Yesterday was the activities fair on UND’s campus where student groups of all sorts set up in front of the union to recruit new members by giving away swag. I stopped in at the campus ministries table, Archives coffee house (free samples), the cycling club, and was handed a bottle of water from a Christian group related to one of the churches in town. Their signs and bottles read, “Experience God, Not Religion.”
Now I know this is a common sentiment among people and has been for some time. The word “religious” carries a lot of emotional baggage and negative associations in contemporary culture. Dallas Willard told an audience at Sioux Falls Seminary a few years ago that today’s generation has a greater sensitivity for spirituality but also a strong skepticism of the institutional church. So “religion” has been replaced by the word “spiritual.” People would now say that they are “spiritual” rather than “religious.” Dan Kimball, one of the emergent leaders, recently published, “They Like Jesus, But Not the Church” as a response to this very issue.
My niece, who is a wonderful girl…freshman in college this year, has on her Facebook page under the heading of “Dislikes: Organized Religion”
This sentiment is just so utterly frustrating to me.
The H20 folk say this on their website, “h2o is a revolution - a revolution of people who want God, not religion. We are trying to follow Christ - the greatest and most humble revolutionary of all time. We are a community of young adults who won't be satisfied with knowing about Jesus, we want to know Him experientially, personally, relationally - the same way you know a good friend.”
All fine, I suppose. But ironically follow that statement with, “h2o is a ministry of Cottonwood Community Church. Cottonwood is a member of a group of churches called Great Commission Churches. (If you are interested in h2o's statement of beliefs, simply check out the one listed on Cottonwood's website here.) In addition, h2o is connected with other campus ministries and churches across the nation and around the world through GCM (Great Commission Ministries). Whether you are thirsty to join our humble revolution or you are searching for answers to spiritual questions, we invite you to check out h2o - you might just find what you're thirsty for.”
So, this group claims to be providing an experience for those who don’t want to be bogged down with the messiness of doctrinal disputes and “dead” rituals that constrict their idea and experience of God. And then in the next breath or paragraph go on to provide links to their denominational affiliation and statement of beliefs.
Umm…what happened to the “no religion” bit? Now don’t get me wrong, I get what they are trying to say. I just think they are wrong to suggest it.
From my perspective a religion-less experience of God is chaos. As soon as we begin, even casually, to frame in who and what God is, what we believe about God and ourselves, and perhaps even the use of the word God itself, we have already trespassed deeply into the nature of religion.
I would prefer to rehabilitate the term “religion” rather than to further its demise.
One of the shocking things is how well this church’s statements fulfill Robert Bellah’s critiques of American religion.
Bellah suggests, “many Americans...[feel] that [their] personal relationship to God transcends her involvement in any particular church” (228). I would suggest that in our contemporary pluralistic state that this extends beyond denominational affiliation even unto traditional religious boundaries.
Bellah also comments on the American phenomenon of revivalism saying, “the emphasis on personal experience would eventually override all efforts at church discipline. Already in the eighteenth century, it was possible for individuals to find the form of religion that best suited their inclination. By the nineteenth century, religious bodies had to compete in a consumers’ market and grew or declined in terms of changing patterns of individual religious tastes” (233). With the demise of discipline, so goes the praxis side of doctrine.
Without the religious structure that H20 and many others oppose (or at least suggest they oppose), what results is what Bellah has termed “Sheilaism.” He says, “Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and who describes her faith as “Sheilaism.” ‘I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.’ Sheila’s faith has some tenets beyond belief in God, though not many, In defining ‘my own Sheilaism,” she said, ‘It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think He would want us to take care of each other.” I suspect pushing the issue to the logical absurdity as Sheila has, the H2O folk would temper their statement.
Showing posts with label individualism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label individualism. Show all posts
Friday, August 29, 2008
Monday, August 11, 2008
Authority, Sola Scriptura, and Individualism
I have been having this inner argument lately about the nature of authority. Those of you who return to my site on a regular basis know of my frustration with individualism and its effects upon our doctrine and practices…particularly upon ecclesiology. Recently I had a conversation about such matters with a good friend from seminary though we failed to come to a true consensus on the nature of the problem or movements toward a solution. I think the conversation itself marks our very different theological trajectories.
I’ve come to have a burning issue with what may be the quintessential tenet of Protestantism…sola scriptura. Authority is found in the scriptures alone. At first blush this seems fairly straight forward and a good thing for a Christian to believe. It holds the bible as the divinely inspired (whatever that might mean…another conversation for another time) word of God. Now I can get on board with this (depending on how we define our terms). As Christians we claim that the scriptures are good for teaching and guiding our lives…and they are. But the short sighted nature of sola scriptura that gets overlooked is the authority of the interpreter. Who gets to interpret?
Our culture of individualism suggests that we are all interpreters. We take the passage of Acts 17. 11 “Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” and apply it individually.
Who has final authority in such matters? Who can we trust? If we are to each weigh the words of the pastor, evangelists, theologians, or whomever, are we not essentially taking the power into our own hands to determine orthodoxy? American culture is so bound into this individualizing tendency that all forms of authority are meant to be questioned as abusive and oppressive to true freedom.
But without some central form of authority are we not doomed to death by individuation? When interpretive authority is centered in the individual, what happens to the church? Does it just become a means of organization? Another form of business structure? And I think we need to look beyond the temporal or visible church for authority as well into the riches of tradition lest our interpretations become too temporally oriented. The loss of tradition and how our spiritual ancestors have struggled to understand the scriptures in their times must color our interpretations. Its seems a terribly prideful thing to suggest that my interpretations are right without consulting the riches of wisdom from our church fathers and mothers.
How do we balance the fact that we are created as unique individuals with unique experiences with the communal reality of the Christian faith in regards to discernment? I don’t want to run off into radical individualism where my fallen rationality is the arbiter of biblical faithfulness nor am I comfortable with mindless acceptance of church dogma. Though I lean towards the latter in my reaction against individualism and much of evangelicalism's capitulation towards it. So in an individualist culture, whose rationality becomes the authoritative voice for biblical faithfulness? Is it really just up to the individual to decide? I don’t know...I go back and forth. I cannot help but wonder if the fact that I have been born and raised in a culture of extreme individualism keeps me from assenting to the authority of the church doctrine or another. In a sense I wonder if we use the "test all things" as a means to keep our precious identity as an individual... just like everyone else (pun intended). Any thoughts?
I’ve come to have a burning issue with what may be the quintessential tenet of Protestantism…sola scriptura. Authority is found in the scriptures alone. At first blush this seems fairly straight forward and a good thing for a Christian to believe. It holds the bible as the divinely inspired (whatever that might mean…another conversation for another time) word of God. Now I can get on board with this (depending on how we define our terms). As Christians we claim that the scriptures are good for teaching and guiding our lives…and they are. But the short sighted nature of sola scriptura that gets overlooked is the authority of the interpreter. Who gets to interpret?
Our culture of individualism suggests that we are all interpreters. We take the passage of Acts 17. 11 “Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” and apply it individually.
Who has final authority in such matters? Who can we trust? If we are to each weigh the words of the pastor, evangelists, theologians, or whomever, are we not essentially taking the power into our own hands to determine orthodoxy? American culture is so bound into this individualizing tendency that all forms of authority are meant to be questioned as abusive and oppressive to true freedom.
But without some central form of authority are we not doomed to death by individuation? When interpretive authority is centered in the individual, what happens to the church? Does it just become a means of organization? Another form of business structure? And I think we need to look beyond the temporal or visible church for authority as well into the riches of tradition lest our interpretations become too temporally oriented. The loss of tradition and how our spiritual ancestors have struggled to understand the scriptures in their times must color our interpretations. Its seems a terribly prideful thing to suggest that my interpretations are right without consulting the riches of wisdom from our church fathers and mothers.
How do we balance the fact that we are created as unique individuals with unique experiences with the communal reality of the Christian faith in regards to discernment? I don’t want to run off into radical individualism where my fallen rationality is the arbiter of biblical faithfulness nor am I comfortable with mindless acceptance of church dogma. Though I lean towards the latter in my reaction against individualism and much of evangelicalism's capitulation towards it. So in an individualist culture, whose rationality becomes the authoritative voice for biblical faithfulness? Is it really just up to the individual to decide? I don’t know...I go back and forth. I cannot help but wonder if the fact that I have been born and raised in a culture of extreme individualism keeps me from assenting to the authority of the church doctrine or another. In a sense I wonder if we use the "test all things" as a means to keep our precious identity as an individual... just like everyone else (pun intended). Any thoughts?
Monday, June 2, 2008
Individualism, Confession & Forgiveness
My hunch is that the practices both confession and forgiveness are also radically altered by individualism. Confession whether to a priest or another member of the church has likely been diminished by the privatization of belief. One need not bare such intimate details to another authority precisely because those matters are between the individual and God. Within evangelicalism many would say that we are all in need of an accountability group. And such things are good. My fear though is that it has a great potential to devolve into group therapy, where confession and forgiveness are geared toward Bellah’s expressivist individuals. Hans Boersma suggests that underlying our individualistic notions of forgiveness and reconciliation is our quest for self-fulfillment. These narcissistic endeavors are concentrated on the effects of ones feelings rather than “the need to discern whether there are tragic misunderstandings or culpable wrongdoing and repentance.”[1] Forgiveness may slip into an “economy of exchange” where confession and forgiveness are more focused the emotional effects rather than truthful responsibility.[2] Could this be played out both vertically and horizontally, in relationships with God and fellow humanity?[1] Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 209.
[2] Boersma, 211.
[3] Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out Without Selling Out, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 81-82. Driscoll is often lumped in with the Emergent but he would distance himself from that group and the subtitle is likely a shot in their direction.
[4] Boersma, 210.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Individualism, Hospitality, Missions & Evangelism
Mark Driscoll, a pastor of young church in Seattle, in his recently written book, The Radical Reformission critiques our individualistic culture stating,
“people are increasingly busy, isolated, lonely, disconnected, and without any helpful solutions in the culture. The isolation is now so entrenched that many people don’t know how to practice hospitality. This trend is even reflected in new architecture, which replaces large dining and living rooms designed for human contact with walk-in closets, home offices, and personal entertainment rooms. Here lonely people can watch sitcoms about friendships and reality-based shows in which characters pretend to interact with human beings, a thing apparently fascinating and foreign to many lonely, isolated individuals…Meanwhile, our neighbors, whom we do not know, are spending their evenings in much the same way.”[1]
Boersma would confer that individualism has distorted hospitality. The introspectiveness and the privatization of religion has turned the church itself inward as well as an exclusive group of individuals. The hospitality of God, through the good news of Christ, chose not to regard his own rights with personal advantage, instead invites all to come. However, the individualistic self or community is a danger to true hospitality because such an offering of self is largely unheard of. For the inward looking individual and community hospitality, if offered at all, likely bears a utilitarian nature of exchange. Hospitality is offered as a selfish quest for recognition or where the gift is tied to expectation.[2] The cross marks a profound danger in true hospitality, but for the receiving individual of such a strange grace from another it is an open door to abuse and consumption by the individual.
Evangelism and Missions
If religion is solely a matter of individual conscience, evangelism could be a very difficult thing. When all beliefs are on equal grounds, tolerance may grant one a hearing of the case for Christianity, but final belief is up to the individual. Depending upon the means of evangelism, it may be easily construed as the oppressive authoritarian structures of the church dictating what one must believe. If seen from that perspective, the individual is likely to dismiss it easily if an individual even has the courage to broach the subject of faith and thus breeching “good social manners.” The inwardly turned collection of individuals is not likely thinking about doing evangelism or missions either except recruiting more from their target audience. It is again the lifestyle enclave.
[1] Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out Without Selling Out, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 81-82. Driscoll is often lumped in with the Emergent but he would distance himself from that group and the subtitle is likely a shot in their direction.
[2] Boersma, 210.
“people are increasingly busy, isolated, lonely, disconnected, and without any helpful solutions in the culture. The isolation is now so entrenched that many people don’t know how to practice hospitality. This trend is even reflected in new architecture, which replaces large dining and living rooms designed for human contact with walk-in closets, home offices, and personal entertainment rooms. Here lonely people can watch sitcoms about friendships and reality-based shows in which characters pretend to interact with human beings, a thing apparently fascinating and foreign to many lonely, isolated individuals…Meanwhile, our neighbors, whom we do not know, are spending their evenings in much the same way.”[1]
Boersma would confer that individualism has distorted hospitality. The introspectiveness and the privatization of religion has turned the church itself inward as well as an exclusive group of individuals. The hospitality of God, through the good news of Christ, chose not to regard his own rights with personal advantage, instead invites all to come. However, the individualistic self or community is a danger to true hospitality because such an offering of self is largely unheard of. For the inward looking individual and community hospitality, if offered at all, likely bears a utilitarian nature of exchange. Hospitality is offered as a selfish quest for recognition or where the gift is tied to expectation.[2] The cross marks a profound danger in true hospitality, but for the receiving individual of such a strange grace from another it is an open door to abuse and consumption by the individual.
Evangelism and Missions
If religion is solely a matter of individual conscience, evangelism could be a very difficult thing. When all beliefs are on equal grounds, tolerance may grant one a hearing of the case for Christianity, but final belief is up to the individual. Depending upon the means of evangelism, it may be easily construed as the oppressive authoritarian structures of the church dictating what one must believe. If seen from that perspective, the individual is likely to dismiss it easily if an individual even has the courage to broach the subject of faith and thus breeching “good social manners.” The inwardly turned collection of individuals is not likely thinking about doing evangelism or missions either except recruiting more from their target audience. It is again the lifestyle enclave.
[1] Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out Without Selling Out, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 81-82. Driscoll is often lumped in with the Emergent but he would distance himself from that group and the subtitle is likely a shot in their direction.
[2] Boersma, 210.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Individualism & Ecclesiology
If speaking about individualism, most commentators point out its effects on evangelical ecclesiology. Individualism infects people and the structures or communities they inhabit. The church may then be seen as a collection of individuals, but also as individualistic communities bearing the same tendencies of individualistic persons.[1] So central is individualism to contemporary assessments of evangelical ecclesiology, even the definition of individualism in The Pocket Book of Theological Terms, explicitly points to its effects as a lack of “sufficient emphasis on the believer’s relationship with and responsibility to the larger faith community of the church.”[2]
If salvation is through a personal relationship with Jesus what makes it personal? To have a personal relationship with anyone requires them to have a body. In one rather stretched sense we can have a personal relationship with Jesus because of his incarnation. Yet since the ascension, Jesus and his body are not visibly around. What we do have, we do have is Christ’s body the church. Perhaps we need to reclaim the physicality of the phrase by referencing the church. To say that we have a personal relationship with Jesus means to have a living relationship where we can actually bump elbows with others as his body within the church.
The physicality of a body of believers suggests a deeper understanding than a purely privatized individualistic religious conversion or personal Christological spirituality. Certainly both the visible and invisible have their theological potentials. And certainly the invisible church with its emphasis on connecting believers to the “cloud of witnesses” and historical church is a wonderful corrective to overcome the amnesia of the modern church. However, a one-sided emphasis on the invisible church seems to allow the privatized faith and Gnostic tendencies of evangelicalism to flourish. The invisible church is an incorporeal reality that has no witness to the world. Where religion is relegated to the private and invisible sphere, it is sapped of its witness in the world. Christ is made into a spiritualized figure for individuals rather than being Christ’s physical embodiment into the world. The internal must be made external. The intangible must be made tangible. The embodied church inhabits social space and places in particular and engages the world by making Christ present in its beliefs and practices within the world.[3] Without the emphasis on the visible church, the private self will seek public expression through the only “valid” physical expression: the state. Individualism, says Craig A. Carter, comports well with theocracy…which serves as the guardian to individual rights.[4] Without strong visible communities, will naturally connect their “welfare with the nation-state that make the pursuit of self-fulfillment possible.”[5] But a visible or tangible collection of people is not enough to constitute the church either. Grenz suggests that the visible church in the hands of individuals “becomes an aggregate of the individual Christians’ ‘contract’ with each other to form the society of Christians.”[6] It seems that individualism cuts off communication of the Church at both ends: keeping individuals away from authoritative groups and contractualizing its nature when people choose to enter in.
Community is a buzzword these days in the church and is often proffered as the postmodern cure for individualism. The church is often called a community, a loving group of people committed to living out the ways of Christ and committed to each other. These are good things. Small groups, or perhaps even accountability groups, are for many the most intimate expression of the church, and have exploded across the nation and around the world. Often the community and small group explicitly offered as a counter to the loneliness of radical individual. Again this can be a good thing. Yet, I worry that there is confusion between the means and the ends. Construing the church as a cure for anything is a distortion of its purpose; whereas a gathering of the true church will inevitably bring about such effects.
Several theologians dealing with ecclesiology have utilized Bellah’s “lifestyle enclave” to describe the state of ecclesiology. Rooted in self-expression, leisure, consumption, and a retreat into the private life the lifestyle enclave is most basically an exclusive group of like-minded individuals who have no deeper connections to each other beyond self interests. Each enclave is a social contractualism in agree to put aside certain rights and enter into a group setting but still with individual goals clearly in mind. Micheal Jinkins suggests that this voluntary contractualism is a “two-edged sword” for Protestant ecclesiology. Positively, it offers a certain liveliness in a distinct evangelical piety. Negatively, points to the exclusivity and “spirit of schism” so prevalent in Prostestantism.[7] While there are a few positives of the contractualist society such as the lively spirituality of evangelicalism, however participation in such a group more likely reflects personal preferences of the expressive individualist than commitment to a larger community.
Recalling Miroslav Volf again suggests that a community of individuals does not make an ecclesial “we.”[8] To some extent, modernity’s individualism is only recast on a slightly larger scale and renamed “community.” This collective individualism still suggests the priority of the individual to choose which commitments and when to retract ones commitments to a particular group. The church is still considered a voluntary association that does not necessarily entail submission to or even acknowledging the collective authority.
The church is condensed to individuals who gather to worship and celebrate their personal relationship with Jesus. Camaraderie among peers is not enough. Meeting the emotional needs is not enough. Both suggest Bellah’s therapeutic tendency and the lifestyle enclave. While fellowship of believers is a key to the churches existence, it cannot be the explicit goal.
As human nature needs to be rooted beyond itself in the Trinity, so should our ecclesiology. An inward looking community of inward looking individuals has not fully experienced the hospitality of God. Rooted in the Trinity the church, like Christ sent to rescue the world, is also sent into the world.
[1] I have wondered for sometime to what extent does free-church ecclesiology reflect American individualism. This is one question I wanted to explore in the project which has grown well beyond my expectations. But it seems from initial impressions that they often model the same tendencies of individuals at the associational level.
[2] Stanley J. Grenz, David Guretzki, and Cherith Fee Nordling, “Individualism” in Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms, (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1999), 66.
[3] William A. Dyrness, “Spaces for an Evangelical Ecclesiology,” in The Community of the Word: Toward and Evangelical Ecclesiology, ed. Mark Husbands & Daniel J. Treier (Downers Grove, IL: IVP), 254-260.
[4] Craig A. Carter, “Beyond Theocracy and Individualism: The Significance of John Howard Yoder’s Ecclesiology,” in The Community of the Word: Toward and Evangelical Ecclesiology, ed. Mark Husbands & Daniel J. Treier (Downers Grove, IL: IVP), 174.
[5] Carter, 174
[6] Grenz, 314. Evangelical Futures
[7] Michael Jinkins, “The ‘Gift’ of the Church: Ecclesia Crucis, Peccatrix Maxima, and the Missio Dei” in Evangelical Ecclesiology: Reality or Illusion?, ed. John G. Stackhouse Jr., (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 181-183.
[8] Volf, 10.
[9] Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 209.
[10] Boersma, 211.
[11] Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out Without Selling Out, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 81-82. Driscoll is often lumped in with the Emergent but he would distance himself from that group and the subtitle is likely a shot in their direction.
[12] Boersma, 210.
If salvation is through a personal relationship with Jesus what makes it personal? To have a personal relationship with anyone requires them to have a body. In one rather stretched sense we can have a personal relationship with Jesus because of his incarnation. Yet since the ascension, Jesus and his body are not visibly around. What we do have, we do have is Christ’s body the church. Perhaps we need to reclaim the physicality of the phrase by referencing the church. To say that we have a personal relationship with Jesus means to have a living relationship where we can actually bump elbows with others as his body within the church.
The physicality of a body of believers suggests a deeper understanding than a purely privatized individualistic religious conversion or personal Christological spirituality. Certainly both the visible and invisible have their theological potentials. And certainly the invisible church with its emphasis on connecting believers to the “cloud of witnesses” and historical church is a wonderful corrective to overcome the amnesia of the modern church. However, a one-sided emphasis on the invisible church seems to allow the privatized faith and Gnostic tendencies of evangelicalism to flourish. The invisible church is an incorporeal reality that has no witness to the world. Where religion is relegated to the private and invisible sphere, it is sapped of its witness in the world. Christ is made into a spiritualized figure for individuals rather than being Christ’s physical embodiment into the world. The internal must be made external. The intangible must be made tangible. The embodied church inhabits social space and places in particular and engages the world by making Christ present in its beliefs and practices within the world.[3] Without the emphasis on the visible church, the private self will seek public expression through the only “valid” physical expression: the state. Individualism, says Craig A. Carter, comports well with theocracy…which serves as the guardian to individual rights.[4] Without strong visible communities, will naturally connect their “welfare with the nation-state that make the pursuit of self-fulfillment possible.”[5] But a visible or tangible collection of people is not enough to constitute the church either. Grenz suggests that the visible church in the hands of individuals “becomes an aggregate of the individual Christians’ ‘contract’ with each other to form the society of Christians.”[6] It seems that individualism cuts off communication of the Church at both ends: keeping individuals away from authoritative groups and contractualizing its nature when people choose to enter in.
Community is a buzzword these days in the church and is often proffered as the postmodern cure for individualism. The church is often called a community, a loving group of people committed to living out the ways of Christ and committed to each other. These are good things. Small groups, or perhaps even accountability groups, are for many the most intimate expression of the church, and have exploded across the nation and around the world. Often the community and small group explicitly offered as a counter to the loneliness of radical individual. Again this can be a good thing. Yet, I worry that there is confusion between the means and the ends. Construing the church as a cure for anything is a distortion of its purpose; whereas a gathering of the true church will inevitably bring about such effects.
Several theologians dealing with ecclesiology have utilized Bellah’s “lifestyle enclave” to describe the state of ecclesiology. Rooted in self-expression, leisure, consumption, and a retreat into the private life the lifestyle enclave is most basically an exclusive group of like-minded individuals who have no deeper connections to each other beyond self interests. Each enclave is a social contractualism in agree to put aside certain rights and enter into a group setting but still with individual goals clearly in mind. Micheal Jinkins suggests that this voluntary contractualism is a “two-edged sword” for Protestant ecclesiology. Positively, it offers a certain liveliness in a distinct evangelical piety. Negatively, points to the exclusivity and “spirit of schism” so prevalent in Prostestantism.[7] While there are a few positives of the contractualist society such as the lively spirituality of evangelicalism, however participation in such a group more likely reflects personal preferences of the expressive individualist than commitment to a larger community.
Recalling Miroslav Volf again suggests that a community of individuals does not make an ecclesial “we.”[8] To some extent, modernity’s individualism is only recast on a slightly larger scale and renamed “community.” This collective individualism still suggests the priority of the individual to choose which commitments and when to retract ones commitments to a particular group. The church is still considered a voluntary association that does not necessarily entail submission to or even acknowledging the collective authority.
The church is condensed to individuals who gather to worship and celebrate their personal relationship with Jesus. Camaraderie among peers is not enough. Meeting the emotional needs is not enough. Both suggest Bellah’s therapeutic tendency and the lifestyle enclave. While fellowship of believers is a key to the churches existence, it cannot be the explicit goal.
As human nature needs to be rooted beyond itself in the Trinity, so should our ecclesiology. An inward looking community of inward looking individuals has not fully experienced the hospitality of God. Rooted in the Trinity the church, like Christ sent to rescue the world, is also sent into the world.
[1] I have wondered for sometime to what extent does free-church ecclesiology reflect American individualism. This is one question I wanted to explore in the project which has grown well beyond my expectations. But it seems from initial impressions that they often model the same tendencies of individuals at the associational level.
[2] Stanley J. Grenz, David Guretzki, and Cherith Fee Nordling, “Individualism” in Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms, (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1999), 66.
[3] William A. Dyrness, “Spaces for an Evangelical Ecclesiology,” in The Community of the Word: Toward and Evangelical Ecclesiology, ed. Mark Husbands & Daniel J. Treier (Downers Grove, IL: IVP), 254-260.
[4] Craig A. Carter, “Beyond Theocracy and Individualism: The Significance of John Howard Yoder’s Ecclesiology,” in The Community of the Word: Toward and Evangelical Ecclesiology, ed. Mark Husbands & Daniel J. Treier (Downers Grove, IL: IVP), 174.
[5] Carter, 174
[6] Grenz, 314. Evangelical Futures
[7] Michael Jinkins, “The ‘Gift’ of the Church: Ecclesia Crucis, Peccatrix Maxima, and the Missio Dei” in Evangelical Ecclesiology: Reality or Illusion?, ed. John G. Stackhouse Jr., (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 181-183.
[8] Volf, 10.
[9] Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 209.
[10] Boersma, 211.
[11] Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out Without Selling Out, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 81-82. Driscoll is often lumped in with the Emergent but he would distance himself from that group and the subtitle is likely a shot in their direction.
[12] Boersma, 210.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Individualism & Hermeneutics
According to Nathan Hatch that having cast off tradition, clergy, and trained theologians, early Americans “agreed to defer to only one source of authority, the rule and guide of scripture.” [1] Americans could now discover the literal and self evident message of scripture for themselves. I have already explored briefly the American populist hermeneutic premised on the inalienable right of every person to understand scripture for him or herself.[2] Perhaps it is our post-modern awareness of our cultural and social positions clearly evident as adding subjective distance and presuppositions into our interpretations. Should this naïve objectivity of the interpreter be traced back to Descartes’ desire to locate the self as the most basic element in knowing?
If individualism is our first language our scriptural interpretations will bear these marks as well. Individualism infects our view of the people we read about in scripture, our interpretation, and application.
Bruce Malina suggests that it is our tendency to read scripture as “unique persons, as individualistic selves, as personalities with opinions and conscience and feelings of guilt and anxiety.”[3] He also suggests,
Americans live in an individualistic culture that centers on the value of self-reliance. Individualism may be described as the belief that persons are each and singly an end in themselves, and as such ought to realize their “self” and cultivate their own judgment, not withstanding the push of pervasive social pressures in the direction of conformity. In individualist cultures most people’s social behavior is largely determined by personal goals that often overlap with collectives such as the family, the work group, the tribe, political allies, coreligionists, compatriots, and the state. When a conflict arises between personal and group goals, it is considered acceptable for the individual to place personal goals ahead of collective goals. Thus individualism gives priority to the goals of single persons rather than group goals. What enables this sort of priority is focus on self-reliance, in the sense of independence, separation from others, and personal competence.[4]
At this point, we can look to the social sciences to help see past our Western individualistic context and perhaps get a glimpse of 1st Century Mediterranean context. What happens without such a careful endeavor is to project our cultural values upon the texts. Individualism is a subtle but powerful eisegetical force. Where Westerners likely read individuals, social scientists encourage us to see collectives which are defined by family integrity, group goals, and group solidarity.[5] Identity is rooted in the collective and not constructed by the individual. Perception of oneself is based typically the central person of the collective and the collectives health.[6] Without seeing ones individualistic tendencies in reading scripture we cannot rightly interpret scripture.
Individualism also infects the framework for scriptural interpretation. Hatch has clearly shown how the lack of framework beyond the individual effects an individualistic interpretation. Sola Scriptura was essential to the Reformers task, yet this idea has been usurped by sovereignty of the individual. Many have readily shown the shortcomings of Luther’s principle from Hatch and Americans desire to create a “novus ordo seclorum”[7] to Stan Grenz’s critique of propositional systematics created by autonomous individuals.[8]
Theologically we see other problems start to arise. With the interpretive community dismissed as an impingement upon the autonomy of self, there is a personalizing of the Holy Spirit (the Holy Spirit revealed it to me) and decreased necessity of tradition and ecclesiology. In this light, Clark Pinnock rightly warns against interpretive individualism leading to uncontrolled subjectivity.[9] Interpreters need to be reminded that Spirit guides interpretation from within the community. Is it enough to locate hermeneutics within the community? Ecclesiology has faced and succumbed to the same individualizing tendency attested by the variety among American Protestantism. This raises a few questions about the extent of contextual theology. Grenz suggests, “our desire is to hear what the Spirit is saying to this particular congregation and these particular believers.”[10] How do we balance the particular needs and questions answered in local theology without devolving into an ecclesial particularism?
Without tradition and communal authority, interpretation is left to un-encombered individual persons and churches. Is tradition, the guiding principle? Does a community framed by tradition, guided by the Spirit offer the true interpretation within the particular? What is the correlation then between one particular community and that of another? Or between the particular and the larger whole? I think my tendency is to want or expect too much from the church which though guided by the Spirit, is still made of fallen humanity.
[1] Hatch, 43.
[2] Ibid., 71.
[3] Bruce J. Malina, “Understanding New Testament Persons,” in The Social Sciences and New Testament Interpretation, ed. Richard L. Rohrbaugh (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996), 41.
[4] Ibid., 46.
[5] Ibid, 47.
[6] Ibid, 45.
[7] Nathan O. Hatch, “Sola Scriptura and Novus Ordo Seclorum,” ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Knoll, The Bible in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 59.
[8] Stanly J. Grenz, “Articulating the Christian Belief-Mosaic: Theological Method after the Demise of Foundationalism” ed. John G. Stackhouse, Jr., Evangelical Futures: A Conversation on Theological Method (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000), 124-125.
[9] Clark Pinnock, Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1996), 234.
[10] Grenz, 126. Evangelical Futures
If individualism is our first language our scriptural interpretations will bear these marks as well. Individualism infects our view of the people we read about in scripture, our interpretation, and application.
Bruce Malina suggests that it is our tendency to read scripture as “unique persons, as individualistic selves, as personalities with opinions and conscience and feelings of guilt and anxiety.”[3] He also suggests,
Americans live in an individualistic culture that centers on the value of self-reliance. Individualism may be described as the belief that persons are each and singly an end in themselves, and as such ought to realize their “self” and cultivate their own judgment, not withstanding the push of pervasive social pressures in the direction of conformity. In individualist cultures most people’s social behavior is largely determined by personal goals that often overlap with collectives such as the family, the work group, the tribe, political allies, coreligionists, compatriots, and the state. When a conflict arises between personal and group goals, it is considered acceptable for the individual to place personal goals ahead of collective goals. Thus individualism gives priority to the goals of single persons rather than group goals. What enables this sort of priority is focus on self-reliance, in the sense of independence, separation from others, and personal competence.[4]
At this point, we can look to the social sciences to help see past our Western individualistic context and perhaps get a glimpse of 1st Century Mediterranean context. What happens without such a careful endeavor is to project our cultural values upon the texts. Individualism is a subtle but powerful eisegetical force. Where Westerners likely read individuals, social scientists encourage us to see collectives which are defined by family integrity, group goals, and group solidarity.[5] Identity is rooted in the collective and not constructed by the individual. Perception of oneself is based typically the central person of the collective and the collectives health.[6] Without seeing ones individualistic tendencies in reading scripture we cannot rightly interpret scripture.
Individualism also infects the framework for scriptural interpretation. Hatch has clearly shown how the lack of framework beyond the individual effects an individualistic interpretation. Sola Scriptura was essential to the Reformers task, yet this idea has been usurped by sovereignty of the individual. Many have readily shown the shortcomings of Luther’s principle from Hatch and Americans desire to create a “novus ordo seclorum”[7] to Stan Grenz’s critique of propositional systematics created by autonomous individuals.[8]
Theologically we see other problems start to arise. With the interpretive community dismissed as an impingement upon the autonomy of self, there is a personalizing of the Holy Spirit (the Holy Spirit revealed it to me) and decreased necessity of tradition and ecclesiology. In this light, Clark Pinnock rightly warns against interpretive individualism leading to uncontrolled subjectivity.[9] Interpreters need to be reminded that Spirit guides interpretation from within the community. Is it enough to locate hermeneutics within the community? Ecclesiology has faced and succumbed to the same individualizing tendency attested by the variety among American Protestantism. This raises a few questions about the extent of contextual theology. Grenz suggests, “our desire is to hear what the Spirit is saying to this particular congregation and these particular believers.”[10] How do we balance the particular needs and questions answered in local theology without devolving into an ecclesial particularism?
Without tradition and communal authority, interpretation is left to un-encombered individual persons and churches. Is tradition, the guiding principle? Does a community framed by tradition, guided by the Spirit offer the true interpretation within the particular? What is the correlation then between one particular community and that of another? Or between the particular and the larger whole? I think my tendency is to want or expect too much from the church which though guided by the Spirit, is still made of fallen humanity.
[1] Hatch, 43.
[2] Ibid., 71.
[3] Bruce J. Malina, “Understanding New Testament Persons,” in The Social Sciences and New Testament Interpretation, ed. Richard L. Rohrbaugh (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996), 41.
[4] Ibid., 46.
[5] Ibid, 47.
[6] Ibid, 45.
[7] Nathan O. Hatch, “Sola Scriptura and Novus Ordo Seclorum,” ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Knoll, The Bible in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 59.
[8] Stanly J. Grenz, “Articulating the Christian Belief-Mosaic: Theological Method after the Demise of Foundationalism” ed. John G. Stackhouse, Jr., Evangelical Futures: A Conversation on Theological Method (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000), 124-125.
[9] Clark Pinnock, Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1996), 234.
[10] Grenz, 126. Evangelical Futures
Monday, May 19, 2008
Individualism & Trinitarian Theology
Perhaps there are many reasons for the resurgence of Trinitarian theology in the last century, but whether an impetus or an outcome, Trinitarian theology forces substantial reconsideration of the individual. Yet I think the Trinity can still be subject to individualisms tendencies. The common expression of God as the “three in one” and “one in three” highlight the dangers of individualism penetrating from both ends by an over emphasis on the unity or diversity of Persons. I do not think that the struggle to define the Trinity throughout our Christian history is will ever be over. We may arrive at balanced theological assertions but the full practice of such is much more difficult.
Certainly Christians are monotheists and must retain the witness to the scriptural witness of a God who is one. I wonder, could the unity of the Trinity have the potential, like the individual, to take priority and be solidified as an undifferentiated, monistic entity.
Or perhaps the opposite is more likely where the danger lies in our common usage of “persons” which we tend to think of as individuals each with a distinct ego and center of consciousness free to exercise their wills against each other.[1] It again is no large step to transfer the self-contained, self-sufficient autonomy of American individuals upon the Trinity. According to Bellah, the “individual is prior to society, which comes into existence only through the voluntary contract of individuals trying to maximize their own self interest.”[2] This cannot be for God. “Although God’s being is characterized by the hypostatic distinctions…all three persons are one in their will and activity.”[3] The loving essence of Trinitarian relations would be exchanged for the self seeking of each person. Bellah’s concept of the individual renders the divine Tri-unity into tri-theism and makes no further sense when applied to the Christian story and the cross.
Potentially, the individuating tendency will dissect each Person from the others and subsequently overemphasize that one member. Migliore recounts H. Richard Niebuhr’s accounts of theological unitarianisms. Unitarianism of the Father, often highlighted by American civil religion, acknowledges God as the “source of life, of certain inalienable rights, and providential guidance of American destiny.”[4] Accompanying this unitarianism of the Creator, there is also a diminished sense of sin, need for forgiveness and repentance, or transformation of life. Unitarianism of the Redeemer renders Jesus is more like a sentimental “cult figure” than the Jesus of the Gospels.[5] Salvation is consummeristic and exclusive. Unitarianism of the Spirit overemphasizes the gifts of the Spirit for the self rather than building up of the church.
[1] Roger E. Olson & Christopher A. Hall, The Trinity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 36.
[2] Bellah, 143.
[3] Olson, 36.
[4] Migliore, 64.
[5] Ibid., 65.
Certainly Christians are monotheists and must retain the witness to the scriptural witness of a God who is one. I wonder, could the unity of the Trinity have the potential, like the individual, to take priority and be solidified as an undifferentiated, monistic entity.
Or perhaps the opposite is more likely where the danger lies in our common usage of “persons” which we tend to think of as individuals each with a distinct ego and center of consciousness free to exercise their wills against each other.[1] It again is no large step to transfer the self-contained, self-sufficient autonomy of American individuals upon the Trinity. According to Bellah, the “individual is prior to society, which comes into existence only through the voluntary contract of individuals trying to maximize their own self interest.”[2] This cannot be for God. “Although God’s being is characterized by the hypostatic distinctions…all three persons are one in their will and activity.”[3] The loving essence of Trinitarian relations would be exchanged for the self seeking of each person. Bellah’s concept of the individual renders the divine Tri-unity into tri-theism and makes no further sense when applied to the Christian story and the cross.
Potentially, the individuating tendency will dissect each Person from the others and subsequently overemphasize that one member. Migliore recounts H. Richard Niebuhr’s accounts of theological unitarianisms. Unitarianism of the Father, often highlighted by American civil religion, acknowledges God as the “source of life, of certain inalienable rights, and providential guidance of American destiny.”[4] Accompanying this unitarianism of the Creator, there is also a diminished sense of sin, need for forgiveness and repentance, or transformation of life. Unitarianism of the Redeemer renders Jesus is more like a sentimental “cult figure” than the Jesus of the Gospels.[5] Salvation is consummeristic and exclusive. Unitarianism of the Spirit overemphasizes the gifts of the Spirit for the self rather than building up of the church.
[1] Roger E. Olson & Christopher A. Hall, The Trinity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 36.
[2] Bellah, 143.
[3] Olson, 36.
[4] Migliore, 64.
[5] Ibid., 65.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Individualism and Soteriology
Robert Bellah states that “most Americans see religion as something individual, and prior to any organizational involvement.”[1] I think Bellah has understated the problem and I would extend this further to include salvation being prior to and outside any organizational involvement. Dennis Hollinger helpfully notes that “one of the hallmarks of Reformation theology is salvation by faith on the part of the individual.”[2] One is able to approach God, through personal faith in Jesus. These points are essential but Hollinger reminds us of the corporate nature of salvation. Individualism tends to reduce election to individuals rather than corporate body of Christ and its effects beyond.
If the individual is given priority in our hermeneutics it is no surprise then that the “us” or “we” of Paul’s letters in regards to the church are still conceived of as a collection of individuals. Miroslav Volf is right to point out that “several I’s together…do not yet constitute an ecclesial we.”[3] At one end, where salvation is made a personal matter between the individual and Jesus, there is a narrowing of interpretation of what the church is and is for. At the other end of the spectrum the church can be eliminated all together for lack of need because a personal decision about Christ has been made by the individual. While the original referent of “Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus,” is the ark of the Catholic Church, I doubt that many American Evangelicals would even consider such a statement as it is an utter affront to their individualism. For the individual, salvation is through “personal faith in Jesus.” A radical individualist may well ask what do faith and Christ have to do with the Church? Such a question would seem to ignore Paul’s metaphor of Christ’s body: the church. Perhaps the subjective personal relationship with Jesus that Evangelicals champion can come only through a personal relationship with Christ’s body the church.[4]
Our individuating tendency separates us not only from fellow humanity but also from physical creation; salvation becomes mental or spiritual decision making only concerned with humanity. Yet Romans 8.22-23 suggest that creation too groans for rescue. This inward or privatizing tendency of individualism only fosters another plague upon Christianity: Gnosticism. Salvation does not bring about new relations for that would acknowledge or relegate persons as individuals prior to salvation. Rather, salvation transforms all existing relations with fellow humanity and creation.
[1] Bellah, 226.
[2] Dennis P. Hollinger, Individualism and Social Ethics: An Evangelical Syncretism (New York: University Press of America, 1983), 242.
[3] Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 10.
[4] This raises a host of other questions about baptism and church membership that I will not go into here.
If the individual is given priority in our hermeneutics it is no surprise then that the “us” or “we” of Paul’s letters in regards to the church are still conceived of as a collection of individuals. Miroslav Volf is right to point out that “several I’s together…do not yet constitute an ecclesial we.”[3] At one end, where salvation is made a personal matter between the individual and Jesus, there is a narrowing of interpretation of what the church is and is for. At the other end of the spectrum the church can be eliminated all together for lack of need because a personal decision about Christ has been made by the individual. While the original referent of “Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus,” is the ark of the Catholic Church, I doubt that many American Evangelicals would even consider such a statement as it is an utter affront to their individualism. For the individual, salvation is through “personal faith in Jesus.” A radical individualist may well ask what do faith and Christ have to do with the Church? Such a question would seem to ignore Paul’s metaphor of Christ’s body: the church. Perhaps the subjective personal relationship with Jesus that Evangelicals champion can come only through a personal relationship with Christ’s body the church.[4]
Our individuating tendency separates us not only from fellow humanity but also from physical creation; salvation becomes mental or spiritual decision making only concerned with humanity. Yet Romans 8.22-23 suggest that creation too groans for rescue. This inward or privatizing tendency of individualism only fosters another plague upon Christianity: Gnosticism. Salvation does not bring about new relations for that would acknowledge or relegate persons as individuals prior to salvation. Rather, salvation transforms all existing relations with fellow humanity and creation.
[1] Bellah, 226.
[2] Dennis P. Hollinger, Individualism and Social Ethics: An Evangelical Syncretism (New York: University Press of America, 1983), 242.
[3] Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 10.
[4] This raises a host of other questions about baptism and church membership that I will not go into here.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Individualism, human nature, & sin
The Psalmist’s question persists today, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor” (Psalm 8.4). This glory and honor is the indelible image of God created within them (Gen. 1.26). What does the “image” actually refer to? At times in our Christian history it has represented our physicality, our reason, dominion over the earth, human freedom, and our creative abilities.[1] All of these seem to be rooted in a distorted anthropology. The definition of the “imago Dei” cannot be rooted in self perception or similarities seen in both humankind and God because we inevitably see ourselves first and fashion God in a likewise manner. Rather the question about what humanity is like as created in the “imago Dei” is really a question about the nature of God. Without Calvin’s well known dialectic of two part knowledge of self and God, resting finally in the knowledge of God shaping our anthropological perceptions we will surely stray into anthropomorphism.[2]
We must return, as many are right now, to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity to be the source of all theology including our anthropology. Our nature then is constituted within the otherness of the relational Trinity rather than humanity’s inherent ability as individuals or collectively. If God is conceived of as a monistic being, it only follows that as God’s creatures we would assume the same of ourselves as individuals. Without this rootedness in the Trinitarian economy, we are free to imagine ourselves as autonomous, creative, and rational, beings. From this vantage point, faith becomes solely a vertical matter between the individual and God. The essence of the social Trinity emanates from the indwelling service to the other Person’s of the Trinity. This Trinity, perfect community in itself, reaches out and invites humanity to join in the dance. Yet this is not just an individualistic venture. This loving and selfless serving within the Economy is to be taken up as the model for the relational life of the Church. But where human identity is not rooted in the interdependence of the Trinity, and subsequently in the body of the church, the individual inevitably takes priority.
We should be careful at this point as well not to continue individualistic approach to God. The individual approaching the Trinity is not much better than the individual approaching a deistic or monistic conception of God unless it drives the individual out of him or herself to others. It is here that we see the Trinitarian shape of ecclesiology mirroring the heavenly Trinity and the individual entering into participation in both.
With such vulnerability, it is likely the individual will balk at giving ones self over to another person or larger entity for fear of exploitation or loss of individuality or uniqueness. These fears are not unfounded in common human experience. Yet the Trinity can set the example to overcome misperceptions and abuses of uniformity. Though being an indissoluble unity, the immanent Trinity functions in eternal distinctions as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and is expressed in differentiated agency. Individuality of each member seems to come from the expressed agency of the larger Trinitarian community. Each person of the Trinity has specified roles. If we take this as the model for human identity and social interaction, our identity is tied to the larger constituting body in the source and use of, and not negation of, individuality.
I wonder too about the ones perception of sin. Where the individual is the primary reality, can we rightly understand the original sin or the corporate nature of sin? Some weeks ago, I noticed in our Sunday morning liturgy that most, in singing the Gloria, changed the phrase, “You take away the sin of the world” to “You take away the sins of the world.” I began to ponder the significance of such a small change. Without a proper understanding of our fallen state through Adam, where sin entered through one and spread to all (Rom. 5.12) and through which all will die (1 Cor. 15.21), we cannot rightly understand our state before God. Where the pervasiveness and radicality of our sinful nature is reduced to sins, individuals are easily led to believe that they become a morally neutral or blank slate before God once sins are forgiven. Sinful nature is reduced to sinful actions. Where the Gloria continues “have mercy on us” the mercy the atoning sacrifice is made into asking a favor of forgiveness. If the blank slate is granted by the individual, Christ’s atoning sacrifice is not even needed because we can choose to live a sinless or moral life.
For the radical individualist, sin likely pertains only to individual actions and not corporate. Certainly personal sins are important to confess to our Creator and Redeemer, but we must look beyond ourselves and our own actions to those wrongs that we may be implicitly and explicitly involved in at all levels of participation. While it becomes increasingly hard to explore our responsibilities within the wider societal circles in the global interactions of today’s world we must be attempt to be aware of the consequences of corporations and nations, economic policies and beyond.
We must return, as many are right now, to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity to be the source of all theology including our anthropology. Our nature then is constituted within the otherness of the relational Trinity rather than humanity’s inherent ability as individuals or collectively. If God is conceived of as a monistic being, it only follows that as God’s creatures we would assume the same of ourselves as individuals. Without this rootedness in the Trinitarian economy, we are free to imagine ourselves as autonomous, creative, and rational, beings. From this vantage point, faith becomes solely a vertical matter between the individual and God. The essence of the social Trinity emanates from the indwelling service to the other Person’s of the Trinity. This Trinity, perfect community in itself, reaches out and invites humanity to join in the dance. Yet this is not just an individualistic venture. This loving and selfless serving within the Economy is to be taken up as the model for the relational life of the Church. But where human identity is not rooted in the interdependence of the Trinity, and subsequently in the body of the church, the individual inevitably takes priority.
We should be careful at this point as well not to continue individualistic approach to God. The individual approaching the Trinity is not much better than the individual approaching a deistic or monistic conception of God unless it drives the individual out of him or herself to others. It is here that we see the Trinitarian shape of ecclesiology mirroring the heavenly Trinity and the individual entering into participation in both.
With such vulnerability, it is likely the individual will balk at giving ones self over to another person or larger entity for fear of exploitation or loss of individuality or uniqueness. These fears are not unfounded in common human experience. Yet the Trinity can set the example to overcome misperceptions and abuses of uniformity. Though being an indissoluble unity, the immanent Trinity functions in eternal distinctions as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and is expressed in differentiated agency. Individuality of each member seems to come from the expressed agency of the larger Trinitarian community. Each person of the Trinity has specified roles. If we take this as the model for human identity and social interaction, our identity is tied to the larger constituting body in the source and use of, and not negation of, individuality.
I wonder too about the ones perception of sin. Where the individual is the primary reality, can we rightly understand the original sin or the corporate nature of sin? Some weeks ago, I noticed in our Sunday morning liturgy that most, in singing the Gloria, changed the phrase, “You take away the sin of the world” to “You take away the sins of the world.” I began to ponder the significance of such a small change. Without a proper understanding of our fallen state through Adam, where sin entered through one and spread to all (Rom. 5.12) and through which all will die (1 Cor. 15.21), we cannot rightly understand our state before God. Where the pervasiveness and radicality of our sinful nature is reduced to sins, individuals are easily led to believe that they become a morally neutral or blank slate before God once sins are forgiven. Sinful nature is reduced to sinful actions. Where the Gloria continues “have mercy on us” the mercy the atoning sacrifice is made into asking a favor of forgiveness. If the blank slate is granted by the individual, Christ’s atoning sacrifice is not even needed because we can choose to live a sinless or moral life.
For the radical individualist, sin likely pertains only to individual actions and not corporate. Certainly personal sins are important to confess to our Creator and Redeemer, but we must look beyond ourselves and our own actions to those wrongs that we may be implicitly and explicitly involved in at all levels of participation. While it becomes increasingly hard to explore our responsibilities within the wider societal circles in the global interactions of today’s world we must be attempt to be aware of the consequences of corporations and nations, economic policies and beyond.
[1] Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), 121-122.
[2] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeil, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press), I.II
Friday, May 9, 2008
Individualism & The Sacraments
The consuming individual is not likely to grasp the depth of mystery involved in either sacrament because they each involve a radical re-orientation from the self to God and the church. Baptism is reduced to a marker of ones salvation with Jesus. Baptism as the initiation into the visible and invisible body of Christ, where one takes on a new identity is diminished. And where that connection has not been severed the individual may still view it as a membership card to the communion club.
Communion for individuals is likely seen as celebration of the personal relationship. It is an acknowledgment of God’s hospitality, but only to the one. In a certain scene on an airplane in the film Fight Club, the main character remarks to another, that he is the most interesting “single-serving friend” he has ever met because all food on airplanes are packaged for the individual. Reflecting on Bellah’s lifestyle enclave and the cubed communion bread in so many churches, it seems all too easy connection that those we dine with as the body of Christ are reduced to “single serving friends.” Communion becomes concerned with remembering what Jesus did for me, not re-membering of the body of Christ.
Communion for individuals is likely seen as celebration of the personal relationship. It is an acknowledgment of God’s hospitality, but only to the one. In a certain scene on an airplane in the film Fight Club, the main character remarks to another, that he is the most interesting “single-serving friend” he has ever met because all food on airplanes are packaged for the individual. Reflecting on Bellah’s lifestyle enclave and the cubed communion bread in so many churches, it seems all too easy connection that those we dine with as the body of Christ are reduced to “single serving friends.” Communion becomes concerned with remembering what Jesus did for me, not re-membering of the body of Christ.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Individualism & Spirituality
Spirituality is the favorite playground of the postmodern expressive individualist. Spirituality is perceived as the perfect means to cultivate the private self and self-expression. Yet with little to no connection to anything historical or theological framework Christian spirituality quickly becomes syncretistic; a strange blend of Holy Spirit and self help. Yet, the purpose of Christian spirituality is not “developing a better self-image, achieving self-fulfillment, or finding self-affirmation, nor is it the development of individualistic qualities.”[1] Rodney Clapp states what orthodox Christian spirituality is not.
It is not opposed to the body, it is not non physical. It is not removed from history, the ongoing flow of time. It is not asocial, a solitary activity or state of being. It is not primarily inward and invisible, a hidden affair of the private heart...[It is not] a compartmentalized experience, customized by and for the lone individual, removed from any pesky, constraining traditions or social bodies (institutions).[2]
Rather it is about developing patterns and virtues that help incarnate Christ’s social body in the world. Clapp concurs stating that “Orthodox spirituality is participation and formation in the life of the church that is created and sustained by the Holy Spirit.”[3]
Evangelical spirituality, as I have noted many times, is a personal Christological piety. Yet when this eclipses the preaching and the Sacraments or that which constitutes the church as the church there is a serious problem.[4] When this type of spirituality is the center of ecclesial unity, “the individual is prior to the church in such a way that a cafeteria style approach to Christianity is inevitable.”[5] The tendency of American individuals is to “leave the church” which may or may not actually entail a physical leaving but rather making “faith their own.” Real or valid faith is determined by a process of internalization not by just accepting what ones parents believe. Particularity of faith is swallowed by subjectivity.[6] Without the framework of church history and theology a flimsy spirituality ensues.
Within individualism, a consumerist tendency fills the self-created void of others with desire for desire. Tolerance and pluralism relegate belief (and practice) “to one more item on the market shelf”[7] where we are free “to treat these narratives, roles, and symbols as disposable commodities: things to be played with, explored, tried on, and, in the end, discarded.”[8] Not only do our individualistic spiritualities succumb to consumerism. Consumerism is a spirituality itself. Not recognizing the irony, culture implores individuals to cast off or empty the self of all things external. The empty or impoverished self may selectively be filled with “commodity based self-enhancements”[9] as salvation from the emptiness of self. Miller’s comments on consumerism are telling about the state of Christianity. Individualism promises wholeness within self-sufficiency, but this leaves the individual in radical isolation, where selves never fully comprehend the other. “Relationships are reduced to acts of consumption, a consumption that, because it is completely determined by the monadic self, can never free it from itself.”[10] The empty self must consume, but gets consumed by the process of consumption where even our Christian spirituality and practices, designed to cultivate and channel our desire of God, are commodified. Consumer desire does not end in possession, rather it is endless desire itself.[11] Christian spirituality, even in the most individualistic sense longs to go to heaven – or more appropriately the coming of God’s Kingdom. The empty individual, consumed by consumerism, desires endlessly, and is thus perpetually seeking a unique spirituality from the “wisdom of many religious traditions stripped from their supporting communal infrastructures.”[12] The perceived freedom of choice in plenty of the spiritual cornucopia distracts us from recognizing the “structures that that maintain our dissipation.”[13]
[1] Simon Chan, Spiritual Theology: A Systematic Study of the Christian Life (Downers Grove, IL: IVp, 1998), 102.
[2] Rodney Clapp, Tortured Wonders: Christian Spirituality for People, Not Angels (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004), 14.
[3] Ibid., 14.
[4] Carter, 176.
[5] Ibid., 176.
[6] Chan, 109.
[7] Beth Newman, “Pluralism as Idolatry” (http://www.abpnews.com/1454.article) Accessed on December 7, 2006.
[8] Vincent Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York: Continuum, 2005), 6.
[9] Ibid., 54.
[10] Ibid., 111.
[11] Ibid., 141.
[12] Ibid., 142.
[13] Ibid., 142.
It is not opposed to the body, it is not non physical. It is not removed from history, the ongoing flow of time. It is not asocial, a solitary activity or state of being. It is not primarily inward and invisible, a hidden affair of the private heart...[It is not] a compartmentalized experience, customized by and for the lone individual, removed from any pesky, constraining traditions or social bodies (institutions).[2]
Rather it is about developing patterns and virtues that help incarnate Christ’s social body in the world. Clapp concurs stating that “Orthodox spirituality is participation and formation in the life of the church that is created and sustained by the Holy Spirit.”[3]
Evangelical spirituality, as I have noted many times, is a personal Christological piety. Yet when this eclipses the preaching and the Sacraments or that which constitutes the church as the church there is a serious problem.[4] When this type of spirituality is the center of ecclesial unity, “the individual is prior to the church in such a way that a cafeteria style approach to Christianity is inevitable.”[5] The tendency of American individuals is to “leave the church” which may or may not actually entail a physical leaving but rather making “faith their own.” Real or valid faith is determined by a process of internalization not by just accepting what ones parents believe. Particularity of faith is swallowed by subjectivity.[6] Without the framework of church history and theology a flimsy spirituality ensues.
Within individualism, a consumerist tendency fills the self-created void of others with desire for desire. Tolerance and pluralism relegate belief (and practice) “to one more item on the market shelf”[7] where we are free “to treat these narratives, roles, and symbols as disposable commodities: things to be played with, explored, tried on, and, in the end, discarded.”[8] Not only do our individualistic spiritualities succumb to consumerism. Consumerism is a spirituality itself. Not recognizing the irony, culture implores individuals to cast off or empty the self of all things external. The empty or impoverished self may selectively be filled with “commodity based self-enhancements”[9] as salvation from the emptiness of self. Miller’s comments on consumerism are telling about the state of Christianity. Individualism promises wholeness within self-sufficiency, but this leaves the individual in radical isolation, where selves never fully comprehend the other. “Relationships are reduced to acts of consumption, a consumption that, because it is completely determined by the monadic self, can never free it from itself.”[10] The empty self must consume, but gets consumed by the process of consumption where even our Christian spirituality and practices, designed to cultivate and channel our desire of God, are commodified. Consumer desire does not end in possession, rather it is endless desire itself.[11] Christian spirituality, even in the most individualistic sense longs to go to heaven – or more appropriately the coming of God’s Kingdom. The empty individual, consumed by consumerism, desires endlessly, and is thus perpetually seeking a unique spirituality from the “wisdom of many religious traditions stripped from their supporting communal infrastructures.”[12] The perceived freedom of choice in plenty of the spiritual cornucopia distracts us from recognizing the “structures that that maintain our dissipation.”[13]
[1] Simon Chan, Spiritual Theology: A Systematic Study of the Christian Life (Downers Grove, IL: IVp, 1998), 102.
[2] Rodney Clapp, Tortured Wonders: Christian Spirituality for People, Not Angels (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004), 14.
[3] Ibid., 14.
[4] Carter, 176.
[5] Ibid., 176.
[6] Chan, 109.
[7] Beth Newman, “Pluralism as Idolatry” (http://www.abpnews.com/1454.article) Accessed on December 7, 2006.
[8] Vincent Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York: Continuum, 2005), 6.
[9] Ibid., 54.
[10] Ibid., 111.
[11] Ibid., 141.
[12] Ibid., 142.
[13] Ibid., 142.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Individualism or Individuality?
One of the difficulties in discussing individualism is that at its heart, it affirms and negates. On one hand affirms our created worth. On the other, it separates us from everything else. For someone to say that they have a personal relationship with Jesus can be affirmed as a good thing. However we cannot slip from the communal aspect of that claim. Christ cannot be had apart from his body. We must affirm both the corporate and the individual. To swing back with the pendulum into a pure communitarian perspective would diminish the created individuality of all people. Perhaps there needs to be a reclamation or clarification of terms. If individualism is about self realization and self-re-creation perhaps a better understanding of individuality versus individualism would be in order. Perhaps people are afraid of being swallowed by the corporation – to become a number. Rather than being born as individuals, we are born with individuality. We are uniquely created beings who seek to cultivate those particulars for a greater good beyond oneself. Paul’s conception of the body speaks of individuality not individualism. If all were a hand where would the sense of smell be? What good is the hand severed from the body? Is it still even a hand without its identity to a larger context.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Individualism & Doctrine
Has individualism affected our doctrine and practice? Most certainly. If individualisms tendencies are to jettison all external authority and tradition, leaving construction of meaning for the individual, then all doctrines and practices are potentially at risk. An individual may “pick and choose” from among the options, but also feel free to “mix and match” as he or she sees fit. I do believe there is hope. Many today are working to reclaim theology and practice from radical individualism.
One of the difficulties in discussing individualism is that at its heart, it affirms and negates. On one hand affirms our created worth. On the other, it separates us from everything else. For someone to say that they have a personal relationship with Jesus can be affirmed as a good thing. However we cannot slip from the communal aspect of that claim. Christ cannot be had apart from his body. We must affirm both the corporate and the individual. To swing back with the pendulum into a pure communitarian perspective would diminish the created individuality of all people. Perhaps there needs to be a reclamation or clarification of terms. If individualism is about self realization and self-re-creation perhaps a better understanding of individuality versus individualism would be in order. Perhaps people are afraid of being swallowed by the corporation – to become a number. Rather than being born as individuals, we are born with individuality. We are uniquely created beings who seek to cultivate those particulars for a greater good beyond oneself.
If individuals cannot be fully autonomous from others, neither can doctrines. As you begin to lift one doctrine the rest come along with it revealing their participation in the conversation. What follows will be a meager attempt on my part to explore the actual and potential distortions that radical individualism effects upon Christian doctrine and practice.
One of the difficulties in discussing individualism is that at its heart, it affirms and negates. On one hand affirms our created worth. On the other, it separates us from everything else. For someone to say that they have a personal relationship with Jesus can be affirmed as a good thing. However we cannot slip from the communal aspect of that claim. Christ cannot be had apart from his body. We must affirm both the corporate and the individual. To swing back with the pendulum into a pure communitarian perspective would diminish the created individuality of all people. Perhaps there needs to be a reclamation or clarification of terms. If individualism is about self realization and self-re-creation perhaps a better understanding of individuality versus individualism would be in order. Perhaps people are afraid of being swallowed by the corporation – to become a number. Rather than being born as individuals, we are born with individuality. We are uniquely created beings who seek to cultivate those particulars for a greater good beyond oneself.
If individuals cannot be fully autonomous from others, neither can doctrines. As you begin to lift one doctrine the rest come along with it revealing their participation in the conversation. What follows will be a meager attempt on my part to explore the actual and potential distortions that radical individualism effects upon Christian doctrine and practice.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Democratization of American Christianity - Nathan Hatch
Having summarized several aspects of Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart last October, I want to turn briefly to Nathan Hatch’s work in Democratization of American Christianity which should help to create a better vista of how our current doctrines and practice are be compromised by individualism.
Hatch attempts to show how the democratic spirit of early America set the tone for the American church as it took on the spirit of the age. This democratic spirit emerged in three profound ways. First, American’s rejected the traditional separation between clergy and laity where power and virtue was transferred from the educated elite to larger body of individuals.[1] Apart from the well educated elite and tradition, individuals were free to explore their “spiritual impulses” thus defining faith for themselves.[2] Filled with democratic hope, Christianity was to become a liberating force for all people from authoritarian structures.[3] From these beginnings, Hatch says that three tendencies emerged for American Christianity: 1) mingling of diverse and contradictory sources, 2) fragmentation, and finally inversion of authority.[4] American religious experience mirrors what was taking place in the name of equality and freedom both at a national level and within its constituents by the systematic and simultaneous raising of the common individual by casting off oppressive authority and placing that authority into the hands of each person.[5] A largely untrained people became the prime interpreters of scripture, now taken from the oppressive hands of educated clergy revealing a populist common-sense or self-evident hermeneutic.
[1] Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 9.
[2] Ibid., 10.
[3] Ibid., 11.
[4] Ibid., 35.
[5] Ibid., 10.
Hatch attempts to show how the democratic spirit of early America set the tone for the American church as it took on the spirit of the age. This democratic spirit emerged in three profound ways. First, American’s rejected the traditional separation between clergy and laity where power and virtue was transferred from the educated elite to larger body of individuals.[1] Apart from the well educated elite and tradition, individuals were free to explore their “spiritual impulses” thus defining faith for themselves.[2] Filled with democratic hope, Christianity was to become a liberating force for all people from authoritarian structures.[3] From these beginnings, Hatch says that three tendencies emerged for American Christianity: 1) mingling of diverse and contradictory sources, 2) fragmentation, and finally inversion of authority.[4] American religious experience mirrors what was taking place in the name of equality and freedom both at a national level and within its constituents by the systematic and simultaneous raising of the common individual by casting off oppressive authority and placing that authority into the hands of each person.[5] A largely untrained people became the prime interpreters of scripture, now taken from the oppressive hands of educated clergy revealing a populist common-sense or self-evident hermeneutic.
[1] Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 9.
[2] Ibid., 10.
[3] Ibid., 11.
[4] Ibid., 35.
[5] Ibid., 10.
Friday, March 7, 2008
Fight Club, the Hegelian Synthesis and Robert Bellah’s Individualisms
The Hegelian synthesis suggests that from a thesis will arise its anti-thesis and as a way to mediate between the two a synthesis will emerge blending and rejecting elements of both the thesis and antithesis.
Fight Club, while giving voice to the frustrations of many post-moderns, seems to utilize this very modern construct.
The thesis is represented by Edward Norton’s character Jack or the Narrator as a buttoned-down un-happy white-collar worker in an un-ethical and mind-numbing job. His antithesis, Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt is the alpha-male unrestrained by societal rules and its ways of functioning.
For this to work we must ask, does the film ultimately condone the violence of
I think we see the synthesis at work in
Robert Bellah in Habits of the Heart describes individualism in two particular forms: utilitarian and expressive. Benjamin Franklin is the epitome of the utilitarian expression of individualism where the individual rises to su
Expressive individualism, a form of Romanticism and best exemplified by Walt Whitman, arose in reaction to the materialistic pursuits of utilitarian individualism. Expressive individualism sought to cultivate the self and self-expression where each person has a “unique core of feeling and intuition that must unfold if individuality is to be expressed (p. 333-4) These sentiments are easily identifiable in Whitman’s writings, as well as, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and others. For the expressivists, “the ultimate use of the American’s independence was to cultivate and express the self and explore its vast social and cosmic identities” (p. 35). We hear this in our language of “finding oneself.”
Fight Club seems to critique both the materialistic utilitarian individual as well as the self-cultivating expressivist. And yet, the film avoids becoming preachy and dictating the synthesis. It is left to the individual to navigate and mediate between the utilitarian and expressivist, as well as the emasculated consumer and ultra-violent alpha male. Jack becomes the one who has su
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Habits of the Heart - Robert Bellah pt. 4
The lifestyle enclave becomes a means of self-expression where the self has been divided between the working public life and private and intimate sphere of the home. Once the self is separated from family, religion, and work, individuals can express their “unique identity” by joining lifestyle enclaves. Rooted in private leisure and consumption, enclaves gather those who are “socially, economically, or culturally similar” to enjoy like-minded individuals.[1] In contrast to a community which seeks to be inclusive, celebrating the interdependence of public and private life, the lifestyle enclave is exclusive. Marriages and church affiliation reduced to the affinity of lifestyle enclaves.
If we have separated the self from family, religion, work, and tradition, what is left to constitute the self? The simple answer is our preferences. But, what are these choices really based upon? If selves are simply defined by their preferences which are arbitrary, “each self constitutes its own moral universe, and there is finally no way to reconcile conflicting claims about what is good in itself.”[2] Without any larger objective framework for right and wrong, good and evil, the self and its feelings become the moral guide.[3] The self is constantly in progress but without fixed moral end and is able to adapt behavior to various social roles.[4] Self-awareness and self-knowledge leading to personal happiness become the keys forming ones personal moral convictions.
Finding oneself also means finding the story in which our life seems to make sense. Yet they seek to do this as individuals without reference or perceived shared experience with a “larger generational, historical religious context”[5] Each life stage becomes a crisis of further individuation. Public work and the private lifestyle enclave become the means of orienting or filling ones divergent selves.
The individual, while striving for self-reliance still seeks out social interaction in the lifestyle enclave. He is afraid to admit the need to such interaction at the expense of his independence and identity. Rather than an empty, unencumbered, consuming self, what would the interactions of a encumbered self look like? The authors suggest Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue to describe communities of memory. Communities are in many ways constituted by their past and re-telling those stories as its central narrative, and by doing so, “offers examples of men and women who have embodied and exemplified the meaning of the community.”[6] Traditions are built upon the stories and lives the community and “contain conceptions of character, what a good person is like, and of the virtues that define such a character.”[7] These stories tell of health and sickness, success and failure bind the community to the past and turn to the future in hope. We see our part in the story being woven into the greater whole. This takes place at the family level as we pass on stories, heirlooms, and practice family rituals. Communities of memory are also practiced at the national level seen in our holidays and monuments. But powerfully we see the potential for this in the church. Each Sunday and liturgical year, our journey to the church building and worship services re-enact and re-constitute the Christian narrative and community. History and memory become the key to constituting ones future. These communities are enacted in special ways called “practices of commitment.”[8] Memories, hopes, and fears are not only passed on orally but are also practices that define the “patterns of loyalty and obligation that keep the community alive.”[9] Yet, where history is forgotten, community “degenerates into life-style enclaves.”[10]
America has had a varied past of established and disestablished religion. However, once it is disestablished it becomes a private matter to be practiced within the church walls and at home. For many in America, religion is a private and optional matter not to enter the public domain. As a private matter, the autonomous individual, apart from the constraints of any religious system is free to concoct a spirituality as they choose. The authors highlight a woman named Sheila Larson who has named her religion or faith after herself. “Sheilaism” is based on “her little voice” to “love yourself and be gentle with yourself” and “take care of each other.”[11] Since religion is a private matter, diversity or plurality is not only acceptable but encouraged.
[1] Bellah, 72.
[2] Ibid., 76.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 76-77.
[5] Ibid., 82.
[6] Ibid., 153.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 154.
[11] Ibid., 221.
If we have separated the self from family, religion, work, and tradition, what is left to constitute the self? The simple answer is our preferences. But, what are these choices really based upon? If selves are simply defined by their preferences which are arbitrary, “each self constitutes its own moral universe, and there is finally no way to reconcile conflicting claims about what is good in itself.”[2] Without any larger objective framework for right and wrong, good and evil, the self and its feelings become the moral guide.[3] The self is constantly in progress but without fixed moral end and is able to adapt behavior to various social roles.[4] Self-awareness and self-knowledge leading to personal happiness become the keys forming ones personal moral convictions.
Finding oneself also means finding the story in which our life seems to make sense. Yet they seek to do this as individuals without reference or perceived shared experience with a “larger generational, historical religious context”[5] Each life stage becomes a crisis of further individuation. Public work and the private lifestyle enclave become the means of orienting or filling ones divergent selves.
The individual, while striving for self-reliance still seeks out social interaction in the lifestyle enclave. He is afraid to admit the need to such interaction at the expense of his independence and identity. Rather than an empty, unencumbered, consuming self, what would the interactions of a encumbered self look like? The authors suggest Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue to describe communities of memory. Communities are in many ways constituted by their past and re-telling those stories as its central narrative, and by doing so, “offers examples of men and women who have embodied and exemplified the meaning of the community.”[6] Traditions are built upon the stories and lives the community and “contain conceptions of character, what a good person is like, and of the virtues that define such a character.”[7] These stories tell of health and sickness, success and failure bind the community to the past and turn to the future in hope. We see our part in the story being woven into the greater whole. This takes place at the family level as we pass on stories, heirlooms, and practice family rituals. Communities of memory are also practiced at the national level seen in our holidays and monuments. But powerfully we see the potential for this in the church. Each Sunday and liturgical year, our journey to the church building and worship services re-enact and re-constitute the Christian narrative and community. History and memory become the key to constituting ones future. These communities are enacted in special ways called “practices of commitment.”[8] Memories, hopes, and fears are not only passed on orally but are also practices that define the “patterns of loyalty and obligation that keep the community alive.”[9] Yet, where history is forgotten, community “degenerates into life-style enclaves.”[10]
America has had a varied past of established and disestablished religion. However, once it is disestablished it becomes a private matter to be practiced within the church walls and at home. For many in America, religion is a private and optional matter not to enter the public domain. As a private matter, the autonomous individual, apart from the constraints of any religious system is free to concoct a spirituality as they choose. The authors highlight a woman named Sheila Larson who has named her religion or faith after herself. “Sheilaism” is based on “her little voice” to “love yourself and be gentle with yourself” and “take care of each other.”[11] Since religion is a private matter, diversity or plurality is not only acceptable but encouraged.
[1] Bellah, 72.
[2] Ibid., 76.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 76-77.
[5] Ibid., 82.
[6] Ibid., 153.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 154.
[11] Ibid., 221.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Habits of the Heart - Robert Bellah pt. 3
Another significant part of Bellah's study that is helpful for many is the articulation of therapeutic tendencies of our culture. Therapy is often related to the expressive individualism we just explored because it focuses on the individual and ones choices about roles, commitments, that one will make. Yet these choices are not based on a larger framework again, but according to “life-effectiveness” as the individual perceives it.[1] Therapy itself suggests a need for cure. But from what? The cure seeks to re-adjust ones social construction between self and the world, private and public meaning. Individuals are able to think in terms of commitments regarding such decisions as marriage, work, and church, as either enhancements or entanglements en route to self creation of ones individuality.[2] In the cultivation of self we see its connection to expressive individualism but its larger root comes from the rub by the incompatibility between the natures of public utilitarian individualism and the private expressive individualism. Only by accepting and asserting ourselves can we enter into “real” relationships.[3]
Several common themes emerge for American individuals: self-reliance, leaving home, leaving church, and work. Self-reliance is a nineteenth-century term popularized by Emerson. Self-reliance in the biblical and republican traditions maintains a collective note expressed in the Puritans who left society to rely upon each other.[4] Yet for the utilitarian and expressive individualists, self-reliance was purely individualistic.[5]
Individuation is a natural part of human development, yet it is a hyper-individuation in America. “Childhood is chiefly preparation for the all-important event of leaving home…in late adolescence” and becomes a recurring theme throughout life.[6] Coming of age means “breaking away from dependency on parents and relying themselves.”[7]
Not unrelated to leaving home, many American’s leave church as well. It is expected that during ones youth, decisions will be made about whether or not to attend church and subsequently which one. Individuals cannot merely assimilate the views of their parents but must make them “particularly and peculiarly one’s own.”[8] This is heightened in Protestantism by “demanding…a unique conversion experience.”[9] The authors point out a fantastic irony by saying, “just where we think we are most free, we are most coerced by the dominant beliefs of our own culture. For it is a powerful cultural fiction that we not only can, but must, make up our deepest beliefs in the isolation of our private selves.”[10]
The demand to “make something of yourself” through work is also a common theme for American individuals.[11] Our sense of work shapes how we view ourselves. For some, jobs are to make a living. For others, the career traces progress through achievement and advancement and is built on success and self-esteem.[12] Whereas calling suggest that ones work and morals are inseparable as an offering of the self into a community for the larger good.
[1] Bellah, 47.
[2] Ibid., 47.
[3] Ibid., 98.
[4] Ibid., 55.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 57.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid., 63.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 65.
[11] Ibid., 66.
[12] Ibid.
Several common themes emerge for American individuals: self-reliance, leaving home, leaving church, and work. Self-reliance is a nineteenth-century term popularized by Emerson. Self-reliance in the biblical and republican traditions maintains a collective note expressed in the Puritans who left society to rely upon each other.[4] Yet for the utilitarian and expressive individualists, self-reliance was purely individualistic.[5]
Individuation is a natural part of human development, yet it is a hyper-individuation in America. “Childhood is chiefly preparation for the all-important event of leaving home…in late adolescence” and becomes a recurring theme throughout life.[6] Coming of age means “breaking away from dependency on parents and relying themselves.”[7]
Not unrelated to leaving home, many American’s leave church as well. It is expected that during ones youth, decisions will be made about whether or not to attend church and subsequently which one. Individuals cannot merely assimilate the views of their parents but must make them “particularly and peculiarly one’s own.”[8] This is heightened in Protestantism by “demanding…a unique conversion experience.”[9] The authors point out a fantastic irony by saying, “just where we think we are most free, we are most coerced by the dominant beliefs of our own culture. For it is a powerful cultural fiction that we not only can, but must, make up our deepest beliefs in the isolation of our private selves.”[10]
The demand to “make something of yourself” through work is also a common theme for American individuals.[11] Our sense of work shapes how we view ourselves. For some, jobs are to make a living. For others, the career traces progress through achievement and advancement and is built on success and self-esteem.[12] Whereas calling suggest that ones work and morals are inseparable as an offering of the self into a community for the larger good.
[1] Bellah, 47.
[2] Ibid., 47.
[3] Ibid., 98.
[4] Ibid., 55.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 57.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid., 63.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 65.
[11] Ibid., 66.
[12] Ibid.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Habits of the Heart - Robert Bellah pt. 2
For Americans, freedom is likely the most deeply resonant and shared value of American society. Yet this freedom, is conceived in the libertarian sense (as we have commented often this semester) as freedom from others values, ideas, lifestyles in both private and public life. Commonality is shared only in the right of the individual to pursue ones own ideals. Justice, based individual rights, becomes the only means to effect and ensure such equal opportunity. In so far as success, justice, and freedom all are common American themes, they provide little help in talking about anything beyond the individual.
The authors suggest that cultural traditions are conversations or arguments about the meaning of the groups shared destiny.[1] Americans have often used a biblical and/or republican mode of discourse to speak of the country’s shared destiny and meaning. The Puritans become the prime exemplar in their desire to create a community where one could live a truly spiritual life. A libertarian sense of freedom is rejected in favor of a “moral” freedom of what is “good, just, and honest” in the context of the covenant between God and humanity.[2] In contrast, the republican ideal casts Thomas Jefferson as the exemplar of public participation for the larger good of society. Equality is conceived as a universal principle defined in primarily political terms to allow equal citizen participation in a self-governing society.[3]
The authors describe individualism in two particular forms: utilitarian and expressive. Benjamin Franklin is the epitome of the utilitarian expression of individualism where the individual rises to success through hard work and personal initiative. Many believed that if each individual vigorously pursued his or her own interest, the social good would also automatically emerge.[4] Societal participation becomes contractual where individuals enter merely to advance ones self-interests.
Expressive individualism, a form of Romanticism and best exemplified by Walt Whitman, arose in reaction to the materialistic pursuits of utilitarian individualism. Expressive individualism sought to cultivate the self and self-expression where each person has a “unique core of feeling and intuition that must unfold if individuality is to be expressed.”[5] These sentiments are easily identifiable in Whitman’s writings, as well as, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and others. For the expressivists, “the ultimate use of the American’s independence was to cultivate and express the self and explore its vast social and cosmic identities.”[6]
[1] Ibid., 27. See Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 206-207.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 30-31,
[4] Ibid., 33.
[5] Ibid., 333-4.
[6] Ibid., 35.
The authors suggest that cultural traditions are conversations or arguments about the meaning of the groups shared destiny.[1] Americans have often used a biblical and/or republican mode of discourse to speak of the country’s shared destiny and meaning. The Puritans become the prime exemplar in their desire to create a community where one could live a truly spiritual life. A libertarian sense of freedom is rejected in favor of a “moral” freedom of what is “good, just, and honest” in the context of the covenant between God and humanity.[2] In contrast, the republican ideal casts Thomas Jefferson as the exemplar of public participation for the larger good of society. Equality is conceived as a universal principle defined in primarily political terms to allow equal citizen participation in a self-governing society.[3]
The authors describe individualism in two particular forms: utilitarian and expressive. Benjamin Franklin is the epitome of the utilitarian expression of individualism where the individual rises to success through hard work and personal initiative. Many believed that if each individual vigorously pursued his or her own interest, the social good would also automatically emerge.[4] Societal participation becomes contractual where individuals enter merely to advance ones self-interests.
Expressive individualism, a form of Romanticism and best exemplified by Walt Whitman, arose in reaction to the materialistic pursuits of utilitarian individualism. Expressive individualism sought to cultivate the self and self-expression where each person has a “unique core of feeling and intuition that must unfold if individuality is to be expressed.”[5] These sentiments are easily identifiable in Whitman’s writings, as well as, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and others. For the expressivists, “the ultimate use of the American’s independence was to cultivate and express the self and explore its vast social and cosmic identities.”[6]
[1] Ibid., 27. See Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 206-207.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 30-31,
[4] Ibid., 33.
[5] Ibid., 333-4.
[6] Ibid., 35.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Habits of the Heart - Robert Bellah pt. 1
“How ought we to live? How do we think about how to live? Who are we, as Americans? What is our character?”[1] So begins Habits of the Heart. Its authors, delving into the life and values of “white, middle-class Americans”[2] explore the pervasiveness of individualism. Their study and title gives homage to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America by returning to his “admiration and anxiety” over the great strength of American individuals, as well as, the potentially isolating tendency of individualism.[3] Tocqueville described these American mores or “habits of the heart” not only as “ideas and opinions but habitual practices with respect to such things as religion, political participation, and economic life.”[4] He described it as the disposition of “each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraws into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself”…where individuals “imagine their whole destiny is in their hands”…finally forgetting their ancestors and descendents.[5]
This sociological study explores the nature of the individual’s participation in both public life through local politics, activism, and voluntary associations and ones private life in terms of love, marriage, and therapy. The first chapter highlights four very distinct individuals which serve to illumine their points through out the text. Even though they betray sharp contrasts in many ways they all share a common individualistic vocabulary in conversations about morality, society, and politics which they call the “first language of American individualism.”[6] Their differences often come in a variety of second languages.
These four individuals give us a broad look at cultural values and the difficulty of reconciling them. The authors claim that our “American cultural traditions define personality, achievement and the purpose of human life in ways that leave the individual suspended in glorious, but terrifying, isolation”[7] because ones selected “values and priorities” are merely a personal choice, as long as it does not interfere with the choices of others, and not justified by a “wider framework of purpose or belief.”[8] The good is then defined by one finds rewarding however, as ones preferences change, so does the good.[9]
Where there is no shared standard value system, individuals all exist on equal ground where tolerance becomes the virtue of plurality. As a private matter, one cannot impose upon another’s chosen values. In such a world, conflicts are resolved by “honesty and communication” of ones “needs and desires”[10] as matters of “technical problem solving, not moral decision.”[11] Morality then is based on the highly subjective nature of personal preferences. Values are arbitrarily chosen. As a result, successful self-reliance and self-fulfillment become the standards for choosing those preferences and yet, that self-fulfillment is done in radical isolation without means of affecting that same fulfillment for others.[12] The only, and very ironic, fragile unity that such a strident diversity is able to bring about is in the language of individual rights.
This sociological study explores the nature of the individual’s participation in both public life through local politics, activism, and voluntary associations and ones private life in terms of love, marriage, and therapy. The first chapter highlights four very distinct individuals which serve to illumine their points through out the text. Even though they betray sharp contrasts in many ways they all share a common individualistic vocabulary in conversations about morality, society, and politics which they call the “first language of American individualism.”[6] Their differences often come in a variety of second languages.
These four individuals give us a broad look at cultural values and the difficulty of reconciling them. The authors claim that our “American cultural traditions define personality, achievement and the purpose of human life in ways that leave the individual suspended in glorious, but terrifying, isolation”[7] because ones selected “values and priorities” are merely a personal choice, as long as it does not interfere with the choices of others, and not justified by a “wider framework of purpose or belief.”[8] The good is then defined by one finds rewarding however, as ones preferences change, so does the good.[9]
Where there is no shared standard value system, individuals all exist on equal ground where tolerance becomes the virtue of plurality. As a private matter, one cannot impose upon another’s chosen values. In such a world, conflicts are resolved by “honesty and communication” of ones “needs and desires”[10] as matters of “technical problem solving, not moral decision.”[11] Morality then is based on the highly subjective nature of personal preferences. Values are arbitrarily chosen. As a result, successful self-reliance and self-fulfillment become the standards for choosing those preferences and yet, that self-fulfillment is done in radical isolation without means of affecting that same fulfillment for others.[12] The only, and very ironic, fragile unity that such a strident diversity is able to bring about is in the language of individual rights.
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