Punctum Saliens

… unless we’re already there and just don’t know it.

It seems to me that there is a disconnect in salvation. If we are totally depraved and can do nothing good without God then how can we receive the gift of God’s son? How can we, as sinners, bring ourselves to realize that we even need God let alone bring ourselves to find God? Through the urging of the Holy Spirit? I think not because the Holy Spirit needs to appeal to something in us which can know God and we in our sinful state cannot.

By way of (obviously imperfect, as all examples are) example, let’s say that I am trying to get Joe, who has been blind from birth, to understand the color red. He has been separated from color all his life (born color-depraved, so to speak) and so has nothing within himself with which he can begin to understand color. No matter how hard I press and explain and urge him to understand the color red, it isn’t going to happen. Any understanding of the color red at which Joe does arrive will, obviously and necessarily, be extremely different from the understanding that I have.

Isn’t that the predicament we are in? If we are 100% separated from God and always have been (and I’m talking about each person and not “man” and “woman” as created by God) then there is no way we are going to understand anything about God no matter how hard the Holy Spirit urges. Unless there us a bit of God in us — a seed or a kernel — then there is no way we can understand our need of God’s salvation and no way we can receive it. This reminds me of something C.G. Jung said:

For it is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.

We all have a “divine life” in us. We all have the image of God within. Sometimes that image is buried quite deeply and we have absolutely no recollection of it but it’s there. It has to be there in order for the Holy Spirit to work. So we are not given the image of God when we are “saved” but that (perhaps tiny) part of us that already is the image of God is brought to our attention.