The Problem with Finding Your Identity in Christ
Why finding your identity in Christ lets us down.
Why is the phrase "finding your identity in Christ" so unhelpful and so dissatisfying? It’s a question that I set out to answer in my final year at Bible college. I’d found the common phrase frustrating and ambiguous for years. I wonder if you’ve ever felt that too? Part of me wondered if it was just me, something I just needed to get over and maybe investigating it would help me do that. But part of me also wondered if I was on to something, and there were issues that were being smuggled in with this popular phase that I felt but couldn't articulate yet.
The answer was the latter.
Why I had gut issues with the phase.
I had been growing in my sense of frustration with the phrase for a long time. It is especially common in discussions around sexuality and faith; I'd frequently read things about people saying you can't use such and such a label to describe yourself because you should find your identity in Christ. But the phrase crops up everywhere. In everyday conversation, sermons, books, podcasts, you name it. Have you noticed that it is INESCAPABLE? Since starting this research project, I can’t stop hearing it everywhere. I’m sure once you look out for it, neither will you. People give me looks across the room when it comes up. I get texts when people find it written somewhere. (I enjoy the irony that my identity has become being the identity guy among my friends).
As I was working through the long process of figuring out how my experiences of same-sex attraction fit in my walk with Jesus that phase was one of the most unhelpful. It never helped me deal with my thoughts and feelings. It cut off a part of me, rather than brought all of who I am under the lordship of Christ. I felt like maybe I just hadn't been shaped enough by Jesus, that I had made some kind of conscious choice to undermine my 'christian identity' with other things. It made me feel guilty. It forced a wedge in my sense of self. It made me confused about what faithfulness looked like with significant parts of myself. There were moments on this journey where sexuality felt (note the emotional work there) like the defining part of who I am, and while I don't believe that is true, in those moments being encouraged to 'find my identity in Christ' only pushed me further away from him.
But I also chatted to others from different backgrounds who had similar issues with it. Who felt similarly dissatisfied with the simple answer its often used as. “What does it even mean?” people would ask. Maybe you have the same question.
So I went on a quest to understand what is going on, and where this phrase came from.
Where does it come from?
The first surprising thing I found out: This phrase is not in the Bible. At all. The word identity never even crops up. There are similar concepts, sure, and lots of ideas about selfhood. But identity as we mean it today is just not present.
The start of this journey began with reading a provocatively titled article in American Reformer called “Stop finding your identity in Christ” by Caleb Morel. (It's maybe one of my favourite article titles ever, and it’s a great article).
He points out, using a Google n-Gram search of the term identity, this is what shows up. (Google n-gram searches for terms in published writing to track their usage)
And tellingly, “Identity in Christ” follows almost the exact same course, emerging only in the late 1970s. Of course, just because a word or idea is new doesn’t mean we should decry it and go back to the good old days of yore. But it also doesn’t mean we should unthinkingly adopt a concept and all it implies. We have a tendency to use it like it’s a Biblical phrase, maybe you, like others are surprised to see just how new it is.
While the word identity has been in use since the 16th century (largely in academia), the more modern use has been around since the 1950’s. It has come to largely mean, in every day conversation a person's internalised sense of the attributes and values that make them who they are. There is a great irony that the word identity comes from the latin idem from which we also get the word Identical. A word that used to mean 'things that make us the same' has come to mean 'things that make me different.' That semantic shift speaks volumes.
It's largely, at least in Western cultures, an internalised individualistic thing. There are so many reasons why identity has become the dominant theme of our age, and there are great books that do this, and I'm not going to recount it here.1
Identity in Christ
In response to the modern obsession with identity, Christians have begun using the phrase “Finding your identity in Christ.” The problem is, even though its used all the time, it's a confusing and imprecise phrase for such a complex concept as the interaction of the particularities of selfhood in the Christian life.
More often than not, it is used not to build up but to negate. It has become a combative doctrine.
'Don't find your identity in that thing, no you should find your identity in Christ!' More often than not, we use it to take something away from someone or to alter their self-perception.
The problem is, what does that look like? What are we replacing it with? What does that phrase, if identity has become to mean a way of describing ones ‘emotional sense of self’ FEEL like? The issue is that the identity in Christ's language lacks clarity and, therefore, more easily embraces worldly thinking about the self than it combats it.
Along with that, the concept of finding your identity embraces platonic ideas that there is something objective out there that is the true you, you just need to find it.
And saying it’s your identity implies that its just that-yours, you own it.
In Christ is the only part of this phrase that is biblical and a deeply important concept. But it is one that has such great complexity that shorthand usage can just confuse us. As I reflected on this concept and researched and thought and chatted with people, I concluded that I could summarise my issues into three main problems:
1. It's overly individualistic
If identity has come to mean my internalised, individual sense of self, identity in Christ language encourages an inner quest to find what it might mean for ME. It embraces the atomisation of the individual, as each person defines what it means for them to be in Christ. Rather than combatting our overly individualistic way of thinking, it pushes us deeper into the isolated frame of mind our culture encourages. Because of how individualistic it is, you are still left to figure this whole thing out for yourself. What does it look like to find your identity in Christ? It’s up to you to look inside and find out. Are others doing it better than you? Am I finding my identity in Christ enough? There is no peace in this fully inward turn.
Instead this, the gospel brings us into a relationship- with Jesus and, through him, with others. We should look upward and outward to understand ourselves, not merely inward.
2. It forces a divide between embodied and spiritual realities
If I am to find my identity in Christ, what does it mean for the other important things that make me feel like “me” and not someone else? Gender, race, relationship status, family, work, preferences and etc all become irrelevant parts of your Christian walk, and then we don't understand why our embodied life matters. We're given some disconnected spiritual truth, that feels irrelevant to our daily life. The Bible doesn't trade in this dualistic way of thinking, neither should we.
In the Gospel, we are given a hope of a future, restored, embodied life. Even now, it is through our embodied reality that we live out these gospel truths. Spiritual realities are not isolated from the here and now. The Gospel puts back together what was broken, not divides what God designed to be unified.
3. It conflates particularity with worth and ownership
Finally finding your identity in Christ is an attempt to combat the obsession in modern identity language of ownership and value. But it confuses particularity with worth and ownership. We should not look to any part of our particularity (the specifics of what makes us one person and not another) to find a sense of worth. That IS only in Christ. Our worth does not come from anything about us, but is wholly from being made by, and made for Christ. If we place the weight of value in any other place it will eventually snap under the weight (be it your job, sexuality, relationships etc). The value we have in Christ Jesus is unshakable, and unchangeable.
And finding YOUR identity in Christ still implies that it is Your OWN. But we are not our own. We were bought at a price. This has wide-reaching implications, as a more important question than who we are, is ultimately whose we are. (This is Alan Noble's big thesis, and it is an important point)2
But again, just because you are not your own, and your value doesn’t come from what makes you ‘you’, doesn’t mean you cease to be you. Our particularities are not erased because we are Christ’s special possession. Rather we live out these realities in our own particular ways.
That is a summation and oversimplification of my entire research project. One of the most neglected aspects is our relational nature, and that has something important to say in response to our modern identity obsession. The question I keep asking of this phrase now is- do we want people to have a neat and expressible 'Christian identity' or do you want them to have a deep, rich and transformative relationship with Christ? I have been growing in my desire to make identity (in any form) take a back seat, to the much more important thing: my relationship with Jesus. Our relational nature is a concept I'm going to come back to in a future blog post.
This idea hasn’t solved all the problems around identity. But has it been deeply helpful and comforting? Absolutely. I recently wrote a blog for Living Out in the UK, where I explore similar ideas, if you want to keep thinking about it, you can find that here.
The next time you hear someone use this phrase, or you find yourself reaching for it, maybe take a moment and think- what am I trying to imply with it? How could I replace it with something clearer, and deeper and more profound? Should I encourage someone that they are known by God? That their worth is in Christ? Or that they should be investing in deepening their relationship with Jesus? All these things reach beneath the surface, to answer deep longings that all get caught up in our identity obsession.
Let’s reach for the deeper and greater truths that the Bible gives us, they will never disappoint.
Self-Made by Tara Isabella Burton is one I particularly enjoyed, also Identity by Francis Fukuyama
You Are Not Your Own by Alan Noble