Who Am I?

I went to a very ordinary state school in Scotland where there were relatively few pupils who were what people used to call “out-and-out” Christians. But, as I was leaving school, one of my teachers gave me a book, which I still own and prize. It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship.

It also had some lesser-known works by Bonhoeffer, including a poem titled “Who Am I?” It’s a very striking poem, written in the 1940s when he was in prison camp prior to his execution. In it, Bonhoeffer reflects on whether he really is the person people think he is. He was engaging in some real spiritual self-examination.

About fifty years or so after Bonhoeffer wrote that poem, I heard that the words “Who Am I?” had become the most frequently used title for poems written by teenagers. But these poems were not a form of self-examination. They were a quest for identity and often an expression of identity confusion. Bonhoeffer was asking about the consistency of his own life, but these youngsters were asking the question, “Who am I?” because they no longer knew the answer to it.

I don’t know whether that statistic is still true about teenagers’ poetry today or not, but what I do know, and you know it too, is that this question now haunts the younger generation. Not only is that true, but in effect, they’re told to be haunted by it.

We are no longer someone who is given an identity. Rather, it’s our personal project to find it. We have to decide who we are: Are we male, female, transgender, lesbian, homosexual, or one of the supposed variety of other subgenders? In some ways, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

My question today is, Why has this transformation—indeed, revolution—taken place? Why is it that we have a society of so many troubled youngsters? Why is it that, despite governments and organizations spending endless millions, the situation is actually getting worse rather than better?

I think our society has become like the woman with the issue of blood in the Gospels. The more she spent on trying to get better, the worse she got.

Well, how this has happened is actually relatively simple to explain. The people who are now called “influencers” told us, “If we just get rid of the Christian faith and the God of the Bible, we’ll return to the basically good, happy, well-adjusted people we were before the gospel ever came.” Sadly, they were not thinking either clearly or historically. We weren’t that before the gospel came; we were pagans. So, it’s hardly surprising there has been a massive loss of certainty today about who we are.

You see, when a society gets rid of God’s identity, when a society gets rid of God Himself, something follows logically, even if gradually: we inevitably get rid of our own identity too. Why? Because as Genesis 1:26–28 teaches us, man—male and female—was made as the image and likeness of God. If we get rid of God, then however gradually it happens, man’s basic identity also begins to fragment and to crumble. If we reject who we really are, then we’re bound to stumble in the dark trying to discover who we are, unless we return to God.

It’s significant, incidentally, that when Scripture says “man” in this context, in Genesis 1, it means man, male and female. Two things have been built into our deep-down, created consciousness. First, we are the image and likeness of God. Second, He has made us male and female—not one kind or three kinds, but two kinds, male and female.

As His image, reflecting His character, we are either male or female. That’s why what is now happening in the Western world, in all its assumed modernity, is that first when we lose hold of God, then we lose hold of our identity as His image, and then we lose hold of the clear-cut distinctions between male and female that are actually embedded in every molecule of our being. Until there is a recovery of the knowledge of God, there is really no remedy for this sickness.

That’s why the biblical teaching on man as the imago Dei, the image of God, is so very important. This is a vital, but it’s also a wonderful doctrine for young Christians to get ahold of because knowing who I am—that I’m made as the image and likeness of God, that I’m created male or female in a way that’s embedded into the depth of my physical being, possessing this wonderfully dignifying knowledge of who I am—yes, with all my faults and inadequacies—gives me the stability and the dignity that I need. That’s exactly what our world needs today.