Continuing from * “Modern Identity is Crushing, Timothy Keller writes for: ‘An Invitation to the Skeptical’: In the New York Times Benjamin Nugent writes about the struggles he had when he was a full time novelist. He says: “When good writing was my only goal in life, I made quality of my work the measure of my worth. For this reason I wasn’t able to read my own writing well. I couldn’t tell whether something I had written was good or bad, because I needed it to be good in order to feel sane. I lost the ability to cheerfully interrogate how much I liked what I had written, to see what was actually on the page rather than what I wanted to see or what I feared to see.” When his identity was based in being a good writer, it made him a worse writer. He announces at the end of the article that he doesn’t base his self on writing anymore because he “fell in love, an overpowering diversion.” But is his love of someone else a better base for an identity?
Earnest Becker, in The Denials of Death, wrote *presciently about the sweeping changes that secularism was bringing to the issue of identity. At one time people got their self-image and self-regard from connecting to something more important than their individual interests—to God, or family, or nation or some cultural configuration of the three. Now we have to go get our own identity. Some do it through love and romance. He calls this the “romantic solution”: “The self glorification we now need to achieve in our innermost being, we now look for in our love partner. . . . Modern man fulfills this urge in self-expansion in the love object just as it was once fulfilled in God.” 37
Becker goes on to say that this is a doomed project. He explains in detail all the ways our over-dependence enslaves us to the other person so either we end up overly controlling them or they us. “If your partner is your ‘All’ then any shortcoming in him becomes a major threat to you. . . . we see that our gods have clay feet, and so we must hack away at them in order to save ourselves, to deflate the unreal over-investment that we have made in them in order to secure our own apotheosis. . . . But not everyone can do this because many of us need the lie in order to live. We may have no other God and we may prefer to deflate ourselves in order to keep the relationship, even though we glimpse the impossibility of it and the slavishness to which it reduces us.”39
If we base our identity on love we come to the same cul-de-sac that we saw with the novelist who got his identity from work. Just as he could not bear poor work, so we will not be able to handle the problems in our love relationships. The writer had to believe he is a great writer in order to be sane. We will have to believe our love relationship is okay—if it goes off the rails, we lose our sanity. Why? If our very identity is wrapped up in something and we lose it, we lose our very sense of self. If you are getting your identity from the love of a person—you won’t be able to give them criticism because their anger will devastate you. Nor will you be able to bear their personal sorrows and difficulties. If they have a problem and start to get self-absorbed and are not giving you the affirmation you want, you won’t be able to take it. It will become a destructive relationship. The Western understanding of identity formation is a crushing burden, both for individuals and society as a whole. ~Making sense of God’ (New York, NY: Penguin Random House LLC, 2016), 130-31. . . continued * Modern Identity is Crushing III
* presciently-prophetic, predictive, visionary
