“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
Growing Dominion, Part 42
Self-interest is built into us. We do not have to create it, and it is not possible to annihilate it. It is fixed; it is a given. This means that when I have a toothache, I know instinctively that a more desirable state of affairs would be for me to not have the toothache. If I am standing outside in the rain, then I should know enough to come in from the rain. Now, how does this relate to the contrast between self-interest and selfishness? God not only gives us enough sense to come in from the rain, He also places us in community. This means that we frequently find ourselves with not enough blessings to go around-e.g. rain, and too many people for the available roof. In turn, this means that we are called to apportion those blessings according to a particular hierarchy of values. How we do that determines whether we are selfish or not.
Reducing this to simplistic terms, if you walk through the kitchen, and there is a plate of cookies there, and you are hungry, then by all means take one. Self-interest means that you eat when you are hungry, not that you eat when somebody else is hungry. But if you are walking through the kitchen, and there is a plate there with four cookies, and you have four kids due home from school in about ten minutes, and your wife just put those cookies out, then to eat one is selfishness, and not self-interest.
Someone who is pursuing the demands of self-interest can always be accused of selfishness (and in our envious times, will be accused of it). The reason we are vulnerable to such charges at all is that when we are chewing on the cookie, someone can always come up and declare that we are not doing it for altruistic reasons. And the reason we have trouble defending ourselves might be one of two. First, we might have trouble answering the charge of selfishness because we were being selfish. Second, we might have trouble answering the charge because we have been falsely taught that selflessness must mean absolutely no self-interest. But this is radically unbiblical.