John D. Zizioulas brought out the difficulty of identifying the self. The response to the question, “Who am I?” tends to answer with “what” one is rather than “who” one is.[i] Instead the search for identity must take place in the context of community and relationships. “Moreover, intimacy [i.e., relationship] liberates one from subjectivistic narcissism and selfishness.”[ii] This challenges the modern and postmodern means of searching for self-understanding via loneliness or solitude. Loneliness is the effect and even the essence of lovelessness. Love needs an ‘other’ as an object of that love and this is one reason (among many) that the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity is congruent with the statement that ‘God is love.’ Lovelessness effects loneliness (or alienation) in that it does not consider ‘the other’ in what is said and done. Lovelessness is loneliness in that there is no longer any ‘other’ with which one can properly relate. Jesus came to redeem us from this, taking our sin (lovelessness and loneliness) upon himself in order to give us a livelihood without loneliness.[iii]
Salvation is, therefore, restoration to the communal life of the Triune God and the invitation to be restored to such a life is for all of humanity. Personhood and identity are restored as the redeemed find themselves not in consuming but in giving away. This is self-sacrificial love and marks the character and life of the Triune God. “For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). By participating in this type of life (i.e., the communal cruciform life), we live according to the shema, whereby we “Love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength…and we love our neighbors as ourselves.”
...Appendix and/or Postlude (perhaps) to come...
References:
[i] John D. Zizioulas, “On Being a Person: Towards an Ontology of Personhood,” in Persons Divine and Human, ed. Christoph Schwöbel and Colin E. Gunton, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 44.
[ii] McGraw, “God and the Problem of Loneliness,” 336.
[iii] Ibid., 335.
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