"Making Sense of God 6b" (Tim Keller)

TITLE: Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical
AUTHOR: Tim Keller
PUBLISHER: New York, NY: Viking Books, 2016, (330 pages).

Who am I? Who are you? Often, the answer depends on our upbringing, our links to certain institutions, or our roles and titles. In non-Western cultures, people are identified through their connections with their communities. In Western cultures, this is reversed via "expressed individualism." While it may be overly simplistic, this offers us a glimpse into the differences in mindset that contrasts "self-sacrifice" from "self-assertion"; Keller even points out the hit movie Frozen's song that affirms the latter in Western culture. With secularism, the image of the modern man has become incoherent, illusory, crushing, and fracturing.

Question 6b: "The Problem with the Self: Question of Identity"
On Illusory:
The problem with the modern self is:

"In short, do not look to anyone else to validate you. Use no standards from the outside. You bestow the verdict of significance on yourself. But this is an impossibility. You cannot get an identity through self-recognition; it must come in a great measure from others. Theologian Philip Ryken qyotes fmor a contemporary novel about a young single woman. She writes a New Year's resolution: 'Develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as a woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend.' However, she sees a problem. 'My sense of self comes not from other people but from . . . myself? That can't be right.' Yes, it isn't right. In fact, it can't be done.

....

Robert Bellah says strikingly, 'The irony is that here, too, just where we [modern people] think we are most free, we are most coerced by the dominant beliefs of our own culture. For it is a powerful cultural fiction that we not only can, but must, make up our deepest beliefs in the isolation of our private selves.' He goes on to say that modern people simply cannot see how their identities owe to others. 'Insofar as they are limited to a language of radical autonomy' and 'cannot think about themselves or others except as arbitrary centers of volition,' it means 'they cannot express the fullness of being that is actually theirs.'

Our identity then, is not, after all, something we can bestow on ourselves. We cannot discover or create an identity in isolation, merely through some kind of internal monologue. Rather, it is negotiated through dialogue with the moral values and beliefs of some community. We find ourselves in and through others. 'We never get to the bottom of ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love, and learning.' In the end the contemporary identity - simply expressing your inner feelings, with a valuation bestowed on yourself independently - is impossible.



" (125-6)


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