Continuing from ‘Making Sense of God’ a previous post. . . .Timothy Keller wrote: . . . .
Ernest Becker, in The Denial 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, of family, or nation, or some cultural configuration of all 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 now fills this urge to self expansion in the love object just as it was once fulfilled in God.”37
Becker goes on to say that this was a doomed project. He explains in detail all the ways our overdependence enslaves us to the other person so we either 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 god’s 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.”38
Finally, he concludes: “After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption, nothing less. We want to be rid of our faults, our feeling of nothingness. We want to be justified, to know that our creation has not been in vain. . . . needless to say, human partners cannot do this.”39
If we base our identity on love we come to the same cul-de-sac 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 that our love relationship is okay—if it goes off the rails, we lose our sanity. Why? If our 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 the 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 for society as a whole. ~Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God (375 Hudson Street, New York, NY, 2016), 130-31
