Grace and Identity

Some years ago, I was strolling through Roscrea, Ireland, one of my favorite villages in that lovely country, when a friend cheerfully greeted me with a hearty and completely typical Irish salutation. “David Cassidy, is dat yerself?” I laughed and, with almost liturgical rhythm, joyfully replied, “Tis meself, Fergus!”

“Is dat yerself” has to be one of the most unique greetings in all the world. These days, it’s also a most poignant, prophetic, and urgent question. Questions about who we are - about identity, personhood, gender - about what it means to be human have flooded into our daily conversations. The answers to these questions are often confusing and unsettling, and there’s a need for a response to these new ideas, one characterized by clarity and charity, by both bracing truth and patient mercy.

“Who are you… What do you say about yourself?” the emissaries from Jerusalem asked John the Baptist as they investigated his popular movement, drawing people out to the desert. They had their ideas and suspicions about John. They asked, “Are you the Messiah? Are you the Prophet? Are you Elijah?”, John answered each of these with a decisive ‘No’. “I’ll tell you who I am”, he said. “I’m what Isaiah said I am - a voice, crying in the wilderness…” John’s contemporaries had a lot of ideas about who they thought or maybe even hoped he might be, but John found his identity in the truth about him revealed in the Scriptures. That’s not where most people turn right now to wrestle with questions of identity.

Who Am I?

Our pride teaches us to ceaselessly wrestle with who we are and what others think of us. A vast array of colorful opinions are offered to tell us the answer to the question, “Who are you… what do you say about yourself?”

● You are your desires, especially your sexual desires

● You are your achievements

● You are your sins and failures

● You are your political tribe

● You are your ethnicity or nationality

To the end of each of these possibilities is appended the benediction, “And you be you!” What could be more self-evident than arriving at the authentic ‘me’ through cultivating everything I discover within myself? I must be me, and that identity surely isn’t found in some ancient dusty text but in the desires pulsating through my body and mind and in the people who, like me, accept me as me. Or so the argument goes.

This is deeply ingrained in us and our society as a matter of personal freedom. Even Disney knows this and immortalizes this approach to identity with the now-famous lyrics from Frozen memorized by a million singing children:

It’s time to see what I can do

To test the limits and break through

No right, no wrong, no rules for me

I’m free!

If a restriction or boundary is even suggested to rule over or negate some aspect of our self-expression, then you’re going to have to ‘let it go!’

The conclusion is quickly drawn that personal freedom - defined as the capacity to be the authentic self - is endangered or denied by the imposition of tradition or unchanging truth from outside of ourselves. Our mission is to ‘break free’ and make of ourselves what we are supposed to be. While pride is nothing new, this ego-centric obsession with the self as a virtue is most assuredly new. Sociologist Robert Bellah notes that a pre-modern person would seek to make something of the world, but the postmodern person seeks to make something of the self. This has the force of religious dogma in a post/anti-religious culture, and it is why any move to ‘deny the self’ is viewed so negatively and any move to deny any person the ability to assert their identity is viewed as oppressive and dangerous, even anti-human. Westerners think of our identity as rooted in and expressed by personal preferences and passions.

This is especially true regarding the hot-button issue of human sexuality. This has not always been so. For many centuries, we spoke of two categories of people regarding sexuality: male and female. That biological binary was the identifier. That men and women had sexual desires of all kinds, licit and illicit, was beside the point. Those desires represented their attractions, whether for good or bad, but did not define their persons. That they acted in various ways sexually was well known, but those actions were exactly that – actions – not identities. They were men and women. They were (and remain) image-bearers of God.

I Am that I Am

In the nineteenth century, the shift away from a view of humanity as God’s image-bearers to self-constructed individuals began to accelerate. It was then that the notion of ‘individualism’, a term that was first used by DeToqueville in connection with Enlightenment assertions (broadly considered) about the nature of human personhood, began its rapid ascent as an arbiter of freedom and fulfillment. This movement marked the transition from what Charles Taylor has referred to as the ‘porous self’ to the ‘buffered self’.

The porous self existed in communion with a world beyond the visible, an ‘enchanted’ cosmos of spirit forces and communion between these and the tangible, visible order. The ‘buffered self’, by way of contrast, holds to a society in which there exists a hard, fixed, impenetrable boundary between persons and ‘the other’, specifically any supposed supernatural being(s) if they – or it — even exists.

The porous self could find its meaning and identity in relationship to God above. The buffered self, denying either the existence of or accessibility to God, cannot discover its meaning beyond itself; it cannot look up but must instead look within itself for identity and meaning. The porous self confesses, “I am who God has said that I am,” while the buffered modern must say, “I am who I say that I am.”

It is the latter option that prevails today. People once saw their personal identity in relationship to the Creator, who assigned to them their creaturely identity: male or female. The new way of seeing reality did away with God’s relevance and authority to name/identify us; we were left to ourselves to define ourselves. How can we do so? Without referencing the Creator above, humans decided to turn to our desires within.

Charles Taylor calls this approach to human identity ‘radical expressivism’, and others refer to this as ‘expressive individualism’. While it concerns far more than our sexual selves, it also clearly includes them, and in some cases, these have become the defining characteristic of the person.

The Search for the Self

This search for the authentic self is rooted in Romanticist notions of the self, of giving full expression to feeling, especially that which is spontaneous and therefore viewed as ‘pure’. Nature is seen as neutral and intrinsic to the self, as Taylor again notes, “Fulfilling my nature means espousing the inner ‘elan, the voice or impulse… expressivism is the basis for a new and fuller individuation…’”

In the definition of the self rooted in desire and impulse, people had to take account of the sexual self to express identity. If one’s desires are for the opposite sex, one confesses, ‘I AM’ a heterosexual, but if one’s erotic desires are for another person of the same sex, then one can say, ‘I AM’ a homosexual.

The heart’s voice has a higher place in this new hierarchy of being than the body’s structure. ‘Male and Female’ fade into the background; ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ step forward as identities.

Others find their identity in their achievements. Those might be academic, professional, athletic, artistic, financial, or even physical beauty. The problem with this lies in the fleeting nature of such achievements; hard-won heights can be quickly lost, beauty fades, and those who lose these often feel themselves to be lost.

A very prominent musician I know was talking with me recently about his struggle in this area. “I love what I do, and I find it incredibly fulfilling. But”, he continued, “I also find that what I do is taking a toll on me and my family. I know this isn’t my identity, but sometimes I feel like it is. If I stop doing this, then who will I really be?”

Some would define their identity in reference to their race or nation, or even perhaps by their social class. More often than not, the prevailing thought today is that people are not what God says they are, what they do, or what they’ve achieved, but what they feel they are. They self- identify, and no one can say that a person isn’t who they say that they are.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has given legal standing to this notion that we are who we feel ourselves to be and that nothing may impede this expression of the true self. In the 1996 Supreme Court decision in Romer vs Evans, Kennedy wrote, ‘At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.’ I cannot imagine a more apt summary of the philosophy most North Americans live by than these words: they appear to be sacrosanct, incontestable, self-evidently true. Are they?

Lady Bird Moments

One of my favorite films is the 2018 Greta Gerwig comedy-drama Lady Bird. Saoirse Ronan brilliantly portrays a girl in her late teens disaffected from her mother, disappointed in her father, and looking to break out of the confines of her upbringing, moving out into the freedom of who she truly is and away from the backward, boring life of her hometown.

In an uproarious scene that sets the story’s tone, she hurls herself out of the moving car her mother is driving just to escape her mother’s voice. To make clear she will not accept any identity imposed on her by others, she rejects her name, Christine, choosing ‘Lady-Bird’ as her name. “Is that your given name?” a teacher asks her. “I gave it to myself. It’s given to me by me.” That’s as ‘assertive individualism’ as can be imagined.

Lady Bird wants to get to the East Coast for college, as far away from her home in Sacramento as possible, and she succeeds. On arrival, however, seeing the emptiness of the life she thought would be ‘free,’ she walks past a Church, reminding her of the Catholic school where she was educated back home. In that church, she rediscovers the beauty of the love that gave her life and meaning. In the end, we watch entranced as she calls her home and leaves this message: “Hi, Mom and Dad. It’s me. Christine. The name you gave me. It’s a good one.”

This is the epiphany we all need, the moments when we discover that the asserted, imposed, or achieved identities we’ve fought so tenaciously to maintain or reject are not where we discover our true selves. Like John the Baptist, we can also learn to discover ourselves in the pages of the text rather than in the passions of our souls, gifts given to us as signal fires sent to point us beyond ourselves to the author of life, God himself. He alone is the One in whom we can find eternal consolation and satisfaction. We finally see that the name he gives us in Christ, despite any protests we want to mount, is actually a precious identity, the authentic self of redemption.

Long before Greta Gerwig wrote Lady Bird, St. Augustine helped the world understand how deeply we need to come home to God to discover our true identity. In Confessions, he writes to God, “I had departed from myself. I could not even find myself, much less you.” This inability to discover himself - despite his wild pursuit of pleasure and acclaim - only reinforced for Augustine that authentic humanness could not be located in his own achievement.

In his Institutes, Calvin notes that our knowledge of ourselves and our knowledge of God is an interdependent knowledge: we know ourselves when we know God and apart from him we haven’t fully discovered our identity. Before the Prodigal headed home to his father, his first turn was within. “When he came to himself”, Jesus said, he was then able to go home. Grace teaches us that our alienation from our true selves cannot be solved by seeking for our identity in the distant countries of our rebellious self-imposed exiles, but only back home in our father’s arms.

By the Grace of God

The Apostle Paul knew that he was not yet what he wanted to be, even if he was no longer what he once was. “By the grace of God, I am what I am”, he wrote to the Corinthians. That’s true for us as well. Because we are God’s people by creation and redemption, our identity isn’t summed up in any categories contemporary culture uses as the gold standard. We are not our sexuality – even our status as male and female for the purpose of marriage and procreation is a temporary relationship; in eternity, we are ‘as the angels’ and not given in marriage. We are not our accomplishments – they will either fade away as the product of our efforts or become crowns we cast before Christ in worship, acknowledging that all comes from him, exists through him, and returns to him.

So, who are we?

● We are humans made in God’s image, according to his likeness, male and female, just a little lower than the angels and crowned with glory.

● We are humans in need of a Savior because the image of God in us has been vandalized by our rebellion against God. The fateful poison of that pride runs deep in us, influencing us at every step and enslaving our wills to sin. “The wages of sin is death”, Paul wrote. That’s still true. But so is what follows the words - “but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:23).

● We are humans justified/made righteous and adopted by the Father through the atoning work of Christ, united to him by the Holy Spirit, sanctified by the Spirit’s work to conform us to Christ, and in a life-long fight to the death with temptations from without made more enticing by the sin which continues to indwell us.

● We are humans who were slaves to sin, but who are now sons and daughters of God.

● We are humans whose best deeds did not and could not save us because our very best was still polluted with the toxins that destroyed us to begin with, but whose deeds now, however pitiable, are sacred offerings made perfect in heaven through Jesus’ mediation.

Because of God’s kindness, we who were dead are now alive in Christ. We are in Christ, and while we are not yet all we shall one day be, we are most assuredly not who we once were. We once were fallen; we are now made new; we will one day find ourselves fully restored to the ancient beauty that was so horrifyingly marred by our rebellion so long ago. To Christians living in one of the most sexually licentious cultures of the ancient world, Paul wrote “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. The new has come.” And the new, not the old, is who we are and signals the way to our heart’s true home.