God and Identity
– Paul K. Hubbard
In Plutarch’s Life of Theseus, he proposes what has become known as “Theseus’ Paradox.” Theseus, believed to be the first king of Athens, rescued the Athenians from King Minos by slaying the Minotaur that held them captive, escaping by ship to Delos. Every year the Athenians would commemorate this deliverance by sailing this same ship on a pilgrimage to Delos. But over time, it was necessary to replace parts of the ship to keep it seaworthy, until at length, practically all its parts were replaced. The philosophical question then arose as to whether or not the ship, when all of its parts were eventually replaced, was still the same ship: “The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and strong timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.” (Plutarch, Life of Theseus, 23.1. )
This paradox – or rather, this thought experiment, was eventually extended to questions about human identity. If we are constantly changing – physically, mentally, emotionally, etc., throughout the years of our development, how can it be said that we are the same person throughout? For that matter, how can the universe maintain its “identity” in any sense like this if all of its constituent parts and their relationship to the whole is constantly changing? Logically, everything is changing; nothing stays the same. So how can there even be any such thing as “identity”?
The key to the paradox is that everything is changing, but everything that is eternal remains the same. As the author of Hebrews illustrates: At that time his voice shook the earth; but now he has promised, ‘Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.’ This phrase, ‘Yet once more,’ indicates the removal of what is shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Thus, after our resurrection, even though we will be changed, we will recognize ourselves from whom we once were. And that’s because we don’t issue ourselves identity. God does. He knows us into existence, and that knowledge, being divine, cannot be changed; otherwise, it is no longer knowledge.
But we must be careful to say here that when God knows us, he knows us before all things (πρόγνωσις) and also after all things (μετάγνωσις ). Because we are, after all, hybrid – the fusion of dirt and divinity; change and changelessness. By learning virtue (through the things we suffer in the forging crucible of a changing world) we become partakers of the divine nature that does not change. Our temporary “personalities” become permanent identities. We not only appear virtuous before God; we are virtuous before him, having permanently acquired virtue. Who can separate us from the love of Christ – or for that matter, any other virtue conceived and brought to maturation in him? Thus the problem – or the paradox of identity – is perspective. From our perspective, everything is fluid; but from God’s “perspective,” our identity is as stable as Plato’s universal chair.
Likewise, reason, conscience and even consciousness are not package deals, issued to us on a one time basis as a new recruit is given his uniform and rifle. These, things, if they can be called things, are organically part of our ongoing creation and development, in which God is always, intimately involved. There is no privacy with him. He is always present. But they are real, created by God. In pantheism, God is so intimately involved with creation – that all creation – including our consciousness and our freedom, remain a figment of God’s imagination; these things never achieve any reality apart (χωρίς) from him. What sets Christianity apart from pantheism is that the creation is, in part, free. The proton is free. Our wills are free. This is what sets the Christian creation apart from the Pantheistic creation. Freedom.
It is indeed difficult to conceive of any kind of freedom from the essence of God. Yet God is constantly insinuating the consciousness of this freedom into our minds. If it were not for his own mind helping our minds to conceive this, the preceding paragraph would be nonsense. If we insist on defining identity, reason, conscience and consciousness from our own perspective, it will all run up against Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. And it will disappear at some eternal vanishing point. But if we begin by defining these things from God’s eternal perspective, they will stabilize eternally. This all sounds philosophically ambiguous, I know, but it doesn’t have to be. I’m simply saying that personality stabilizes the minute I stop looking at it in a time-bound mirror. My personality is stable and eternally knowable because God, who cannot change, is eternally defining me. His idea of me is eternally consistent and comprehensive. And he will never forget me. God knows me, therefore, I am.
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