Identity - Lesson 1

Identity
Dr. James Houston
th731-01
Introduction: Culture and Identity
Lesson Transcript

In this unprecedented culture that we live in today of fluidity, our identity has also become fluid. And this is clear in all the controversies about sexuality, gender and, with globalisation, ethnic identities as well. And it’s in this context that I wanted to prepare a series of lectures last year that would be a preliminary to a jubilee volume for the celebration of Regent College, which in 2018 will have celebrated 50 years. We collected together distinguished alumni and other distinguished scholars, so a book is being published with 41 essays that will celebratory of our event. But it’s also very appropriate for the times that we live in because the whole subject of what is our identity has become a great industry in the humanities in the contemporary world.

This started in the 1960s and today in the humanities identity has become a huge central issue of discipline research. But for us, the other source of identity that is far more troubling was what happened in the Holocaust, when, for the first time, it was questioned why the Jews should be allowed to have an identity. We think of the Holocaust as the darkest stain in perhaps human history, certainly Western history. And it was in a poignant essay that the noted Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel asked desperately what does it mean to be a Jew. What is it? He notes there’s a high cost of living in this way. He has to be exalted to live normal in a world that is neither propitious nor sympathetic to his survival. His Jewish identity—is it worth the cost?

We as Christians can risk the same thing, but we do not do so so hopelessly, for Jesus Christ has come as our Messiah and Saviour of the world to utterly transform our identity back to God’s primary design before He created the cosmos, to become transformed into the Imago Dei, the image and likeness of God, as true humanity, the noblest blessing a human being can ever have. Today then, what is at stake? It’s not the fate of Christians in this generation of such secular hostility. It is the future of remaining human with the threat of merely becoming hominids. Never has there been such an upheaval as the deliberate attempt to remove the whole history and culture of Western civilisation as if it had never existed. As Herschel concludes, we are ‘God’s stake in human history’. We are the dawn and the dusk, the challenge and the test. God purposed this before even the creation of the cosmos. No wonder then, the Christian identity, grounded upon the incarnation of Jesus Christ, exceeds all our comprehension of what it is to have an identity in the purpose of God’s creation.

[00:04:06]

As we reflect on this, I want to begin by distinguishing in the Old Testament, and that’s what we’ll focus on in this first address, the aetiological and figural identities of the Old Testament—they’re distinguished. Adam and Eve, Noah and his sons, are these stories aetiological? By this word from the Greek aitia, or cause, we mean what is causal, not what is historical stories. We’re claiming that Adam and Eve, and Noah are non-historical; whereas, Abraham, Moses, David, are historical figures. For the essential focus and burden of Biblical scripture is the redemption of man, of all the ethnic races of humanity, so it conveys this through many literary genres. Perhaps 60% of the Bible is historical narrative and the poetry is another perhaps 10%. We also have wisdom literature and among the other smaller sources of genre that we have is this new concept that I’m introducing to many of you of the aetiological.

The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 is the oldest document to record how the present world population originated and spread after the flood in three distinct families of Shem, the Semitic; Ham, or the black race; and the Japhethite or the Indo-European. According to the scientific evidence, the Hamitic are the originators of all humanity which evolved in the Cradle of Africa, in the Rift Valley of the Great Lakes—perhaps 60 million years ago was the evolution of homosapiens. Shem, or the Shemites, evolved in the Middle East, and the Japhethites evolved in Asia. The Japhethites then spread throughout the rest of the world, moving into Southeast Asia, northwards through Siberia, across the channel of the Aleutian Islands to North America, as well as spreading all the way down through Southeast Asia into Australia. They have the most significant spread in the history of humanity.

[00:07:34]

The table of Nations in Genesis 10 is a historic table in the sense that it indicates how the present populations of the world have been derived from Shem, Ham and Japheth. This threefold division is more than merely, however, a genetic variation of certain racial types. It appears each was divinely appointed to fulfil a characteristic capacity, which has been reflected in the unique contribution that each branch has rendered in the service of mankind as a whole.