first being born again. A summary of this doctrine is here.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUjQp8UlrPc

2. That the sinful nature is the capacity and inclination to sin. We are not ‘born sinners’, but the inclination to sin is inherent in our natures and all but Jesus Christ have succumbed and become sinners from an early age. For many, this capacity and inclination was not present in Adam and Eve, but is a consequence of the fall.

3. The Early Church view, prior to Augustine, aligns with the second interpretation, but with the proviso that both the capacity and inclination were present in Adam and Eve in their desire to be like God which allowed them to be deceived by Satan and disobey. In other words, we have the same nature as Adam and Eve, but have inherited the consequences of Adam’s sin, mortality,  due to the Fall. 

The term ‘sinful nature’ is a translation of the Greek word ‘sarx’ which literally means ‘flesh’. However, sarx means much more than just a body (soma) but includes desires, emotions, ambitions, instincts etc. 

Those fundamentalists who insist that we are born depraved and sinners, often use the argument that children are selfish and self-centered from birth. In truth, they are making a western cultural rather than biblical claim. In Jewish culture children were ‘seen and not heard’. Parents were not viewed as domestic slaves to their kids and children were taught patience and discipline from birth.

In Western cultures, especially in families of just one or two children, by the time a child is 2 years old he/she thinks they are the center of the universe. Over the past 100 years there has been a great deal of research conducted regarding child and adolescent development. It is well documented that infants react to the emotions of parents, and can even be influenced by these emotions while in the womb. 

In Western cultures, once born, babies are bombarded with positive compliments, ‘she’s just perfect, a little miracle, she’s so beautiful, he has your eyes, and what a wonderful smile’. Everyone looks into the cradle with smiles, everyone has to hold the baby as if this was the first child born in 1000 years.

When the child is hungry, it cries. Immediately someone rushes to feed it…when it soils it’s diapers it cries and someone rushes to change it, and when it wants company in the middle of the night it cries and someone rushes to pick it up, or drive it around town. Once it’s in a high chair, in modern cultures, it gets to decide what food it will eat and spits the rest out or throws it on the floor. ‘oh, he doesn’t like that so we only give him what he likes’…he’ll grow out of it’. Most children have more toys than they can handle, and parents will give them whatever they demand just to keep them happy, quiet, and contented. Modern cultures instruct parents you must always be positive, never growl or sound angry, never use any form of physical discipline, and many children have never heard the word ‘no’ even by the age of 5. Yes, positive emotions are incredibly important, but so is discipline. Discipline will not prevent the child from becoming a slave to sin, but it will teach them how hopelessly enslaved to sin they are.

But let me be clear…I am not talking about beating babies and children here, or verbal abuse, but simple common sense. In some cultures a child spends most of the day in a back-pack on its mother’s back as she works in the field, but western cultures have created a generation of entitled spoiled people who think the 11th commandment is ‘thou shalt not offend anyone, especially me’.

To our second question: Are we driven by biological animal instincts which contribute to our demand for autonomy?

We also must recognize that children have an insatiable desire for knowledge. They want to experience everything they see, they want to imitate their parents. This is a natural process, not a sinful one. But there is also a desire for independence developing in the child which becomes more intense leading up to puberty and is multiplied tenfold when hormones are released. The disciplined child may respect the parent saying ‘no’ to being allowed to play with sharp objects, or turn the supermarket into a playground, however, the desire to rebel and be independent, at the risk of discipline, is a powerful thing.

When a person reaches puberty there are instinctual and biological factors which dominate a teen’s thinking. Human beings are sentient animals, the only sentient animals. From a purely biological perspective, like other animals, we reach a certain age and instinct dictates that we must prepare ourselves for procreation and parenthood, we must prove that we have passed from child to adult. 

There is a powerful compulsion to compete with our own gender which begins from around age 6-7 and goes into overdrive at puberty. Boys become obsessed with developing muscles, some become bullies, and we are constantly trying to impress the opposite sex and make ourselves attractive through competition as we exert ourselves. This scenario plays out every day in the animal kingdom as the young males compete for the right to mate. And girls are no different when it comes to competition, albeit perhaps less aggressive than boys. The biological instinct to attract a mate is a powerful force driven by hormones, a force which is extremely self-centered. 

Many cultures have a rite of passage in teen years as a boy becomes a man and a girl a woman. 

All teens have a powerful biological instinct for independence which very often puts them in conflict with their parents. Forbid your teenage daughter from wearing makeup or her choice of attire to a party or ball and you will come into direct conflict with her biological instincts. Competitive sports, beauty contests, gaming, clubs etc, often fill the role of helping both genders develop and express these competitive instincts. Again, none of this is a ‘sinful nature’, but simply ‘sarx’, the flesh, the fact that, although we are made in God’s image as sentient creatures, we are also like the rest of the animal kingdom in our biological instincts. 

3. Is the demand to rule ourselves a natural consequence of being made in God’s image?

The desire for autonomy and independence is a two-edged sword for it is not only a powerful biological instinct to prepare us to leave the nest, but is also tied to our being made in God’s image as sentient creatures. Human beings are the only creatures which recognize themselves as individual selfs, we are self-aware.   

God is an autonomous being, meaning, He answers only to Himself.  The word autonomy means to have control over oneself, to be free to make our own decisions, to be independent or self-ruling. This desire is inherent in our nature. Scripture asks the question ‘who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor’? (Romans 11:34). The answer is ‘no one’ because God is autonomous. As beings made in God’s image, we also reflect autonomy, but it is a limited autonomy by virtue of the fact that we are creatures, not uncreated as God is uncreated. No human can ever be totally independent from God for ‘he gives all men breath and life and everything else’, ‘for in him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17: 25-27). 

Yet even in Adam and Eve we witness a degree of freedom and an opportunity to exercise autonomy. Being given a choice to obey or disobey warrants at least a degree of independence in having the freedom to make that choice. The earliest church theologians such as Irenaeus considered Adam and Eve to be like infants. They had no concept of patience, self-control, or self-discipline, indeed they didn’t even have a knowledge of good and evil. 

Adam and Eve walked with the Lord in the Garden of Eden. They saw the pre-incarnate Christ, the one who is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15). We are made in God’s image, but unlike Christ we are not complete, we are just beginning. But the desire to be like God is a powerful thing, and Satan used this desire to tempt Adam and Eve to demand their autonomy telling them ‘you will be like God’.

Satan deceived them into thinking they could just reach out and become like God in an instant. Like children, their desire for knowledge exceeded their fear of disobedience, and like Satan, through their disobedience they were in essence stating, ‘I will make myself like God my way’.

The root of all sin is when the creature demands, ‘I will rule my own life’. When acted upon, this demand immediately puts a child in rebellion to parents, who are God’s representatives, and therefore, puts the child in rebellion to God, making the child a sinner.  One could argue that the fact that we have powerful biological instincts, coupled with our being made in God’s image, means that none can resist the temptation to demand independence and rebel.

The fact that ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ would testify to this. Only Jesus, who, as Philippians 2:6 states, ‘did not consider equality with God something to be grasped’, fully submitted to God the Father throughout His entire human life. Satan tried desperately hard to tempt Jesus to act independently of the Father, especially in the Garden of Gethsemane. What Satan achieved in one garden, Eden, he failed to do in the other, Gethsemane.

Was God unjust to create us this way? Not at all, indeed it was essential. World history testifies to the evil and suffering that human beings have inflicted on one another in our demand to rule our own lives, and rule over each other. Self-rule is the heart of lawlessness, the heart of the human ego, the foundation which demands to set its own standards of morality, justice or right and wrong. The Lord created us to be like Him, but first we had to see what kind of a world we would create when demanding our independence of Him. How could we ever make ourselves like God when we cannot even control our own flesh with all of its desires and emotions??

Scripture says that ‘there is a way that seems right to a man, but the end thereof is death’. To be born again, we must surrender our autonomy to God’s autonomy and submit to His plan for our lives, to be made like Him, His way in His time. This is why Jesus said we must ‘deny self, take up our cross and follow Him’. A person can only come to this decision through seeing their sin as God sees it, by the conviction of the Holy Spirit. When we see our rebellious hearts compared to the sacrifice and love of Christ, there is a self-loathing, a desire to be set free from the slavery to sin we have willfully submitted to.

The criteria to be born again, regenerated, is in surrender, in humbly saying, ‘not my will but yours be done’. At the moment we repent of our rebellion and surrender to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, we are filled with the divine nature and begin the process of being made like Christ His way. That old self is crucified with Christ (Romans 6:6) and we are new creations.

In Summary

Having a right understanding of what we mean by a sinful nature is essential in how we present the gospel. If we do not recognize that the demand to rule ourselves independent of God is the primary root of sin, we will not teach that this demand must be surrendered and destroyed through submission to the will of God. Human beings are called to make a choice…our way or God’s way?

Those who teach total depravity end up with a monergistic counterfeit of Christianity where humans play no role in salvation, and even claim that God ordered the sin of Adam and Eve.

This doctrine is utterly contrary to Scripture as summarized in my video ‘Monergistic Calvinism: Christian or Cult’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTj8tBzR4ao

Those such as free-grace adherents, who deny repentance and self denial as requirements for regeneration, end up with claiming, that, and I quote, ‘a person can ‘just believe, live any old way they like, and still go to heaven’. This form of counterfeit Christianity never deals with the very heart of sin, the root of sin to rule our own life. It also denies that those who live according to the acts of the flesh will not inherit the kingdom of heaven, as Galatians 5:19-21 states.

Salvation is not just a ‘change of mind’ as these people claim, but a ‘change of ownership’. We must ‘belong to Christ (Romans 8) and be ‘God’s own possession’(Ephesians 1:14). If we still belong to ourselves, we do not belong to Christ, we cannot have two masters. In the Galatians passage (v24) Paul states that ‘those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires’. Paul was never stating that Christians will never be tempted or fall on occasions, but rather, that we now have power over sin, that it is not our master as he outlined in Romans 6.

The apostle John explains this in detail in his first letter, chapter 3:4-10, where he states three times that those who are born again cannot continue in sin. The sin he refers to is ‘lawlessness’, rebellion against God, the sin principle which has been destroyed in us if we are born again. These verses are explained in detail in my video entitled ‘Cannot continue in Sin’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKi-w6Nl9Ns&t=1s

We human beings are complex creatures. Being made in God’s image we have an insatiable desire for knowledge, perfection and autonomy. We are aware of ourselves as individual selfs from an early age and we soon become self-centered. At puberty, our hormones kick in and our self-centeredness is amplified as our biological instincts drive us to compete and be independent. 

Our self-rule stands in opposition to God as we demand to make our own standards of morality, justice etc, and as we live in slavery to our flesh with all its passions and appetites. Many religions practice forms of self-discipline, forms of asceticism, but only the very strong-willed have any success in suppressing the flesh, and often, such people fall prey to self-centered pride, like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day.

The Lord promises that if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. Only the indwelling divine nature can give us the power to live as Christ lived, and His gift is only available to those who come humbly before the King of Kings, repenting of their rebellion, owning their slavery to sin, calling on His mercy and surrendering their will to His will. He and only He has made this great salvation available through offering Himself for the sin we committed, destroying the power and consequences of sin in His death and resurrection.

Steve Copland