Centuries before the birth of Christ, someone wisely said, “Know yourself.” That is still good advice. The New Testament reminds baptized Christians to know who they are: “no longer foreigners and strangers, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household” (Eph 2:19). Thanks to God’s love, Christians are called, and truly are, God’s children (see 1 Jn 3:1-3). In the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), we find a strange teaching about Christian “identity” that focuses on the supernatural power and authority that every believer is supposed to have. The NAR teaching on “identity” distorts authentic Christian teaching on who we are in Christ.
“Schools of supernatural ministry” that teach Christians how to practice signs, wonders and prophecy begin with “identity.” Typically, they tell their students to move from a “performance mindset” to an identity-based mindset. A person with a performance mindset focuses on goals and the actions needed to achieve them. This can be detrimental if someone believes that their worth depends totally on what they achieve or how they are viewed by others. According to NAR teachers, if you have a performance mindset, you hesitate to believe that you can work miracles, but once you understand your identity as a child of God, you will think differently.
Kris Vallotton of Bethel Church in Redding, California, says that every Christian should think about himself or herself in the same way that we understand Jesus: “The reason why you do miracles is because your Daddy is God. … Only God can heal the sick. You are acting like God, because you’re children of God. Listen, if you teach people to heal the sick, raise the dead, and cast out demons, and you don’t teach them who they are, then they have a performance-based identity. But as soon as you figure out who you are, you’re like, ‘if that’s who I am, where’s my power?’”
Similarly, the Encounter School of Ministry teaches its students to build “a foundation for all ministry on your royal identity as sons and daughters of God. … The first quarter focuses on the royal identity we receive as sons and daughters of God who have received an inheritance to do the works of Jesus and even greater works (Jn 14:12) … students work to shift from a performance-based mentality where their value and identity comes from what they do for God and into an identity where their value comes from who they are as sons and daughters of God alone.”
These same teachers contrast this concept of identity with a “pauper mentality” or “poverty mindset.” Paupers believe they have limited resources, not understanding that God is King who gives his royal children power and authority to work miracles. The Encounter School of Ministry says, “You cannot accomplish the amazing works that God has prepared for you unless you believe in who God says you are.”
In this view, Christians who say, “I can’t do miracles, I’m just a simple sinner,” are demonstrating false humility instead of accepting their identity as “world-changers.” If they accept their identity, they will “visibly demonstrate the kingdom,” performing mighty deeds.
These teachings about identity, whether from Protestants or Catholics, boil down to this: Because God is your Father, you can do the same works that Jesus did. For these teachers, when Romans says “for those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom 8:28-29), it was saying that “Jesus is the model of the normal Christian life” and we should do the same miracles he did, and greater ones. Ironically, a teaching about abandoning a performance-based identity defined by doing things ends up saying that knowledge of your true identity empowers you to, well, do things.
This is not how Catholics should understand their identity as God’s adopted children. Jesus Christ is the eternal, only begotten Son of God. Christians were not always God’s children; we became his adopted children in baptism. After baptism, we still have only a human nature, unlike Christ who had both a human and divine nature and worked miracles by the power of his divine nature.
Yes, the second letter of Peter says that Christians have become “partakers of the divine nature” because of the grace of adoption. But this text, instead of telling Christians to perform miracles, advises them to “make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love” (2 Pt 1:5-7)
We appreciate our identity, not by performing mighty deeds of power, but by leading holy lives of discipleship. The Lord’s Prayer, wrote Pope Benedict XVI, tells us that “we are not ready-made children of God from the start, but that we are meant to become so increasingly by growing more and more deeply in communion with Jesus. Our sonship turns out to be identical with following Christ” (Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Doubleday 2007, 138).
Pope Leo the Great (d. 461), in a Christmas homily, exhorted Christians to understand their identity this way: “Beloved, let us give thanks to God the Father, through his Son, in the Holy Spirit, because in his great love for us he took pity on us, and when we were dead in our sins he brought us to life with Christ, so that in him we might be a new creation. Let us throw off our old nature and all its ways and, as we have come to birth in Christ, let us renounce the works of the flesh. Christian, remember your dignity, and now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. Bear in mind who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God’s kingdom.”
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