I believe we are witnessing a significant development in the shape of our popular Christian discourse, yet one which is generally passing unremarked. This decade has seen the rise to prominence of a new breed of Christian writers, typically in their twenties and early thirties, who are writing about faith from a distinctively personal and autobiographical perspective. For these writers, the affective first-person narrative--'telling your story'--is treated as a privileged frame for reflection upon the Christian faith.

A connection between theological reflection and autobiographical narrative is hardly a new phenomenon; Augustine's Confessions is just one of many examples of this from the Christian tradition. However, while such as Augustine places his 'story' into an unsparing theological frame, for our contemporary Christian 'storytellers', this pattern tends to be reversed. Rather than relating their stories in a more detached and 'objective' fashion and subjecting their stories and sense of self to rigorous theological judgment, their stories are typically told with an affective immediacy and left immune from such questioning.

In this affective immediacy, they might find some of their roots in the particularly evangelical tradition of the 'personal testimony', in which the teller recounts the way that God has worked in their life. However, these new storytellers do not only relate their private and personal experience of God's grace but treat their wider personal experience as a privileged vantage point from which to reflect upon Christianity more extensively. The intimate personal story is the site from which we are encouraged to discuss the deeper truths of our faith. Personal narratives are programmatically employed as the lens through which we regard Christian truth.

We frequently comment upon the content and manner of our Christian discourse, yet considerably less upon its form.  Perhaps we believe that the form of our discourse is fairly ambivalent: provided that our content is correct, we can be indifferent to the form within which it is presented. Yet, when we look closer, it is easy to see our content, manner, and form exerting subtle influences upon each other. While we should not overstate this mutual influence--neither content nor form, for instance, determine each other--it is imperative that we are alert to it.

Characteristics of the New Storytellers

This new crop of 'storytellers', whose voices were first cradled in the world of blogging and social media, frequently adopt a confessional tone, confiding truths about themselves to their readers. They share their doubts, their hopes, their visions, their anger, their weaknesses, their failings, their sorrows and their joys. For such self-disclosure they are richly rewarded with many devoted fans, who 'relate' to them and are drawn to their vulnerability. They are characterized as 'brave' and 'courageous' for their 'rawness', 'authenticity' and 'honesty' in telling their stories. The typical reactions to their writings are excited expressions of emotional resonance, demonstrative and enthusiastic approval, claims of weeping, etc. 

As these persons tell their stories, others resonate with them and tell their own stories too. Around these shared stories communities are formed, the personal spaces formed by individual stories expanding into shared communal spaces. What I believe we are currently witnessing is an extension of the domain of such spaces, as they assert themselves as a governing context for theological reflection.

The style of discourse of the new storytellers is typically designed primarily to create an emotional impact and impression, rather than to present a closely reasoned argument. Logos tends to get drowned in pathos, which is presumed to provide the grounds of ethos--we should listen to the sort of people who emotionally resonate and empathize with us. Writing is calculated principally to appeal to people's feelings and impressions and encourages people to process the things that they read primarily with their feelings and impressions than with their reasoning. I have commented on this sort of writing before, relating it to the phenomenon of advertising:

If you read many blogs, especially from a certain brand of progressive evangelical, you will notice similar styles of writing and thinking in operation. Sentences are brief, there are numerous single sentence paragraphs, sentences in bold, or fragmented statements. Anecdotes and engaging narratives are consistently employed. Rhetorical questions, potent images, and controlling metaphors are used extensively. Such writing typically persuades by getting the reader to feel something. The responses to such pieces are almost always emotive and affirming, very seldom critical (and critical responses are hardly ever interacted with carefully).

In an age dominated by advertising and the manipulation of feelings for the purpose of persuasion, the proliferation of conversational and self-revelatory styles of discourse, designed to capture people's feelings, where logical argumentation once prevailed, shouldn't surprise us. Where persuasion occurs through feeling, truth becomes bound up in the authentic communication of the 'self' and its passion, rather than in the more objective criteria of traditional discourses, where truth was tested by realities and practices outside of ourselves. This is truth in the mode of sharing one's personal 'sacred story'.

It is for this reason that narrative, anecdote, metaphor, and potent images are so important for such approaches. All of these are non-argumentative ways of drawing and inviting you, the reader, into the feelings of the text. They also serve as ways of avoiding direct ideological confrontation and engagement. By couching what would otherwise have to be presented as a theological argument in an impressionistic narrative they make it very difficult to frame disagreements. The most effective communicators of this type tend to be those who elicit and direct feelings most consistently. It can almost be as hard to have reasonable argument with such people than it would be to argue with an advert.

The new storytellers tend to be representative of a stridently anti-elitist and democratizing movement. The restriction of the theological conversation to trained academics or church leaders or the privileging of them within it is vociferously resisted. Having a 'story' is what qualifies one to speak. Everyone has a story, everyone's story should be told, everyone must tell their own story, and stories are 'sacred'. A person's story is inviolable, integral to their human dignity; to make objective moral statements that challenge a person's story is to dehumanize them.

At the heart of the new storytellers' vision is the value of empathy. Truth arises out of our capacity to feel other people's feelings and to share their perspectives. Emotional resonance is the great test of truth. Feelings are foregrounded within this movement, a movement that typically expresses itself in a drive for 'social justice'. The strong emphasis upon empathy often comes with an equally strong antipathy towards anything that does not emotionally resonate or which hurts one's sensitivities or those of the people with whom one empathizes. Empathy is a focusing and parochial trait and those who are driven by it often have their moral perspective deeply skewed by it. The more one empathizes with a particular party, the less able one typically becomes to recognize the force and legitimacy of competing perspectives (and the more likely one is to feel antipathy towards them) or an overarching moral framework. The empathy of the new storytellers tends to constrain their vision and capacity to understand alternative perspectives.

As they foreground and heighten sensitivities, the new storytellers tend to be highly emotionally reactive. It is imperative for them that they feel that their feelings and the feelings of the people they identify with are empathized with and, consequently, almost every attempt to call their positions into question is met with shrill offence-taking, outrage, recriminations, and tone-policing. It is difficult to 'feel understood' when one is being disagreed with. Issues are surrounded by an emotional shield of sensitivities, making conversation nearly impossible.

With the emphasis on empathy, things often tend to become personal. Criticism is felt as a personal assault and can often provoke vicious reactions. When the positions that I present are inextricably intertwined with my 'story', which is in turn inextricably bound up with my personhood, challenges to my positions are perceived to be an attack upon my very self. The lack of appropriate empathy is perceived to be a vice and empathy is integral to a truth-driven posture. Any position that does not feel appropriately validating and affirming of my personhood must be driven by hate, a 'phobia', or some other pathology. 'Truth' claims are consequently treated with radical suspicion, as it is believed that they dissemble the true driving forces of hatred, fear, violence, and a desire to dominate. A corollary of most instances of the insistence that 'my humanity is not subject to your moral reasoning!' is that people's moral reasoning exists for the purpose of establishing power relations, subjugating others to themselves. When criticism is primarily perceived as personal attack and when truth claims are perceived as veiled attempts to control, receptive dialogue between people of sharply differing positions becomes nigh impossible. Concerns of truth are slowly eclipsed by concerns of empathy or suspected of dissembled antagonisms.

A further feature of the emphasis upon personal narratives is the narrowing of the horizons of interest, concern, and enquiry. A truth that lies beyond and that can lay claim to or relativize our identities retreats from view. Little can attain to the escape velocity from the orbit of our personal stories or break open their claustrophobic horizons to a greater reality and truth beyond. Matters will only occupy our attention to the degree that they express or impinge upon our identities or those of our groups.

 

A Shift in Interpretation and Dialogue

One of the most immediately visible effects of the shifts mentioned above can be seen in a change in posture towards both interpretation and dialogue. The change in the case of interpretation takes the form of a privatization of meaning. Interpretation, as more traditionally understood, seeks to grasp the meaning of texts as something distinct from us. It is a task that calls us to move beyond the immediacy of our own prejudices and personal feelings and to grapple with something distinct from and resistant to ourselves. Meaning is primarily external and interpretation is the process by which we become attentive and receptive to this. By contrast, with the privileging of the personal and affective realm, impression starts to displace interpretation. Meaning is no longer primarily external and publicly accessible, but retreats into the affective realm of the self. The primary meaning of a text starts to become what it 'feels like' to me, what it looks like 'from my perspective', what it 'means to me', or what I 'hear it to be saying.'

As meaning so retreats, texts and words cease to have public meaning and authority, because they mean different things to different people. 'Interpretations'--which are really subjective impressions--are increasingly immune to public judgment and challenge. It is not accidental that one will often find one's statements badly misrepresented in such a context: how people 'hear' you--something radically contingent upon the nature of their affective posture towards you--takes priority over the objective reality of your actual words. Constant misrepresentations, unrelenting projections of assumed 'tone' (because affective posture is so important for the new storytellers and their ilk, as readers and interlocutors they will always be deeply invested in the occult divination of the supposed tone of others), and calls to apologize for the offensive impressions one's statements supposedly provoked all serve to assert and enforce the dominance of thin-skinned readers' sensitivities and sensibilities over any opposing voice. As criticism is felt to be driven by personal animus, a hostile and nasty tone will frequently be projected onto critics' words, portraying their words in the worst possible light. The importance given to affective posture means that, once you have been deemed to be without empathy, there is hardly anything that you can write that can dislodge the impression, as every word you write will meet a jaundiced eye.

'Pervasive interpretative pluralism' also becomes a particularly acute problem when interpretations can no longer be publicly contested. At least when the meaning of texts was perceived to be more public we could weed out and discredit bad interpretations through disputation.

Other popular contemporary approaches to literary criticism tend systematically to prioritize the reader's subjective and ideological positions, only valuing texts to the degree that they are useful to its ends. Texts become the plastic dummies of ventriloquized ideologies, are cannibalized for serviceable parts, or are deconstructed and read against themselves, rather than serving as independent voices in critical conversation with their readers. With the emphasis upon the personal story and the subjective identity and interests of the reader, the new storytellers tend to indulge in readings of Scripture that are characterized by highly selective 'picking and choosing' or which are overwhelmingly driven and constrained by the personal interests and oriented around the personal identities and ideologies of the interpreters.  The result is that Scripture cannot easily function as an authoritative voice over against them.

Criticisms

The Narrowing of Our Vision

To the degree that theological concerns register within the writing of the new storytellers, they are typically situated principally within the affective frames of personal narratives. That is, theological concerns are almost invariably viewed primarily in terms of the more immediate subjective needs, desires, concerns, moral instincts, feelings, doubts, and hopes of the storytellers. As the personal story is given so much weight, it is difficult for theology to pose any great challenge to it or fundamentally to reframe it, decentring the individual. Rather, theology will tend to be drawn around it. Not only are theological concerns framed by personal narrative, theological concerns often only register to the degree that they directly impinge upon personal identities. Within such a context, people will seldom be drawn to contemplate or reflect upon the reality and truth of God as it exceeds immediate relevance to their experience and identities. They will run the real risk of becoming preoccupied with a theology drawn around the idol of their own identities, experience, and ideologies.

The Problems with Empathy

Though routinely praised, empathy is by nature an ambivalent trait and any dependence upon it will tend to produce profoundly unhealthy results. I have already linked to a piece which highlights the bigoted focusing and vindictiveness that frequently characterize it. An emphasis upon empathy will tend to produce ugly polarizations as people emotionally identify so intensely with some positions that they are swallowed up by their immediacy, unable to see any bigger picture.

A focus upon empathy also routinely sacrifices truth to sensitivities, finding it difficult to countenance anything that might make people we identify with feel hurt. As I've observed:

Such an ethic is concerned about anything that might negatively impact upon people's feelings. This negative impact can take a number of forms. None of us should be made to feel judged, condemned, or defiled on account of our actions, nor should we be allowed to feel that we are suffering the just consequences of past sinful actions. As much as humanly possible, we should all be affirmed and validated in our choices and stories. It is unreasonable to hold people to standards that are painful and unpleasant and especially wrong to maintain that someone has a very demanding moral duty when we have no personal experience of their position. Instead of harsh and judgmental language such as 'sin' and 'fornication', we need to be prepared to adopt softer and more therapeutic terms, palliating the unpleasant feeling of shame, and, rather than speaking of God's claim upon us, which can seem demanding and subject us to external judgment and potentially coercion, speak of virtue in terms of the language of self-realization, authenticity, and being all that we can be.

For such an ethic, the sin of non-marital sex takes a backseat to the sin of 'slut-shaming'. Far, far worse than having sex outside of marriage is the possibility that one should be made to feel really bad, impure, judged, or subject to long term adverse consequences on account of that fact...

The more that empathy is foregrounded, the more sensitivities will be given preference over truth or morality. When it becomes imperative that sensitive people not be discomforted by truth or by the claims of morality, our ethics and our discourse concerning truth will hedge itself in ever more qualifiers, or retreat to limp statements about personal preference: 'I feel the practice of Christian chastity is good for me, but your mileage might vary.' Higher norms, principles, values, or realities should not be permitted to impose themselves upon our feelings.

It is important to recognize that Scripture frequently challenges the instinct of empathy, calling judges not to be swayed by pity when enacting God's laws, and condemning leaders who allowed their sense of truth, justice, and obedience to be swayed by emotional ties. The clarity and reality of something--and of Someone--beyond ourselves that claims our loyalties and our lives, of morality and reality that takes priority over our feelings, will only be retained as we resist the sort of excessive empathy for which causing people emotional discomfort is the deepest concern.

Edwin Friedman highlights further problems with an overvaluation of empathy, especially as it relates to the dynamics of groups.  He observes the way that an emphasis upon empathy takes the place of any emphasis upon responsibility and how it is manipulated by the 'sensitive' to make groups without moral nerve adapt to them. The appeal to empathy can close down any uncomfortable movement in the direction of greater responsibility before it begins. Friedman argues that, unless leaders develop a higher threshold for other people's supposed 'pain', the sensitivities of the hyper-sensitive will be used to engage the herding mechanism of the group and shut down any process by which people might be moved towards healthy growth. The more sensitive we become to other people's discomfort and the more that we allow this sensitivity to prevent us from doing or saying anything that might be unpleasant for them, the more we will incentivize their regression into an ever thinner skinned state. Friedman makes clear that he is not criticizing caring for and about others, not is he advocating harming others (which is not the same thing as hurting them). Rather, he is making apparent the difference between care--which aims at healthy growth and responsibility--and empathy--which tends to value people's feelings to the detriment of all else. In the long run, empathy can be profoundly uncaring: when we are so concerned about our pain threshold for other people's discomfort we cease to seek their personal and moral well-being and growth. Growth doesn't typically occur without challenge, or without a measure of discomfort. As Proverbs 27:6 implies, friends can cause us pain for our good, while affirmation and kisses can arise from such an indifference to our well-being that the giver is to be regarded as our enemy.

The overvaluation of empathy has produced a regime of 'niceness'. 'Niceness' is agreeable, inoffensive, tolerant, affirming, inclusive. It never says no, it doesn't draw lines, it doesn't exclude, it never denies. It values feelings over the character of action and intention. The demand for 'niceness' is a means of disqualifying, dismissing, and discrediting without the need for careful engagement and the regime of niceness is enforced by a host of online 'hall monitors' poised to punish the slightest infraction. If someone doesn't use the correct terminology, says something that might potentially be 'offensive' or 'triggering', they can be frozen out of the conversation.

The extreme emphasis upon empathy and niceness and the focus on personal story all arise from a sort of emotional entitlement, the belief that the world should adjust itself to individuals' sensitivities and perspectives. When so elevated the effect is the arresting of growth and a regression into immaturity and self-centredness.

The alternative to empathy is not callousness but compassion. In contrast to empathy, compassion is not an emotive reaction, governed by the feelings of other parties, as these relate to our low pain threshold for their discomfort. Rather it is a loving and responsive moral posture that addresses itself principally to the good of other persons, not to their feelings.

The Shrinking of Truth

I mentioned above the danger of our statements of truth and morality being reduced to statements of personal experience. This is particularly concerning when we are speaking about the Christian faith. For instance, Rachel Held Evans writes:

I often wonder if the role of the clergy in this age is not to dispense information or guard the prestige of their authority, but rather to go first, to volunteer the truth about their sins, their dreams, their failures, and their fears in order to free others to do the same. 

'Volunteering the truth about their sins' is rather different from telling the truth about sin more generally. The clergy are no longer so much those especially entrusted with upholding and communicating God's truth, but those who communicate their own truths in a liberating manner. Sharing one's autobiographical truth in hope that it might resonate with others is quite a different thing from sharing a Truth to which we all must submit, a Reality greater than all of our personal narratives, a Story that relativizes all of our stories, and a One who lays claim to our allegiance. As the Apostle Paul declares in 2 Corinthians 4:5: 'For we do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your bondservants for Jesus' sake.'

None of this is to deny the value of personal testimony and narrative in its own place, just that that place is at the centre of the picture.

Why we Shouldn't Trust Our Stories

Our stories told from inside are not necessarily trustworthy. Slavoj Žižek observes:

The first lesson of psychoanalysis here is that this "richness of inner life" is fundamentally fake: it is a screen, a false distance, whose function is, as it were, to save my appearance. ... The experience we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is thus a lie--the truth lies rather outside, in what we do. 

Žižek's description of our personal narratives--'the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing'--is an exceedingly important one. As I observe elsewhere:

First, 'our story' is not some eternal truth, but an account told by interested and unreliable narrators--ourselves--and should be handled very carefully as a result. Second, not only are we the narrators of our own stories but we are also the primary hearers--it is a story we 'tell ourselves about ourselves.' We are the ones most easily and typically deceived (usually willingly) by our own unreliable narration. Third, it is a story told 'in order to account for what we are doing.' As such it is a story typically designed to help us live with ourselves and our actions. It is usually a rationalization, an attempt to make sense of our actions retrospectively, in a manner that acts as a defence against the harshness of the ethical or rational judgment that they might otherwise provoke.

Recognizing the character of personal stories is imperative. We can easily deceive ourselves with our stories. They are not the unvarnished truth. They are not merely the brute 'facts' but are interpretations and constructions, interpretations and constructions that should not be preserved from cross-examination or challenge. If we focus wholly upon the immediacy of our personal story as narrated from within, we will typically be highly subject to the blinding effects of our self-empathy, our reluctance to subject our actions to the painful scrutiny of more absolute external standards or perspectives. We often like to portray our internal selves with rich colours in order to deflect attention from the far less flattering cold reality of our external actions.

The morally blinding potential of the first-person perspective and the elevation of empathy is well illustrated by infidelity's recurring presence in romantic movies. Critically acclaimed Oscar winning movies such as Titanic, The English Patient, Brokeback Mountain, The Bridges of Madison County, all have infidelity or adultery as a key element. However, the audience seldom registers the wickedness and the immense damage caused by the protagonists' actions because they are so absorbed in their first-person perspective and the intensity of their love. For this first-person perspective, adopted through the film-makers' co-option of our empathic instinct, sin will be rationalized and wronged parties will tend to be painted in a negative light in order to make us feel better about the sins committed against them by our heroes. If we were to step back from the first-person framing, resist the pull upon our empathy, and look at matters more objectively, we would be appalled.

The Need for Public and Confrontational Discourse

Intimate personal spaces operate differently from public spaces. Public spaces don't belong to any particular individual. They are arenas which we can enter and participate in, but from which we can periodically retreat to private, personal spaces. Because they represent a non-intimate and bounded arena of discourse, public spaces are very useful sites for directly tackling differences of opinion that would be highly threatening in a more personal space.

The new storytellers privileging of personal narrative frequently comes with resistance to the manner of public discourse. Sensitivities are appealed to as reason to curtail public discourse, lest it 'trigger' vulnerable participants. Rather than exposing people to unsettling challenge, we must carry out our conversations in a 'safe space'. The privileging of personal narrative and sensitivities squeezes out challenging public discourse from two directions. On the one hand it is insisted that public discourse must be inclusive and that people must tell their personal narratives and not address issues in which they are implicated in their absence. On the other hand it is insisted that public discourse must be carefully policed to ensure that it is safe and sensitive to these persons. As they claim to be 'dehumanized' or triggered by voices that challenge their personal narratives and the identities bound up in them contrary voices are often disqualified from speaking or muzzled.

Public spaces call us to public conversation. Public conversation differs from private and personal conversation in summoning people beyond the immediacy of their own particularity and self-expression to relate positions together within a broader and more universal 'horizon'. Hans-Georg Gadamer observes: 'To acquire a horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand--not in order to look away from it but to see it better, within a larger whole and in truer proportion.'  Gadamer distinguishes this process from 'the empathy of one individual for another' or from 'subordinating another person to our own standards.'  He identifies the way that many people operate in terms of 'closed horizons,' for which the other party's vantage point is always so 'factored into' what he is trying to say that his voice cannot move beyond the cultural, social, and material conditions from which it arose to speak truth to different vantage points. This falsely insulates us from voices that might unsettle or relativize our own perspectives.

Gadamer's focus in these passages is upon horizons within history, but similar principles apply to public conversation, which calls us to venture without the cloistered walls of our own self-expression and identity groupings to situate ourselves within a broader horizon alongside others. As we do this, that which is most immediate to us will no longer enjoy such determining power over our thought and we will become more alert to truth that exceeds our vantage points. Within the larger context, although it never ceases to exert a powerful influence upon us, our personal perspective no longer enjoys the same privilege. Although we are situated within the immediacy of a particular historical and personal horizon, we are not imprisoned within it, but can expand and change that horizon, 'fusing' it with others, chiefly through encounter and engagement with different vantage points upon truth that exceeds us all.

The recognition that, while we all have a particular vantage point, we are not imprisoned by it and we need to move beyond the immediacy of our own situatedness to operate in terms of a more universal horizon is of considerable importance. This exposes the radical limitations of an approach that is narrowly fixated upon the immediacy of personal narratives and empathic identifications.

Public and confrontational discourse is a means by which societies seek to operate within a more universal horizon. Such discourse takes cognizance of particular vantage points, but presses us to articulate such vantage points in a way that overcomes the distorting refractions of what is nearest to us, not least our personal narratives and empathic identifications. Operating within a more universal horizon isn't a straightforward affair, but requires discipline of us.

Most people are limited in the degree to which they are equipped to participate in such discourse. This is one of the reasons why traditional discourse does not adopt an egalitarian form. Rather, discourse is differentiated in character. For instance, in a law court personal stories and vantage points are heeded as testimony is given. These vantage points are then subjected to questioning and cross-examination as legal representatives try to place such stories within a broader horizon. Judges, juries, legal representatives, eyewitnesses, defendants, expert witnesses, reporters, and other figures all play differentiated roles in a complex and multifaceted conversation that is designed to produce a just judgment. The limitations of personal narrative are recognized by the structure and exposed in the course of the conversation.

Much the same thing is required of us in our theological conversation as Christians. While we do need to hear the witness of those who are personally invested, but we also need to expose them to the scrutiny and questioning of a greater horizon of truth. We need rigorous theological argumentation and careful judgment by people who aren't immediately personally invested and who are less likely to have their vision distorted by personal interest or empathy. We need to resist the overvaluation of the first-person perspective or identity-driven accounts of truth. We need to foster public discourses committed to the pursuit of truth through mutual challenge, discourses that routinely unsettle and discomfort us, as these are primary contexts of personal and societal growth and maturation.

Conclusion

Within these posts I have characterized and criticized the new storytellers. Although their sensibilities are widely shared within our society and have considerable traction, I have argued for the need firmly to challenge them. I have maintained that the new storytellers' elevation of the first-person perspective, emphasis upon empathy, and stress upon niceness, self-evidently justified though they may seem to many of our contemporaries, are in fact fundamentally and fatally misguided. I have argued for the importance of establishing modes and contexts of discourse that relativize personal narrative and subject it to the discipline and challenge of more public, objective, and universal truth and reason. Our stories are not 'sacred', nor are they a straightforward expression of our humanity. While they should be attended to and while we should recognize the dignity of every person as God's creation, personal narratives should not be immune to challenge or questioning.

Finally, recognition of the restrictive frame of the personal narrative should drive us towards a greater appreciation of and acquaintance with the One in terms of whose Story all other stories must be retold and from which all other stories must take their bearings. While God does not 'empathize' with us in our stories, he comes to us with love, compassion, and kindness. He comes to save us from the lies that we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing and to give us a new way of telling our stories. As we are caught up in a Story far bigger than ourselves we can also discover a new way of relating to others, one that depends not upon our limited capacity for empathy and instinctive mutual emotional resonance, but upon the oneness that we can share in Christ and the way that all are comprehended in God's purposes. Such a form of storytelling is liberating and expansive, as all obstacles between identity groups are traversed by the rushing wind of God's renewing Spirit, when it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us.