You Are Not Your Own but Belong to Christ
There is a Christian version of affirmation that fails to ground our identity. Christians will sometimes speak of their identity in Christ as a response to feelings of insecurity or an identity crisis. You may hear a ministry encourage you not to “find your identity in your work” (or beauty, or wealth, or education, or whatever the idol may be) and instead to find it in Christ.
There is an important truth here: in liquid modernity, we will try all sorts of means to hold together our identity. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, liquid can only be temporarily forced into a shape, just as our identities can only be temporarily solidified in liquid modernity.
Imagine yourself as four ounces of water. You are infinitely malleable. Others may try to impose a shape upon you, but you are fundamentally liquid. You may pour the water into a glass (an identity) in order to give it form, but the water doesn’t actually become solid unless you freeze it.
It is true that modern people, stuck with selves that are more like water than ice, tend to obsessively try out different cups and glasses to give form to our lives. You might “find your identity” in being physically fit or in advocating for a particular social justice cause or in a theology or a style of music—all different kinds of glasses and cups.
The danger for Christians who urge others to find their identity in Christ is that most modern people have a secular understanding of identity, one rooted in that contemporary anthropology, where identity has more to do with lifestyle and image than personhood. “Christ” becomes just another, better identity. You’re still pouring water into a cup, you just had to find the right cup.
“The danger for Christians who urge others to find their identity in Christ is that most modern people have a secular understanding of identity, one rooted in that contemporary anthropology, where identity has more to do with lifestyle and image than personhood. ”
There are a number of serious problems with this advice. For one, what exactly does the Christ-identity look like? Certainly, being a follower of Christ gives you a set of morals and a community. We may go so far as to say that Christianity offers us an entire worldview. But morality, community, and worldview are not identity. They can contribute to our identity, but they are not our identity.
An identity necessarily includes a name and a face. I am O. Alan Noble. There may be other O. Alan Nobles in the world, but to address me, you must call my name and look at my face. When you do, you refer to the person (with a consciousness, body, and history) who has had certain experiences, carries certain memories, and can be said to hold a “biblical worldview.”
But when you address me, you are not addressing my worldview or morality or community or even the sum of all those things. It turns out, all the “identities” I have tried on, all the cups I have poured myself into, aren’t actually solid identities at all. If Christianity is merely a different cup, even if it is a superior cup, then my “identity” in Christ is no more than a style of living.
When we encourage people to find their identity in Christ, what we too often mean is that all the other cups we choose to pour our identity into are idols that can never give us the solid identity we desire. This is true, but it’s equally true that if we consider Christianity just a different cup, then it is no better. In fact, it can become just as much of an idol.
The kind of affirmation of personhood I am speaking of in the Christian anthropology is radically different from secular affirmation and from calls to “find your identity in Christ” that do not challenge the modern conception of identity.
If you are your own and belong to Christ, then your personhood is a real creation, objectively sustained by God. And as a creation of God, you have no obligation to create your self. Your identity is based on God’s perfect will, not your own subjective, uncertain will. All your efforts to craft a perfect, marketable image add nothing to your personhood. The reason the opinions of others don’t define you isn’t because your opinion is the only one that counts, but because you are not reducible to any human efforts of definition. The only being who can fully know you and understand you without reducing you to a stereotype or an idol is God.
“The reason the opinions of others don’t define you isn’t because your opinion is the only one that counts, but because you are not reducible to any human efforts of definition. ”
This does not mean that you don’t have a “true self.” You do. But it is just not one that you are burdened with creating. We live as our true selves when we stand transparently before God, moment by moment, as Kierkegaard reminds us: The self’s task is “to become itself, which can only be done in relationship to God.” This means knowing that we are spirit as well as body. It means living in light of eternity without the effacement of earthy life. It means knowing that we are a miraculous creation, a pure gift from a loving God. It means that we have limits, we have duties, obligations, and commandments that we must obey. It means we are contingent and dependent upon God. Anytime we imagine ourselves to be autonomous, anytime we, like Cain, strive to be utterly self-sufficient and deny the hand of God in our lives, we are not merely in sin; we are in denial about the way things truly are. In Kierkegaard’s view, this denial is fundamentally despair. Our contemporary drive to be authentic can find its fulfillment in the active choice to recognize our belonging to and before God.
In Rowan Williams’s book Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life, the Anglican theologian captures the Christian understanding of identity:
You have an identity, not because you have invented one, or because you have a little hard core of selfhood that is unchanged, but because you have a witness of who you are. What you don’t understand or see, the bits of yourself you can’t pull together in a convincing story, are all held in a single gaze of love. You don’t have to work out and finalize who you are, and have been; you don’t have to settle the absolute truth of your history or story. In the eyes of the presence that never goes away, all that you have been and are is still present and real; it is held together in that unifying gaze.
Human identity assumes and requires an external person who can acknowledge and affirm us, who can say our name, look us in the face, and tell us it is good that we exist. It can’t be a generic statement or a platitude either. When we see someone wearing a T-shirt that says, “The World Needs You!,” nobody seriously feels acknowledged and affirmed. When a famous YouTuber tells his young, emotionally vulnerable viewers that they are “all beautiful just the way they are,” they only feel affirmed if they fantasize about him saying those words to them, personally, face to face. The fantasy quickly fades, however. Like a dying fire, it requires constant attention and fuel to keep it alive. Which is one reason YouTubers and celebrities who target insecure teenagers tend to have obsessive and addicted fans.
To know that we are okay, we need acknowledgment and affirmation from someone who knows us. We desire to be truly known and loved for who we are—not for the image of ourselves that we have created, not for the image of ourselves created by other people, and not for us as a generic human with certain inalienable rights or potentials, but ourselves as we really are. That’s why I have been emphasizing the importance of your name and face.
It is no coincidence that one of the most common blessings in the Christian tradition includes the image of God looking at us in the face. In Numbers 6:24-26, the Lord gives Moses a blessing for Aaron and his sons:
The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
The repetition of “you” and of the Lord turning His face upon our face stresses the personal nature of the Lord’s blessing. The God of the Bible is a God who loves nations and peoples and persons. It is only in God that we can find someone who can know us without any deception and love us still. Our identity is grounded in the loving gaze of God. When we stand transparently before God, abandoning our efforts of self-establishment and confessing our sins and accepting His grace, we feel that loving gaze upon us.
Adapted from You Are Not Your Own by Alan Noble. Copyright (c) 2021 by Alan Noble. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, www.ivpress.com.
Alan Noble (PhD, Baylor University) is associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University, cofounder and editor in chief of Christ and Pop Culture, and an advisor for the AND Campaign. He has written for the Atlantic, Vox, BuzzFeed, The Gospel Coalition, Christianity Today, and First Things. He is also the author of Disruptive Witness.