Brad's Bookshelves

Henry Ford gave the world some very good things like the ability of working people to afford the products they produced. He also believed and promoted dangerous ideas like antisemitism and works based salvation. University of California, Irvine Comparative Culture Professor James J. Flink wrote of Henry Ford in his 1990 book The Automotive Age. He quotes Ford as saying,

“Thinking men know that work is the salvation of the race, morally, physically, socially. Work does more than get us a living; it gets us a life.”

Our 30th president, Republican Calvin Coolidge (in office 1923-1929), wrote “The man who builds a factory builds a temple. The man who works there worships there.”

Few of us would be honest enough to put it in those terms but our attitudes are revealed when under pressure, when we lose a job, are stuck in a job we dislike, or do not get the position we desired. After graduate school and two years as pastor of a small rural church in Iowa I was questioning my skills, education, value, and ability to provide for my family. I judged myself unworthy because I thought I had failed in my calling/career. Now in my 10th year as a college professor I see the opposite temptation of thinking too much of myself because of my career.

img_1346-2 How do we avoid the extremes? Find our identity in something greater than the title we hold or seek, what we own, what we produce, or what we consume. Beyond Identity Finding Your “self” in the Image and Character of God by Dick Keyes helps the reader see how they have sought identity in temporary and manufactured materialism and why we are so fascinated with and desire fame but are cynical of the heroic.

He says, “The crisis of middle-and upper-class youth in the social and economic structure of the Western world is precisely a crisis of belief in the vitality of the hero-systems that are offered by contemporary materialist society. The young no longer feel heroic in doing as their elders did…To make matters worse, heroism has become separated from moral values; often morals and models work against each other in the same person and in the same society. The heroes and heroines of music, film, and literature are only rarely heroic for their moral qualities. Rather they are heroic for their rebellion against the values of society, for their freedom from restraint and limitation. The worst in them is often pictured as being desirable. This is a drastic change from the mainstream of Western cultural history.”

Security, identity, acceptance, these are things we long for and sacrifice to obtain. Notice the words we use to describe our work. We sacrifice for our families. We devote ourselves to our careers. “Sacrifice” and “devotion” are religious words. To sacrifice is to give up something valuable to someone and for something we consider worthy of that giving up. I have only finished the first chapter of Beyond Identity but the insights in that small space has been well worth the price of the book. I look forward to reading the rest as it addresses issues of how to base our identity in Jesus Christ, how to reflect God’s image after the restoration of that broken relationship, how to offer that restored relationship with God to others, dealing honestly with ourselves, dealing with anger, and dealing with our ongoing struggle to live up to what we believe.

So far the book is a well balanced description of how we have been created in the image of God, what that means, and how our rejection of that continues to influence how we see ourselves and others. The quote at the beginning is an example of that balance.

‘You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve, and that’s both honor enough to lift up the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth.’ C. S. Lewis “Prince Caspian”

Dick Keyes is director emeritus of L’Abri Fellowship in Southborough, Massachusetts, where he has worked with his wife and family since 1979. He holds a B.A. in History from Harvard University, and an M.Div. from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.