Our culture is obsessed with identity.
We're often told you do you and encouraged to live according to our true and
authentic self, expressing publicly how we feel about ourselves internally.
However, the very concept of personal identity is inherently slippery.
It encompasses things like ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, belief, educational background, profession, and personality.
But it's not fixed.
It can change through time, through circumstance, and even through self invention.
So, as Christians, how should we regard identity?
God created us as unique individuals.
How does our creatureliness affect who we are?
Furthermore, as sinners redeemed and sanctified by the Lord Jesus, and adopted
into the household of God, how does Christ's work change the way we view ourselves?
How does the encouragement to find your identity in Christ actually play out in the complexities of competing sources of identity?
At our final event in our series on Culture Creep in October 2024, Rory Shiner, Senior Pastor Providence City Church
in Perth, showed us how losing ourselves for the sake of the kingdom will help us find ourselves once and for all.
In this episode, we bring you the audio from that event, minus the Q&A segment, which you can find on our website, ccl.
moore.
edu.
au.
We hope you find Rory's talk helpful as you think about your identity in Christ.
Well, good evening and welcome.
My name is Peter Orr and I'd like to welcome you to our fourth Centre for Christian Living event of 2024.
The Centre for Christian Living is a Centre of Moore College that exists to bring biblical ethics to everyday issues.
And this year we've dedicated our four live events to exploring the idea of culture creep.
And the Apostle Paul's letter to the Romans, he talks about not being conformed to this world.
I'll read that passage in a second.
This year, we're looking at different temptations we face to be conformed to this world.
Previously, we've thought about technology, particularly AI.
We've thought about casual sex.
We've thought about wealth.
And tonight we're thinking about identity.
And we're very privileged to be joined by Rory Shiner, who has flown in from
Perth to be with us tonight to help us to think about the question of identity.
We'll get to know Rory in a moment, but let me start by reading that passage I mentioned
Is what the Apostle Paul says.
Therefore, I urge you brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.
Holy and pleasing to God.
This is your true and proper worship.
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is.
His good, pleasing, and perfect will.
Well, in response to what I've just read, and anticipation of what we'll hear this evening, Why don't we pray
our father, we do thank you for this time that we can meet together and think about the question of identity.
Would you pray that you would help Rory as he explains your word and helps us to think about how it relates to the
world that we live in and please help us to listen carefully and to respond in a way that honors the Lord Jesus.
And we ask it in his name.
Amen.
But I might just call Rory up and we'll get to know Rory.
Uh, Rory, I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and your family and then how you became a Christian.
Yeah, so my name's Rory, great to be with you.
I've left behind a wife and four kids, so we're all under one roof, four boys, and really great to be with you tonight.
I had the privilege, which I hope lots of you have had, of Being from a Christian family.
And I think the double whammy there was that they believed in and taught us about the Lord Jesus Christ.
And they live lives that checked out as in whatever else I ended up believing.
They definitely believed that Jesus was real and that he'd brought them into salvation.
So that's my kind of story through them.
And I'll probably like again, lots of people in the room, a few little scrapes and bruises along the way, and probably into a
settled mature adult faith at 19 at University with some kind of untoward behavior during high school and all that sort of thing.
And
here you are, and you're a pastor of a church in Perth.
How did you go from the 19 year olds mature
faith to being a pastor?
Yeah.
So at university, that's where I got radicalized and got involved in the Christian union there.
And the significant thing there, which wasn't as much part of my background was just a
really credible way of using the Bible and having God's word at the centre of everything.
Christian ministry that really did something in me.
And then the main staff worker for the Christian union took me aside and I kind of ended up in ministry under false
pretenses or misunderstanding because he took me aside and he said, look, I think you should come and do ministry training.
And what we do is raise support for about 26, 000 a year.
And two things occurred to me.
One was, Oh my goodness, you must think I'm great.
He's asking me to do this thing and 26, 000 a year.
That's more money than I've ever seen before in my life.
So you saw this is unbelievable.
And then since have discovered that 26, 000 a year is not amazing.
And it turns out the guy was asking everyone to do ministry.
And so there was nothing special about maybe on that false pretense.
Here I am.
That's all right.
It's just been too awkward to get off the conveyor belt.
Having got onto it.
Yeah.
Rory and I were just chatting about ministry and what would be a good question to help you get to know.
So I was going to ask what's harder now at this stage in ministry than it was at the beginning and what's easier at this stage of ministry
than it was.
So the easy one first, say there is a point where.
Say for example, preaching is not all of ministry, but it's a big part of ministry.
And I think you get to a point in preaching where the shadow of fear recedes to about 10 o'clock the night before.
So when you start, the shadow goes to about Wednesday of the week before, and you live in dread of having to deliver this sermon.
Preaching, there's a bit of inside baseball, but it's like an exam that you can't write and say, listen, I'm not quite ready yet.
Could tell you're starting at 11 o'clock today.
You just kind of do the thing.
So that gets to a point where you manage, I don't think you ever get to zero anxiety, but where you can manage that in a livable way.
The boring thing that gets hard, well, the generic thing that gets harder is the kind of leadership thing that as
things grow and develop, you get to a point where everything that could have been solved would have been solved.
Before it got to you.
So everything that gets to you is difficult and ambiguous and unwinnable.
I think that's true of anyone in leadership.
So I'm sure people here will recognize that maybe there's specific one, which is relevant tonight
is I think our culture is uniquely ill equipped to deal with chronic as opposed to acute problems.
And one of the things you discover in ministry, which you're not confronted with
at university is sometimes people just have problems that don't fix that go on.
indefinitely at a kind of heart level.
That's a whole thing.
And I think where there's ways in which our culture sells us short in our ability to make sense of and care for people in chronic situations.
Thank you, Roy.
I'm going to hand over to you.
Thank you.
Excellent.
Well, it's great to be here.
So thank you very much for coming out tonight.
And I'm really glad to be thinking with you about these things.
Well, I've got three goals and therefore you've got three ways of marking tonight's assessment
and seeing whether it pleases you or not, or whether I've achieved according to the rubric.
So here we go.
Firstly, I want to describe as best I can the way we moderns go about answering the question of who am I?
I think we do have a very distinct way of doing that, and I want to ask for high marks if the way I describe it is resonant.
If you hear it, and my aim in that section is that you recognize it and you say, yeah, that sounds like how we do it.
That's the first section to faithfully describe how we go about constructing identity, how we go about answering the question, who am I?
The second thing I want to do is find fault with that.
Having described it fairly impartially, I do want to, at that point, pick at it and criticize it to point out some of its weaknesses and shortcomings.
But then, In a surprising move that no one saw coming, I want to turn to the idea of finding your identity in Christ.
And instead of saying that as the obvious, no brainer solution, I want to find a little bit of fault there too.
I want to raise the idea of find your identity in Christ.
And at least tease that out or think critically about that as a kind of panacea solution to our
pastoral and personal problems, because to quote the Princess Bride, when we use that kind of language.
Find your identity in Christ.
I don't think that word means what we think it means.
And then finally, having shocked you with that dangerous move, peace will be restored.
And I'll say something positive about being in Christ and how that could work in a kind
of more complicated, but interesting way to shape our sense of who we are and how we live.
Ready for this journey?
Let's do it.
All right.
Our first part is thinking about how we construct the modern self.
I take it by your present here, you think that this is a topic, that something's
going on, that the way we use the language of identity is having kind of a moment.
So we think about identity politics.
We construct in social media, online identities.
We see a shift in language, a subtle but interesting one, from saying, I am a zealot.
Or, I am a Christian, to I identify as a.
Zealot or Christian.
Something's going on there.
I think that is interesting.
The word itself, identity, is a fairly new word.
It's got a bit of a background, but it really emerges in the way we use it
out of sociology and social psychology in the first half of the 20th century.
As you can see on a graph I've got here from an article by Nathan Campbell in Zadok, it
explodes in usage after the second world war, and especially you can see there into the 1960s.
So I'm not doing anything with that, except to just let you look at it and just note that that's interesting.
That the language of identity doesn't come out of the Bible.
It's not a Bible word, concept might be there, but for whatever reason, it
suddenly becomes useful in our culture, very dramatically and very, very quickly.
Recently, perhaps at the pointy end of this issue, you had the transgender debate where kind of ironically or
interestingly at a science level, one of the things we have discovered is that gender or sex goes deeper than we thought.
So for example, if I.
Rub the lectern like that.
A forensic scientist can come in tomorrow and say not only that there's a smudge left
by a human, but it's in some weird way, a male smudge that I will have left behind.
But the transgender debate isn't really a debate about science, but about naming rights.
About identity, does my culture or the science or even my own body have naming rights over me?
Who gets to say who I am?
That's the space I think we're kind of occupying tonight.
The issues that come up for us in this area of identity.
And so I want to think first of all about how we construct our identities as moderns.
The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor talked about sources of the self, that's his way of thinking about it.
What are the sources by which we construct selves as people in modernity?
And rather than bore you with a description of that, I wanted to do a little experiment, kind of a thought experiment.
So here it goes, but you've got to come with me for it to work.
I want you to think about you, so same physically, psychologically, biologically, IQ, everything is the same.
I'm just going to introduce one variable to you, which is the you that was born 500 years ago.
Everything else is the same.
except 500 year ago birth.
Can you do that?
Let me have a go at this.
How would you have constructed yourself if you were born then?
Well, you would have been born into a context in which you were one of eight, 10, maybe 12 children.
Several of whom would have died before their fifth birthday.
You would have known we'd like 99 percent accuracy.
What you were going to do when you grew up, because it was shaped by two unchangeable realities, which were your gender and your family of origin.
If you're a boy, father was a farmer.
You were going to be a farmer.
If you're a female, you're going to be a wife and a mother in that context.
So.
In that context, you never had the conversation.
So what are you going to do when you grow up?
You never heard a graduation speech about following your dreams.
Your parents never said to you, look, the main thing about your job is that you enjoy it, that you, you really get into it.
Most of the wisdom that was available to you.
That is the folk songs that you sang, the advice from your elders, the stories that
you knew, the poems that you learned were about how to cope with given realities.
They were about the wisdom of making peace with the hand that had been dealt to you.
Your life was communal.
So you had next to no enemies.
Privacy.
There were always people around the world that you looked at was another Charles Taylor word enchanted.
So there were spirits and demons and forces in the world that were beyond your control and everything meant something.
The question was not whether it meant something, but what it meant.
The thunderstorm might mean that God is angry with you.
The failure of the crops might mean there's a sin in the village that requires repentance.
So it was a world that had a surplus of meaning.
A lot of your.
Troubles were to do with how much everything meant, everything meant something and nothing meant nothing.
Your life meant something because you had been assigned a role that you were required to play out.
The play, if you can use that metaphor, started before you arrived and it would continue after you died.
And your role in the play was to be an extra.
You weren't cast on centre stage.
You didn't have any participation in the script, but your identity, and you would never have used that word, your identity was what had
been assigned to you and you needed to stand in the spot That had been assigned without complaining or arguing for the good of the whole.
So if they're the sources of the self, if that's how you're constructed, what's it like to be that person?
You might want to think about that, the 500 year ago version of you, I've got a few thoughts.
I reckon compared to you now, you would know more than you do now what it feels like to be afraid.
The world was a threat to you.
You probably weren't an environmentalist because nature was mainly trying to kill you.
Death was present.
God was, in a sense, not someone that you decided to believe in, but someone whose reality was not so much just a choice as a given, like breathing.
You almost couldn't imagine the version of you or your culture that didn't believe
in God because belief in him and evidence of him was everywhere and self evident.
You would feel guilty and ashamed of the things that you did wrong, but you would
rarely feel anxiety and it would never occur to you that your life might not have any
meaning.
Right?
So fast forward to 2024 version of you, 500 years later, how are we put together now compared to then?
Take another shot.
I'm pitching for recognition.
So you're probably born into a family of one, two, maybe three siblings, four, and someone somewhere has gone a bit crazy.
Uh, it's possible to have got to 30 without having seen a dead body or even attended a funeral.
Death is off screen and hidden.
The chances that you will do with your life, what your parents did with their life are small because your whole education has encouraged you to pursue
your dreams, to do what is meaningful for you, your parents, especially if they're Caucasian, will consider themselves to have been good parents.
If they encourage you to find your own place in the world, to not do the same job as them, and.
If you do the same job as them, they're slightly embarrassed at dinner parties and they explain to their friend that, Oh, he really wanted to do it.
He made that choice himself.
If life is a play, you've been encouraged to occupy the centre stage, to be the protagonist in your story and to write your own part.
Because a part that's been assigned to you by someone else will be unsatisfactory and inauthentic.
Gender will have had a pretty low relevance to the kinds of career you chose.
And if you grew up from 16 to 21, you'll be sick to death of the question.
So what are you going to do when you grow up?
Almost all the major decisions in your life, the things that are sources of the self, where you study, what
you do, who you marry, which, if any faith you follow, how you perform your gender are all your decisions.
And almost every book and every movie and every song, you know, is not about coping with given, but about navigating choice.
And people in life with chronic situations that don't get fixed, they just seem to disappear.
You kind of don't know what happened to them, but you don't see them around much anymore.
Your world is disenchanted.
So even if you technically, as I do, believe in spirits and demons, you can go days, weeks, months, even a
whole lifetime without being able to name a single event that you're certain was caused by a spirit or a demon.
You may have lived alone, and you probably will one day live alone.
Your friends will mainly be your peers, and you'll instantly recognize the experience of loneliness.
Your world has a deficit of meaning, vast numbers of things, thunderstorms, droughts, economic events, probably have no meaning.
And at several points in your life, you've wondered whether anything in your life means anything at all.
Almost everything you are comes from decisions that you have made.
So what's it like to be that person?
Well, you're almost never afraid in the sense that you could relax on Friday
night by watching a horror film about literal demons to unwind from the week.
If you believe in God, you're aware that you do.
And even if you believe the exact same creed as humans 500 years before, you're conscious that in some sense you've chosen that.
And here's the thing.
You can imagine the version of you that doesn't believe in that.
The alternative you that doesn't believe in God is a fairly easily imagined individual.
So you're not afraid in terms of demons and spirits, but you are extremely anxious because you're worried that you've made the wrong choices.
You feel the crushing weight of the possibility that because everything was your choice, everything in life is also your fault.
That's the way it plays out.
And that's the way we've come to think about ourselves from large families to small, from death being from present to hidden.
A strong, tight, suffocating experience of community to a weak, loose, and easily escapable experience of community.
What you did was what your parents did, conditioned by your gender.
Now it's what you decide to do.
Gender is way down the list.
Freedom of choice almost non existent.
Freedom of choice now almost overwhelming.
Natural world is full of meaning.
Your natural world is absent of meaning.
You experience fear and guilt.
Now you experience anxiety and a lack of purpose.
Your identity is chosen for you and your identity now is chosen by you.
Let's come at this from another angle.
I wanted to think with you and ask you to help me exegete a picture.
Mark Sayers I think points this out that once you see it you can't unsee it because it is literally everywhere.
It is the picture in a thousand different guises of a woman.
on a mountaintop with a backpack looking at a sunset.
I just want to take a moment and maybe if you're online you could think this out in your group or by yourself
but I might just ask you here and I'll repeat it back into the microphone just to tell me what you see.
We're doing a bit of exegesis together.
Not of a text but of a picture.
That picture.
What is it?
What do you see?
So it's an ad for Kathmandu that may well be there.
Okay.
So I can't remember where it was harvested from.
Yeah.
Possibility, right?
If you're looking at over a mountain and it's sunrise, right?
I think it's sunrise, not sunset.
There's possibility.
Freedom.
Yeah, that's absolutely.
This is someone who's free.
Who's unconstrained.
Adventure.
That's right.
The backpack.
There's some sort of adventure.
Someone that's decided to do something kind of fun.
Yeah.
A communal.
There's no people around her.
That's a woman.
Yeah, I think the gender is significant.
There's a version of this from the 19th century of the Grand Tour.
Byron and that kind of figure, always male.
This picture is almost always female.
I think that's probably significant.
Accomplishment.
Yeah, accomplishment.
So they've done something and they've done something, I don't mean this in the pejorative sense, but for themselves.
So there's no advantage bestowed on the community.
There's a very strong kind of eat, pray, love vibe here.
Con Yeah, it is interesting, isn't it?
There's a kind of a conquest idea.
Again, it's slightly different from the Victorian picture of the male figure out on the grand tour.
But there is some sense of someone having made a decision and conquered a mountain over.
Couple more.
She's been enabled by great gear.
Yeah.
Okay.
She's been enabled by great gear.
I don't know whether that's like a haunted advertising thing or a thing, but yeah.
It is great gear.
It's also worth remembering that once you step outside from the fantasy, there's also
some poor sap there who's been told to get the angle right and so on and so forth.
Encouraging risk taking.
Yeah, that's right.
It's a situation in which there's a certain degree of risk and possibility.
Absolutely.
Oh yeah, that's right.
This is the thing.
Once you've seen this, you can't unsee it.
It's just every, it's like an icon of 2024 life.
Yeah.
We'll go one more.
It's like a commitment to go and do it.
She's got an early sunrise.
She's got up at three in the morning.
Yeah, I think that's part of it, that it's not someone who's living in what Charles Taylor would call sacred time.
It's not morning and evening prayer.
It's not a communal feeling.
It's someone who's made an independent decision to obviously get up before dawn and go up in the dark and be there herself.
It has the freedom of wealth to do something like as well.
Yes.
Free time to do something like that.
Yes, yes.
So there's kind of a flex there of someone who's chosen to do what they could do.
Again, which is a privilege only bestowed on men in the 19th century as they did their grand tours, Byron, etc.
But here is a woman, I think we've got it all.
Right?
Unconstrained by her community, undefined by the people around her or the roles that she occupies in the community.
She has climbed a mountain.
I think if we look at this picture, we assume that in some sense, she is finding herself, that she's made a decision to get in touch with who she is.
Whereas anytime up until about the 1960s, she would appear to most humans as lost as someone who couldn't
possibly know who she is because she's been abstracted from the community that gives her meaning.
Most humans would read that as a picture of lostness.
We immediately understand it to be a picture of someone who is finding herself.
Second bit of art, integration.
The other thing I want to think about, here's a very interesting and difficult prospect.
How do you persuade someone to join the army?
Now think about that, that's high stakes baked into the whole deal is that you might kill or be killed.
And that's about as hardcore as it gets, right?
Kill or be killed, that takes some persuading.
How do you do that?
Here's the next picture.
Again, for your exegesis.
This is from 1914.
Notice the persuasive work.
How are we being persuaded here to put our lives on the line?
Read it out.
Come into the ranks and fight for your king and country.
Don't stand in the crowd and stare.
You're wanted in the front line enlist today.
What do you say?
Get
on board.
Be part of your community.
Yeah.
So there's
a get on board.
It's appealing.
And I mean, it's in the morally neutral sense of the word, but it's appealing to a sense of shame.
That is shame is the experience of your peers thinking less of you.
And it appeals to a sense of shame because you'll be left and that's shameful.
Anything else?
It's all about, uh, do it for your king and country.
Yeah.
So do it for your king and country.
So there's an appeal.
Now the technical word for this is an appeal to transcendence, an appeal to something that is bigger than you, that is larger than you.
So the appeal is, Hey, don't think about you.
Think about a thing that's bigger, that transcends you and your situation.
Right.
One more.
Activity.
Yeah.
Activity and activity.
So you're either standing and staring or going and doing something.
So do something.
Don't just stand there.
Fantastic.
Let's go to the next one.
This is a 20, 24.
Now, interesting, right?
So again, I will stop getting you to do the lecture for me, but immediately I think, again, gender is probably relevant to the picture.
It's a person by themselves.
And the appeal is to do what you love, that is in our categories, to think about the army as the
platform on which you could enact your play and bring your script into the army to enact your play there.
And just in case you missed it, they italicized the word you, which is kind of amazing.
That is a picture, and it's a picture again of what Charles Taylor calls expressive individualism.
This is his phrase, Charles Taylor to say that, how do we construct our modern selves?
He says, we are expressive individuals.
That is, we find ourselves by an inward journey rather than a communal journey.
You climb up a mountain, you decide to join the army to play out a particular narrative and so on.
So that's the individual aspect.
And then your moral obligation is to having discovered that identity to then express that to the world.
And our obligation as fellow citizens is to receive your expression, to validate that, and to take that on.
Where expressive individuals in an age of authenticity, that's again Taylor, in the post 60s cultural revolution, in which
authenticity, that is not merely accepting the role to assign to you, but forging your own way, is essential to the good life.
Finally, there's the end of the descriptive bit, but you might have picked up on this already.
It comes kind of in the form of a salvation story.
So if you're a Christian and you think in categories of creation, fall, redemption,
and new creation, you'll notice that expressive individualism has a similar structure.
I think we've got the map here.
So The way it plays out in films and books and popular music is that there's a true self.
That is, that's the origin story, but in the fall, I've become kind of alienated from that true self.
Something's disrupted that harmony of the original creation.
These external forces have made that a hostile experience.
There's a hero moment where you're liberated and through some sort of circumstance or crisis or human, you reconnect with that true inner self.
Self and the circumstances.
Now, the testimony is that you're still working on it, facing some conflict and so on, but things are
materially different having gone through that crisis and got in touch with your original and true self.
So again, high marks if I've described something that sounds familiar and my bad if I haven't.
My second task, part two, is evaluation.
That's my attempted kind of fairly impartial description of expressive individualism and you may be shocked to find that I have some criticisms of it.
However, I'm going to completely evacuate the room of all energy and introduce
a word that kills political and online discussions by introducing nuance.
That is, I think the answer to the question, is expressive individualism good or bad is game.
Where's the energy go?
It's complicated.
Here's a few reasons that I think are complicating.
Firstly, in economics, economists distinguish between revealed and stated preferences.
Right.
So stated preferences are the ones that we think we have and reveal preferences are the ones that we actually have.
So before Netflix went online, everyone claimed that we're into art house and indie films.
As soon as Netflix goes online, we just want to watch reality television and Will Ferrell films.
Or in the airline industry.
If you ask people right up until deregulation what they wanted, they said they wanted the full service with food and lots of legroom.
And it turns out what we actually want is no legroom, terrible seats, no food and a cheap fare.
In the same way, I think you almost never meet someone who's an enthusiastic, expressive individualist.
You almost never meet anyone who says, Oh, this is the good life.
This is the way it's done.
And yet it is what we consistently choose.
So you think about migration pattern, that's a very high stakes thing that by the time you've moved
your family from X to Y, migration patterns are almost always from less freedom to more freedom.
Almost always from rural to urban.
Which is a kind of proxy vote for having more freedom about establishing your identity.
That's why urban centres work, they give you the freedom that rural centres do not.
Secondly, the other complication, or one of a few, is that you couldn't understand this way of
constructing the self apart from Christianity in general and the Protestant Reformation in particular.
And so you just want to kind of bake that into any harsh criticisms of the way we put ourselves together, that it is
at least partly, whether it's an own goal or a wonderful fruit, at least partly the product of the way Christianity in
general understands individuals and the way the Reformation in particular made it possible for someone to somehow dislodge
from their nationality and family and geographic location, that those things ought not be the last word on who you are.
And so one of the complications and nuances is that we're telling as Christians a kind of family story.
But I have got a few criticisms.
Really quickly, number one, it's just really new.
Like this way of thinking about how to put yourself together is super new.
It's kind of a post sixties thing.
And I think that just by its own, you should raise some red flags because things that are new second point are often under thought.
And I think this way of putting yourself together, because it's so ubiquitous, we assume
that someone somewhere has done the hard thinking to work out whether it's coherent.
But I think the truth is that it's very under thought.
The Emperor, if not completely naked, is at least taking a dash for the bathroom
and has grabbed what he thought was a towel and turned out to be a flannel.
And we're all hoping he doesn't trip over.
Some of them are so obvious it's almost embarrassing.
Like for example, how are we deciding on these true selves?
Which true self is the one that you're privileging?
Which is the one that you're hiding from the rest of us?
On what criteria are you making these decisions?
On what basis have you decided this part of yourself is authentic and these other parties completely extraneous to who you really are.
Second one that's super obvious is who decided that I.
Was best positioned to answer who I am.
My qualifications are immediately bought into suspicion by the fact that I don't even recognize my voice when it's on a voice recorder,
but the moment I hear it, I say, that's not what I sound like, which has once been described as like a chipmunk with Australian accent.
But you know, that is what I sound like.
So at what point did we decide that the guy that doesn't even know what he sounds like is the infallible last word on who I am?
One of the liberations of the Christian doctrine of the judgment of God is that it tempers our ability to judge ourselves.
The apostle Paul opens up the first century version of the Johari window where he says in 1 I don't even judge myself.
Verse four.
My conscience is clear.
But that doesn't make me innocent.
It's the Lord who judges me.
Part of Christian identity is a little bit of circumspect judgment of our own judgment of who we are.
And the other one, which is obvious, and I don't want to be misunderstood on this
is if we're finding ourselves alone, why do those selves end up being so similar?
If those selves are forged in the deep isolation of Mount Doom, why do they need all this community validation?
If the true self is unique and self discovered, why do we need communities to express them?
I don't say that in judgment of other communities, I say it as a truth about my community.
I'm a Christian, and just like people of certain sexual orientations or gender expressions find others, that's exactly what I've done.
Having become a Christian, I've found a group of people, a church with whom I can
work out who I am based on this kind of shared identity, but why does that happen?
My criticism is not doing that, which I think is vital to any sense of identity, to any coherent answer to the question, who am I?
My critique is just that expressive individualism doesn't have a good reason.
For why we do that.
I think the scriptures, two other criticisms.
Number one, just the poor mental health outcomes.
And one of the easy ways is just to describe expressive individualism and just say, so how's that going for you?
The anxiety and fragility and crushing sense of aloneness and meaninglessness are very bracing.
And finally, as Christians or me, at least as a Christian, I just notice that it comes to us as a kind of competitor to the gospel.
It is shaped like a salvation story and comes to us either as a rival to the gospel.
The traffic from the church is not toward Islam, not toward Buddhism.
It's not toward Hinduism.
If your church is smaller than it was, that's not where they've gone.
They've gone to a kind of general secularism that is undergirded by a sense of expressive individualism.
It's an alternative to the gospel, or maybe even more insidiously, it comes into the church in a kind of
moralistic therapeutic deism as the gospel, that we are centre stage and that Jesus is in some sense, the one
that allows me to come to my full expression at centre stage as the kind of person that I always was meant to be.
So part three, finding your identity in Christ.
This is the shocking turn.
So brace yourselves.
It's like one of those old Buzzfeed number three will shock you because we're at to the
point where we talk about finding your identity in Christ, finding yourself in Christ.
And the answer feels like, is that what we should do?
Like, obviously, yes, that's the solution.
Find your identity in Christ.
And is that true?
And I'm going to say yes, no, and sort of.
Firstly, at some basic level, yes.
Now the Bible doesn't use identity language, that word is new, but if you know how to
read the Bible, you don't need the word there to tell you the concepts there, right?
So doing a word study on love, you won't find the prodigal son.
And if the prodigal son is not part of how you understand love, that's kind of a really weird thing.
And I think it would be weird to say that the Bible doesn't have something to say about what we call identity.
From the very first, when Christianity launches onto the world, it creates identity crises wherever it goes.
It's an identity crisis for Israel?
It's an identity crisis for the Gentiles and their relationship to Israel.
It creates a crisis for Roman citizens and single virgins and slave owning masters.
The New Testament language is easily recognized as some kind of identity language.
We're in Christ, we're united to him, we're one with him.
We put off our own self and we're being renewed into a new self.
Paul says, it's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.
So there is some sense where identity in Christ is not something we bring to the Bible, but something we find in it.
But here are my cautions.
The word is not there.
And it may be that in that word we bring some freight with us.
Again, in Nathan Campbell's article in Zadok, he talks about this, that there may be a kind of Trojan horse situation
to watch there, that when we use the word identity, we're bringing more into the city than we first anticipated.
Secondly, it accepts the premise that the question's right and the solution is wrong.
So if our world says, find your identity in X, Y, or Z and we say, no.
Find your identity in Christ.
We just, at that point, just swapped out the nouns.
So the noun of your nationality, we swap that with Christ.
We haven't said much more than that.
And so therefore we haven't questioned whether the methodology is valid, whether the
search frame that way is actually one that we're going to set ourselves up to win.
I think the tell phrase here is when we talk about identify as a Christian.
I think at that point, something has been smuggled to the scriptures.
And I want to ask thirdly, it's kind of a pastor's question.
How robust is that just in the trenches of pastoral care?
How is that high definition enough as a concept to do the kind of help that we sometimes think it will?
When a young adult is discovering, struggling with a sense of same sex attraction, and we might say they ought to find their identity in
Christ, but we wouldn't tell the mother having miscarried that her grief is evidence of that her identity was in motherhood and not in Christ.
There's something going on there that's just a bit more complicated than the way we sometimes present it.
So I thought to finish, we'd do something just fully crazy and do a little Bible study.
Although we could look at the Bible and rather than jump all over the place, just to settle down as
we finish into Colossians chapter three, as we try to see what the Bible does say about these things.
Notice both.
The radical and conservative nature of this passage.
Colossians chapter three, verse one, since then you've been raised with Christ.
Listen to the language.
Set your heart on things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.
Set your mind on things above, not on earthly things.
For you died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
When Christ, who is your life appears.
Then you will also appear with him in glory.
There's something about identity there, right?
That the person who's encountered Christ has experienced in him some radical transition about where they are, about where their self is.
Is they're hidden with Christ in God, their life will appear with him because it's hidden with him.
And there's a radical kind of recasting of what we would call identity.
So verses 10 and 11, having put on the new self, which has been renewed in knowledge and the image of its creator.
Here, there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and is in all.
It's kind of wild.
There's this new self that we put on and by putting on that new self, by being in Christ, by being united to him,
these words are worth paying attention, we enter into a here, H E R E, which I take it to be like the church.
Here in Christ amongst his people, we enter into this space in which our previous Ethnic identities, Gentile
or Jew, religious identities, circumcised or uncircumcised, cultural identities, barbarian or Scythian,
socioeconomic identity, slave or free, are all swept away here because Christ is all and is in all.
But notice alongside that, there's a moral imperative, Descriptive language, it's a
statement of what you are, not a chosen identity, but an identity that is given to you.
But the moral imperatives involve a kind of acting out, a kind of dressing up, a cosplay, a form of what C.
S.
Lewis calls in mere Christianity, let's pretend.
Which is kind of a dissonant language in the age of authenticity, but I think here, part of the form of the moral life,
part of the way you find your identity in Christ is not to be drawn on an inner journey, but to cosplay an identity
that has been received as being, or at least giving a crack at being compassionate, kind, humble, gentle, and patient.
That's different.
The modern construction of self discovery involves spontaneity, its interior and inward.
Directed, but this form of identifying with Christ and in him has much more space for putting on, trying out.
It's got a kind of a moral rote learning.
It sounds more like the kind of humble inauthenticity that comes at least in the early stages, as you try to learn a new language and your face
has got that kind of pensive look as you try to conjugate the verb and worry that you've said a word that might either mean mum or you're dead.
To me, or it's like learning a new dance in which you're awkwardly not indwelling the form because you're thinking 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4.
As you look inauthentic ahead of anything becoming really natural and notice the way that the new Testament owns the formative power of community.
I think in the Bible, the community of the church is not the fruit.
The reward you get at the end of self discovery that happened in isolation, but it is itself
the source and the, to use a modern word, lived experience of working your way into Christ.
I've been part of a community where you see in others.
What you're meant to be.
And this is where the Bible does things that we find embarrassing, such as inviting imitation.
To say to Christian leaders, one thing you could do is be more like them.
Imitate them to be part of a community where you can mimic one another, where you can get together, like in a language course and practice, not lying.
Let's give that a crack to be in a community where you have a go at forgiving
each other and teaching and admonish one another and often by wrote and against.
Instincts, practice receiving one another across cultural and economic barriers as fellow selves in Christ.
And notice finally, the conservative force of creation alongside the newness and radicalism of the new creation in Christ.
Sometimes we speak about identity is cut from whole cloth, this kind of year zero approach.
Where the before and after of life in Christ is dramatic, where we come from a kind
of Rousseau's jungle, a kind of blank canvas on which Christ imprints a new identity.
And certainly here, there is no Jew or Gentile circumcised or uncircumcised.
Because we have been overwhelmed in Christ and yet from verse 17, there are in Christ, husbands and wives and
fathers and children and masters and servants, pre existing realities that get dragged into this new situation
and continue to exert their obligations and duties on us, even though, and because we have been united to Christ.
And I think the tell here is the language of being renewed in the image of our creator, which is both
radical newness, but also harking back to our original purpose of bearing the image of God in the world.
Matthew Anderson argues in a 2012 essay that we might be better served by the more concrete language of the New Testament.
Finding your identity in Christ, I think that is essentially true, but it's a kind of abstraction.
The question is, how do you do that?
And you do that in the concrete, not by being identified as a Christian or identified
in Christ, but by, try this on, being a disciple of Christ, a child of God.
A brother or sister within the community or in the traditional baptismal liturgy, a soldier of Christ Jesus.
These sources of the new self bring with them the duties and obligations.
I think without which we will never be truly and authentically those who have been found in Christ.
Brilliant.
Thank you very much, Rory.
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Can you join me in thanking Rory for his time tonight?
Thank you, Rory.
Why don't I close our evening in prayer.
Oh father, we thank you so much for Rory's hard work in preparing this evening and
stimulating us, helping us, pointing us to your words, helping us to think about who we are.
And Father, we do pray that you would continue to give us clarity, help us to think about ourselves truly, honestly, in light of you and your
word, and help us as we minister to others to help them to think about themselves truly and honestly in light of your word and in light of Christ.
And we ask it in his name.
Amen.
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