IDENTITY

There are moments—and questions—for which the blog format does not well serve the purposes that I and perhaps you have for it. The topic that I raise in this post may be one such. 

Lately I’ve been thinking about identity. Who we are in the deepest sense. How we form identity. What’s makes for true identity. These sorts of questions arise in part because of where I and many of you find ourselves in relationship to the denomination which has long been an essential part of who we are. We have been Christian Reformed. 

And part of us still is, will always remain so. Like Paul  in Philippians 3:4-6, I am tempted to trot out my credentials: baptized as an infant in Third CRC of Lynden, long of the Reformed persuasion, of the tribe Dutch on my mother’s side (though, tellingly, not on my father’s side), educated in Christian schools from the First Grade, graduate of Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary, frequent delegate to synod. . .; well, you get the picture.

But now, those of us who have had a long and contentious and loyal relationship with the CRC, have been told that we must either change our minds about important matters or get out. We have been told that we don’t belong. They, those who have dominated the last few synods, are “more Christian Reformed” than the rest of us. Identity. Who belongs to the family? Who doesn’t?

Perhaps this doesn’t matter. Denominations are relatively recent ecclesiastical inventions, American in origin. Denominations form, grow, split, diminish, merge, and die over time. Perhaps it’s time to move on. 

But the question is broader than this. It has to do with faith and faithfulness. What does it mean to have faith? What does faithfulness look like? What does it mean to be faithful to a denomination? To a congregation? To a people? To a Lord? These are important questions, and how we answer them is crucial not just for the present moment but always. What does it mean to belong?

In the end, it’s the story we tell. Those now in power in the CRC like to tell the story as one of redemption. The CRC, they say, was dangerously drifting toward liberalism, losing its moorings in the Reformed faith, becoming “mainline,” and we (or God) at the very last moment pulled it back. They are nearly giddy with the wonder of it all (see on this the recent report Gospel Coalition report by Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, “The Curious Case of the Christian Reformed Church.”)

I suspect that this way of telling the story for many who represent this point of view is deeply personal. They themselves were at some point in their lives drifting until they found faith. The faith they found draws sharp moral and theological lines. Absolutes. Stand on one side of the line, and you are saved; stand on the other side, and you are lost. And, make no mistake, they regard many of us as lost.

But this way of establishing identity, whether for a denomination or for an individual, never quite works. If a denomination or an individual spends all their time policing the edges of identity—what’s in and what’s out—they will lose the center. 

There is another story, a story that has been an important part of the CRC legacy and an important of my life, perhaps yours, too. It’s this way of telling the story that I would like to explore in my next few posts, beginning with what’s left of this post. 

What I have in mind is this: for this post, I would like tell a different story of faith or, better perhaps, tell the story of faith differently, taking off not from my own story but from a recent piece in The New Yorker by Manvir Singh. In a second piece, picking up on some clues about identity formation from a recent book by Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio, I would like explore what’s going on in the broader culture, not least for insights into what’s going on the CRC. In a third piece, I plan to turn to the brilliant discussion about moral and theological identity by the Apostle Paul in the book of Galatians. And somewhere in all of this, I would like to get to some points about the nature of personal identity that are rooted in the theological reflections of the early church. It was, after all, the church that invented the idea of a person. But that’s another story.

Oh, and I mean for all these pieces to work together. I hope you find them helpful or, at least, thought-provoking. Let’s begin with a story

FINDING FAITHFULNESS IN A POST-FAITH AGE 

Manvir Singh, “The Post-Moral Age,” The New Yorker, September 15, 2024, pp. 22-26.

Manvir Singh, prolific researcher, speaker, and writer—he currently teaches Anthropology at the University of California, Davis—grew up Sikh. He says of his youth, “I wore a turban, didn’t cut my hair, didn’t drink or smoke.” And then, as a young researcher he encountered burying beetles. Burying beetles, beetles that bury the carcasses of small animals in order to feed their young, exhibit another peculiar trait in the insect world: they co-parent, working together as females and males to prepare the nest in which their offspring hatch and grow up. At first glance, they seem admirably cooperative, dutiful parents. But the more Singh looked, the more he saw not actual cooperation so much as “evolved selfishness.” “What looked like cooperation was, I discovered, laced with sexual conflict.” So much for burying beetles.

For Singh, his discoveries about beetles quickly became a crisis of faith. He began to look at himself in the mirror. Were his Sikh ways, his empathy for others, his passion for justice just a more advanced form of evolved selfishness? Was he fooling himself? After a dalliance with a self-made philosophy he called “Celebrationism,” he gave in to deep skepticism about the moral claims of human beings. He says, “I struggled, unsuccessfully, to construct a new framework for moral behavior which didn’t look like self-interest in disguise.” He didn’t find it. As he says, “A profound cynicism took hold.”

The Sikh boy was all but gone: “By the end of my senior year [in college], I was painting my fingernails, drawing mehndi tattoos on my limbs, and regularly walking without shoes, including during my college graduation.” His mother with all the quiet exasperation of parents everywhere asked simply, “Why, Manvir?” 

None of this will surprise you. Perhaps you took something of the same journey. I did, certainly. The specifics are different: not Sikh but Christian Reformed, not burying beetles but those first college philosophy courses, not painting my fingernails or drawing mehndi tattoos on my limbs but growing a beard and taking up the pipe. What’s important is not the specifics but the journey. And what’s important about the journey is that it is two things at once. It is at once a journey into skepticism and a journey into new and deeper truth. 

The skepticism is important. Before one can take the next step, you must see what you did not see before. For Singh, it was seeing that one cannot escape self-interest. Even the most sacrificial acts come laced with the desire to be seen well. You want to be seen as sacrificial, as doing something noble and good. 

Any preacher who has reflected on what we preachers do will have had these same sorts of thoughts: why am I doing this? For the applause or a nobler purpose? The answer is always: both. As Singh says in The New Yorker piece, self-interest goes all the way down. You can’t escape it. 

But seeing what you did not see before is only the first step. The second is to see what you did see before but see it in new ways. The old faith does not disappear in these new insights; it’s still there, lurking in the background. If one persists, the old faith returns, but now in a new and deeper way. It was of this that T.S. Eliot wrote at the end of the last of the Four Quartets, “Little Gidding.” 

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time. 

For Manvir Singh, it has meant a return to Sikh ways, even if he has not returned to the Sikh faith. He tells us at the end of the article, “A sense of meaning has reestablished itself. Tressed, turbaned, and teetotalling, I am, at least by all appearances, a good Sikh.” He goes on to mention his baby daughter, observing that “Her existence feels more ecstatic and celebratory than any ideology I could have conceived.” In this way faith slips back in.

But now faith is layered. The skepticism has not gone away, will not go away. What Singh learned from the burying beetles remains learned. His new faith may look like the old—the same turban, the same uncut hair, the same morality—but it is changed. It’s now laced with skepticism, with questions, and with new ideas about what it means to be faithful, a faithfulness won in the face of doubts, but one that opens to a new perspectives on the world.

My journey of faith is not dissimilar from Singh’s, only older and Christian. And perhaps yours, too. I have met many Christians in the congregations I have served, long-standing members of congregations, whose journey is much the same. Their faith is hard won from an amalgam deep skepticism, new insights, faithful practice, and love—the love of the church, of the scriptures, of Jesus.

It’s this journey that the current CRC would deny to its office holders. They are asked to sign on “without reservation” to the Reformed confessions not only but to the synodical interpretation of the confessions. But for many of us “reservation” is integral to the journey of faith. We learned faith by learning doubt. It’s our doubts that brought us to faith.

To require of office holders that they hold to the teachings of the church without reservation is to require that pastors and elders and deacons come only from those who have never been troubled by science or the study of scripture or by meeting a happily married same-sex couple. Those of us whose journey has taken us to deep doubts and troubling thoughts and back again to faith require different kinds of leaders. Leaders who are “without reservation” can have little to teach us.

Faith “without reservation” leads in the direction of absolutism. Without the humility of doubt, we are likely to foist our opinions on others as if they were the very thoughts of God, which they are not. I was told once by a well-meaning member of the church I was then serving that I would be more effective with young people if I more often said, “Thus saith the Lord.” Absolutes, this person claimed, are what people thirst for.

Perhaps, but my absolutes, like yours, like those of the now ruling cabal in the CRC, lead nowhere except back to where we were. For many people it is to condemn the Christian faith to irrelevance. Once you have seen the truth about burying beetles or the evolution of humankind, you cannot unsee it. To be Christian in the deepest sense is to plunge into the death of my ideas in the trust that if I do so the Spirit will lead me back to a faith new and old at the same time.

In this, I follow Paul, writing in the great 3^rd chapter of Philippians. After laying out his credentials as I did above, he says of these claims that in themselves they are so much excrement. Rather, he says,

I want to be found in him . . . to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering, being shaped by his death, if so, somehow, I may attain to the resurrection of the dead (Philippians 3:10-11).

Note how much passion and struggle makes its way into that “somehow.” He adds:

Not that I have already attained all this or arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. (12)

For Paul, struggling toward new life in the face of what he does not entirely understand; for the writer of Ecclesiastes, seeking a wisdom that constantly escapes him; for Job, holding to his truth in the face of the theological teachers; for each of you, working your way to faithfulness in the face of all you do not understand, I give thanks. And I pray for people and readers and congregations and denominations that will accompany us our journey, not requiring of us what we cannot give—absolute certainty—but glad for what we bring as we explore together the old faith in new ways. 

I am glad to be on this journey with you.

Clay