So that's the problem!

Because God is active in Jesus Christ, Christ’s call is both an act of grace and an act of salvation without failing to be a call to obedience at the same time…At the center of Bonhoeffer’s soteriology is his insistence that the unredeemed human subject is trapped inside itself…Only as the sinful human subject is encountered by God’s own self can the human person be liberated from his or her own self-imposed entrapment, isolation, and the resulting alienation from others. Neither human action nor human reflection is capable of delivering humanity from its self-enclosed isolationism. Only by being actively confronted by the living God can the human self be freed from its distorted selfhood to be free for God and for others in community. Self-reflection is not the solution to the problem; it only compounds the problem.—Bonhoeffer the Assassin?, pages 140-141

<idle musing>
Indeed! And in our self-worshiping society, with it's constant attention to self, we are compounding the problem every moment...and the solution seems ridiculous. Death to self? Are you crazy? Deny your self? Yougottabekiddingme!
</idle musing>