Introduction to Autonomy (Forthcoming Book!)
Here's a sample chapter from my next book, which focuses on autonomy and our need to ask for help.
As I’m working on my next nonfiction book, I thought I’d share the first chapter with you, in an adapted form. The working title for the book is Autonomy: A Little Book about the Greatest Problem in the Universe. Let me know what you think!
Lake Seneca, NY, June 2024
The story of brokenness is a story of bending.
It’s a tale about loving and leaning.
Though at the beginning, all seems to be ending,
There’s a question that leads to the meaning.
If the great God of glory bent down towards the earth and pressed the edge of his thumb into the rolling hills of New York state, you would get Lake Seneca. He was gentle and left ample room for checkered farms on the eastern side, and vineyards ripening round the edges. But his thumbprint went seven hundred feet deep, too. God always marks his world in length, breadth, and depth.
The lake is a thirty-seven-mile testament to the power, beauty, and grace of a God so prodigal that he fills the air with as many sounds as he does the landscape with breathing colors. From where I sit, house wrens, cardinals, nuthatches, and a verbose indigo bunting sing over the steady hiss of a waterfall hidden behind the foliage. The leaves are rubbing out a silken symphony in the breeze. Bees add a soft vibration, beating their wings 230 times per second as they hover over clover flowers. Sounds fill the atmosphere.
And the colors—they breathe. Each object takes in the full spectrum of light and sends back what wavelengths it won’t allow in. As the poet John O’Donohue wrote,
Different colours arise when certain wavelengths are filtered from the spectrum. Colour is always the result of a subtraction from whiteness and not the singular, lonely choice of outer garment by an object. . . . It is the light rays which the object resists and will not let in that return and reach our eyes. The very thereness of a flower or a stone is an act of resistance to light, and colour is the fruit of this resistance.[1]
The maple leaves send back their summer-steady green. Behind me, the shale blue of the house siding sends back a color between dusk and midnight. The white trim and columns on the front porch are already rich. They send the whole spectrum of light back with blinding enthusiasm.
So many sounds and so many breathing colors at Lake Seneca on this June morning. Such is a small part of the ever-pulsing prodigality of the intensely personal, ever-present, and invisible God. This is the God who holds all things together in a wondrous web, the God from whom, through whom, and to whom are all things (Rom. 11:36). All things at this very moment are leaning on him. That is why they are so beautiful. That is why we are who we are. We are leaning on God.
Now, why talk about a lake in relation to a theologically stuffy word like autonomy? Well, because autonomy opposes the world I’ve just described. And it can be helpful to define things by staring at their opposites. In opposition to the beautiful and breathing network of life, sound, and color from Lake Seneca, autonomy is feigned isolation. It is the fiction (for humanity, not for God) of self-governance, self-rule, self-law. That’s where the word comes from: autos (self) and nomos (law). Autonomy is the futile fondness of individual governance at the expense of God-given dependence.
We could get at this differently if we follow something that Saint Augustine wrote in City of God (XI). He used an expression, popularized by Martin Luther, to refer to the sinful nature of humanity: incurvatus in se, curving in on yourself. This seems to reflect the spirit of autonomy. Autonomy, or self-governance, is about turning in towards ourselves. That also means its about turning away from what’s around us and beyond us so that we become blind to every kingdom outside our alleged manipulation. And after that blindness comes reductionism, the chase for control, mastery, and—in the end—self-immolating idolatry: the worship of something that only has the power to destroy us. I realize that sounds dramatic, but I promise it’s not. We just practice autonomy so often that we’ve become numb to its effects. And that’s a terrible thing, since one apologist claimed, “The key problem in all of life is autonomy.”[2]
Autonomy has no appreciation for Lake Seneca—with its wild power and intimate connectedness. Staring off the porch at the giant thumbprint of a prodigal God on New York’s landscape, I see how ridiculous autonomy is, and also how destructive it continues to be in our society. How could anyone in God’s world even dream of being self-governing and perfectly independent? And do we really want to be?
Kenneth L. Pike, my favorite linguist, wrote that autonomy isn’t something to be proud of. Autonomy is a kind of death. It means being cut off from everything that upholds and sustains our spiritual and physical existence. He linked autonomy to the popular notion of “independence,” and our desire to boast and trust in ourselves.
When a person boasts of himself, trusts in himself and turns away from trusting in God, he closes the gates to adequate sustenance and health from God. In other words, boasting leads to independence, and independence is the great sin because it leads to ruin. In the garden of Eden (Genesis 3:5) the serpent said to the woman, “You will be like God”—that is, independent. Why should a person not want to be independent? Because if a person succeeds in becoming independent, he dies. If the environment is removed, if the air is removed, if the water is removed, he cannot live. He has no sustenance within himself to last more than a fraction of a minute.[3]
Put more starkly in Pike’s words, “Isolation is the road to hell.”[4] That’s really what this book is about: it’s about the road to hell; it’s about autonomy. But it’s also the story and study of how salvation lies in relationships, how sanctity sits in communion, how our leaning is the best part of our living.
Fracture Mechanics
Let me return to that image of bending, of curving in on ourselves, to plot three points on our existential roadmap: where we’ve come from, where we are, and where—in God’s grace—we’re headed.
Imagine a glass vase. It seems void of diversity until you look closer. Upon inspection, there are many pieces bound in relationship. Soda ash, lime, and sand were put into a molten state. And each of those elements can be further broken down: sodium, carbon, oxygen, calcium, hydrogen, and other rocky minerals. All of these things linked arms in the heat, and have become one from many. We only see the smooth, unifying surface of the glass, but the diversity is there.
Now imagine if all the molecules in that vase started bending, curving in on themselves, practicing Augustine’s incurvatus in se. Plains of weakness and tension would emerge. Then stress fracturing would propagate throughout the vase. In a second, we would have a pile of splintered shards. If the vase were ever to be whole again, it would have to be reheated, remade.
That’s a poetic answer to the questions of where we’ve come from and where we are—the first two points. In the Bible, the story of Genesis 1–3 is a story of brokenness through bending. Like the vase, creation was wonderfully diverse but perfectly unified. Eggplants, stardust, light waves, ants. “All things counter, original, spare, strange,” as Hopkins put it, coming together to create a unified, God-honoring, worshipful environment.
But then came the bending and breaking. At the prodding of a serpent, the first humans looked away from God and began staring at themselves. Perhaps God had been withholding in telling them they could not eat from the forbidden tree. Perhaps they could be gods. Perhaps God was . . . unnecessary. They turned their chins down. They stared at themselves. They bent inward with feigned independence. And the bending led to breaking. Fractures mapped the vase of God’s good creation. “Brokenness” now describes the three realms of our relationships: humans with God, humans with each other, and humans with the earth. Creation, the once holy and unified work of living art, fell to pieces all because distrust led to a crippling couplet humanity has been singing ever since:
I’m fine on my own—no divine assistance.
Heart set like a stone, hardened in resistance.
Things could have ended that day (Gen. 2:16–17), had it not been for a candle of hope that came by speech. And that is the answer to where we’re going by God’s grace: our third point. Most theologians say this candle of hope appeared in Genesis 3:15, but I’m convinced it starts in Genesis 3:9. God asks a question—a question he already knows the answer to and a question that encapsulates their situation and ours: Where are you? This is a question of location in more ways than one. It orients Adam and Eve not only to space but to relationship. They are no longer in communion with the living God. That is not where they are. Shame and guilt lie between God and man. At the same time, fear and embarrassment have settled between husband and wife. They are at enmity with each other, with warring wills. That is where they are. And something had to die in creation in order to clothe them, as they tried to farm a cursed soil. Their relationship with creation and the ground is fraught with difficulty and danger. That is where they are. Now, perhaps you can better understand the poem I opened with:
The story of brokenness is a story of bending.
It’s a tale about loving and leaning.
Though at the beginning, all seems to be ending,
There’s a question that leads to the meaning.
This is a book about that problem, the greatest problem in the universe: autonomy. The theologian John Frame wrote, “The spirit of autonomy underlies every sinful decision of every human being.”[5] And Richard B. Gaffin Jr. said, “human wholeness cannot be recaptured unless every vestige of autonomy is abandoned in submission to the Triune God of the Bible.”[6] Those are big claims. But autonomy is a big problem. Everything corrosive stems from it. All evil, decay, corruption, and loss have threads tied to it. Autonomy is a spiritual cancer that penetrates us and the world so deeply that we have learned to live with it rather than against it. We are a species settled into the illusion of self-sufficiency and independence—skipping down the road to hell, as Kenneth Pike would have it. And our souls are shrinking because of it.
But that doesn’t mean we’re hopeless. Far from it. In fact, Christians alone have the glorious response to the world’s biggest problem. Though we are staggering and sick from the ancient cancer of autonomy, we have a warrior-healer, a glass mender, a re-creator. And his name is Jesus Christ. He is God’s answer to the ultimate problem we face. And that’s precisely because he undoes the very thing our autonomy set in motion: he restores our relationship of beautiful dependence on God, on each other, and on the world. He is the true candle of hope from Genesis 3:9, the living Word the Father spoke (John 1:1) in seeking us out with a question: Where are you?
The blueprint of what follows is simple. There are three sections. First, there’s the anatomy of autonomy—what it looks like and how it works. Second, there’s God’s response to it in Christ. Third, there’s our task of relying on God’s Spirit to apply God’s response in our daily life.
The anatomy of autonomy moves along a path I’ll develop through a discussion of key biblical texts (Gen. 3; Gen. 12; Num. 20; and 1 Sam. 11), showcasing our blindness, reductionism, control, false mastery, and idolatry. After looking at this anatomy, we’ll examine God’s response to it in Christ. And then we’ll apply that response to the main centers of human activity: thoughts, words, and actions.
In the end, I hope to make one thing crystal clear: every human being was made to lean. You’ll soon discover more about what that means. For now, brace yourself. We’re about to dissect the most dangerous phenomenon in the universe.
Prayer
God of grace and glory,
|Autonomy plagues us.
We are so quick to turn
And stare inward,
Rather than look up
To your faithful shepherding.
As we bend, we break.
Help us to notice this in ourselves.
Help us to look up instead of in.
Remind us of the great gospel:
That you have come down
To turn up our chins.
Reflection Questions
How have you heard the word “autonomy” used in your own life? Is autonomy looked at as a good thing our modern Western context?
Kenneth Pike said, “Isolation is the road to hell.” Do you think he’s being too strong there? Why or why not?
What biblical passages seem to speak against this notion of autonomy?
What is one area in your life where you’re tempted to act autonomously, as if you could govern yourself?
[1] John O’Donohue, Beauty: Rediscovering the True Sources of Compassion, Serenity, and Hope (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 87.
[2] This claim was made by Greg Bahnsen on a course he taught regarding autonomy.
[3] Kenneth L. Pike, With Heart and Mind: A Personal Synthesis of Scholarship and Devotion (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1962), 73.
[4] Pike, With Heart and Mind, 75.
[5] John M. Frame, Doctrine of the Word of God, A Theology of Lordship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2010), 15.
[6] Richard B. Gaffin Jr., Word & Spirit: Selected Writings in Biblical and Systematic Theology, ed. David B. Garner and Guy Prentiss Waters (Glenside, PA: Westminster Seminary Press, 2023), 491.
Wow!!! Looking forward to this book! Praise God!