Identities
The tricky thing about modernity is that it adds a phenomenological layer of identity that easily becomes unhinged from one’s given (created and ontological) identity. Our experience of the self becomes unstable and elusive. In premodern times, people found their identity in a more fixed social order. God, or the gods, defined us. There was no question of a gap between our given and our lived identity. You were the son of the tribal leader, you were destined to become the tribal leader and that was who you were and that was that. Moving outside the realm of fixed identity was the stuff of tragedy. Romeo doesn’t wake up.
But what we might call the “phenomenological” aspect of identity (our reflexive sense of what it means to be “me”), can now become unmoored from our objective reality and it becomes unsettling, subversive, even transgressive. Constructing ourselves runs the risk of becoming too idiosyncratic, making identity too particular, outside the concrete communal feedback that has historically tethered our identity to the ground. This ironically sabotages the sense of community originally sought. The unpredictable rage within social media confirms this. Trying to extract social identity from disordered individualism turns out to be inevitably chaotic and disruptive. What once had to legitimate itself by the common good is now legitimated almost exclusively because it is internally desired, and as each idiosyncratic group increasingly demands political recognition. What was once rooted in the whole cosmos is now reduced to the categories of the psychological and the sexual. What began with two sexes has grown exponentially. In a few hundred years we have changed identity from I think therefore I am, to I feel therefore I am, to I desire therefore I am, to I demand you to see me for what I am today. We thought to be, felt to be, desired to be and now demand to be.
Identity Politics
We cannot make sense of the “Gay Christian” phenomenon without noting the juxtaposition it requires between given and “unhinged” phenomenological identity. These brothers and sisters have bound their reasoning to modern discourse on desire and its relationship to politics, and this is an uncomfortable alliance. While I love the good questions being asked by them, I take issue with some answers. I admire the pastoral concerns and the commitment they have to live celebate lives and cling to an orthodox understanding of sexuality. But my own judgment is that to speak of being a “Gay Christian” is to appropriate a uniquely modern kind of identity that must inevitably be in tension with God’s given identity. Secondary identities are worthy qualifiers only to the extent there is no necessary baggage associated with them. As Dr. Leithart showed last week, the Gay Christian has yet to determine the value of the modifier, whether primary or secondary. For instance, I am a Christian, man, husband, father, elder, artist, and speaker. But I choose not to identify as a Gay Christian even while I may experience those desires and temptations on occasion. I choose not to identity as a Gay Christian, nor claim that I am in a “mixed orientation” marriage. I am not willing to be scripted into a role from which I have been redeemed. I’ve moved on to be defined by my conscription into God’s story rather than demanding that He recognize my lesser yarn.
Certain pragmatic considerations still apply, of course. I understand the argument that “gay Christian” is sometimes merely shorthand used when speaking to those whose experience is largely shaped by these desires. But to dress in that myself is not useful. In fact, to be over-obsessed with becoming an “ally” is often received with cynicism in the LGBTQ+ community. And in any case, the identity support that so-called “allies” offer is not what most of these persons really crave at the core of their created and objective identity.
The average trans woman is actually hungry to be a man. There is a desperate longing to be who they were created to be ontologically. Don’t underestimate just how much someone in these identity categories wants to be brought back into their objective identities. Their deepest longing is that “While I’m acting like I’m in one narrative I’m actually born for another.” Suppressing the Truth is actually knowing it we need to remember.
I, one who was transgender, one who thought from the age of 5 that God had made a dreadful mistake with my sexual identity, deeply wished I could be like other boys. I tried so hard to fit in but knew I couldn’t. My identity was established in my own mind and its conclusion was that I just couldn’t do what I was designed to do. Telling myself the story about myself wherein I was not really a boy, but was rather a girl functioned for me. Because If I’m not really a boy, I don’t have to give away the gift of my maleness to the world, a matter about which I was deeply insecure and felt inadequate in the first place. This narrative kept me safe!
Imago Dei
Our deepest and most profound sense of image is that we are the image of God and it is our purpose to reflect Him. Bavinck states in Reformed Dogmatics that “the image of God is the human similarity to God whereby we display in our own creaturely way, the highest perfection of God. We are God’s image with respect to all of our existence, in the soul with all its capabilities (thinking, feeling, willing) and also in the body.” (16) We are located in our bodies, not just as metaphor (although we are certainly that). We are moving creatures “discerning the will of God, that which is good and acceptable and perfect,” in our bodies (which are presented as a living sacrifice Romans 12:1,2). We are not Gnostics. Our bodies, which reflect God, also reveal us, imaging who we are and what we’re on about. Our identities are wrapped up in our bodies and our bodies are wrapped up in the Trinity. The body will be resurrected in glory. That is to say the body has meaning. Likewise, we eat His body and drink His blood at the Table until He comes. We involve the body in “one baptism.” We are community, in the Body, because of our reflection of the Godhead, the eternal Communion. So our identity is tethered deeply to the objective “God said” and “It was very good.” Our bodies “say” who we are and how we move into the world. Since we are quoting Marias, “the disjunction between man or woman affects both man and woman establishing a relationship of polarity between them. Each sex co-implicates the other, which is reflected in the biographical fact that each “complicates the other.” (137) He goes on to show how we are actually located in our maleness or femaleness. (137) We were not created human with gendered “apparatus” but created gendered with mutually human properties.
Innermost to our being is that we are designed to glorify God in our bodies. That makes identity gendered, and falling from glory gendered as well. I am what my body tells me I am. To reflect Trinitarian glory I get to move as a man into my world with the power and purpose of a man. Women, likewise. Our bodies reveal something about God. Truth and Love are imaged in our genders. Men and Women reflect God uniquely and powerfully by how they have been made. Even though we are now being told that both sex and gender are socially constructed, both are grounded in the body and are secured to the character and nature of God. “Zakar” and “Neqibah,” “male” and “female” from Genesis 1:27 give us a hint on how we are to move. “To remember” is the male and “to receive” is the female. Men give that which is memorable and women nourish and nurture and create with what is received. Women give back (as Ezer) more than the sum of its parts thus creating a powerful feedback loop of giving, receiving, joy and beauty. The Trinity is imaged in this beautiful portrait.
Our stories are located in our bodies and from there we get to spin our tales. Romans 1 says that everything that has been made (including and especially us, the pinnacle) points back to the Creator and we know this inherently. We may choose to suppress it but that doesn’t discount its Truth. Exchanging the Truth for the Lie has everything to do with a refusal to reflect God in our persons and how we act out on Nature’s stage proclaiming Him. Romans 1, often rendered a merely classicus locus clobber passage, in reality really speaks to our ultimate identity. We are not our own and deep down we know it. Our nature craves what we refuse it.
As numerous as are the letters in the LGBTQ+ nomenclature, don’t underestimate the degree to which those who claim these identities are starving to be brought back to the ground in their identity. Regardless of a narrative that states “born this way,” not only do identities change but desires do as well. Desires, in fact, often spontaneously arise from identity because they function to buttress it. Desire functions to create identity and then sustain it. If one is at a loss of identity, or insecure in it, then that deficit will manifest in desires for what is less than what God has given, in order to compensate for a forgotten birthright. Desire works as a self-protective mechanism. Just as the lie entered the human race in its infancy, so do our false identities incubate, especially in our own childhoods.
Inhabited narratively, our story (which one might think of as a fusion between the given and the phenomenological) is our identity. We don’t completely know ourselves as we don’t know how much we have been known by God. I believe that we will never, throughout all eternity, completely know ourselves as we will always be getting to know God and He is unsearchable. He will continue to impact us with His knowing of us. “If anyone loves God he is known by God.” We will grow in the knowledge of our own stories and the way He used our stories to point back to Himself.
This is just to have an identity ultimately shaped by love. Love does not seek its own, but rather moves into the world that God has made, and ultimately opens us to our task of bringing glory to the Creator. And ironically, the deepest sense of self and identity is discovered in this. Here there is fulfillment and rest rather than constant adjustment and demand for recognition from men. As Dr. Roberts stated “sexuality can be seen as a neediness that must aim at something beyond itself if it is to achieve its realization.”
Conclusion
Jesus was the exact representation of the Godhead. He never fell from glory and we are therefore, in Him, free to live as our created selves. When finding our identity in Christ, our secondary identities will point to the Creator: husband, father, elder, artist, speaker, etc. We glorify God there. The depth of our identities, explored and expressed, is how that is primarily accomplished. It makes perfect sense that our enemy would confuse us about our identity, and the orientation we might receive from going back to our bodies. To re-discover the nobility of the divine image gives terror to the devil. Before a certain period in my own story, I cannot recall a time when I didn’t feel like a “girl trapped in a boy’s body.” No longer. It feels like a foreign concept, even if it took a long process for it to become so. I had to engage in long-term “identity repentance,” refusing (over and over again), and in many ways, to believe the story that I wanted to tell myself about myself. I learned rather to listen and to let God tell me (over and over again) the story He wanted to tell me about myself. Conceivably this is something all Christians are required to do in some way. Perhaps “Working out our salvation with fear and trembling” is precisely to continually repent of one’s self-scripted identity, and to discover the liberation of the story God would write for you.
Jim Pocta is a licensed professional counselor with Pocta Counseling in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex where he has lived for almost 42 years. He lives there with his wife of 42 years, Linda. They have three sons and daughters-in-law. They enjoy three grandchildren in their spare time. He has been an elder at New St. Peter’s Presbyterian Church in Dallas for about 10 years. He and Linda speak at their gender and sexuality conferences around the country sharing their story of redemption. He enjoys writing and art. He also likes time in the kitchen as a former pastry chef.
Identities
The tricky thing about modernity is that it adds a phenomenological layer of identity that easily becomes unhinged from one’s given (created and ontological) identity. Our experience of the self becomes unstable and elusive. In premodern times, people found their identity in a more fixed social order. God, or the gods, defined us. There was no question of a gap between our given and our lived identity. You were the son of the tribal leader, you were destined to become the tribal leader and that was who you were and that was that. Moving outside the realm of fixed identity was the stuff of tragedy. Romeo doesn’t wake up.
But what we might call the “phenomenological” aspect of identity (our reflexive sense of what it means to be “me”), can now become unmoored from our objective reality and it becomes unsettling, subversive, even transgressive. Constructing ourselves runs the risk of becoming too idiosyncratic, making identity too particular, outside the concrete communal feedback that has historically tethered our identity to the ground. This ironically sabotages the sense of community originally sought. The unpredictable rage within social media confirms this. Trying to extract social identity from disordered individualism turns out to be inevitably chaotic and disruptive. What once had to legitimate itself by the common good is now legitimated almost exclusively because it is internally desired, and as each idiosyncratic group increasingly demands political recognition. What was once rooted in the whole cosmos is now reduced to the categories of the psychological and the sexual. What began with two sexes has grown exponentially. In a few hundred years we have changed identity from I think therefore I am, to I feel therefore I am, to I desire therefore I am, to I demand you to see me for what I am today. We thought to be, felt to be, desired to be and now demand to be.
Identity Politics
We cannot make sense of the “Gay Christian” phenomenon without noting the juxtaposition it requires between given and “unhinged” phenomenological identity. These brothers and sisters have bound their reasoning to modern discourse on desire and its relationship to politics, and this is an uncomfortable alliance. While I love the good questions being asked by them, I take issue with some answers. I admire the pastoral concerns and the commitment they have to live celebate lives and cling to an orthodox understanding of sexuality. But my own judgment is that to speak of being a “Gay Christian” is to appropriate a uniquely modern kind of identity that must inevitably be in tension with God’s given identity. Secondary identities are worthy qualifiers only to the extent there is no necessary baggage associated with them. As Dr. Leithart showed last week, the Gay Christian has yet to determine the value of the modifier, whether primary or secondary. For instance, I am a Christian, man, husband, father, elder, artist, and speaker. But I choose not to identify as a Gay Christian even while I may experience those desires and temptations on occasion. I choose not to identity as a Gay Christian, nor claim that I am in a “mixed orientation” marriage. I am not willing to be scripted into a role from which I have been redeemed. I’ve moved on to be defined by my conscription into God’s story rather than demanding that He recognize my lesser yarn.
Certain pragmatic considerations still apply, of course. I understand the argument that “gay Christian” is sometimes merely shorthand used when speaking to those whose experience is largely shaped by these desires. But to dress in that myself is not useful. In fact, to be over-obsessed with becoming an “ally” is often received with cynicism in the LGBTQ+ community. And in any case, the identity support that so-called “allies'' offer is not what most of these persons really crave at the core of their created and objective identity.
The average trans woman is actually hungry to be a man. There is a desperate longing to be who they were created to be ontologically. Don’t underestimate just how much someone in these identity categories wants to be brought back into their objective identities. Their deepest longing is that “While I’m acting like I’m in one narrative I’m actually born for another.” Suppressing the Truth is actually knowing it we need to remember.
I, one who was transgender, one who thought from the age of 5 that God had made a dreadful mistake with my sexual identity, deeply wished I could be like other boys. I tried so hard to fit in but knew I couldn’t. My identity was established in my own mind and its conclusion was that I just couldn’t do what I was designed to do. Telling myself the story about myself wherein I was not really a boy, but was rather a girl functioned for me. Because If I’m not really a boy, I don’t have to give away the gift of my maleness to the world, a matter about which I was deeply insecure and felt inadequate in the first place. This narrative kept me safe!
Imago Dei
Our deepest and most profound sense of image is that we are the image of God and it is our purpose to reflect Him. Bavinck states in Reformed Dogmatics that “the image of God is the human similarity to God whereby we display in our own creaturely way, the highest perfection of God. We are God’s image with respect to all of our existence, in the soul with all its capabilities (thinking, feeling, willing) and also in the body.” (16) We are located in our bodies, not just as metaphor (although we are certainly that). We are moving creatures “discerning the will of God, that which is good and acceptable and perfect,” in our bodies (which are presented as a living sacrifice Romans 12:1,2). We are not Gnostics. Our bodies, which reflect God, also reveal us, imaging who we are and what we’re on about. Our identities are wrapped up in our bodies and our bodies are wrapped up in the Trinity. The body will be resurrected in glory. That is to say the body has meaning. Likewise, we eat His body and drink His blood at the Table until He comes. We involve the body in “one baptism.” We are community, in the Body, because of our reflection of the Godhead, the eternal Communion. So our identity is tethered deeply to the objective “God said” and “It was very good.” Our bodies “say” who we are and how we move into the world. Since we are quoting Marias, “the disjunction between man or woman affects both man and woman establishing a relationship of polarity between them. Each sex co-implicates the other, which is reflected in the biographical fact that each “complicates the other.” (137) He goes on to show how we are actually located in our maleness or femaleness. (137) We were not created human with gendered “apparatus” but created gendered with mutually human properties.
Innermost to our being is that we are designed to glorify God in our bodies. That makes identity gendered, and falling from glory gendered as well. I am what my body tells me I am. To reflect Trinitarian glory I get to move as a man into my world with the power and purpose of a man. Women, likewise. Our bodies reveal something about God. Truth and Love are imaged in our genders. Men and Women reflect God uniquely and powerfully by how they have been made. Even though we are now being told that both sex and gender are socially constructed, both are grounded in the body and are secured to the character and nature of God. “Zakar” and “Neqibah,” “male” and “female” from Genesis 1:27 give us a hint on how we are to move. “To remember” is the male and “to receive” is the female. Men give that which is memorable and women nourish and nurture and create with what is received. Women give back (as Ezer) more than the sum of its parts thus creating a powerful feedback loop of giving, receiving, joy and beauty. The Trinity is imaged in this beautiful portrait.
Our stories are located in our bodies and from there we get to spin our tales. Romans 1 says that everything that has been made (including and especially us, the pinnacle) points back to the Creator and we know this inherently. We may choose to suppress it but that doesn’t discount its Truth. Exchanging the Truth for the Lie has everything to do with a refusal to reflect God in our persons and how we act out on Nature’s stage proclaiming Him. Romans 1, often rendered a merely classicus locus clobber passage, in reality really speaks to our ultimate identity. We are not our own and deep down we know it. Our nature craves what we refuse it.
As numerous as are the letters in the LGBTQ+ nomenclature, don’t underestimate the degree to which those who claim these identities are starving to be brought back to the ground in their identity. Regardless of a narrative that states “born this way,” not only do identities change but desires do as well. Desires, in fact, often spontaneously arise from identity because they function to buttress it. Desire functions to create identity and then sustain it. If one is at a loss of identity, or insecure in it, then that deficit will manifest in desires for what is less than what God has given, in order to compensate for a forgotten birthright. Desire works as a self-protective mechanism. Just as the lie entered the human race in its infancy, so do our false identities incubate, especially in our own childhoods.
Inhabited narratively, our story (which one might think of as a fusion between the given and the phenomenological) is our identity. We don’t completely know ourselves as we don’t know how much we have been known by God. I believe that we will never, throughout all eternity, completely know ourselves as we will always be getting to know God and He is unsearchable. He will continue to impact us with His knowing of us. “If anyone loves God he is known by God.” We will grow in the knowledge of our own stories and the way He used our stories to point back to Himself.
This is just to have an identity ultimately shaped by love. Love does not seek its own, but rather moves into the world that God has made, and ultimately opens us to our task of bringing glory to the Creator. And ironically, the deepest sense of self and identity is discovered in this. Here there is fulfillment and rest rather than constant adjustment and demand for recognition from men. As Dr. Roberts stated “sexuality can be seen as a neediness that must aim at something beyond itself if it is to achieve its realization.”
Conclusion
Jesus was the exact representation of the Godhead. He never fell from glory and we are therefore, in Him, free to live as our created selves. When finding our identity in Christ, our secondary identities will point to the Creator: husband, father, elder, artist, speaker, etc. We glorify God there. The depth of our identities, explored and expressed, is how that is primarily accomplished. It makes perfect sense that our enemy would confuse us about our identity, and the orientation we might receive from going back to our bodies. To re-discover the nobility of the divine image gives terror to the devil. Before a certain period in my own story, I cannot recall a time when I didn’t feel like a “girl trapped in a boy’s body.” No longer. It feels like a foreign concept, even if it took a long process for it to become so. I had to engage in long-term “identity repentance,” refusing (over and over again), and in many ways, to believe the story that I wanted to tell myself about myself. I learned rather to listen and to let God tell me (over and over again) the story He wanted to tell me about myself. Conceivably this is something all Christians are required to do in some way. Perhaps “Working out our salvation with fear and trembling” is precisely to continually repent of one’s self-scripted identity, and to discover the liberation of the story God would write for you.
Jim Pocta is a licensed professional counselor with Pocta Counseling in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex where he has lived for almost 42 years. He lives there with his wife of 42 years, Linda. They have three sons and daughters-in-law. They enjoy three grandchildren in their spare time. He has been an elder at New St. Peter’s Presbyterian Church in Dallas for about 10 years. He and Linda speak at their gender and sexuality conferences around the country sharing their story of redemption. He enjoys writing and art. He also likes time in the kitchen as a former pastry chef.
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