Relocating To Elfland

I recently listened to a sermon by Dr. Tim Keller in which he said the reason for the frenetic pace of life and general exhaustion among urban dwellers is that they have come to the city in order to find themselves. It is different for the people of God, he said (preaching from Jeremiah 29:1–14). We come to the cities of the world having already been given a self in the gospel; so our labors in a city are those of loving service, not the exhausting pursuit of self-discovery and self-promotion.

I appreciate that Keller’s comments were focused on urban missions, but I want to draw attention briefly to his more general insight regarding a given identity. Readers of this blog know that I am passionately interested in the rising generation of Christ’s church (not least because I am a father of four), and I can think of no more basic problem among the youth of today’s Christendom than their nearly wholesale lack of functional Christian identity. This shows up in a myriad ways: they have no problem “yoking up” with unbelievers; they cannot live without the latest status symbol; their lives are every bit as dominated by consumerism as their pagan peers; they have little or no interest in deep relationships with prior generations of the church (witness their conversation and reading habits) or in preparing themselves to rear the generation to come; they neither understand nor enjoy the Christian scriptures; their Facebook pages are indistinguishable from those of teens who make no pretense of worshiping Christ; and so on and so on.

The reason for all of this is that, at a functional level, our youth have no clear sense of who their God has declared them to be, and thus no compelling interest in becoming who they actually are. (Now there is a pronoun pileup for you!) They lack a functional Christian identity.

But we cannot stop there. Say the word “identity” in the modern context, and immediately we all start thinking in individual terms: the issue of my “identity” addresses who I am. But is this really so? Is it not the case, rather, that my identity is entirely situated, so that I cannot know who I am without knowing where I am located (in space and in time), to whom I stand related, and what is the fundamental vision of life in which I (and my relations) are operating (call it a worldview, or a Weltanschauung)? Let me quote from Charles Taylor:

“The question [of identity] is often spontaneously phrased by people in the form: Who am I? But this can’t necessarily be answered by giving name and genealogy. What does answer this question for us is an understanding of what is of crucial importance to us. To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.” (Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, p. 27)

Taylor later speaks of “a frame or horizon within which things can take on a stable significance, within which some life possibilities can be seen as good or meaningful, others as bad or trivial.”

And this, in turn, begins to sound a bit like the way the Christian scriptures address identity. In the Bible, we learn that every human life is fundamentally defined by a relationship either with the first Adam or with the Last Adam (Christ Jesus). Every human being is either “in Adam” or “in Christ.” Every human stands in a relationship with the Creator-God that is defined either by Adam’s sin, curse, and death, or by Christ’s righteousness, blessing, and life. To use a metaphor coined by a friend of mine, these are two different “operating systems” in which every one of the various “programs” of human life functions (eating, drinking, education, sexuality, etc.); or to use Ridderbos’ phrase, they are two different “modes of existence”; so that two people may be doing the exact same thing (eating a salad, for instance) and yet be doing so within two totally different life-situations or contexts. One is eating as a righteous, forgiven, beloved child of God; the other is eating as a condemned enemy of God for whom the creature (the salad, in this case) is the “be all and end all.” They are worlds apart, these two people, while eating the same salad.

Once I know where I am situated – who my God is and how I am related to Him, who my people are and how I am related them, and what is the overarching story (or metanarrative) in which my tiny individual story is being written in this time and space – I can begin to figure out how to live.

Perhaps another metaphor may help us here. Biblically conceived, my life is not a story that I am making up as I go. My life is, rather, situated from the moment of my conception in the kingdom story God Himself is writing. Or to change the image slightly, I am given from conception a play script (theologians refer to it as the “covenant”) in which I am assigned a particular role (I have a unique spot in the dramatis personae); and I am to “put on” my costume and play that role by the script. I am told that, as a member of the covenant, I am “in Christ”; and I am to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” and make no provision for the old Adamic life (Rom 13:14). I am to “put off” all of the practices that naturally belonged to the “old self,” for the old self was itself put off when God placed me in His covenant and kingdom (Col 3:9–10). I am to “put on” all of the practices of the “new self” God has given me in His Son. Practice, practice, practice. And eventually, the role no longer feels unnatural; I have become what God has told me I am.

At the risk of being insufferably tedious, let me quote something I once wrote in another context (trying to relate all of this to the subject of Christian wisdom):

“Here perhaps is the genius of true wisdom. If it is the blight of folly (too often characteristic of youth) to be entirely absorbed with the self, and more narrowly still, in the present moment of the self, it is wisdom’s genius to view the self, and especially the moment, as a small and slightly significant part of a large and grandly significant whole. For the wise, every moment of the self stands ‘within’ a larger moment that itself stands within a grander series of moments – what we call a ‘history.’ Put another way, for the wise, each self-moment is part of a community-moment, which in turn is part of a historical movement (or better, a number of historical movements); and only as such does the self-moment retain significance.

“It is but a slight step from this to the idea that wisdom is inextricably grounded in narrative. The absence of a well-formed sense of narrative and a well-formed sense of identity in a community defined by a particular narrative, will usually explain the pervasive foolishness of youth. What is particularly frightening about this absence in the modern context is that modernity has, for many generations, self-consciously rebelled against the ancient narratives that once defined all human community. In bygone centuries, there existed religious narratives, or at least tribal and national narratives, that defined and shaped human community, and in which young ones were schooled. Now the religious narratives are simply ‘myths’; now the tribe is a ‘neighborhood’ in which all are functionally strangers, and the nationhood of nations is rapidly washing away into the global sea. Now the best one can hope for is a ‘Facebook community’ a year or two old, or perhaps a ‘reading community’ loosely built around the latest Twilight novel.

“The Christian scriptures are violently subversive of our modern foolishness. To us they present the grandest of narratives: the story of the kingdom of God stretching back to Eden, the story of God’s covenant community stretching back through Abraham to the creation-kingdom, and past that to the inner life of the Triune Creator. The surest way for us to impart wisdom to the youth of Christendom is to brand this story on their consciousness, resulting in what the Apostle Paul called sophrosune – sobermindedness. The ‘sober’ soul is aware; he has his wits about him; he is able to pull his head out of the present moment, to look about and orient himself to the larger community and story of which he is a part. He lives out of the wisdom and insight lavished upon God’s covenant people in Christ, a wisdom in which God has made known to us ‘the mystery of His will, according to His purpose which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth’ (Eph 1:8–10).”

I would love to go on to talk about how this concretely affects absolutely everything in daily life. There’s nothing impractical or abstract about it. Every day we are enacting a narrative of the self (an “identity” that rules in our hearts); we have only to become self-conscious about this, and we will see how it affects everything. But I have run on far too long, and must wait for another time.