Self esteem

As we spoke about worldviews at house-church on Sunday, it became increasingly obvious that Australians tend to think that, a) people are fundamentally good and can make the world a better place [ie people are responsible for good], and b) sometimes people stuff-up, perhaps as the result of a troubled upbringing, being under a lot of stress or a personality disorder, but whatever the root cause, that's not who they are [ie people are not responsible for bad].

This sort of thinking makes life a nicer place because you always have reason to feel good about yourself and never to feel bad. That's pleasant and endurable. But it's also dishonouring and dehumanising, as it make us out to be less capable and less mature than we are.

We are not victims tossed around by our circumstances; we are adults who actively make the choices we want to make. When we do wrong, it's not because we suddenly forget ourselves and lose our personhood; we make our choices out of who we are. They are real choices. I'm not saying that our circumstances have zero effect - their effect is significant, yet that does not change the fact that we could always chose differently. We are making that decision, not our circumstances. (Obviously I'm not thinking of something terrible like a hostage situation here, which is terrible in large part because it does strip away all our dignity and volition.)

Taking responsibility for our actions, whether good or bad, hands us back our human dignity because it says that we have the capacity and power to think and act. Indeed we are so noble that we even have the capacity to do this in the face of awful circumstances.

Of course, with responsibility comes the burden of failure. But hope is found in Jesus, who didn't patronise us but took our wrongs so seriously he chose to die in our place, and who now holds out forgiveness to a people so full of dignity and potential, yet so shot through with perversity and self-centredness.