Expressive Individualism
The true you is defined by your feelings and desire. You will be happy when you are true to yourself, give expression to your truth, and find that truth affirmed and celebrated by others.
Who am I according to EI?
I am who I think and feel I am
Who am I according to Jesus?
I am who God says I am.
What is life according to EI?
To know yourself
What is life according to Jesus?
“Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” John 17:3
What is the way to life according to EI?
To be true to your inner feelings and desires and to surround yourself with a community of people who will not question or evaluate your truth.
What is the way to life according to Jesus?
“Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6
“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Matthew 16:24
What is the problem according to EI?
You aren’t true to your inner feelings and desires, and you are surrounded by external realities and external authorities that do not affirm your truth.
What is the problem according to Jesus?
Human rebellion stoked by an evil and mysterious force that seeks to destroy life by enticing humans to trust in ourselves rather than God.
“Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom, Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.” CS Lewis, Mere Christianity
The more we get what we now call “ourselves” out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of “little Christs,” all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented—as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to “be myself” without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call “Myself” becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call “My wishes” become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call “me” can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own. CS Lewis, Mere Christianity