The partial identities don’t “go all the way down in terms of who we are.” But “the image of God does go all the way down to the bottom of who we are.” Keyes observed that the Romans called Christians “the third race, because they could hold together contentious groups that nobody else could hold together.” He said that Paul’s message was that Christians can “rise to the challenge because of who you are.”

Personal identity has become an explosive issue in our time, and was the focus of the recent conference of the L’Abri Fellowship in Rochester Minnesota. Dick Keyes, Director Emeritus of the L’Abri Fellowship in Southborough, Massachusetts, discussed the “shrinking foundation” of identity in the western world, and true human identity in God’s image, in two lectures.

With the imposition of same-sex marriage and the advent of self-defined sex, much has changed over the past decade. People press their identity claims against traditional understandings. Nevertheless, people have not changed, Keyes observed. They may raise different issues, but they continue to be human. Further, “God has not changed,” Keyes said that personal identity is indeed “a question that the Bible does address.” Identity can mean one of two things. First, human beings have a unique capacity to “reach out and turn back on ourself.” This is our ability to be self-conscious, and have a picture of who we really are. But secondly, there is also “the image of yourself that you try to project to other people.” Sociologist Irving Goffman spoke of this as “impression management,” and said that it is the main thing that human beings do in all their social interactions. This raises the question of how much the private view of the self corresponds to the projected image of the self. Identity can thus be a problem, because it’s both an image of one’s self, “and self-acceptance of that self.” What people need is both coherence in their personal identity over time, and self-acceptance of their identity.

Identity gives “unity in the midst of a lot of divergent, conflicting, clashing images of ourselves, pictures of ourselves, impressions of ourselves, verdicts about ourselves.” Identity is not something we can find in physical reality. You don’t find it “in the way you would lost care keys … We’re most conscious of the issue of identity when we’re aware of being without it.”

During the twentieth century, psychologist Erik Erikson coined the term “identity crisis,” and popularized the concept. Identity was less of a problem before Darwin. By dispensing with the notions of divine order and natural order in favor of an ever evolving reality, the crisis of identity has become intense. “The human need for identity called for the Biblical God he [Erikson] did not believe in.”

A strong sense of identity frees an individual to get on with life. It also pushes us beyond our own identity to the foundation of personal identity. No foundation is possible if we “are just strange, out of place accidents.” Living on a tiny blue speck in the Milky Way galaxy, many of today’s thinkers believe that there is no foundation for personal identity, although they do not personally “live by that judgment.” Keyes said that “God alone” is the foundation for our personal identity, not “biochemistry,” “the late hunter-gatherer society,” “parents,” “majority vote” or “the shopping mall.” God claims absolute self-sufficiency in his name “I Am That I Am.” He is not identified by contingent things like thought, feeling, vocation, etc. We are contingent beings, but are securely identified by our relationship with God.

The Bible, Keyes believes, provides four building blocks of identity: 1) moral convictions, 2) heroism, 3) dominion (or agency), and 4) love. Failure in these areas “make us uncertain about who we are, they leave us with hatred and disgust over ourselves because of what is revealed to us by our own failures.” Citing Francis Schaeffer, he said that a person needs “moment by moment forgiveness” from God.

Our morality is determined by how well we image God. The more we become like God, the more we image his character known from his commandments, the more we become ourselves. Sin on the other hand “scars our identity.” He referred to a saying common at the L’Abri Fellowship, that every human being “is a glorious ruin.”

With respect to heroism, Keyes said that “heroes show us honor, glory, and true greatness.” They “connect your imagination to your own future.”

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