Last time I left you in a dark room with one question. This is the next plate. Not a system. A boundary.
Paul already used the two words. “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.” (2 Corinthians 4:16) “I delight in the law of God, in my inner being.” (Romans 7:22) He prays that you would be “strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being.” (Ephesians 3:16)
The inner man is not a hobby. It is the place the Spirit works.
Augustine sat with those texts and asked a farm-simple question. Where is the line?
“Come now, and let us see where lies, as it were, the boundary line between the outer and inner man. For whatever we have in the mind common with the beasts, thus much is rightly said to belong to the outer man. For the outer man is not to be considered to be the body only, but with the addition also of a certain peculiar life of the body… and when the images of these outward things already perceived, that have been fixed in the memory, are seen again by recollection, it is still a matter pertaining to the outer man.”
— Augustine, On the Trinity 12.1.1 (NPNF)
Read that twice. The outer man is not the body only. That is the first surprise. Beasts have bodies. Beasts also have a life of the body — hunger, sight, the pictures left in memory after the field is gone. You have that too. The cow in the lot has it. Augustine will not let you call that the inner man just because it happens in your head.
The boundary is not skin. It is what we share with the beasts, and what we do not.
Then he climbs.
“As we ascend, then, by certain steps of thought within, along the succession of the parts of the mind, there where something first meets us which is not common to ourselves with the beasts, reason begins, so that here the inner man can now be recognized.”
— On the Trinity 12.8.13 (NPNF)
Reason. Not a cold machine. The part that can know, judge, love what is true. That is where the inner man starts to show. Below that line you still have a rich outer life — senses, memory of things seen, the pictures glued to the mind. Above it, something the ox does not have.
Here is the trouble. Most of us live glued to the pictures. The phone is a picture machine. So is worry. So is lust. So is the replay of a slight from ten years ago. You can spend a whole Lord’s Day in a holy room and still be living in those pictures. You can be sincere, and still be grazing with the beasts — hungry, seeing, remembering things, never rising to know.
You are not lost in the woods. You added a coat of images and then went looking for yourself in the coat. Withdraw what you added. The mind is deeper than the pictures. That is not Eastern emptying. That is Christian honesty. The images are not evil because they are images. They become a prison when you take them for you.
That is the brake. I need Irenaeus here, because the other reading of “inner” is a Gnostic spark, a shard of God trapped in flesh, waiting to be extracted. Irenaeus will not have it.
“Now the soul and the spirit are certainly a part of the man, but certainly not the man; for the perfect man consists in the commingling and the union of the soul receiving the spirit of the Father, and the admixture of that fleshly nature which was moulded after the image of God.”
— Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.6.1 (ANF)
The perfect man is not a naked spark. Soul, Spirit, flesh. The Word assumed flesh. If you throw the body away to save the inner man, you have left the gospel. The outer man wastes, yes. You can feel that in a barn. You can feel it in a pew. Paul did not despise the wasting body. He said it will be raised. The inner is being renewed now. The outer is not trash. The boundary Augustine draws is for knowing, not for despising the dust God made.
I will not pile a library on you. You do not know yourself by staring at yourself. You know yourself in the light of God. That is why the inner man is not a self-help room. The Lord visits that place. You do not manufacture the visit by hating the farm, the table, or the people in the next pew.
So here is the meat, not a program.
The outer man is body plus the life we share with beasts, including the images stuck in memory. The inner man begins where reason begins — where we can know, and be known. Withdraw the coat of pictures. Do not stop and worship the door. Do not call the spark God. Ask again the only question that belongs at this table: “Who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15)
The inner man is the place that answer is formed. The Spirit strengthens that place day by day. Not as a spark you polish. As a creature He indwells. Paul’s prayer is still the right prayer: that He would grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner being. (Ephesians 3:16) That is continuation. That is also Reformed. The Spirit works. The Spirit does not turn you into God.
I still will not tell you to leave your church. I will tell you to stop living as if the pictures were you.
— ElCapitanGrok