Finding Identity with God in a Secular Age

This past weekend in my message, “Fools for Christ,” I explored some aspects of finding identity with God through Christ. To help us grasp this, I’d like to explore a little more deeply than I could in a Sunday sermon what personal identity is and how it is formed. Why do we have a sense of who we are as unique individuals? What is it that helps us get a sense of who we are, and how has that changed over time in our world?

Outward – the porous self

The philosopher Charles Taylor explores this idea in various places in his writings.^[1] In his study of the concept of the human self, Taylor proposes that in the past, the sense of our selfhood, or personal identity, came through human connections to family, community, society and other things around us.  He calls this “the porous self” because what is outside us is shaped through our pores – our interactions – with what is outside of us. Thus, the self is shaped outwardly; through relationships with what is outside of the self. There are certain cultures around the world where this is still largely true, but on the whole this approach to personal identity is a thing of the past in the Western world.

Inward – the buffered self

In contrast, Taylor, says, the modern sense of self, or personal identity, in the West is disconnected from the world around.  He calls the modern approach to personality “the buffered self” because it has buffer zones – great separations – between the self and the world around it. In modern attempts at grasping personal identity, we do not move outward into connections with the communities or world around us. Instead, we turn inward to find our deeper desires, dreams, and the like. These become the raw material from which we shape our sense of identity. The challenge is that we find so much inside of us that is in conflict that we have to make value judgments and decisions about what we pay attention to. And here is where the lie of the buffered self reveals itself: we do not make these value judgments or decisions in a vacuum but, instead, make them in relation to communities or authorities that we choose to listen to, whether they are peers, medical authorities, theological authorities, voices from social media, or any other thing we put into a position of authority for ourselves.

Upward – the God-ward self

Into this conflicted place, if we are honest, we must realize that we need an authority to listen to, to learn from and, ultimately, to submit to if we want to answer the question: “who am I?” St. Augustine of Hippo, the great 4th-5th century philosopher-theologian from North Africa, speaks to the reality that our journey outward and our journey inward must lead us into a deeper engagement with the God who has made everything “out there” and everything “in there.” He writes in his book Confessions, “Let me know you, for you are the God who knows me; let me recognize you as you have recognized me.”^[2]

Pastor Tim Keller helpfully points out that this third way could be referred to as “upward” as opposed to the “outward” approach of the porous self and the “inward” approach of the buffered, modern self.^[3] In order to find ourselves, we cannot merely look outward or look inward but upward to One who is greater.  If we want to break through the endless voices outside of and the endless voices inside of us telling us who we should be, we need the right authority speaking into our lives. If we want to know who we are, we must look to God, who has made us. 

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^[1] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 

^[2] Quoted in Brian S. Rosner, Known by God: A Biblical Theology of Personal Identity, Biblical Theology for Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 115.

^[3] Tim Keller, Making Sense of God (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 133-134.