How Can You Know Who You Are

When a Christian of African descent asks who they are, two answers usually arrive at once: the one their history gives them and the one Scripture gives them. Many people assume they must pick one. The eight short questions and answers below argue that the two belong together, and that the order in which you hold them matters more than anything else. Learn the answers in sequence, test each against the Bible, and then spend a week practicing them. You can work alone in two sittings or with a group over two meetings.

The material comes from a Jude 3 Project conference panel on personhood with Vince Bantu, Kobe Campbell, Dr. Malik Blade and Khristi Lauren Adams, moderated by pastor Perrin Rogers. Keep a Bible open the whole time. Each answer is only as strong as the passage underneath it, and several prompts below ask you to check that for yourself.

Eight questions, learned in order

Say each answer aloud before reading the explanation. The explanations show why each answer has to come before the next.

1. Who are you, first of all?

A creature. God made me, and I did not make myself.

Everything later rests on this. Dr. Malik Blade, CEO of the Whole Brother Mission, said the Christian answer to “who am I” starts with “understanding that we are created beings rather than the creator.” He also named what happens when we forget it. When we try to run every part of our lives, he said, “we’re attempting to be gods of our own lives.” Blade affirmed free will in the same breath. Your choices are real. Your existence and worth, though, come to you from outside.

2. What does it mean that you are made in God’s image?

I was made to reflect God, so I cannot be understood apart from him.

The text reads: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). Christians have explained the image in more than one way, and you do not need to settle that debate here. On any reading, a human being is defined by reference to God before anything else. Vince Bantu, who teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary and pastors in St. Louis, drew the consequence: “I cannot know who I am if I don’t know who God is, because I was made in the image of God.”

3. Why can’t you figure yourself out alone?

Because I bear the image of a God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and I come to know myself in relationship, with him first and then with others.

Jude 3 teaches that God is one God in three persons, co-equal and co-eternal, and Bantu built on that doctrine. The persons are named in relation to each other: “A father is a father because there’s a son. The son is a son because there’s a father.” He concluded that “God is a relational God, and we also are relational people.”

That step is an inference, and it deserves a fair test. Someone could object that God is unlike us in countless ways, so a truth about the Trinity need not transfer to human beings. The objection has force. The inference does not stand on the Trinity alone, though. Observe: read Genesis 2:18, where God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” This is the first thing in creation God calls not good. What does it add to Bantu’s argument, and what does it leave unproven?

Kobe Campbell, a licensed clinical mental health counselor, described the same pattern from experience: “I am beloved and everything flows from that.” Nobody can make themselves beloved. That knowledge has to come from someone else.

4. Then do other people get to define you?

No. God’s word about me is final. People are where I hear it, test it and learn to live it.

This answer guards answer 3 from a predictable misreading. Blade has counseled people who mistook a church’s cultural habits for God’s standard, and his test was simple: “we need to understand the differences between what God said and what they said.” Bantu found help in Acts 10, where Peter refuses food he considers unclean and hears: “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common” (Acts 10:15). In context the vision concerns food laws and, more deeply, the welcome of Gentiles. Bantu applied it by parallel to a teenager who believed he had to change how he talked and dressed before God would accept him. Observe: read Acts 10:28 and 10:34-35, where Peter explains the vision himself. Does his explanation support that parallel?

5. Where does your race fit?

God made the peoples of the earth, and my ethnicity is part of how he made me. I receive it as a gift, and grace does not erase it.

Paul told the Athenians that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). Shared origin and real diversity sit in the same verse. Bantu put it this way: “Because God is the one who made black, and he made white and brown and yellow and red in every other color.” Campbell applied it to herself: “God designed me to experience Christianity in him as a black woman.” If God chose the setting, then the setting is part of how he meant to be known by her.

6. Which comes first, your race or your faith?

My life in Christ comes first, and from there I learn what my race and culture truly are.

The panel offered two pictures, and comparing them is the lesson. Dr. Malik Blade said that “my blackness comes second to my Christianity.” He was describing what wins when loyalties pull apart. Vince Bantu agreed with the sentiment but preferred other wording, because he did not want the two treated as opposites. His version: “my blackness comes out of my Christianity.” That answers a different question, namely where a culture gets its meaning. The two men are not contradicting each other.

Observe: read Galatians 3:28 alongside Philippians 3:5. In one, Paul says believers are all one in Christ Jesus. In the other, he still calls himself a Hebrew of the Hebrews. Does oneness in Christ erase Paul’s people, or rearrange how he holds them?

Campbell added a caution: the church should not demand this ordering only of Black believers. Every Christian’s ethnicity sits under Christ. That matches the order Jude 3 keeps, stated plainly in its own words: before any adjective, we are Christian.

7. Does following Christ mean keeping every part of your culture as it is?

No. Christ keeps what God made good and corrects what sin has bent, in every culture.

Blade said that “There are some aspects though of black culture or any culture that come more from the world than God.” Bantu agreed. Of some traits people treat as simply who they are, he said, “That’s how oppression and sin has made us to be.” The error can run the other way too, treating holiness as moving toward someone else’s culture. Campbell named that directly: “you becoming Christian does not mean that you lose your identity as a black person.” Scripture judges every culture, including the dominant one.

8. So who are you?

A child of God, made in his image and loved before I did anything, given a people and a history, learning who I am among his people.

John writes: “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God” (1 John 3:1). Campbell’s version: “there’s nothing that defines us more than being God’s children.” This answer comes last because it needs the others to be safe. Without answer 1, “child” becomes a feeling. Without answers 5 to 7, it can be used to make people disappear.

The strongest objection

Here is the hardest challenge to this ordering. Telling people that Christ comes before race can be used to silence them. A believer who has been harassed, excluded or told their culture is unholy may hear answer 6 as one more request to stop talking about it. That has happened in real churches, and the objection should not be waved away.

The catechism answers it from inside. Answer 5 says ethnicity is God’s work, so naming harm done to it honors the Creator. Answer 4 says God’s word outranks what any group says, including a group that wants the subject dropped. And Blade, the panelist who ranked his blackness second, also insisted that “unifying everyone does start with telling the truth about what happened.” Putting Christ first does not end the conversation about race. It gives that conversation a judge who is not on anyone’s side but his own.

Watch for the mirror error as well: making race or culture the deepest thing about a person. A gift turned into a foundation will eventually have to carry more weight than any gift can bear. Answer 1 corrects that drift, and Revelation 7:9 corrects the first one.

Three readings to finish the test

• Genesis 1:26-28. Circle every phrase about how humans relate to God and underline every phrase about what they are made to do. Which answers above does this passage actually support?
• Acts 17:24-28. List what God does and what people are meant to do. Where does ethnicity appear, and what is it placed under?
• Revelation 7:9. John sees “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” before the throne. Are the nations still distinguishable at the end? What does that suggest about answer 5?

A week of practice

1. Days 1 and 2: Learn answers 1 to 4 by heart. Each evening, write one moment when you acted as if one of them were false.
2. Days 3 and 4: Learn answers 5 to 8. Copy Acts 17:26 by hand once each day.
3. Day 5: On a two-column page, list on the left what your family, church or community has told you about who you are. On the right, mark each item as something God said, something people said, or a mix.
4. Day 6: Ask one person who knows you well what they see God doing in you. Listen without correcting them, then reread answer 3.
5. Day 7: Say all eight answers in order. Then answer in writing a question Campbell asks herself: what about how God made me, including my people and history, made it the right setting for me to know him?

Questions for discussion

1. Before this study, where did you look first to answer “who am I”? What changes if answer 1 comes first?
2. After reading Genesis 2:18, how convincing do you find Bantu’s move from the Trinity to human relationships? What would strengthen or weaken it?
3. Think of one standard you absorbed from a church or community. Was it what God said, what people said, or both? How did you tell?
4. Blade’s picture ranks; Bantu’s picture traces a source. What does each protect against, and which helps you more right now?
5. Name one thing your culture has given you that God made good, and one thing you suspect needs correcting. What standard are you using?
6. Has “Christ comes first” ever been used to quiet you or someone you know? How does the catechism answer that misuse?
7. What would it look like for a whole congregation, of every background, to take answer 6 seriously?

For whoever leads

Split the questions across two meetings: answers 1 to 4 in the first, answers 5 to 8 and the objection in the second. Open the second meeting by reciting the first four answers. The order does the teaching, so keep the group from jumping to race before it has worked through creaturehood and relationship.

Both errors will likely show up in the room. When someone uses identity in Christ to dismiss history, send them to Revelation 7:9. When someone treats ethnicity as the last word, send them to answer 1. Correct the idea and protect the person. Some participants have been told for years that their culture made them unacceptable to God, so let them answer questions 3 and 6 at whatever depth they choose, or not at all. Before people leave, have each one name the answer they find hardest to believe and carry it through the week.