International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 1 Number 1 March 1999

Theology and the Fragmentation of the Self

LINDA WOODHEAD*

Abstract: Modern Christian anthropology frequently adopts from socio-cultural

theory the thesis that modern selfhood is fragmented. This fragmentation
thesis should be placed within a framework which sees modernity not as
homogeneous but as stranded. Four conflicting construals of modern selfhood
can be discerned: the bestowed self, the rational self, the boundless self and the
effective self. In promoting versions of the bestowed self through communitarian and Trinitarian ideas, contemporary theological anthropology often
fails to meet the challenges posed by other construals of selfhood, or to take
seriously lessons learnt from contemporary forms of Christianity like the
evangelicalcharismatic upsurge.

Are our modern selves fragile and fragmented? In what follows, I consider the
common claim that they are. Whilst I do not wholly repudiate this claim, I suggest
that it becomes more substantial and more plausible when placed within a
framework which views modernity not as a single, homogeneous entity, but as an
internally diverse interweaving of various cultural strands. By considering the
nature of these strands, I identify four influential forms of modern selfhood: the
bestowed self, the rational self, the boundless self and the effective self. I explore
these renderings of selfhood and some of the more common conflicts between
them, and suggest that it is in terms of such conflict that the fragmentation thesis
makes most sense.
In the course of this exploration of the strands of modern selfhood I show how
closely Christianity is implicated in all of them, and draw out the implications of
this analysis for contemporary attempts to forge Christian anthropologies. I reflect
in particular upon the communitarian, Trinitarian, relational understanding of
selfhood which seems to dominate much recent theology, and suggest ways in
which it may fail to meet the challenges posed by conflicting contemporary construals of selfhood. I also consider briefly the possibility that Christian anthropology may have something to learn from the success of certain contemporary
forms of Christianity, not least the evangelical-charismatic upsurge.

* Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YG, UK.

Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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The fragmentation thesis

The question of how human identity is constituted in modern societies has long
been of central concern to sociologists. One of the most influential theses to arise
from consideration of this question postulates the fragmentation of identity in
modernity. According to the fragmentation thesis, many of the most central and
characteristic processes of modernity lead directly to the decentring and
destabilization of human identity. It is claimed that whereas in traditional and
premodern societies the self was firmly embedded in wider, stable systems of
meaning and social organization, modern societies have witnessed the breakdown
of such order and stability and the concomitant collapse of stable identities.
This is to put the fragmentation thesis at its most abstract. In practice, different
theorists work out the thesis in more concrete ways, developing different versions
in the process. To take one of the more influential examples, the British sociologist
Anthony Giddens characterizes modernity in terms of a number of inter-related
processes including:
1.
2.
3.

4.

the speed and extent of change in the modern world

detraditionalization and the loss of a sense of the authority of the past
reflexivity, the process whereby social processes are constantly examined and
reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus
constitutively altering their character1
globalizing processes that lift out social relations from local contexts and
restructure them across indefinite spans of spacetime.2

Giddens argues that the effect of these macro-processes is felt even at the level of
the personal and intimate. Their impact on self-identity is immense, and all serve to
fragment, destabilize and disrupt that identity in a process which Giddens
portrays as simultaneously emancipatory and fraught with danger.3
Giddens statement of the fragmentation thesis, and of its relation to wider
structural change, carries echoes of Marxs much earlier depiction of the same
phenomenon. In The Communist Manifesto, for example, Marx spoke of modernity
in terms of
[the] constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of
relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation... All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed
ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air...4

1 A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 37f.
2 A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, p. 21.
3 See A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity and Modernity and Self-Identity
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
4 Cited in S. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew, eds, Modernity and Its Futures (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1992), p. 277.
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Yet Giddens sees that the fragmentation thesis has gained further force since Marx
as a result of wide cultural developments, not all of which need to be related back to
macro-economic transformation. Those who identify themselves as sociologists of
the postmodern have been particularly active in detailing these developments and in
suggesting their constitutive importance for the decentring of the subject. Different
theorists point to different cultural developments as key to this process. So
Baudrillard, for example, singles out the new electronic media of communication as
most influential in the disruption and falsification of the self and social relations;
Lacan shows how psychoanalysis reveals the self to be a problematic on-going
project rather than a stable given; Foucault presents the modern subject as the
product of different forms of disciplinary power; and those influenced by linguistic
theory since Saussure picture the self as the inhabitant of unstable worlds of
meaning and identity never fully amenable to control and closure.
Despite debate and disagreement about the processes by which the modern and
postmodern self has become fragmented, there is thus widespread agreement that
such fragmentation has indeed taken place, and that the modern self stands in
significant discontinuity with the stable identities that are thought to characterize
the inhabitants of premodern societies. The transition from pre- to postmodernity is
seen to be accompanied inevitably by the transition from stable to increasingly
fragmented identity.5 And yet, despite the extent of the agreement that surrounds
the fragmentation thesis, and despite the thesis undeniable explanatory power in a
number of areas, it still seems vulnerable on several fronts.
First, it is far from clear that the assumption that modern selves and identities
are in a state of chronic disruption is anything other than an assumption; a good
case can be made for saying that the burden of proof in this matter still lies with the
fragmentation thesis. Until the notion of identity and the mechanisms by which it is
formed are more clearly understood, the gathering of evidence in this matter is
bound to be difficult, yet in practice the fragmentation thesis seems often to rely on
anecdotal and autobiographical evidence, conclusions derived from developments
in high culture (especially French philosophy), and contestable readings of popular
culture. Counter evidence, which suggests that strong and stable identities are still
alive and well in the modern world, must also be taken into account. The
resurgence and resistance of religious, ethnic and national identities must count as a
major part of this evidence even though the fragmentation thesis can explain such
unexpected phenomena in terms of a reaction to fragmentation, this is an argument
that very easily becomes circular. Other counter evidence includes, for example,
5 S. Hall, The Question of Cultural Identity in S. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew, eds,
Modernity and Its Futures (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 273316, presents a
good summary of sociological theories of identity which makes the extent of the
agreement in this area very clear. The three-fold typology offered by Hall of 1) the
Enlightenment subject, 2) the sociological subject and 3) the postmodern subject is very
revealing of the way in which the fragmentation thesis is most often formulated, and of
the way in which it understands the passage from stable/premodern to fragmented/
postmodern identity.
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the persistence and continuing influence of stable Enlightenment discourses of

humanity, human rights and human values,6 and readings of popular culture which
show how, against the readings of postmodern theorists, clear identity types
continue to be recognized and reinforced in many areas.7
Furthermore, the fragmentation thesis foundational belief that there was a
premodern era in which selves and identities were (even relatively) stable and
uncontested seems highly dubious. There is a revealing disagreement between
theorists about when and where this golden (or benighted) age existed. Some tend
to identify it with the Enlightenment and its presumed belief in rational, substantial
selves (most notably the Cartesian self). Others identify it with so-called
traditional societies, which are pictured as undifferentiated and deeply religious,
their religion consisting of a set of ancient beliefs, practices and institutions that
were unified, consistent and unchanging, which regulated every aspect of life,
which were accepted unquestioningly as the edicts of higher power, and which had
sovereign authority over the obedient and heteronomous individual. As Zygmunt
Bauman puts it
In the traditional way of life... the totality of ways and means, in all its
aspects, was lived as if validated by powers no human will or whim could
challenge; life as a whole was a product of Divine creation, monitored by
Divine providence. Free will, if it existed at all, could mean only... freedom to
choose wrong over right... to depart from the way of the world as God ordained
it; and anything that visibly deflected from custom was seen as such a breach.
Being in the right, on the other hand, was not a matter of choice: it meant, on
the contrary, avoiding choice following the customary way of life. All this
changed, however, with the gradual loosening of the grip of tradition.8
Bauman mentions traditional Christianity as an example of the sort of society he is
speaking of yet it is extremely hard to tally his remarks with any known period of
Christian history. If such traditional societies full of stable selves really existed, it
seems strange that so few historians and anthropologists have yet stumbled upon
them. One is left with a strong suspicion that such societies exist in the
ideologically conditioned imaginings of sociologists rather than in historical reality.
This objection is tied to a wider one. The fragmentation thesis seems weakened
by its dependence upon what David Martin (speaking in relation to the secularization thesis) calls a unilinear view of history.9 On this view, history moves
6 P. Heelas, On Things Not Being Worse and the Ethic of Humanity in P. Heelas, S.
Lash and P. Morris, eds, Detraditionalization. Critical Reflections on Authority and
Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 20022.
7 See, for example, D. Kellner, Popular Culture and the Construction of Postmodern
Identities in S. Lash and J. Friedman, eds, Modernity and Identity (Oxford: Blackwell,
1992), pp. 14177.
8 Z. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 4
9 D. Martin, Forbidden Revolutions. Pentecostalism in Latin America, Catholicism in
Eastern Europe (London: SPCK, 1996), p. 17.
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forward through a set of identifiable stages, all societies inevitably pass through
these stages, and the different social processes within each stage are ultimately
convergent. Most commonly, the unilinear view divides history into three stages:
the premodern (or traditional), the modern, and the postmodern, with each stage
viewed as a cultural whole at least to the extent that generalizations about identity
are thought to hold good for each period in toto.
It is scepticism about this unilinear view together with the foregoing
criticisms of the fragmentation thesis which suggest that it may be helpful to
retain some of its insights whilst recasting it in a way which is more sceptical of
catch-all periodizations, and which, even if it accepts the usefulness of the category
of the modern, can take account of its cultural diversity, and of its continuities as
well as discontinuities with the past.

Recasting the fragmentation thesis

How might it be possible to preserve the insights contained in the fragmentation
thesis, whilst avoiding its tendency to generalize about modernity and the crises of
identity to which it gives rise? One way in which this may be done is by recasting
the fragmentation thesis in terms of a more nuanced understanding of modernity, an
understanding which recognizes that modernity is not one thing and attempts to
make sense of its diversity through a schematization of its main cultural
trajectories, currents or strands. By its nature, any such schematization is bound
to be somewhat arbitrary, provisional and inadequate to the complex reality of
modernity. Yet, as I hope to show, the attempt to strand modernity may
nevertheless provide us with an extremely useful tool of understanding, and may
illuminate sociological generalizations like those about fragmentation in new and
helpful ways.
One of the most impressive and helpful schematizations of modernity arose out
of close empirical research into post-1960s American moral and cultural attitudes.
Steven Tiptons Getting Saved from the Sixties (1982) gave an early presentation of
this schematization, though Tipton himself was drawing upon earlier work by
Bellah, as well as upon typologies of moral philosophy and theology.10 In 1985 this
schematization was again used in Bellah and Tipton et al.s Habits of the Heart,
once more revealing its power to account for the patterns of values and attitudes
revealed by the books empirical research. In 1989 the scheme was recast by
Charles Taylor in his Sources of the Self, this time in the course of a narration of the
main philosophical and religious sources of the modern self rather than an
10 One of the main influences upon Tiptons formulation of this schematization was a ThD
thesis by Ralph Potter, which categorized different Christian responses to the nuclear
dilemma: see S. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties (London: University of
California Press, 1982), p. 309, n. 2. See also R.N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart.
Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985).
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empirical survey.11 And most recently, Paul Heelas study of The New Age
Movement has shown once again the power of this schematization (of which he
gives a particularly clear synthetic rendering) to illuminate and explain one of the
more intriguing cultural and religious developments of late modernity.12
The schematization of modernity as it appears in Tipton divides modern
culture and its styles of ethical evaluation into four main strands: authoritative,
regular, consequential and expressive.13 As Tipton explains this scheme, the
authoritative is oriented toward an authoritative source of morality and truth a
God, sacred scripture, or authoritative leader, who is known by faith. The regular
locates the good in rules or principles known by reason. The consequential is
oriented toward principles which are tested by costbenefit analysis; though it is
concerned with maximizing benefit, the nature of this benefit is left open to the
actor to decide. Finally, the expressive takes its authority from within, from
personal feelings and intuitions. Its goal is appropriate, sincere and honest selfexpression.
Clearly this scheme operates at a high level of generality. Neither Tipton nor the
other scholars who make use of it would wish to claim that it offered anything more
than a framework within which to organize and understand a vast array of diverse and
often highly subtle cultural positions. Taylors Sources of the Self, for example, is
effective in showing the ways in which each strand is represented and developed by a
variety of philosophical and theological writers. Each strand maps a cluster of
positions which are diverse and yet which, despite their differences, have enough in
common to be classified within the same broad trajectory.
The attempt to come to a fuller and more nuanced understanding of modern
culture by identifying its main strands has an immediate relevance for the
fragmentation thesis. As Taylor shows particularly clearly, each of the strands of
modern culture embeds a particular form of identity. And the simple fact that
modernity offers a number of different cultural possibilities for the self is enough to
explain why identity confusion and fragmentation occur. To that extent plural
theories of identity may be used to recast the fragmentation thesis. Extrapolating
from such theories, fragmentation may be viewed not so much as the result of
certain universal and unilinear modern processes, but as born from the confusion
generated by the plural modes of selfhood available to modern men and women.
11

12

13

In his own words, Taylor presents a map which distributes the moral sources [of
modernity] into three large domains: the original theistic grounding... a second one that
centres on a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms;
and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism or in one
of the modernist successor visions. See C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of
Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 495.
P. Heelas, The New Age Movement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). It is through my
acquaintance with this book, and through conversation and collaboration with Paul
Heelas, that I have come to understand the nature and the power of this particular
schematization of modernity. In this and in many other ways this paper is greatly
indebted to him.
See Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties, pp. 2826.
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Four strands of modern identity

Bellah, Taylor and other commentators build upon the original stranding model
proposed by Tipton in various ways. Continuing this enterprise, I shall in turn offer
an interpretation of this scheme, and an attempt to spell out its implications for an
understanding of identity in the modern world.

Authoritative strand: the bestowed self

Whilst Tiptons exposition of the authoritative strand tends to focus upon a higher
authority which stands over against the individual, and to which the individual must
be obedient, I believe it is helpful to understand this strand and its construal of
identity rather more broadly. On this wider understanding, the authoritative strand
is identified by its insistence upon the necessity of looking beyond the self in order
to understand and to perfect the self. The human being is understood, not as selfsufficient, but as formed through wider relations, whether that be with God,
scripture, a religious community, the family, or some other authoritative source or
site. Contrary to Tiptons understanding, such authority need not be thought of as
completely external to the individual, but may be conceived as something with
which the individual becomes bound up inseparably a community into which the
individual is incorporated, or a God who, as Holy Spirit, indwells an individual and
their community, for example. For this strand, true selfhood is something which is
received or bestowed. It is not the natural inheritance or achievement of an
individual, and it demands an attitude not just of passive obedience, but of
receptiveness, openness, gratitude and (possibly) faith.
The authoritative strand incorporates both religious and secular, Christian and
non-Christian construals of selfhood. To begin with the Christian, many aspects of
Christian doctrine and practice provide evidence of the importance of such a
construal within Christianity. Common Christian use of the language and
conceptuality of creatureliness, for example, throws the emphasis, not onto the
individual actor and his or her nature, but upon human beings existing in relation
to God the creator and to other created beings. So Psalm 8, in answering the
question What is man? depicts human beings not in terms of their possession of a
particular nature or attributes, but in terms of their position intermediate between
God (a little less than God) and the rest of the created order. Jesus preference for
the term neighbour reveals a similar reluctance to define the self in terms of its
possession of a certain substance or attributes. The neighbour is rather the concrete
person upon whom one stumbles in lifes path, the one to whom one is bound by the
simple fact of proximity (neighbour = proximus).14
The central Christian rite of baptism may also be cited as evidence of the
centrality of bestowed selfhood in Christian thought and practice. Baptism reveals
14 See O. ODonovan, Resurrection and Moral Order. An Outline for Evangelical Ethics
(Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1986), pp. 22644.
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an understanding of the human person born not just by natural human means, but by
the gift of Gods grace and through membership of the Christian community. In the
radical form developed by Augustine, this belief was expounded in terms of a
notion of original sinfulness (the natural human state) which can only be (partially)
overcome through the second birth of baptism. Though Christian interpretations
and understandings of human sinfulness are various, some sense of sin as an
inescapable part of the human condition is common in many forms of Christianity.
The naked self is both insufficient and corrupt. It stands in constant need of divine
grace for redemption from this condition. Only by such a means as regular
participation in Christian worship, the gift of Word and sacrament, prayer and
discipline, can the imago dei in man and woman be realized.
As well as stressing the importance of God and the Christian community in the
bestowal of selfhood, some forms of Christianity additionally stress the importance
of other authoritative engagements. The Lutheran tradition, for example, develops
the notion of different orders of creation, different spheres through participation
in which human beings obey divine calling. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer expounds this
tradition, for example, there are four such spheres (or realms of divine mandate):
marriage, government, labour and church. To be fully human is to live creatively
and obediently in each of these spheres. It is to be husband or wife, citizen, worker
or member of the church not a self-subsisting and self-sufficient individual.15
The belief that identity is bestowed by participation in community is not, of
course, exclusive to Christian thought. Many forms of contemporary communitarianism provide clear evidence of how the authoritative strand of culture may be
given a secular rendering.16 Some communitarianism also draws upon a wide range
of older sources, some of them secular, ranging from Aristotle to John
Macmurray.17 Related attempts to recover the institution of the family and to
present it as the main site of soul-making also work within the trajectory of
bestowed selfhood, and these too are manifest in both secular and Christian
forms.18

Liberal humanistic strand: the rational self

In contrast to the authoritative strand of culture, which rejects the idea that selfhood
is constituted by possession of a particular nature or attributes, the liberal
humanistic strand takes its stand on just this belief. Selfhood is construed in terms
of being human, and humanity is construed in terms of the possession of a rational
nature. The roots of this strand of rational selfhood can be traced at least as far as
15
16
17
18

D. Bonhoeffer, Ethics (London: SCM Press, 1978), pp. 25267.

See, for example, A. MacIntyre, After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory (London:
Duckworth, 1985); S. Benhabib, Situating the Self (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).
Tony Blair, the current leader of the Labour Party in Great Britain, recently claimed that
Macmurray was the chief influence upon his communitarian brand of democratic
socialism.
See, for example, F. Mount, The Subversive Family (London: Cape, 1982).
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Plato, and it was kept alive within some traditions of Christian thought until revived
and renewed by the Renaissance and Enlightenment and undergirded by the
successes of scientific reasoning. Descartes famous depiction of the human person
as thinking subject gives this strand one of its clearest and most influential
articulations, as does Kants categorical imperative with its bidding to treat
rational nature as an end in itself whether in your own person or in that of
another.19
In secular renderings of the liberal humanist strand, selfhood is identified
with the possession of rationality because it is this which defines the human
being; in Christian renderings, it is the possession of rationality which constitutes
the image of God in man. For both, reason is understood as the ability to know, to
think, to understand. Above all, perhaps, it is the ability to discern order. As
Taylor puts it, reason can be understood as the perception of the natural or right
order, and to be ruled by reason is to be ruled by a vision of this order alone.20
Through its perception of order, the rational itself becomes ordered. By imposing
control over other potentially rebellious elements of the self spirit, desires, the
body, animal nature a person becomes fully human; virtues such as selfmastery, self-control, temperance, even-temperedness and consistency are highly
prized within this strand of selfhood, and the category of law is central. But the
order which the rational self discerns and brings into being extends beyond its
own boundaries. Rational selfhood construes the self as bounded, as existing
within clear limits, and as taking its allotted place within a wider (natural or
providential) order whose laws reason can discern. So the rational self tends to be
clearly differentiated from God, from other human beings and, particularly and
decisively, from animals (the non-rational). Again, this forms something of a
contrast with the bestowed self, whose boundaries are more blurred, and which
exists not as an individual monad, but through interaction with God and other
creatures.
The rational self thus has clear limits and a clear individuality. But within its
own sphere it is sovereign. The selfs possession of reason grounds not just its
humanity but its liberty. The self, able to know and to understand, must also be able
to choose and to will. It has no need of an authority to legislate for it, for it is
capable of self-legislation. The ideal for the rational self is autonomy, and the
bestowed self (especially as represented by pre-Enlightenment Christianity) is
rejected as heteronomous. Equally, the rationality of the self grounds its equality
and fraternity with other selves. Since all human beings possess reason, and all are
subject to the same universal laws, all human beings must be equal. Though women
were sometimes excluded from this equation, the first feminists were able to
appropriate the rationalists own belief in a liberty common to humanity to fight
this exclusion.
19 I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, ed. M. Gregor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 37f.
20 C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 121.
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Like the bestowed self, the rational self has both religious and secular
renderings. Deistic or rationalistic theistic interpretations of Christianity were key
to the emergence of this strand of selfhood at the beginning of the modern era. In
later centuries it has been most clearly manifest in Christianity in some of the
varied forms of belief and practice subsumed under the wide heading of liberal
Christianity (in the twentieth century, for example, it was clearly evident in the
personalist interpretations of Christianity so central to Liberal Theology in the
1920s and 1960s). This strand has also been prominent in other non-Christian and
post-Christian forms of modern religion; in Comtes proposal for a religion of
humanity, and in many of the forms of alternative spirituality which appeared in
the West in the first part of this century, for example.21 And, of course, the rational
self has also taken violently anti-religious forms in traditions of secular
humanism and free thought, for example. The continuing influence of this strand of
selfhood is still apparent today in the continuing and uncontroversial appeal to
human values, humanitarian values, human rights, freedom of choice and
human equality.22

Expressive strand: the boundless self

Some sociologists and social commentators argue that a turn to the self constitutes
one of the most striking and generalized features of late modernity. So Taylor
speaks of the massive subjective turn of modern culture, Talcott Parsons refers to
an expressive revolution, and Ronald Inglehart identifies the same phenomenon
as a silent revolution.23 The revolution finds its clearest and most extreme
example in the emergence of a new mode of selfhood: the boundless self.
In many ways the boundless self seems diametrically opposed to the rational
self. Most obviously, it differs through its rejection of rationality. The expressive
strand not only denies that rationality is the defining mark of the human, it is
actively opposed to reason and its rule. Here its romantic origins are most clearly
evident. In place of reason, the expressive strand exalts feeling, intuition and
creative impulse. The desires which Enlightenment reason sought to order and
control are unleashed and liberated, and reasons activity in ordering, differentiating, analysing and dividing is abandoned in favour of a search for connections,
linkages, harmonies and creative unities.
The boundless self also differs from the rational self in its refusal to
acknowledge bounds or limitations to selfhood and in its refusal to differentiate self
from God, from others, and from the natural order. It is this unbounded and dedifferentiated quality which marks the most characteristic strand of selfhood
21
22
23

See, for example, R. Tagore, The Religion of Man (London: Macmillan, 1931) and the
progressive and messianic humanism of much Theosophy, particularly evident in the
work of Annie Besant.
P. Heelas, On Things Not Being Worse and the Ethic of Humanity.
Quotations from P. Heelas, The New Age Movement, p. 160.
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according to this tradition. The bestowed self stands not in relation to God, nor in
isolation from God, nor in a Godless universe, but totally immersed in the divine. In
its more religious renderings this strand of selfhood speaks of the self as having two
modes: the everyday, phenomenal, limited self (the self with a small s), and the
true, unfathomable Self, which is one with all (the self with a big S). For the
boundless and sacralized self, the goal of human life is to break through the illusion
which is the self to the divine reality which is the Self.
Finally, the boundless self differs from the rational self in its high valuation of
the natural world. Where the rational self was sharply differentiated from the
natural and non-rational world (as from its own animal nature) the boundless self
tends to embrace the natural as part of its own essence. Nature is no longer an arena
in which the divine may be partially revealed through law-like order; nature is now
divinized. As such, nature is now understood to be deeply linked to the self, and
self-realization and contemplation become complementary activities.
In some respects, however, the boundless self reveals a closer continuity with the
rational self than might be imagined. For a start, the boundless self takes over and
takes further the rational selfs exaltation of freedom. In addition, as Taylor
emphasizes, both traditions manifest an inward turn, the privileging of the inner
over the outer, which is such a characteristic mark of contemporary selfhood. This
subjective turn may be seen as part of a wider and even more far-reaching process by
which the self comes to usurp privileges formerly reserved for God. If the tradition of
the rational self begins this process, that of the boundless self completes it. Now the
self is seen as omnipotent and as intrinsically good, the source of all value and the
creator of all meaning. For the boundless self, morality becomes a matter of selfexpression, and the self-referential notions of authenticity become the key virtues.
Whereas the rational self and the bestowed self may be understood within
either secular or religious frames of reference, it should be clear that the notion of
the boundless self lends itself particularly easily to a spiritual rendering. This can,
however, take more or less explicitly religious forms. The expressivist turn is now
visible in many quarters, some of them religious only in the most minimal sense. As
Heelas explains:
Educationalists, therapists, counsellors, management trainers and HRD
specialists, readers of psychological self-help books, social workers, members
of AA, counter-culturalists, and students are among those most likely to think
in terms of delving within to get in touch with ones feelings, to discover and
cultivate ones authenticity and in general to experience the riches of life
itself.24
Heelas argument, however, is that the boundless self comes into clearest focus in
its most radical its most religious renderings. He regards the New Age
movement as one of the most striking of such renderings, a form of religiosity that
explicitly celebrates the divinity of the self and calls upon its followers to realize
24 P. Heelas, The New Age Movement, p. 161.
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the God within. Charismatic Christianity, with its deeply experiential focus, may
represent the most important Christian rendering (and re-ordering) of the same
cultural strand.

Utilitarian strand: the effective self

Steven Tipton traces the utilitarian strands of modern culture back to the work of
Thomas Hobbes. He draws the contrast between Luthers authoritative stance and
Hobbes utilitarian individualism in the following terms:
For Luther, all men are equal by virtue of their relation to the highest authority,
God. For Hobbes, all men are equal by virtue of their relation to the most basic
drive, namely preservation. Protestantism relates the individual to the absolute
and personally unique judgments of God. Utilitarianism relates the individual
to the constant end of his own self-preservation. It also relates him to the
shifting, comparable (to objects as well as to other persons), and impersonal
judgments of the relative utility of means to the end of self-preservation. Every
man has his price in this sense, just as every thing does.25
As Tipton explains, the utilitarian individual in the twentieth as much as in the
sixteenth century, concentrates on seeking to satisfy his own wants or
interests.26 Here, selfhood is seen to consist in effectiveness in the effective
realization of ones goals and the effective satisfaction of ones wants. The
nature of these goals and wants remains open. This strand of modern culture is
purely procedural. It is concerned to maximize efficiency, to devise better
means for the attainment of ends, but it does not prescribe or proscribe the ends
themselves. In Tiptons understanding, the ends which utilitarian individualism
seeks tend to be the goals which are widely accepted in the culture as a whole
which today means happiness, success in relationships, wealth, power, success,
material goods and sensation. Anthony Robbins, the self-help guru, exemplifies
this position in his best-selling book Unlimited Power: The New Science of
Personal Achievement:
If I were to say to you in two words what this book is about, Id say: Producing
results! Think about it. Isnt that what youre really interested in? Maybe you
want to change how you feel about yourself and your world. Maybe youd like
to be a better communicator, develop a more loving relationship, learn more
rapidly, become healthier, or earn more money. You can create all of these
things for yourself, and much more, through the effective use of the
information in this book.27

25
26
27

S. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties, p. 8.

S. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties, p. 6.
A. Robbins, Unlimited Power: The New Science of Personal Achievement (London:
Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 24.
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Unlike the boundless self, then, the effective self is not thought of as particularly
deep or sacred, nor as the natural possessor of a plenitude of resources. Its wants
are many, and they must be satisfied in order that adequate selfhood may be
achieved.28 Yet though the effective self does not have the confident plenitude of
the boundless self, it does have potential. This strand of selfhood assumes the
existence of untapped capacities of the self that can be maximized through the
harnessing of all available techniques. And very often these capacities will be
viewed as limitless; there is no end to what the self may achieve when it becomes
truly effective hence the use of the word unlimited in Robbins title.
The effective self thus displays some similarities with the boundless self,
particularly in its understanding of the self as (potentially) infinite. Like the
boundless self, and to some degree the rational self, the effective self may also be
viewed as a manifestation of the wider subjective turn so characteristic of
modernity. In Heelas view, The trajectory has to do with an instrumentalized
rendering of that turn within.29 Similarly, the rational self and the effective self
are linked by a common emphasis upon the importance of the will. As we have
seen, the rational self is a self which reasons and makes its choices on the basis of
that reasoning; the will is seen as the enforcer of reasons deliverances. The liberal
humanistic strands stress on the importance of human liberty is tied up with its
confidence in the ability of each individual to make his or her own choices and
stands in contrast to more pessimistic Christian understandings of the weakness and
corruption of the human will. But the effective self takes voluntarism even further
than the rational self, and the will becomes more prominent than any other faculty,
including reason. For the effective self, there is no limit to the capacity of the
human will. Human beings are, above all, beings who make choices, and effective
human beings are those who make effective choices. There is nothing that the will
cannot achieve if it is sufficiently powerful, directed, informed and disciplined
there is nothing which lies outside its control.
Despite the fact that the effective selfs belief in its own potentially unlimited
power and its sovereign and effective will puts it at odds with many more
traditional Christian understandings of selfhood, the effective self does have
religious and Christian renderings. The father of self-help, Norman Vincent
Peale, was a Christian minister who presented his self-help gospel as a spiritual
message. Similarly, American Protestantism has recently spawned various forms of
prosperity gospel, which promise material blessings and enhanced personal
effectiveness and contentment as the gifts of the Spirit. Steven R. Coveys recent
highly successful interpretation of the self-help genre, The Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People, shows this spiritualizing tendency continuing into the 1990s.
Interestingly, Covey not only presents the effective self as compatible with spiritual
ideals, he also presents it as compatible with respect for human values. In this way
28 cf. the analysis in C. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism. American Life in an Age of
Diminishing Expectations (London and New York: Norton, 1991).
29 P. Heelas, The New Age Movement, p. 166.
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Covey shows the remarkable assimilative qualities of effective selfhood; the way it
is able to draw eclectically, and in utilitarian fashion, on other strands of modern
selfhood.30 As the back cover of the book proclaims:
Steven R. Covey presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centred approach for
solving personal and professional problems... Covey reveals a step-by-step
pathway for living with fairness, integrity, honesty, and human dignity
principles that give us the security to adapt to change, and the wisdom and
power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.

Theology and the fragmentation thesis

When recast in terms of the different sources of modern culture and selfhood, the
fragmentation thesis assumes a significantly new form. Now the cause of the
fragmentation of the modern self is seen to lie not so much in the action of monolithic
and universal processes of modernity but in the large number of cultural possibilities
which compete for the self in the contemporary context. The fragmentation thesis is
no longer tied to a unilinear view of history. It can happily accept the historical
evidence which indicates that earlier ages and different cultures were not always
characterized by stable, embedded identities (such as Late Antiquity, to take a
striking example). Nor does it have any particular stake in showing that we are now
entering a postmodern age of intensified fragmentation. Instead, it accepts that some
of the strands of modernity are in significant continuity with premodernity, and is not
closed to the possibility that premodernity was itself diverse and stranded.
Most importantly, however, the recast fragmentation thesis is better able to
explain why modern crises of identity take the many different forms they do.
Fragmentation ceases to be a blanket explanation and becomes a more nuanced tool
of analysis. One example must suffice. Revived national, racial, religious and
ethnic identities can be understood as variations on the theme of bestowed selfhood.
As such, these identities might be expected to clash with liberal humanistic
renderings of selfhood as indeed they do. This clash has come into theoretical
focus in the rise of forms of communitarianism that distance themselves sharply
from liberal humanism, such as MacIntyres After Virtue. Feminist writers have
also played a central part in attacking the liberal rational self.31 But some feminists
then find themselves embroiled within another conflict, for secular humanism has
undergirded the struggle for womens equal rights in the past, and its overthrow
may have serious implications for the feminist cause in the future. In actual life
practice as well, it seems that many women find themselves torn between a feminist
30
31

S.R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (London and New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1989).
See, for example, R. Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991)
and G. Lloyd, The Man of Reason. Male and Female in Western Philosophy
(London: Routledge, 1993).
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allegiance that tends to encourage very independent forms of selfhood, and family
lives that mesh much better with a tradition of bestowed selfhood.32 Should women
prize freedom above all things (liberal humanist) or should they nurture
relationality and connectedness (authoritative)? The debate continues to run, and
the recast fragmentation thesis helps bring it into clear focus.
As well as helping us interpret contemporary crises of identity, the stranded
account of modern selfhood has clear relevance for theological anthropology.
The current fashion is for anthropologies that restate some version of bestowed
selfhood. Such anthropologies strongly emphasize the created and relational
nature of the self, insisting that persons should be understood not as selfsufficient or self-created beings, but as creatures who live, move and have their
being in the Trinitarian God. It is in Christ that we glimpse perfect humanity, and
it is in being conformed to Christ, as Bonhoeffer put it, that we become fully
human. Furthermore, we become human only as part of the body of Christ, the
church. As Stephen Fowl and Gregory Jones explain, Being disciplined by the
Word entails allowing our lives to be patterned in Christ... It involves a
willingness to have our lives formed and transformed in and through particular
Christian communities.33
Contemporary Christian thought about the self is thus at pains to stress that it is
only in relation to God and other people that we become fully human. Very often
this preoccupation is spelt out in relation to an understanding of the Trinity as the
instantiation of what the influential Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas has
described as being as communion.34 Just as the Christian understanding of God is
not of a self-contained solitary being, but of a God who is God in relation, so the
Christian understanding of the human person is of a being who becomes human
only in relation to the other. As Zizioulas says, The being of God is a relational
being; without the concept of communion it would not be possible to speak of
God... True being comes only from the free person, the person who loves freely
that is, who freely affirms his being, his identity, by means of an event of communion with other persons.35 For Zizioulas, as for other contemporary theologians
who share his ontological insights, this Trinitarian model of personhood leads
directly to the church and, in particular, the eucharist as the site of human formation
and perfection. As Alan Torrance says, the ecclesial creation of the New Humanity
represents the profoundest expression of our creation in Gods image36 and as
Zizioulas says, the church has bound every one of her acts to the eucharist, which
32 See L. Woodhead, Faith, Feminism and the Family Concilium: The Family (1995) pp.
4352.
33 S.E. Fowl and G. Jones, Reading in Communion. Scripture and Ethics in Christian Life
(London: SPCK, 1991), p. 34.
34 cf. J. Zizioulas, Being as Communion. Studies in Personhood and the Church (London:
Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985).
35 J. Zizioulas, Being as Communion. Studies in Personhood and the Church, pp. 17f.
36 A. Torrance, Persons in Communion. Trinitarian Description and Human Participation
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), p. 367.
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has as its object mans transcendence of his biological hypostasis and his becoming
an authentic person.37
The influence of Barth, Moltmann, Jungel, Pannenberg and even Rahner on this
new Trinitarianecclesialeucharistic theological understanding of personhood is
clear. So, too, is the influence of the currently fashionable and somewhat more
secular classicalrepublicancommunitarian tradition of thought represented by
writers like Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Bellah and Alan Bloom.
In theology the latter tradition is perhaps played out most clearly in the work of
Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas also develops an ecclesial anthropology of bestowed
selfhood, but the Trinity and the eucharist assume a less prominent place in his
theology. For Hauerwas, following MacIntyre, it is Christian narrative which takes
centre stage; it is in living out the Christian story that church and self are shaped and
formed. Similarly, Gerard Loughlin, a British narrative theologian, speaks of human
personhood as consisting in narratively formed ecclesial existence. As he says,
Entering [the Christian] story, becoming a character within its storied world, is... a
matter of becoming part of the story that embodies the story... shaping consists in the
formation of virtuous habits through communal practices.38 Selfhood, in other
words, is bestowed by participation in a story-shaped church.
To liberal humanist and expressive ears, of course, such talk of a selfhood
bestowed by God and the church sounds dangerously heteronomous (to use a
word plucked from the liberal vocabulary). The conflict between the liberal and the
authoritative traditions of selfhood is, as we have seen, long-standing, and the two
have been shaped by mutual opposition since the Enlightenment. Some
communitarians, like Hauerwas, are happy to acknowledge their enmity towards
liberalism and to spar with real or imagined liberal opponents, both Christian and
secular. Similarly, Gerard Loughlins theology often seems framed in opposition to
liberalism, though he is equally concerned to critique those like Don Cupitt and
Mark C. Taylor whom he calls nihilist postmodern theologians.
The latter tendency is even clearer in Anthony Thiseltons Interpreting God
and the Postmodern Self, where a Christian anthropology of bestowed selfhood is
developed in explicit reaction to all postmodernists and the entire postmodern
scene. Despite its undeniable insights and critical power, it is in Thiseltons book,
perhaps, that some of the problems inherent in the current enterprise of restating a
communal anthropology of bestowed selfhood come into clearest relief. Thiselton
adopts the fragmentation thesis wholesale and without demur. For him the
postmodern self (the self of today) is simply the fragmented, decentred self. As he
says, the postmodern self perceives itself as having lost control as active agent, and
as having been transformed into a passive victim of competing groups.39 The
37
38
39

Being as Communion, p. 61.

G. Loughlin, Telling Gods Story. Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 87.
A. Thiselton, Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self. On Meaning, Manipulation
and Promise (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), p. 12.
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culprits in Thiseltons view include party-politics, capitalism, advertising, bureaucracy in fact, the whole contemporary Western socio-political matrix. For
Thiselton, postmodern thinkers, both Christian and non-Christian, are all those who
articulate and thereby reinforce such fragmentation. They range from Nietzsche,
Derrida and Foucault on the one hand to Don Cupitt on the other. Against the
postmodern self, it is the task of the Christian to reassert belief in a self given by
God and a God who gives himself to the self. By such a means, Christianity can
reassert belief in love and relationality, and so dissolve the acids of suspicion and
deception.40 The Christian self is a self which is no longer passive victim to pregiven roles and performances, but a self which perceives its call and its value as
one-who-is-loved within the larger narrative plot of Gods loving purposes for the
world, for society, and for the self.41
In terms of the analysis for which I have been arguing in this article,
Thiseltons blanket condemnation of the postmodern world and the postmodern self
is bound up with his uncritical acceptance of the fragmentation thesis. It therefore
suffers from a failure to understand the multiple sources of contemporary selfhood,
sources which may, as we have seen, ground very stable identities as well as many
different kinds of identity crisis and fragmentation. (Thiseltons book also
illustrates how an acceptance of the undifferentiated fragmentation thesis often
goes hand in hand with a broad-brush characterization of modernity or
postmodernity as characterized by unvarying and universal linear processes.) If
my analysis is correct, what is needed from theologians today is not such broadbrush characterizations and condemnations of modernity or postmodernity,
followed up by the triumphalist claim that only Christianity can offer a viable
alternative, but more honest and nuanced approaches to both the contemporary
world and Christian construals of selfhood. This will involve at least two things:
first, a recognition that there are several, often conflicting, strands of contemporary
selfhood and, second, a willingness to admit that Christianity is involved and
implicated in these strands and subject to many of the same tensions. Christianity
cannot, in other words, pretend to stand aloof from the problems of modern
selfhood and offer a timeless solution.
Once it is accepted that the contemporary debate about selfhood is an intraChristian as well as a secular one, it is less easy to escape the fact that enthusiastic
theological espousals of bestowed selfhood often amount to an attack on fellow
Christians of different persuasions. As we have just seen, some theologians quite
deliberately attack other forms of Christian conviction Thiselton and Loughlin
contra the nihilist postmodern theologians, for example. On even the most
optimistic estimates the number of such postmodern Christians is, however, tiny.
The number of Christians who accept either a liberal or an expressive construal of
selfhood (or some combination of the two) is, by contrast, exceedingly large. In a
recent extensive survey of a wide variety of Christian congregations in America, for
40 A. Thiselton, Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self, p. 160.
41 Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self, p. 160.
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example, Nancy Ammerman and her team of researchers found that liberal
Christians (Golden Rule Christians) were much the most numerous in American
churches (51%), outnumbering even evangelicals (29%).42 It is also possible to
argue that the whole Diana phenomenon (the spirituality she espoused and the
echoes of it in reactions to her death) provides evidence of a similarly widespread
religion of expressive/liberal humanitarianism on this side of the Atlantic.43
Contemporary anthropologies of bestowed selfhood constitute an attack on such
forms of Christianity, and thus on vast numbers of fellow Christians. Obviously this
does not invalidate such an enterprise. It should, however, be made more explicit,
and borne in mind as a factor which will undoubtedly affect the reception and
influence of contemporary anthropologies of bestowed selfhood.
A much more serious effect of the failure of many contemporary Christian
accounts of selfhood to take seriously their historical situatedness is, I believe, their
failure to address the criticisms of bestowed selfhood which led liberals and
expressivists to depart from this trajectory in the first place. It is not enough merely
to articulate communitarian versions of bestowed selfhood without answering the
most weighty and long-standing objections which face them. Of these much the
most important is the criticism that such selfhood degrades men and women by
placing too much emphasis on human weakness, fallibility, dependence and
sinfulness. Such a criticism can be traced at least as far back as Erasmus, though it
became much more widespread at the time of the Enlightenment. So frequently
does one come across such criticisms in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury literature that a good argument could be made for saying that dissatisfaction with Christian understandings of the human person was at least as important
a cause of secularization as the rise of the natural sciences. In the later part of the
twentieth century the objection has been stated with fresh force by feminist critics
who hold Christian doctrines of bestowed selfhood guilty of reinforcing patriarchal
oppression by undermining womens sense of self-worth and their confidence in
their own agency and ability.44
Such criticisms surely need to be addressed by contemporary advocates of
bestowed selfhood, though they rarely are. How is it possible to assert our complete
dependence on God without denying human freedom? How is it possible to
maintain belief in human agency whilst insisting that the self is constituted by
relationality? And how is it possible to remain faithful to Christian doctrines of
human sinfulness in ways which do not undercut belief in human dignity and have
42

43
44

N.T. Ammerman et al., Congregation and Community (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1997); N. Ammerman, Golden Rule Christianity. Lived Religion in
the American Mainstream, in D.G. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America. Toward a
Theory of Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
cf. L. Woodhead, Diana and the Religion of the Heart in J. Richards, S. Wilson and L.
Woodhead, eds, Saint Diana: The Making of a Postmodern Icon (London: I.B. Tauris,
in press).
See, for example, the influential essay by V. Saiving, The Human Situation: A
Feminine View, Journal of Religion 40 (1960), pp. 10012.
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the baleful effects pointed out by feminists and other critics? None of these
questions necessarily require that theologians should abandon their defence of a
Christian version of bestowed selfhood, but they do require somewhat less evasive
accounts. To take only the last question, the question about sin, it is noticeable that
many contemporary anthropologies skirt around the doctrine altogether. Again,
Thiseltons book is instructive. Far from attempting to address the issue, he ends up
developing an anthropology whose stress is overwhelmingly positive: Christianity
alone can help us regain faith in human agency and the reality of relationality, love
and trust. Strangely, it is his postmodern opponents from Foucault to the feminists
who end up articulating more powerful accounts of sinfulness than Thiselton
himself, who is at pains to insist that institutions like the church are not really as
prone to manipulate and abuse power and promote their own interests as the
postmodernists maintain.
Again, I do not wish to single out Thiselton for particular criticism, for he
merely brings into focus a more general failure to take seriously the issues that any
Christian defence of bestowed selfhood should face. Instead of tackling the issue of
sin head on, too many theologians skirt round it, with the paradoxical consequence
that they look remarkably nave, not just about individual, but particularly
institutional, sin. Enthusiasm about the need to be disciplined by the church would,
I believe, carry more conviction if it went hand in hand with an honest exploration
of the abuses of ecclesiastical power which this can invite. In actual fact, liberal
Christians, often accused of being nave about sin, have tended to be much more
aware of the ways in which institutional Christianity can and has inhibited more
just forms of social and personal existence.
Part of the problem may be the unwillingness of theologians to take seriously
what is actually happening to the churches in the late twentieth century. We have
just noticed the way in which anthropologies of bestowed selfhood sometimes fail
to take account of the impact of their doctrines on the vast liberal constituency of
the churches. The failure to take seriously liberal and expressive criticisms of
bestowed selfhood may be related. Just as important, however, seems to be the
failure of contemporary theology to take seriously another striking contemporary
development: the worldwide evangelicalcharismatic upsurge. This upsurge has
been most evident in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, but it is also
noticeable in the Philippines, the Pacific rim (above all, Korea), China, parts of
Eastern Europe, and in Western Europe and the United States. Charismatic
Christianity has not merely spawned new churches and denominations; it has also
exercized a powerful influence within the older churches, both Protestant and
Catholic.45
The significance of this upsurge for Christian anthropology may lie in its
ability to embody forms of selfhood which manage to combine elements of the
authoritative with elements of the liberal, expressive and utilitarian strands of
selfhood. At its best, in other words, charismatic Christianity seems to move
45 cf. D. Martin, Forbidden Revolutions.
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beyond the old authoritativeliberal stalemate, and suggest new and creative forms
of faithful selfhood. On the one hand, it restores human agency and empowers
individuals who often find themselves in the most desperate situations. On the
other, it maintains belief in the transcendence of God, the authority of scripture, and
the reality of human sinfulness (often ascribed to demonic powers). David Martin
explains charismaticevangelical religions ability to empower those who are most
often downtrodden without succumbing to pure expressivism or abandoning belief
in the Trinitarian God in the following terms:
Evangelical religion provides empowerment through its offer of healing, its
demand for responsibility, and its invitation openly to affirm and express. For
people to be addressed in evangelical language as persons is to be spoken to in
terms that truly speak to their condition, confirming beyond the shadow of
doubt their dignity, worth and significance... It is just when your circumstance
is most severely limiting and when structures are most obdurately resistant that
you need to know yourself as agent, otherwise you will be passively swept over
the abyss.46
At its best, evangelicalcharismatic Christianity manages to build strong Christian
communities at the same time that it upholds this stress on personal dignity thus
reinforcing an important theme of contemporary communitarian anthropologies. At
the same time, its constructions of selfhood seem to bear witness to important
aspects of the tradition of bestowed selfhood, whilst also responding in new and
remarkably creative ways to the contemporary situation. Of course, this form of
Christianity has its own particular weaknesses and blind spots, including a tendency
to give rise to authoritarian forms of personal leadership. It would be foolish to hold
it up as the anthropological touchstone theologians have been seeking. It is far from
foolish, however, for theologians to take note of the fact that the forms of
Christianity that appear to flourish in the contemporary world are those which
manage to combine the elements of the liberalexpressive and the authoritarian
strands of selfhood (and in some cases the utilitarian as well).
It is not enough for Christians today merely to repudiate modernity and the
modern (or postmodern) quest for selfhood. To have any real bite, theology should
engage seriously with the complexity of the modern world and the diverse modern
construals of selfhood. It should do so in honest acknowledgment that it is already
implicated in these strands and has played a significant part in their unfolding. It
should do so with the confidence that it can continue to influence and play a part in
the unfolding of modernity or even postmodernity. And it should do so with a
willingness to learn from those flesh-and-blood men and women in the churches
today who reveal to us something of the authentic selfhood to which we are called
in Christ.

46

D. Martin, Forbidden Revolutions, p. 45.

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