Self-Deception and the Christian Life
Gregg A. Ten Elshof
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.
All rights reserved
Published 2009 by
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
2140 Oak Industrial Drive n.e., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 / p.o. Box 163, Cambridge cb3 9pu U.K.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ten Elshof, Gregg, b. 1970–
I told me so: self-deception and the Christian life / Gregg A. Ten Elshof.
p. cm.
isbn 978-0-8028-6411-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Self-deception—Religious aspects—Christianity.
2. Christian life. I. Title
bv4267.f3t46 2009
241′.673—dc22
2009012686
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
(even when it falls on a Wednesday)
3. How-To, Part 1: Attention Management and Procrastination
4. How-To, Part 2: Perspective Switching, Rationalization, and Ressentiment
5. Getting Help When It’s Not Working
6. How-Not-To, Part 1: Giving Self-Deception a Demotion
7. How-Not-To, Part 2: Three Good Ideas
In his teachings Jesus Christ picked up on a note struck by the prophet Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me” (Mark 7:6, Isaiah 29:13). The apostle Paul famously remarked upon the incongruity between what he wanted to do and what he actually did (Romans 7:15). Jeremiah stood in amazement before the deceitfulness of the human heart. He judged it to be “desperately sick” and inscrutable to the human mind. He as well as the Psalmist could only look to God to penetrate its murky depths (Jeremiah 17:9–10, Psalm 139:23–24). Current events easily suggest that not that much has changed since ancient days, and the tenor of the usual Christian landscape seems to match up pretty well with what Jesus and the prophets saw.
There is not much use in getting indignant about this. It is really too important to spend much time attacking it, for attacks do little to help or change the situation. Transformation of believers into disciples clothed with inner and outer Christlikeness has increasingly become a matter of concern for Christians and Christian leaders in recent years, and the dynamics of personal inconsistency, individually and in groups, must be understood and practically mastered if anything like the clear patterns of Christlike living, familiar from the New Testament, are to be realized.
Self-deception is a major part of what defeats spiritual formation in Christ. In self-deception the individual or group refuses to acknowledge factors in their life of which they are dimly conscious, or even know to be the case, but are unprepared to deal with: to openly admit and take steps to change. As a ...
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About I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian LifeThink you’ve ever deceived yourself? Then this book is for you. Think you’ve never deceived yourself? Then this book is really for you. Scripture is peppered with talk of self-deception and its poisonous effects on the pursuit of holy living. Christians in the past thought long and hard about the ways we deceive ourselves. They called on self-deception to explain a wide range of problems in Christian experience. Strangely, though, self-deception has all but disappeared from our consciousness today. We rarely admit to the possibility of deceiving ourselves in any area of our lives. In I Told Me So, Gregg Ten Elshof reintroduces readers to self-deception and offers an explanation for its recent neglect in Christian thought. He describes conditions that tempt us to deceive ourselves and points out where they exist in contemporary Christian life. He explains the most successful strategies we use in self-deception and offers practical advice on how to confront and eliminate them. But readers will be surprised to discover that self-deception isn’t always such a bad thing. Ten Elshof shows how sometimes it can even be a useful, God-given gift. Honest and incisive, consistently wise and frequently funny, I Told Me So offers fresh insights on how we deceive ourselves and smart strategies to combat the deceiver in all of us. |
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