It was a typical early afternoon for a northeastern Scotland winter’s day in 1998. The sun was setting, the wind was howling, black ice was forming on the roads, and condensation had fogged up my car both inside and outside. Sitting there waiting for the engine to warm up sufficiently to demist the windscreen, I reached up to adjust the rearview mirror and stared for a few moments at someone I didn’t recognize. Seeing I was alone, it was a tad unnerving. After a few moments of confusion, and upon further reflection, the stranger I had seen turned out to be me!
It wasn’t that I was losing my mind. A psychologist might describe such an event in terms of a dissociative disorder, the state of being disconnected from your sense of identity. My experience, however, was more symptomatic of an emotional state than a mental illness.
Certain events had changed my life dramatically. I’m sure I’m not the first person to have my marriage end unexpectedly. But for my wife of thirteen years to disown me and renounce our life together left me shattered. Cherished memories seemed like they belonged to someone else. Half of the photos in my mind’s album went missing, and the rest were spoiled with coffee stains. My hopes and aspirations evaporated. Looking forward became a luxury I couldn’t afford.
With damaged memories, an uncertain destiny, and a troubled present, I had lost my sense of self and was forced to revisit the question that you’re supposed to settle for good in your childhood and adolescence. That most personal question of all: Who am I?
It’s a big question with many layers. How important is self-knowledge? How do your circumstances affect your sense of self? What role do your relationships play in knowing who you are? How about your possessions, your job, and so on? What makes you, you? What is a human being, anyway?
“Nothing is more unfathomable than ourselves, individually and collectively, at any given moment and from the earliest beginning of human time.”
Marilynne Robinson1
Being a Christian, I turned to God and the Bible for answers. What I found has made an enormous difference to me personally. It doused a destructive pessimism that threatened to engulf me, instilled in me a sense of value when I felt worthless, and steadied my course when I went close to coming off the rails. Twenty years on, it continues to supply me with a stable and satisfying sense of self, along with the blessings of significance, comfort, humility, and direction for living.
I believe that I am far from alone in wrestling with questions of personal identity. Over the years I’ve had countless conversations with people of all ages in a myriad of circumstances who are wondering who they really are: people who’ve lost their job; people whose parents have died; people whose online identity leaves them feeling like a phony; people who feel deflated by their aspirations for life not coming to fruition; people who feel diminished by consuming responsibilities for children or parents; and people who feel at sea in our rapidly changing world. There are in fact good reasons to think that “identity angst,” to coin a phrase, is on the rise in the twenty-first century. And it is not just those who are suffering a crisis who are not sure who they really are.
In our day and age the question of personal identity is subject to two powerful but opposing forces. On the one hand, nothing is more important than knowing who you are and acting accordingly. But the problem is that it is harder to know who you are today than at any other point in human history.
There is one piece of advice that you hear everywhere today in all sorts of contexts. It’s a big mantra for the self-help book and seminar industry. It turns up in everything from school captains’ speeches, celebrity interviews, and children’s books to high-brow literature and philosophical discussions of ethical dilemmas. To disagree with it is almost unthinkable. And most people think it’s about the best advice you can give. It is this: “Be true to yourself.”
“We live in an age of self-obsession. Everywhere we look, we encounter a preoccupation with self-interest, self-development, self-image, self-satisfaction, self-love, self-expression, self-confidence, self-help, self-acceptance . . . the list goes on.”
Michael Allen Fox2
To be true to yourself means to act in accordance with who you think you are. Its appealing corollaries are to follow your heart, think for yourself, resist external pressures, and be willing to stand out from the crowd. Put another way, to be true to yourself “captures the fullness of our commitment to authenticity as a moral ideal.”3 According to social researcher John Zogby, people today are hungry for authenticity because there is “a deep-felt need to reconnect with the truth of our lives and to disconnect from the illusions that everyone from advertisers to politicians tries to make us believe are real.”4 Many people, it seems, feel that they are surrounded by a mediated reality, by the shoddy, shallow, and superficial; that is, the inauthentic. The call to authenticity is a broad movement calling for congruity between our inner and outer selves.
Despite its currency and widespread popularity, some dampening of our enthusiasm for being true to yourself might actually be needed. The problem is that the appeal to authenticity can be just an excuse for questionable behavior. If I do something that is inconsiderate of others or even harmful to myself, I can just claim I am being true to myself. Virtues like patience, kindness, and faithfulness can take a back seat to following your heart. What if my self is selfish? After all, the abusive spouse, the dishonest friend, the greedy workaholic, and the malicious gossip can all claim to be true to themselves when they behave in character. The problem with being true to yourself is that too often the self abuses the privilege.
The advice to be true to yourself probably goes back to Shakespeare. In Act I, scene iii of Hamlet, the character of Polonius prepares his son Laertes for travel abroad with a speech (ll.55–81) in which he directs the youth to commit a “few precepts to memory.” At the top of the list is the dictum: “This above all: to thine own self be true.”
However, Shakespeare probably meant something different from what we mean. Whereas we think in terms of self-fulfillment and “keeping it real,” Polonius’s advice was concerned with avoiding self-indulgent pursuits that might be harmful to his son’s image, such as borrowing money, lending money, and carousing with women of dubious character. For Shakespeare, “to thine own self be true” means to keep your reputation intact.
The biggest problem with the advice to be true to yourself is that in order to do so, you have to know who you are. And while these days more and more people are telling us to be true to ourselves, many of us are unsure of our true identity.
A myriad of factors weighs against having a stable and satisfying sense of self. Living our lives in the separate compartments of home, work, and leisure can produce superficial relationships and problems for genuine self-knowledge. Multiple careers and marital breakdown can lead to confusion about some of the most basic answers to the question of who you are, namely your occupation and marital status. Juggling the competing demands of work and family can make us feel that there is no space left in our lives for ourselves. However, even if living longer in retirement gives more time for yourself, the later years of life can also be plagued by feeling redundant and, if you live long enough, being “deserted” by your peers who know you best.
“If you are true to ‘yourself,’ you will end up a complete mess. The challenge is to take the ‘self’ you find within, and to choose wisely which impulses and desires to follow, and which ones to resist.”
N. T. Wright5
In the past an individual’s identity was more established and predictable than it is today. Many of the big questions in life were basically settled before you were born: where you’d live, what you’d do, the type of person you’d marry, your basic beliefs, and so on. It’s not that there was no choice. Rather, the shape of your life was molded by constraints that limited your choices. Today we are literally spoilt for choice, which can be both a source of joy and anxiety.
Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman explains:
Traditional communities are rivers, while modern societies are oceans. A river has a direction and carries you along with the current, just as traditional societies direct their members in a particular way. In modern societies there is no current; we can choose to go any direction, no direction, or to shift direction with every change of winds.6
To extend the metaphor, there is also more chance of getting lost or drowning in an ocean!
Sociologists talk about the phenomenon of “churning” where globalization, consumer culture, and hypermobility leave us giddy with choice. Journalist Brigid Delaney believes that this smorgasbord of options leaves us with a gnawing uncertainty and restlessness. She writes from experience, with a career of some 144 jobs in six countries by the age of thirty-five! Not surprisingly, Delaney complains of a sense of not belonging anywhere. While Delaney is an extreme example, her experience does underline a trend towards living widely rather than deeply: “In the fatigue of living widely with all the spending and experiences this involves, no great collective wisdom has emerged.”7 Modern life, with all its possibilities, can leave us with a feeling of dissatisfaction and something short of a healthy sense of self.
According to Peter Leithart, our world destabilizes the self by uprooting people from the traditional fixity of class and place, custom and community. Today our sense of belonging and identity is not supported by continual contact with the same set of friends, the same family members, or the same coworkers. Leithart paints a picture of a society marked by fragmentation and fluidity, where relationships are temporary and loose. In this context, self-fashioning is the order of the day, and self-knowledge is superficial at best.8 This is often brought into sharper focus when a crisis hits.
In previous times the question of personal identity was settled for most people in their adolescence when they recognized, revised, or rejected the identity given to them by their parents. An optional additional chapter to this narrative of identity formation was the midlife crisis. Dissatisfied with how their lives were panning out, such people set out to “find themselves,” often indulging in out-of-character behavior involving anything from having an affair to buying a red convertible or a Harley-Davidson.
“The human race at the dawn of the third millennium, following the demise of the Christian paradigm and the break-up of modernity, is suffering from a collective identity crisis.”
Kevin Vanhoozer9
These days, life-cycle dilemma experts believe that for many people identity transitions occur earlier than midlife and much more often. The age of discontent can happen at any and every age, since the obligation to define or design yourself is always at hand. You don’t have to wait for midlife to have doubts about how your life is tracking. The dreaded “thrisis” awaits those turning thirty, who having climbed the ladder of success are disillusioned to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall.10 Those of us turning forty, fifty, or sixty years of age might experience “cuspiety,” the anxiety associated with reaching the precipice of so-called cusp ages.
The digital age has added a new dimension to the question of personal identity. The web is now the platform on which many of us live our lives. With social media, the internet is the way you tell the world not just what you are up to and what you are thinking, but who you are. Regular profile and status updates on sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have taken defining yourself to a new level. Many believe that the web has affected our very identity.11 The jury is still out on whether or not this is a good thing. Some decry the torrent of self-absorbed output; others are more positive about the new possibilities for social connection. Certainly social media offers the temptation to project an inauthentic self. If humans have always worn “masks,” as Peter Leithart notes, “with the arrival of postmodern communication technologies the masks have become thicker and more concealing.”12
The twentieth-century German pastor and spy Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned by the Nazis during the Second World War for his part in plots to kill Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer wrote letters and papers from prison that are still in print. One of his prison poems, “Who Am I?” was written as a kind of self-analysis the year before his execution. It raises poignantly several of the issues that are germane to this book. Many people who read the poem resonate with Dietrich’s predicament, albeit usually with less intensity.
The question of the title “Who Am I?” occurs five times in the body of the poem. The “they” in the first third of the poem are the prison guards reporting their view of the prisoner. Remarkably, the guards’ view of Bonhoeffer is very positive. Bonhoeffer’s view of himself in the following lines is understandably more anguished as he struggles under the ghastly circumstances of his imprisonment. The last eight lines wrestle with this dilemma of personal integrity and identity.
Who Am I?13
Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
Like a squire from his country-house.
Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
Freely and friendly and clearly,
As though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
Equally, smilingly, proudly,
Like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
Struggling for breath, as though hands were
compressing my throat,
Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
Tossing in expectation of great events,
Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
Faint, and ready to say farewell to all?
Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Who I really am, you know me, I am yours, O God!14
Bonhoeffer’s poetic reflections raise several uncomfortable questions:
• What part do the impressions of others play in the way I perceive myself?
• What happens when these impressions differ substantially from my own opinion of who I am?
• What would be left of me if the props of my identity (my job, possessions, roles, etc.) were removed?
• What impact would a stolen past and a bleak future have on my sense of who I am now?
• What happens if the goals and aspirations that define me are left unfulfilled?
• What should I do with negative thoughts about myself, whether or not others confirm them?
• Where should we turn for answers when our sense of self is shaken to the core?
• Who am I, really?
The final line of the poem gives a sneak preview of the major thesis of this book. Bonhoeffer points to the critical and comforting notion of belonging to and being known by God: “Who I really am, you know me, I am yours, O God!” I made the same discovery in my own search for a stable and satisfying sense of self in the years following my own crisis of identity. As I wondered who I was, it was a great comfort to be reminded that I am known by God. The goal of this biblical theology of personal identity is to explore that insight in full.
1. Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 199.
2. Michael Allen Fox, “We’re Self-obsessed—But Do We Understand the Nature of the Self?” The Conversation, August 31, 2004, http://theconversation.com/were-self-obsessed-but-dowe-understand-the-nature-of-the-self-30912.
3. Andrew Potter, The Authenticity Hoax: Why the “Real” Things We Seek Don’t Make Us Happy (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), 18.
4. John Zogby, The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream (New York: Random House, 2008), as reported in Potter, The Authenticity Hoax, 5.
5. N. T. Wright, The Early Christian Letters for Everyone: James, Peter, John, and Judah (London: SPCK, 2011), 8.
6. Cited in Peter J. Leithart, Solomon Among the Postmoderns (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2008), 40–41.
7. Brigid Delaney, This Restless Life (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009), 40.
8. Leithart, Solomon Among the Postmoderns, 114, 116, 127.
9. Kevin Vanhoozer, “Human Being, Individual and Social,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 158.
10. See Kasey Edwards, 30 Something and Over It (Sydney: Random House, 2009).
11. E.g., James Harkin, Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That’s Changing How We Live and Who We Are (London: Little Brown, 2009).
12. Leithart, Solomon Among the Postmoderns, 123.
13. Quoted with permission from Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), seventh page of photo inset found between pages 466–67.
14. The final line in German consists of twelve monosyllables, which climaxes the poem in striking fashion: “Wer ich auch bin, Du kennst mich, Dein bin ich, O Gott!” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, ed. E. Bethge [Muenchen: Christian Kaiser, 1964], 243). The English translation of this final line found in Metaxas reads: “Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine!” I have replaced this rendering with my own translation to update the archaic language and bring out what I think is the sense.