“The simplest reason Christians have to unlearn the story of the autonomous individual, therefore, is this: It makes the story of everything into a story about myself. "Everything" is finally drawn into the self that I take myself to be. Whatever is not of my-self is subject to myself. I am the ruler not only of myself but of all things in relation to myself. Which is to say that I have become God. The sovereignty that is proper to God is repositioned within the individual human. I am the God of my life, I am self-sufficient, I decide who I am, and nothing can intrude on my freedom to be exactly this self-ruled, self-sufficient, self-unto-itself. This is idolatry of the most basic kind: the inversion of the Imago. No longer does God image himself in me; I have taken God's image and turned myself into God. I am the God who images myself in the world.” - page 90

“that the story of the autonomous individual cannot fund life together. It will break down and eventually fail, and the lives we've hoped to live together will come apart. (In-deed, we are witnessing the tremors of such failure now.) But it is still the most powerful narrative about the human being that underpins much of the modern West. And it is both intoxicating and toxic to us all. It is intoxicating because there is a heady, even euphoric, sense of freedom” - page 89

“Lawyers have a central place in the story of the autonomous individual precisely because they must exist to enforce the contracts that we agree to but to which we are not truly bound. We have to force people to do what we know they don't really have to do as autonomous individuals.

Law, and the force that backs it, are conceived and used as resistance to the implosion of a society that believes the story of the autonomous individual.”

"Freedom for [the early Christians] was freedom from self- obsession and self-protection and for obedience and service to Christ in every corner of the earth.

And it was freedom to hope in and to anticipate God's good work everywhere even in the face of demise and death. The resurrection of Jesus established a future beyond death to which the Christians looked forward and which reached back into the midst of the present. Their vision was for eternity, and that gave them remarkable freedom and power in the present.

They believed that life would win even when death struck its mortal blow. And they thus trained not to fear death in a world full of its obvious power. And that meant that no matter what came the Christians were completely free to surprise the world.

They had good news, and they were going to share it. High and low, near and their way, far, the gospel went to work."

"In short, the early Christians attempted to live out the story that gave them their humanity-the shape of the lives in which they discovered who the human truly was. It set them free to proclaim the gospel anywhere and everywhere, to disobey the Roman demand to worship, to risk death in a plague, to care for each other in costly ways, to raise children who were not their own, to build hospitals, to establish places of rest for the indigent and homes for orphans, to take time to educate themselves in the reading of scripture, and to do all these things and many, many more-without any obvious earthly reward."

"Wherever God's light could possibly shine, there the Christians were to be."

"The story of everything is the story of God and not-God, and there is nothing else. There is no wider story that encompasses that story. It is the one story within which all other stories can be told.

... human beings don't need comprehensive stories to oppress other human beings." page 82

"the story of the autonomous individual says that the "I" is self-sovereign, emerges into without any prior obligations that have been placed on it, and chooses the laws it has for itself.

...imagine an isolated individual, unconnected by any necessity to anything else at all and able to make for itself the life it chooses to make. The will of this individual is inherently free and chooses from an original position of freedom what sort of attachments and commitments it will have.

Nothing can be forced upon the autonomous self from with- out that it does not agree to from within. When someone or something— a person, other people, various groups, governments, and so forth-tries to force the "I" to accept something it does not will to accept, the "I" is violated. The border between the "I" and the world of self-chosen obligations has been broken, and the invaders have entered territory that is not theirs.

The territory of the "I" is mine alone-inviolable, sovereign, free." -p85