Introduction To A Hermeneutics Of Identity

By Klyne R. Snodgrass

[Klyne R. Snodgrass is Paul W. Brandel Professor of New Testament Studies, North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois.

This is the first article in a four-part series, “A Hermeneutics of Identity,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas Lectureship, February 2-5, 2010, Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, Texas.]

No task is more important for Christians than hermeneutics, for hermeneutics determines everything else. Hermeneutics is the process by which texts are understood and appropriated. Lately numerous qualifiers have been added to the word “hermeneutics,” so that one may hear of a hermeneutic of suspicion, a hermeneutic of liberation, of feminism, and so forth. Thiselton lists fifteen such qualifications in the index to his New Horizons in Hermeneutics.[1] Attention to hermeneutics has shifted from a focus on texts to a focus on human actions to a focus on understanding oneself. Possibly “hermeneutics” is too broad a word, but we do read to understand ourselves.

Such qualifications have their value, but I suggest primarily a four-level hermeneutic. First is a hermeneutics of realism, the common-sense logic of Ben Meyer that among other things emphasizes that the biblical text is a communication between other people and groups, which demands that we respect both the “otherness” of the people and their communication.[2] Second is a hermeneutics of action, which has been advocated by Thiselton, Lundin, and Walhout, and which emphasizes that texts are the result of actions and were intended to produce action, which accords well with speech-act theory.[3] Third is a hermeneutics of hearing, for what God seeks and Scripture calls for more explicitly than anything else is hearing—that we listen to the text and the voice of the Holy Spirit.[4] There are at least eight levels of meaning in the 1,194 occurrences of שׁמע, most of which are evident as well in the 428 occurrences of ἀκούειν. The range of meanings, among other things, includes hearing physical sounds, understanding, paying attention to, agreeing with, and obeying. A hermeneutics of action and a hermeneutics of hearing both call for a hermeneutics of obedience. One not willing to obey will find a way not to understand (John 7:17). Scripture seeks attention and depth in hearing that leads to transformation and obedience. Fourth, and the concern of this series, is a hermeneutics of identity. Scripture tells us who we are, which is evident in the fact that Scripture is full of identity statements.[5]

In urging a hermeneutics of identity I am aware that I am focusing on a word that does not appear in most translations of Scripture and for which there is no immediately obvious corresponding Hebrew or Greek word.6 In fact the word “identity” appears first toward the end of the sixteenth century. Ancients did speak of being and of self but had no word corresponding to our word “identity.”[7] Still the Bible gives us an identity, tells us who we are and how we fit into God’s story and how that identity is to be lived out. The Bible is about who we are to be, despite all the hermeneutical discussions of distancing. How do we do justice to the task of distancing, to considering the fact that Scripture is written to another place and time, without being distant ourselves from the text?[8] Scripture is about identity formation. In the end the whole discussion about the authority of Scripture is about identity. Do we allow Scripture to tell us who we are and who we are to be, or do we give that authority to something else?

Identity formation must be the focus of the church. At least in part church is the place people go to take their identity and declare their allegiances. Individuals all go somewhere to take their identity, assert their allegiances, and relate to others like themselves. Evangelism and preaching are articulations of a needed and new identity. As Kierkegaard insists, Christianity is not a doctrine but an existence-communication.[9] Our society is bombarded with messages attempting to tell people who they are, what they should look like, how they should spend their money, and what success will look like. Christians have the task of telling people who God says they are and who they are to become.

The expression “a hermeneutics of identity” is relatively new. I started using the expression a few years ago and was unaware of its use elsewhere. Since then I have seen a few occurrences—without explanation and mostly from philosophers. Paul Ricoeur speaks similarly of a hermeneutics of the self.[10] But while the expression may be recent (or at least not noticed till recently), the thinking and theology are not. At some level if you are human, you have to focus on identity. The famous maxim of Greek wisdom, attributed to Thales and inscribed in Apollo’s temple at Delphi, urged, “Know yourself.” Epictetus (ca. A.D. 55–ca. 135) commented, “First learn who you are, and then, in light of that knowledge, adorn yourself. You are a human being.”[11] The problem is that while philosophers urged, “Know yourself,” they did not tell how.[12]

There is also another side to the story. Goethe reportedly said, “I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should. Know yourself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.”[13]

We know things but not ourselves, and it might not be a nice picture. Yet as Christians we say (a) that one must know oneself, sin and all, (b) that grace makes it possible to look honestly at oneself, and (c) that we know ourselves and find our true selves only by knowing Jesus. Pascal commented, “Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ alone; but we know ourselves only by Jesus Christ.”[14] Humans cannot know themselves without knowing the One in whose image they were created. Or as Paul might say, you cannot know yourself without being known by Him (1 Cor. 13:12; Gal. 4:9).

Of course dangers lurk in focusing on identity. People often read themselves into the text in naive ways, which violates the critical realism with which we started. Even as the text reveals who we are, it maintains an otherness that does not allow a naive identification. Also a focus on identity can be merely another form of self-centeredness. Humans have the innate ability to distort any good into self-centeredness and an opportunity for self-promotion, including the reading of Scripture. But if we focus on vocation or some other aspect of Christian existence, such a focus already assumes an identity. All of life is lived out of a sense of identity, even if one’s sense of identity is confused. Every reality of Christian existence has its foundation in identity. Further, faith confronts and seeks to exclude self-centeredness, for conversion is about ego management. Faith displaces the ego so that Christ is the primary self determinant. In other words the Christian understanding of the self is found outside oneself.

Identity is obviously not a new subject. Philosophers and theologians, especially people like Augustine, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, have charted a course for dealing with identity, and technical discussions can be found among modern philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and theologians.[15] Postmodernism has created a Zeitgeist focused on identity, witnessed in new ways by avatars and Internet identities

In recent years identity has become a popular theme among New Testament scholars. Although earlier works could be mentioned, the recent emphasis among New Testament scholars stems from the three volumes on Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, edited by E. P. Sanders,[16] and to some degree the works by Ben Meyer.[17] Since then numerous studies have appeared explicitly focused on identity, works by Philip Esler, Klaus Berger, Judith Lieu, William Campbell, Atsuhiro Asano, V. Henry T. Nguyen, and Mikael Tellbe,[18] to say nothing of articles and collections such as Identity, Ethics, and Ethos in the New Testament, Exploring Early Christian Identity, Identity Formation in the New Testament, and Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities.[19] However, most of these studies focus on ethnic identity, group or social identity, or on the self-definition of first-century Jews and Christians as opposed to other groups in the ancient world, or on the supposed “parting of the ways” of Jews and Christians. These works are instructive, but they fail to do justice to the theme of identity. While there are exceptions, most of these works are concerned with the identity of Christianity, sometimes as a cloak to discuss something else, but a hermeneutics of identity is concerned with the identity of Christians. The difference is significant. These studies give far too little attention to identity, what makes up identity, and how the Christian message seeks to construct a new identity for people. Of course Scripture also focuses on the identity of God and of Jesus Christ, but the purpose in doing so is not to give abstract knowledge. The identity of God and Christ are revealed to show what humans created in God’s image are to be.

Questions of identity are crucial, whether in the ancient world or the modern world. Who really is a Jew? Would the people at Qumran think their opponents, the “seekers after smooth things,” were really Jewish? Who really is a Christian? What really makes a person a Christian, especially in societies like ours where many claim the label “Christian”? Our splintered churches and denominations are largely the result of disagreements about identity.

The failure to focus on identity has created enormous problems. The gospel in our time is an unimportant item in peoples’ lives. It has been presented as a minor attachment to people, one that barely touches their identity. Christ, however, is not an add-on to an existing identity; He seeks to remake one’s identity. Often language here is hyperbolic, implying that nothing of the old identity remains. Obviously much remains the same; what is changed is the old life of sin, the old being and its old orientation.[20] Christ is not an accessory to our identity, as if one were choosing an option for a car. He takes over identity so that everything else becomes an accessory, which is precisely what “Jesus is Lord” means. It is the opposite to a cheap form of a gospel without demand and without content, as if faith were a short transaction, a prayer, a decision, to get security taken care of in order to go to heaven. The New Testament, however, is far less concerned about going to heaven than people think.[21]

Humans by nature tear the act of thinking from the act of being. Rudolf Bultmann accused W. Wrede of tearing the act of living from the act of thinking.[22] The result is a bifurcation of head and heart, of thinking, doing, and being. Hypocrisy abounds, and any sense that Jesus actually makes a difference in living is, if not lost, at least curtailed. A focus on identity obliterates all these bifurcations. Bultmann recognized that “only those who are stirred by the question of their own existence can hear the claim which the text makes.”[23]

A focus on identity allows us to put thinking and being back together. Christianity is not about thinking the faith. Theology is useless unless backed up by life. If we proclaim a gospel that does not lead to doing, we proclaim an alien gospel. Being does not exist without doing. We are what we do, no matter what we say. Identity cannot be shaped or exist without doing. Nor is there a necessary sequence from thinking/being to doing. There is a reciprocal action. Sometimes we learn first and then do; at other times—and probably most of the time—we do first and then learn.

What Is Identity?

Theological discussions of anthropology too frequently move from considering the image of God to discussing sin, and they neglect discussions of identity. What really is a person?

What seems like a simple question is not so simple, as quite complex discussions among philosophers and theologians attest. In asking this question I am less interested in distinctions of the self, selfhood, and the ego or between the internal self “behind the mask” and the external self “in front of the mask.” Identity is that sense of being and self-understanding that frames our actions, communicates to others who we are, and sets the agenda for our acts. We live out of a sense of identity. It may be unexpressed or even unconscious, but it still determines us. Image is not identity; image is what we project to others, an attempt at how we would like to be seen, which may have little to do with what we really are. Our society believes that possessions, especially clothes and cars, are our identity. We spend billions on image and give little useful attention to identity.

On the other hand should we speak of identity at all? Postmodernism rejects the “modern” idea of a unified and static sense of the self and argues instead for multiple selves/identities/self-representations, a constellation of “sub-selves,” in every person. Because of the complexity of relations in a global world, the rapid changes in society, the loss of any controlling metanarrative, and the multiple contexts in which people exist, identity is viewed as never fixed or determined but always shifting. Self-fragmentation is viewed as positive. “We no longer exist as playwrights or actors but as terminals of multiple networks.”[24] Postmodern analysts disagree on whether an essential self is coordinating the various identities, but they grant that the idea of multiple selves is as old as Plato and is obvious in Freud and others. What is new is the degree of emphasis in present thinking, even a “deep-seated Angst about human personhood.”[25]

How should we react to this postmodern claim? If the issue is a fixed identity independent of history, culture, and relations, obviously such an idea of identity will not work. If the claim stems from the multiple contexts in which we all find ourselves and the multiple roles we have and ways we present ourselves, again postmodernists are correct. Is the issue concerning multiple selves whether the pluralities of selves are connected and in dialogue or strangers to each other? All of us know a “me” that is not “me,” or, stated differently, the mind has a mind of its own. Further, the people who emphasize pluralities of self are the very people who also discuss identity crises and speak of the fragmentation and meaninglessness people experience. The real issue, it seems, is how we view what it is that experiences and narrates all these factors and modes of existence. In looking at the various modes of being, have we merely hidden being? Those people are surely correct who argue that awareness of multiple self-representations does not require the conclusion that there is no essence of the self,[26] and that essence of the self is our identity. Also the biblical text is well aware—even in a primitive world—of various modes of being. Paul’s lament in Romans 7 that the very thing he wanted to do he did not do and his discussions of old and new being are evidence, as is James’s complaint about double-minded people (James 1:8) and the psalmist’s concern for the integrity of a pure heart (Ps. 24:4). If postmodernism denies any concept of a unified self, is that not precisely what Christianity seeks to achieve in believers, or at least a coherence of being?

So, what is identity? Identity is the sum of everything that pertains to and shapes a person. Our identity is constructed from eight factors.

First, our physical and psychological characteristics (some given, some chosen): gender, size, race, abilities, tendencies toward shyness, aggressiveness, and so forth; much is hardwired, but it is not necessarily determinative. The significance of the body for identity must not be underestimated. Human identity is always embodied.

Second, our histories: our experiences have shaped us in our families of origin, opportunities, education, trauma, failures, and celebrations. Paul Ricoeur describes this narrative identity as a function of permanence over time, established by self-constancy and perseverance of character.[27] Narrative identity also assumes an agent acting and acted on.

Third, our relations: life is relational, and relations determine identity. Identity is not an individual affair; it is a social construct. An African proverb asserts, “A person is a person through another person.” “Who are you?” is not a question a person answers alone. Especially important is one’s family of origin and what happens during childhood and adolescence. Then come the friends one chooses, the people one works with or serves, perceived expectations, and whether we accept or reject the expectations.

Fourth, our commitments: (a) To a location: we are defined to some degree by the place we live, especially in growing up. To some extent geography is identity. (b) To investments of interest, time, and money: that to which one assigns value then assigns value to and defines that person. (c) To oppositions: what one opposes, hates, and fights shapes who one is. (d) To attitudes, perceptions, and opinions. Beliefs and attitudes held are not merely facts one believes but realities that shape identity (e.g., attitudes about sexuality, violence, materialism, and what is important). Our true theology is those beliefs to which we give defining force for ourselves, not the ideas in books with which we agree. The things (or people) one admires and with which (or whom) one identifies define that person. Plato asked, “Or do you think it possible not to imitate the things to which anyone attaches himself with admiration?”[28] (e) To activities we are assigned or choose—our jobs. “We are what we repeatedly do.”[29] (f) To the icons or “heroes” we choose. (g) To the people we seek to impress.

Fifth, our boundaries, which partly overlap with commitments: being is a process of putting down some boundaries and of removing others. We are both separate from and bound to other people. Identity has to do with opposition. Every factor about identity is in opposition to something else. Boundaries include the following: (a) Our skin. (b) Our geography whether it is the limit of our horizon or the choice to be or not to be in certain places. (Again, geography is identity.) (c) Our associations. To join a group is to set down a boundary between you and those who do not belong, even if you do not want such a boundary. Marriage is a boundary marker; in fact in marriage a couple agrees to merge boundaries partially, although those boundaries do not become coextensive. (d) Ethical boundaries, that is, boundaries of concern and boundaries of actions.

Sixth, an ongoing process of change. Identity is flexible and changing and is never an accomplished fact until death. We are continually changed physically as we age and in other ways as we have new experiences, relations, commitments, and so forth. We are constantly constructing our identities, although we are usually oblivious to the whole process.

Seventh, we do not yet have an identity. Identity is what gives internal coherence, if there is any. Identity has been defined philosophically as the unity with oneself (which postmodernists reject), that stable core of defining factors in which a voice says, “This is the real me.” Identity is the internal self-interpreting memory.[30] If people do not have a stable core, they are more likely to be diagnosed with personality disorders or institutionalized. Identity is an internal reality and is framed by memory. Humans, as far as is known, are the only self-interpreting animal. Identity is very much about memory. Without memory there would be no identity. Identity requires a persistent sameness within oneself and a persistent sharing of some kind of essential character with others. But there is something more.

Identity is more than all these boundaries, relationships, and commitments; it is at bottom the internal synthesizing, valuing, and interpreting with regard to how one relates to all the realities of life. Identity is the result of the person thinking, interpreting, and concentrating life and character. It has to do with valuation, ordering, and self-esteem. Such decisions are moral decisions and result from conclusions one draws about responsibility, accountability, and self-awareness.[31] Real identity is what you are in the dark, not the identity you project because of what you want people to think. The real you is the internal you.

This internal self-interpreting memory is not merely the individual making such assessments. Identity is something assigned to us by others and something we assign to ourselves in response to a community’s assignment of identity to us, an interaction of self-description and communal description.[32] The more the internal and external are in agreement the stronger the sense of identity that results. Neither assessment is necessarily correct, and difficult as it may be, one can reject a community’s description. But an assessment can be disproven only by performance.[33]

Eighth, identity includes some sense of the future, some sense of where I am going and what will happen next, for from our identity we project a future.

An additional reality must be mentioned. Sin, the propensity to self-centeredness and worse, already mentioned in connection with Romans 7, is not a ninth factor of identity; it is a reality that pervades all our identity, all eight previously mentioned factors, especially the internal self-interpreting memory that organizes and values the rest of life. The destructive fragmentation and fracture we know in our relations and in ourselves is the direct result of sin.[34] This creates another kind of internal dialogue and an obvious theological and practical problem. The very part of us organizing, valuing, and interpreting life is disoriented by sin. Sin is part of our identity, but sin does not get the last word.

Faith Transforms Identity

All factors mentioned above, including the comments on sin, do not require Christian presuppositions. They are true of all humans, but all factors shaping our identity must be reconsidered from a Christian perspective. As evidenced by passages like John 12:36 (“While you have the light, believe in [εἰς] the light, so that you may become sons of light”), faith transforms identity. Faith is a set of choices, commitments, and relations that enable being and by their very nature transform identity. Each of the identity factors above must be rethreaded theologically.

First are our physical and psychological characteristics. Surely the defining reality here is the fact that we are created in the image of God. That is part of our physical and psychical makeup which gives us certain abilities and responsibilities. If the theological component of identity is missing, one has no idea who he or she is. If we are created in God’s image, there is nowhere else to go to know who we are, even though for many people God is the last “place” they want to look. Another fact is that our bodies are not our own; they belong to Christ (1 Cor. 6:19-20). Further, we are mortal but not limited to mortality. We are a people with a hope—a resurrection people. Suffering is part of human life, but some suffering is chosen in identification with the Cross.

Second, our histories and our experiences have shaped us, but Christians by faith have adopted a history not our own to be our own. Our true history is the history of Christ into whom we are grafted. His history, within which and to which our personal history is subsumed, is our defining history. Conversion is the acceptance of a new identity, of deriving our identity from someone else’s story, of transferring defining power from our personal history and self-presence to Christ’s history and His presence. While we cannot change our histories, we do not have to live them or give them ultimate defining force. The question concerning what a person gives defining force in life is the key identity question. Our histories are not changeable, but histories are to be remembered and processed for truth, not lived in. We are called past our histories—not out of them—to live in Christ. Our histories do define us, but they are subordinated to the defining history of Christ. Each of us has to be who we are, but we do not have to be stuck with who we are. Even God cannot call us out of some place other than where we are and who we are. We are not equally called out of culture, but culture too is deprived of its central defining force. Culture is a necessary ingredient, but it is not determinative. Despite its importance, culture in the end is an adiaphoron (i.e., having no moral merit or demerit), as Paul implied in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23.

Third, regarding relations, our primary relation is our relationship to God in Christ, and that has primary defining force. The body of Christ is the fundamental metaphor. Our relation to Christ determines us but also sets us in relation to all others in Him and to all of humanity. As much as we may love our historical families, our true family is the family of God (Mark 3:31-35; Eph. 2:19-22). Christianity is not an individual affair. Others belong to us and we belong to them. Life is relational; it is dialogically constructed. Other people have only derivative defining force; Christ is the ultimate “definer.”

Fourth is our commitments. (a) Commitment to a location. If we are defined to some degree by the place we live, Christians must know their true location is in Christ. Geographically we belong in Christ and are defined by Him; He is our environment. He is the sphere of influence within which we live. No part of Christianity is more powerful than the idea of life in Christ. Christianity, especially as presented in the writings of Paul and John, is to be understood in participationist terms. We participate in the death and life of Christ. Faith attaches us to Jesus; it is not what we think about certain ideas in our heads. (b) Commitment to investments of interest, time, and money. That to which you assign value assigns value to you and defines you. Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be” (Matt. 6:21). God’s work in Christ is to be our interest, our investment. In naming Christ as Lord we honor ourselves. A second-century Christian put it this way: “Whatever you honor most will rule you. Honor what is best that you may be governed by what is best.”[35] People render themselves worthless by investing their lives in worthless things.

(c) Commitment to oppositions. What a person fights shapes his or her agenda and identity. Some realities we must oppose. Pick an opponent that needs to be opposed, but even when fighting we are still to be defined by Christ. To fight evil without becoming evil is the task of all Christians—and a fundamental human problem.

(d) Commitment to attitudes, perceptions, and opinions. This is the reason the Bible places so much attention on the mind. There is a commitment to having the mind shaped by the mind of Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). Identity is a “mind thing.”

(e) Commitment to activities we are assigned or choose—our worship, entertainment, and work. We cannot avoid being defined by activities and roles, even at times in ways we do not accept. While activities define us, we are not our jobs. It is Christ who defines us, not a task or office. Commitment to do the will of God defines us. Worship and rituals are activities that help define us. Some Christians have implied that people can act in ways totally separate from what they believe and know. No, we cannot. We are what we do. There is no antithesis of faith and works. Humans cannot live without acting. You will work. The question is whether you will work in accord with faith or unbelief, in accord with your Christ identity, or as if your identity is elsewhere. When faith is understood as identity in Christ, then works are not separable actions but the necessary living out of that identity.

(f) Commitment to the icons or “heroes” we choose. There is only one icon worthy of our commitment, namely, our Lord.

(g) Commitment to the people we seek to impress. There is only one person, the Lord Himself, whom you should be seeking to impress (John 5:44; cf. 12:43).

Fifth, our boundaries. Being is a process of putting down some boundaries and of removing others. We do not all need a cataclysmic conversion experience, but we do need experiences that set down boundaries to which we keep returning to remember who we are. Much of the Bible is about boundaries—a boundary around one tree in Eden, a boundary around Mount Sinai, boundaries in the tabernacle and temple, to note a few examples. The Ten Commandments put down boundaries to mark identity. God said, in effect, “This is who I am and who you will be, a ‘one-God’ people who do not make idols or violate My being, who know how important boundaries of time and family are, who do not violate boundaries of person, property, truth, or relations.”

Conversion is itself a boundary. Christians do not erect boundaries to exclude people; they should always be willing to embrace even their enemies. But Christians like all other people have and set boundaries. (a) The boundary of our skin. (b) The boundary of our geography, whether it is the limit of our horizon or the choice not to go to certain places. Yet Christians by necessity are to have a universal outlook “into all the world.” (c) The boundary of our associations, especially with our past. (d) The boundary of our ethics, boundaries of concern and boundaries of actions—not doing certain things. The Torah and much of the Gospels and the epistles are discussions of boundaries. Some boundaries we do not allow—between races or to set the limits of forgiveness; some boundaries we will not cross. The concerns and implications of boundaries involve nearly all aspects of Christian living.

Sixth, regarding the ongoing process of change, conversion is a process, not merely an event. The Christian life is a life of growth, a continual renewal, a process of continually being changed from one stage of “glory” to another (2 Cor. 3:18; 4:16; Eph. 4:22-24; Col. 3:9-11). Therefore identity maintenance is of major importance, which is the church’s task in worship and education. Worship and learning are about identity maintenance.[36]

Seventh, regarding the internal self-interpreting memory, Christian existence is an internal, reflective adventure, both remembering and interpreting who we are. The reasons for the biblical focus on the heart and on faithfulness—a continuity of identity—are obvious. The role of prayer, worship, and meditation becomes clearer; they are avenues for our minds to remember and interpret, to be reformed with the identity God seeks for us. The role of memory in worship in the Lord’s Supper and baptism becomes clear. With these acts memory is an act of participation in which an event is called forth in the soul.[37] The Lord’s Supper and baptism are identity-shaping acts based on identification with a crucified and risen Lord. Issues of self-esteem, accountability, and responsibility take on even more significance. The interaction of self-description and community description is enhanced because individual and community are both part of the body of Christ. Even more important is the addition of God’s description. For Christians, identity is founded in what God says, affirmed and tested by the interaction of self and community.

Eighth is commitment to some sense of the future. Christians have an eschatology, and eschatology shapes identity both in the present and the future.[38] Death is not the end of identity, for judgment and openness to God’s future continue to define us.

What Does A Hermeneutics Of Identity Entail?

First, a hermeneutics of identity requires that we have humility in coming to the biblical text and that we listen, knowing that our present identity needs a radical lifelong conversion, reorientation, reshaping, and empowering. It will not focus on attempts to define in great detail the ego, the self, selfhood, and other such terms, nor will it limit concerns with identity to the identity of Christianity and Judaism and the supposed parting of the ways.

Second, a hermeneutics of identity focuses on the goal of reading and seeks to keep central the realization that the ultimate and central question is always, “Who are you?” and the answer is in how God views humanity, especially humanity as God intended in Christ. A hermeneutics of identity is not self-centered; it is a focus on the relationship of the individual to God, the source of human identity. A hermeneutics of identity will focus on a comprehensive view of identity, one informed by modern philosophical and psychological studies, but also one that is directed even more by the focus of Scripture, telling us about the various components of identity. It is Scripture first that tells us we are not merely individuals but that we have our identity in community. Scripture tells us what our bodies are, the spectrum within which attitudes are useful, what our relations should be, what our true history and geography are, what our commitments and boundaries should be, how our minds relate to our being, how freedom is to be understood and used, what our accountability and responsibilities are before God, and what our future is about. A hermeneutics of identity seeks the identity-revealing aspects of the Scriptures. The text can be used for other things, to address issues of historicity, to understand the ancient world, to learn of grammar and syntax, but none of these or other such things is what the text is really about.

The intent of Scripture is to tell us who we are, and our goal in reading should continually be to discern answers to the questions “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” Answers to these questions carry implications for other questions, such as “What should I do?” “What should I think?” and “How should we relate?” The answers to the basic questions are not simplistic or naive. They bear within themselves a full theology and provide handles by which we may grasp Scripture and life. This is a hermeneutic that emerges from the concern of the text.

Third, a hermeneutics of identity focuses on the process of reading and hearing as an identity-forming activity. Identity is not merely something we learn about; it is something formed in the process of understanding. Christian readers and hearers need to be consciously aware of how the identity described by the text interacts with their own identity, confronting, changing, and shaping to bring about new life in Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit. This hermeneutic presupposes a willingness to find one’s identity in Scripture.

Fourth, a hermeneutics of identity will remember that interpretation of Scripture is a communal affair. If identity is a social construct, any hermeneutic focused on identity will be too. If identity is a continual process and a dialogical process, the interpreter of Scripture must know that no one has the depth of field or the breadth of preunderstanding to grasp the significance of the whole. In discussions about the text and with the willingness to be truthful with each other we move forward in understanding the text, our God, and ourselves.

In short, a hermeneutics of identity provides a lens for reading that brings the matters of life into focus.

Identity is the most important topic for us. Who are you? What has happened to you and through you? Where are you? Where are you going? Who is going with you? What do you do because of who you are? Answers to these questions reveal your identity. To the degree that Christ is involved in the answers is the degree to which you are a follower of Christ.

The gospel seeks to make us human, not merely human, but fully human, the human God called us to be as defined by Christ.

Notes

1. Anthony C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), 681.
2. Ben F. Meyer, Critical Realism and the New Testament (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1989), x–xiv.
3. Roger Lundin, Clarence Walhout, and Anthony C. Thiselton, The Promise of Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999). This is an expansion of their argument in The Responsibility of Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985).
4. See Klyne R. Snodgrass, “Reading to Hear: A Hermeneutics of Hearing,” Horizons in Biblical Theology 24 (2002): 1-32; and idem, “A Hermeneutics of Hearing Informed by the Parables with Special Reference to Mark 4,” Bulletin of Biblical Research 14 (2004): 59-79.
5. Paul Ricoeur defines hermeneutics as the deciphering of life in the mirror of the text (“Preface to Bultmann,” in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980], 53).
6. Judith Lieu suggests πολιτεία is equivalent (Neither Jew nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity [London: Clark, 2002], 179). In some texts ψυχή is close to identity.
7. Bruce Malina would go so far as to say that first-century Mediterranean people did not share or comprehend our idea of an “individual” at all (New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology, rev. ed. [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993], 66). The problem is with the way “individual” is understood to mean individualism, but individualism is an illusion anyway. Malina describes the first-century Mediterranean world as dyadic, a group-embedded personality, in which one needs another to know who one is. Identity theorists argue that identity is always known only in relationship to others.
8. Søren Kierkegaard speaks of being contemporaneous with Jesus (Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse Which “Accompanied” It, trans. Walter Lowrie [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944], 67).
9. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967), 1:1060.
10. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 297. He is not alone in speaking of a hermeneutics of the self.
11. Epictetus, Discourses 3.1.25.
12. Xenophon has a long commentary on the expression, but he focused mostly on knowing one’s own powers (Memorabilia 4.2.24-40).
13. See also G. K. Chesterton: “One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are” (“The Ethics of Elfland,” in Orthodoxy [London: John Lane, 1908], 96-97).
14. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), no. 548.
15. For example Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle (New York: Norton, 1980); Ricoeur, Oneself as Another; Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); John D. Zizioulas, “On Being a Person: Towards an Ontology of Personhood,” in Persons, Divine and Human: King’s College Essays in Theological Anthropology, ed. Christoph Schwabel and Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: Clark, 1991), 33-46; Anthony C. Thiselton, Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self: On Meaning, Manipulation and Purpose (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996); Hermann Häring, Maureen Junker-Kenny, and Dietmar Mieth, eds., Creating Identity; Concilium (London: SCM, 2002); Niels Henrik Gregersen, Willem B. Drees, and Ulf Görman, eds., The Human Person in Science and Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); and Richard Lints, Michael S. Horton, and Mark R. Talbot, eds., Personal Identity in Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).
16. E. P. Sanders, ed., Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980-1983).
17. Ben F. Meyer, The Early Christians: Their World Mission and Self-Discovery (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1986); idem, Critical Realism and the New Testament, 173-94; and idem, Christus Faber: The Master Builder and the House of God, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 29 (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1992), 149-69.
18. Philip Francis Esler, Conflict and Identity in Romans: The Social Setting of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); Klaus Berger, Identity and Experience in the New Testament, trans. Charles Muenchow (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); Lieu, Neither Jew nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity; idem, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); William S. Campbell, Paul and the Creation of Christian Identity (London: Clark, 2008); Atsuhiro Asano, Community-Identity Construction in Galatians: Exegetical, Social-Anthropological and Socio-Historical Studies, JSOT Supplement (London: Clark, 2005); V. Henry T. Nguyen, Christian Identity in Corinth (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2008); and Mikael Tellbe, Christ-Believers in Ephesus: A Textual Analysis of Early Christian Identity Formation in a Local Perspective (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2009).
19. Jan G. van der Watt, ed., Identity, Ethics, and Ethos in the New Testament (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006); Bengt Holmberg, ed., Exploring Early Christian Identity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); Bengt Holmberg and Mikael Winninge, eds., Identity Formation in the New Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); and Fabian E. Udoh et al., eds., Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).
20. See Campbell, Paul and the Creation of Christian Identity, 87-93.
21. See N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (New York: HarperOne, 2008).
22. Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel (n.p.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), 2:246; see also 2:248-50. Bultmann was following A. Schlatter, who accused statistical inventories of New Testament thoughts in orthodoxy, a rationalistic “concept of doctrine” method, and a history of religions approach of separating the act of thinking and the act of living.
23. Rudolf K. Bultmann, “The Problem of Hermeneutics,” in Essays Philosophical and Theological, ed. Rudolf K. Bultmann (London: SCM, 1955), 256.
24. J. Baudrillard, quoted in Mick Cooper and John Rowan, “Introduction: Self-Plurality—The One and the Many,” in The Plural Self: Multiplicity in Everyday Life, ed. John Rowan and Mick Cooper (London: Sage, 1999), 2. They add, “What began the century as master of its domain has thus been reduced to little more than a website in cyberspace” (ibid.). See also Léon P. Turner, “First Person Plural: Self-unity and Self-multiplicity in Theology’s Dialogue with Psychology,” Zygon 42 (March 2007): 7-24.
25. Meic Pearse, “Problem? What Problem? Personhood, Late Modern/Postmodern Rootlessness and Contemporary Identity Crises,” Evangelical Quarterly 77 (2005): 5-12. His description of premodernity as not reflecting on personhood hardly does justice to the common ancient epitaph “I was not, I was, I am not, I do not care.”
26. See John A. Powell, “The Multiple Self: Exploring Between and Beyond Modernity and Postmodernity,” 1-16 (http://www1.umn.edu/irp/publications/multiple.htm; 11/28/2009 (accessed January 19, 2010); and Michael McNamee, “Identity and the Self,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 15 (1996): 107-11.
27. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 113-39, esp. 118-23.
28. Plato, Republic 500C.
29. This is a summary of a point made by Aristotle. See Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers (1926; reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 76.
30. See Taylor, Sources of the Self; and Svend Brinkmann, “Identity as Self-Interpretation,” Theory Psychology 18 (2008): 404-22.
31. Among others see Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 167-239; and Niels Henrik Gregersen, “Varieties of Personhood: Mapping the Issues,” in The Human Person in Science and Theology, ed. Niels Henrik Gregersen, Willem B. Drees, and Ulf Görman (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 1-17.
32. Even a person without a sense of identity (e.g., someone with Alzheimer’s or a child with severely impaired cognitive ability) has an identity, one assigned by others.
33. On American Idol Susan Boyle was in effect told she was not a singer, but she refused that description and asserted a different identity by her performance.
34. The cognitive disjunction is described in Romans 1:21, “For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks.”
35. Sentences of Sextus, 41-42.
36. Miroslav Volf rightly complained of Christians being guilty of “frozen identities” (Evangelical Covenant Midwinter Conference, 2008).
37. See Nils Alstrup Dahl, Jesus in the Memory of the Early Church: Essays (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1976), 11-29 (cf. Deut. 5:3 and m. Pes. 10:5).
38. “All this means that groups tell themselves who they are in part by imagining where they are going” (Esler, Conflict and Identity in Romans, 337).