Being known by God brings significance, humility, comfort, and direction.
Ed: How did you get interested in the topic of personal identity?
Brian: It was for very personal reasons. Back in the 1990s I had my own crisis of identity of sorts. Some big changes happened in my life and I found myself asking some uncomfortable questions. I talk about it in the opening pages of the book.
Being a Christian, I turned to God and the Bible for answers. What I found made an enormous difference to me personally. It also dawned on me that I was far from alone in wrestling with questions of personal identity.
In the ensuing years I had conversations with and read about people in all sorts of circumstances—people who’d been made redundant; people whose parents had died; people whose identity online leaves them feeling like a phony; people with questions about gender and sexuality; people who felt deflated by their aspirations for life not coming to fruition; people who felt diminished by consuming responsibilities for children or parents; and people who felt at sea in our rapidly changing world.
As Kevin Vanhoozer puts it, at the beginning of a new millennium, the human race seems to be suffering from a collective identity crisis. The book is my attempt to pass on what I’d learned.
Ed: People define themselves in all sorts of ways, with reference to their race, gender, age, marital status, occupation and so on. What does the Bible make of the so-called ‘traditional’ identity markers?
Brian: Such markers of identity are obviously essential for personal identity, but they are not the whole story. They are all important, but none of them is all-important. The Bible judges them to be inadequate foundations upon which to build your personal identity and even warns about putting too much weight ...
from
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