Thomas, thanks for your input – it is always incredibly thoughtful. With James, I am thinking that I need to pick up Lash’s Theology of Pilgrims as well.

I think it also significant to widen your point out of the enclave of theological work and identity and highlight its import for anthropological considerations more generally. Your point about the existential ‘bi-polar angst’ that grows out of a person’s anchoring of his/her identity in their individual significance, whether it be their roles, functions or productivity, is a helpful way into localising one of the variant ways in which idolatrous living disorders and disorients human existence. The polarised extremes of dislocated selves in modern life and the unhealthy role that certain types of perfectionism (fundamentalist spiritualities or their secularised equivalents) play in the bifurcations are fragments of the larger story of sin and its radical consequence. But the good news is found in sin’s overcoming, an overcoming which transposes the idolatrous self into the majestic presence of God upon the liberating announcement of our restoration in Christ. This liberation has the grand consequence of teaching us to ‘be creatures’ (as Nicholas Lash so often reminded us). Here there is a grand freedom. Firstly, it is the freedom of not having our selves defined by anything other than our createdness and ultimate dependence on God. In the knowlede of God in Christ is revealed too the mystery of our createdness, and the centring of our being and action in eschatological existence. Here, our central identity is not located in ‘our’ vocation, production, social alliances (as absolute magnitudes), etc, but in God’s good ordering of the world and our place in it as receiving our true selves in God’s self-giving (which includes these things but not as absolutes determining our existence). Secondly, it is the freedom that we don’t have to be perfectionists. To quote Lash ‘The story of this learning process (on learning to be a creature) is the history of Jewish and Christian doctrines of God…there is a sense in which each generation, and indeed each individual, has to take the time to learn this for themselves; has to grow, or fail to grow, into something of what it means to be, in every fibre of one’s being, absolutely dependent on the mystery that we call God’ {Lash, Theology for Pilgrims, pp. 25}.

Lash’s last point I think great for your theme here. That the temptation of thinking ‘we’ are central is fundamentally the idolatrous thinking that we are not creatures but ‘God’… the central significant for determing our selves and our relations. And the spiritual consequence of this has been the ‘hells’ of life. However, the liberation that comes from attuning afresh to God’s self-manifestation in Christ is not simply the re-placement of ourselves as the central object of our concern, devotion and self-interpretation, but its the very ground that gives us the right kind of reading of our lives and significance in our place in the ordering of the world. We do our best work and love when we’re not fixated on ourselves.