Follow Jesus Christ

Does the article’s title mean yet another dose of “Christian psychology”? Is the author overcomplicating the Gospel? Let’s sort it out.

How do you personally understand the Gospel? Though everyone simply calls it “the Gospel,” in the mind of each believer it actually carries some adjective — even if people aren’t aware of it.

There is the “legal” Gospel: everything is seen in terms of guilt, punishment, justification, and one’s status before God. Typical medieval European thinking. But does that account for everything? What about purity of heart, inner motives, a renewed mind?

There is the “ritual” Gospel. Here it all comes down to belonging to the right religion, the right rites, the right systems. Christianity certainly stresses this side, and millions use it to mark who is “in” and who is “out.” The problem with that definition is that a person can become a slave to religion and ritual — or to subtler systems. Didn’t Jesus warn against trusting in rituals and ceremonies, even those associated with his own name?

There is the “afterlife” Gospel. People don’t want to get into details about practice or ritual; they’re mainly concerned with one question: where will they end up after death? But focusing solely on this metaphysical view makes the Gospel diffuse and unclear.

Lately we’ve seen a “political” or “social” Gospel: transforming society and its structures. Undoubtedly Christianity has contributed over time to social change, and that matters. But isn’t the inner life of the person more important than social reform? Can society really change if individual people do not change?

There is a “psychological” Gospel: various self-help techniques, a toolkit for self-realization and adjustment to reality — for example, the “prosperity gospel.” But then Christianity loses its depth and becomes mere self-hypnosis. Jesus’ teaching addresses the heart, the will, love. The human problem is far greater than what a person thinks about himself.

Perhaps the full Gospel is the sum of all the human ways of understanding it. Add to that the “anthropological” Gospel: the idea that the Gospel is a fundamental transformation of the human being, of his entire inner world. Anthropos means “human” in Greek.

Jesus shows the human being as he is: religious yet cruel; moral yet vain; strong yet inwardly empty; suffering yet able to use others; confident yet not truly self-aware. And he shows what a person can become: free, whole, merciful, truthful, unmasked, capable of loving without seeking gain.

Sin is not only the breaking of a law. Sin is a mode of existence in which a person lives at another’s expense. Salvation is not only an amnesty. Salvation is the birth of a person who no longer needs to exploit his neighbor.

Take the example of someone who plays the victim: blaming circumstances or other people. He gets used to thinking nothing can be changed, and so remains in the role of the sufferer. Responsibility is externalized: “this is being done to me.” This “suffering” brings its own benefits: attention, pity, escape from duties, control over loved ones. Guilt, pity, dramatization are used to influence others — or for outright manipulation.

Why does this work? Because many people find it hard to bear another’s pain. They automatically start rescuing, excusing, feeling guilty, giving away energy, forgetting boundaries. A cycle forms: one plays the victim, another plays the rescuer. From an objective, dispassionate standpoint, such behavior is not sane love. It’s a painful, distorted way of existing. This is precisely where salvation is needed — a human-centered, anthropological Gospel as a means to radically change the person who plays the victim, who torments himself and others and doesn’t know how to live any other way.

What has been described here is very close to a major strand in world religious and philosophical thought: sin is not merely isolated misdeeds but a distorted mode of being in which a person uses others as means to his own ends. Then salvation is not the wiping away of minor infractions but the transformation of the very way of being human. This idea appears first in Jesus and later in many Christian thinkers.

Augustine saw the root of sin not only in actions but in disordered love: a person loves himself and temporal goods so much that the right ordering of love is lost. Kierkegaard understood sin as a state of false relation to oneself and to God: a person does not want to be his true self, or wants to be himself without God. From that arise masks, games, dependence on opinion, the use of others. Immanuel Kant formulated the moral principle to treat a person always as an end and never merely as a means — exploitation of another is a fundamental distortion. Erich Fromm wrote that a person can live in the mode of having or the mode of being: in the having mode people become resources, status, or validation. Salvation, then, is the move from having to true being and love. In Eastern Christianity sin was often understood as a sickness of the soul rather than merely guilt. Passions (vanity, pride, desire for power, attachments) deform the person. Salvation is healing and theosis — restoration of the image of God.

The anthropological Gospel speaks of a salvation that means becoming a person who no longer lives parasitically. Of a salvation in which a person outgrows himself as a mere personality, is perfected and transformed. The Gospel as message is not only about metaphysics, the afterlife, or legal justification, but about the person himself, his injury, and his possibility for inner transformation.

The main tragedy is not just that a person uses others, but that he may consider himself good, righteous, spiritual, self-sacrificing. This is one of the central threads of the Gospels: the Pharisee is sure of himself; the accuser does not see his own darkness; one pulls a speck out of another’s eye while ignoring the log in his own. Modern people live in roles and don’t understand themselves; Jesus taught to drop all masks, to know the truth, and to find freedom. Religious parasitism is that even sacred things can become instruments of the ego. And perhaps hell begins where people devour one another psychologically, morally, socially — here and now. Jesus comes into the human interior to save him from this hell. That is what is called the anthropological Gospel.