Alex Nolette
We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self. In fact, the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord.1
The past forty years have seen a few writers—from philosopher Charles Taylor to historian Carl Trueman—declaring that people in the Western world answer the question Who am I? in fundamentally distinct ways compared to history past.2 Christians have been caught up in this shift as well, often unwittingly, and have found themselves together with the rest of the West in the midst of an identity crisis.
The claim of Jesus that no one can be his disciple unless he hates his own life (Luke 14:26), and his call to deny oneself, shoulder a cross, and lose one’s life to find it truly (Matt 16:24–25) descend on clogged ears. We hear him, but only as though muffled by our passions, dreams, and desires for this life, which still functionally serve as determinative of our sense of who we are and where we are going. Lulled into lethargy, we would do well to shake ourselves awake to the call of Christ—or find someone who will do it for us.
Created as Stars
The church fathers give good shakings.3 Ignatius’ Letter to the Romans, which is too often dismissed due to his uncomfortable-to-us desire for martyrdom, is typical of how the Fathers thought about true discipleship:4
Neither the ends of the earth nor the kingdoms of this age are any use to me. It is better for me to die for Jesus Christ than to rule over the ends of the earth. Him I seek, who died on our behalf; him I long for, who rose again for our sake. The pains of birth are upon me. Bear with me, brothers and sisters: do not keep me from living; do not desire my death. . . . Let me receive pure light, for when I arrive there I will be a human being. Allow me to be an imitator of the suffering of my God.5
Ignatius sees the call of Jesus in Matthew 16 as turning inside-out the world’s view of life and self. To find our life here is to build our homes in death; true life, rather, comes through death.
The patristic theologians are always trying to get Christians to see that to be truly human—a human being who images God well—is to follow the God-man, Jesus, the true image of the invisible God (Col 1:15), in self-sacrificial death for the love of God and neighbor. God’s design for the human being is to live like a star, lighting and blessing the people and creation around us in representation of the love and glory of God.
The Lord promised to make Abraham’s offspring like the stars in the heavens (Gen 15:3). Jesus called his people to be salt and light, to shine like stars in the world in their obedience to him.6 And throughout the Bible, stars function as symbols of, among other things, earthly rulers and the people of God.7 Humanity is, like the sun and stars, to radiate as patterns of God’s glory and sovereign rule through their loving, beautiful dominion over the earth. But, since the fall in the garden, human beings have become like black holes instead.8
On Black Holes
Black holes are formed when stars die. They become like Dyson vacuums, sucking up all the mass and matter around them, exhibiting a gravitational pull so strong that even light particles cannot escape. A black hole’s existence is dependent upon the consumption of everything around it.
Likewise, humanity’s selfish heart sucks up everything God created good in and around it and uses these created goods to sustain its life. But what the heart usually fails to see is that this insatiable hunger is precisely what will kill it.
Recent quantum research, pioneered by Stephen Hawking, has shown something previously thought to be unlikely—black holes die.9 The prior consensus was that black holes may exist into eternity as they gobble up more mass, but with the progress of quantum physics and its insight into matter and anti-matter particles, the scientific community has changed its mind.
Even the blackness of space is teeming with life. If we could see into the quantum realm, we would see particles popping in and out of existence. These particles come into being as matter/anti-matter pairs (positively and negatively charged, respectively), which then are annihilated instantly as the matter and anti-matter particles cancel each other out.
A black hole, however, has such a strong gravitational pull that when one of these matter/anti-matter pairs pops into existence close enough to it, the black hole separates the anti-matter particle from the matter particle before the pair is annihilated, drawing the anti-matter particle into itself.10 The negative charge of these anti-matter particles continues, over many hundreds of years, to decrease the size of the black hole until it dies.
The black hole’s selfishness will be the cause of its death. The black hole’s greed sows the seed of its own destruction.
Black Hole Hearts
Humanity lives a paradoxical life. In our terror of death, we endeavor to live life to the fullest now. Fr John Behr puts it well when he says, “It is the fear of death that drives us to try to hold on to our breath of life and gives rise to all the passions that flow from this egotism, ensnaring us ever further in our mortality.”11
Black holes that we are, we fail to see that it is our desire to find, establish, and keep our satisfaction in this life that leads us to the grave. We tend to disassociate ourselves from the deep selfishness we see in others and refuse to see it in ourselves. Yet selfishness infuses all that we do.
We cut down our spouse to feel important. We waste time at work indulging ourselves when we could have labored diligently for the sake of others. We believe we deserve to withhold forgiveness or to gossip about someone. We grow angry when someone is recognized for an achievement of which we know we are more worthy. We neglect to help someone else because we do not feel that we have attained all that we need first. We resent and rebel against the authorities over us that stifle our projects of self-determination. In our absolute commitment to “wellness,” we spend hours learning about diets, exercises, diseases, remedies, and techniques without a thought to how that wellness might be leveraged for the sake of Christ and others.
This but brushes the surface of our selfishness. Even those things that are good—our marriages, families, faith, communities, acts of service—are tainted and stained by black hole hearts. Frankly, many have used Jesus and Christianity to try to gain the world while in danger of losing their very souls.
The Great Heart Surgeon
Yet Jesus, the Great Physician, wants to bring us into his gracious surgical room. His scalpel cuts without warning, and it cuts deep. What he wants to remove often catches us off-guard. The knife slices into the worst sins. This is what is expected. But his scalpel continues right past these diseased organs. He keeps cutting down into the most intimate parts of us. His goal is to divide soul and spirit (Heb 4:12) and get down to the cause of the disease: the heart.
The pain is excruciating, but he will only proceed as far as is necessary and good for us. He never stops promising that this procedure will end in abundant life, but the unspeakable pain shouts that we are losing ourselves in the process. The only other choice is to tell him to cease, to turn back to the former ways, to leave what is killing us inside. We can then make the best of what is left of our short life. Unfortunately, far too many make this choice.
There was once a man, a royal, who not only had all the wealth and status one could long for but was also a man of great religious obedience and zeal. He had followed the law of his God to the letter. Yet, we do not know his name. History has left him to us with a simple description: the rich, young ruler.12
Approaching the Good Teacher, this rich, young ruler expected to be vindicated in his way of life. He appears to have had a hunch he was “getting in” to heaven but had come to Jesus just to double-check. But rather than meeting a teacher, he found a doctor. This young man would pass any of the tests that anyone around could dream up, but in a Dr. House-like moment, Jesus made a diagnosis that no one else but God could see: his heart was bad. The rich, young ruler loved being the rich, young ruler.
Therefore, Jesus gave him a treatment plan: “Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Luke 18:22b). The man who came looking for identity vindication—a clean bill of health—received an order for Physician-assisted identity suicide. Jesus called the rich, young ruler to become the poor, generous follower. He brought the man into exploratory surgery, cut down deep, and put his finger on the dying heart, sending shockwaves of pain throughout the young man’s entire body. It was unbearable. Jesus wanted to turn this black hole heart inside-out. He wanted it to release everything it held onto by its greedy pull, but if a black hole did such a thing, it would cease to exist. If the black hole heart stopped consuming, it would starve to death.
The young man began to weep, knowing that he could never go through with a procedure that would cost him his very life, his very self. He loved this life and the things in it too much. He went away sad.
Dying to Live, Daily
We try to protect ourselves from the force of this story, but Jesus wants to do the same thing with us. We think we are not rich—we are wrong. Any time that we take life for ourselves instead of giving it over to Jesus and others, we demonstrate that we are rich in spirit; we think that sustaining this life is what matters and that we deserve it.
But every grasp for life is really a reach for death. To be rich in spirit is to have a black hole heart. The rest of humankind is no different than the rich, young ruler. But our futures can be.
Jesus calls us to find our lives—our very selves—in him, the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 who was crucified for his people. This must be the foundation of the entire Who am I? search. In the context of the comfort of rich, Western lives, it is easy to forget that the pursuit of Christlikeness is a pursuit of death—it is a pursuit that our Savior calls us to take up daily (Luke 9:23).
Upon dying to sin and self and rising with and in Jesus in baptism, the rest of life is made up of daily putting to death all that is selfish and sinful and embracing in trust the abundant life that Christ gives so that we can give all of ourselves to God and others (John 10:10). Walking by faith—confident that by grace we have been seated with Christ in the heavenly places (Eph 2:6), assured that our lives are hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:3)—we pattern our lives after Jesus’ cruciform, self-sacrificial love for God and neighbor.
As new creations (2 Cor 5:17), Christians are resurrected stars, “that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world” (Phil 2:15).
Alex Nolette teaches Western Literature at Thales Academy in Apex, NC. He is a member of Imago Dei Church, where he is involved in a pastoral training cohort to pursue domestic church planting.
Image: Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night
- St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1972), 14.28 (p. 593).[↩]
- See, e.g., Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1989); Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020).[↩]
- I am greatly indebted to the work of theologian and patristics scholar Fr John Behr for the direction and support of these thoughts, whether through his patristic translations or his work in theological anthropology.[↩]
- For a great study on this, see Christopher A. Hall, “’They Looked Like Flaming Angels’: Martyrdom,” in Living Wisely with the Church Fathers (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2017), 29–58.[↩]
- Ignatius of Antioch, “The Letter of Ignatius to the Romans,” 6:1-3a, in The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, ed. and trans. Michael W. Holmes (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 231–3, emphasis mine.[↩]
- See esp. J. Brandon Meeks, ”Salt and Light: A Recipe for a Well-Seasoned World,” March 9, 2022, https://cateclesia.com/2022/03/09/salt-and-light-a-recipe-for-a-well-seasoned-world/.[↩]
- See esp. James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World (Brentwood: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1988), 53–68.[↩]
- Cf. the way the prophets describe stars darkening when earthly powers like Babylon and Egypt fall in texts like Isa 13:9–10; Ezek 32:7–8.[↩]
- Meredith Fore, ”Stephen Hawking Was Right: Black Holes Can Evaporate, Weird New Study Shows,” LiveScience, June 10, 2019, https://www.livescience.com/65683-sonic-black-hole-spews-hawking-radiation.html.[↩]
- The positively charged matter particle then continues on into existence as ”Hawking radiation.” If we wanted to be cute with extending the symbolism, we could say that Hawking radiation is like the positive effect humans may have on the world even though they are primarily self-interested.[↩]
- John Behr, ”From Adam to Christ: From Male and Female to Being Human,” The Wheel 13/14, (Spring/Summer 2018): 19-32, https://frjohnbehr.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2018_Behr_Adam_to_Christ_The_Wheel.pdf.[↩]
- See Matt 19:16–30; Mark 10:17–31, Luke 18:18–30.[↩]