The pandemic is exposing the myths of Western individualism

This post is sparked by reading Douglas Campbell’s marvellous Pauline Dogmatics.

If asked to diagram social relations, very likely most of us would typically use a number of circles to represent individuals.

Each person is imagined as a self-contained ‘unit’, a discrete individual, separated off from other individuals by a social space.

This is a picture of the person as a self-sufficient person, with clear boundaries delineating them from other individuals. Others exist in their own spheres, perhaps bouncing off each other now and then, but essentially each of us are our own island.

Margaret Thatcher famously took this to its logical conclusion in stating that there is ‘no such thing as society’. Or, in Campbell’s words;

Personhood exists in isolation and society is a game of marbles

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But with even a little analysis we soon realise this is a myth. All of us are incomplete, indeed we are crippled, without a network of social relationships. Our very identity and sense of personhood depends on interaction with, and recognition of, others.

This simple diagram begins to hint at how who we are is bound up with with relationships. The self cannot exist in splendid isolation.

^{By Wykis – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1618169}

This is why the pandemic is so hard to bear – we are being forced to actually live like the isolated individuals of Western consumerism / capitalism. And it shrivels the soul and breaks the heart. There is something deeply alien to our humanity to be in enforced lockdown.

For those us locked away with family members that we actually like and get on with this is just about survivable! But we still miss 1001 things about everyday life – its vibrancy, life, and delicious complexity, not to mention hugs, food with friends, and endless fascination of meeting new people.

For those trapped in spaces characterised by toxic relationships, it is unimagineably difficult. For those living on their own it is a lonely wilderness experience, unsustainable in the long term.

Douglas Campbell wrote his book long before Covid-19 was known about. So his words have perhaps attained extra prophetic weight in the meantime. He speaks of the connection between our social identity and the nature of God – Father, Son and Spirit.

We must let this revelation concerning the true nature of personhood sink down into out theologial bones, since it will pervade all that follows. People are relational beings because the personal God that is the Trinity is a relational communion, and we are made in the image of God …

At the heart of all reality lies an interpersonal and hence fundamental familial God. We are involved with a divinity that is interpersonal in the most committed and relational fashion.

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Lockdown is necessary. But it comes at great cost – and I am NOT talking money here. It’s an issue of love. I say this because Christians believe, as Campbell says that

At the heart of the universe is a play of love between the Father, the Son and the Spirit.

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We are embodied beings, made by a relational God of love to be in relationships of love with him and with each other. Of course we can still love others we can only see on a computer screen, but it is a pale imitation of a fully functioning relationship.

And so, from a theological perspective, we long for the ending of lockdown, NOT so we can save the economy (although we need it to work in order to live) but so that we can love – for that is what we have been created to do.

And, even more remarkably, as God’s children love they ‘witness’ to the truth of who God is. God takes the ‘risk’ of choosing people like you and me to reveal or demonstrate his love to the world.

So in this pandemic, let us be asking ourselves, how can we as individuals and as church communities mediate something of the love of the triune God to a coronavirus world.

Comments welcome

Sologamy: the logical end of Western individualism?

From Aeon Magazine  –  a superb article by Polina Aronson. Worth reading the whole thing.

‘Sologamy’ is the latest relationship trend not only in Europe and the United States but also Japan. A budding industry of self-marriages promises to make us happier by celebrating commitment to the only person in this world truly worthy of a relationship investment: our precious self. A variety of coaches worldwide offer self-marriage courses, including guidance through preparatory steps (such as writing love poems and composing vows) and orchestration of the ceremony itself.

While self-marriage has no legal power (you can’t normally do it in a town hall, at least not yet), it is open to anyone regardless of age and gender. I wasn’t – and am not – single, but that doesn’t disqualify me; my coach cheerfully confirmed that anybody, regardless of their situation, was welcome to learn how to ‘cherish’ and ‘love’ themselves. Still, most women (and it is almost always women) whose stories I read in blogs, Facebook pages and media reports were driven into self-marriage by the desire to emancipate themselves from the stigma attached to singledom and by the prospect of self-discovery. Some hoped that self-marriage would ‘heal them from a chain of painful break-ups’; others opted for it as a means of proving the worth of their lifestyles – and all of them were willing to learn how to love themselves ‘unconditionally’. Welcome to the 21st century, where we are no longer only ‘bowling alone’, to use the expression coined back in 1995 by the American sociologist Robert Putnam – we are marrying alone, too. So is this a sign of a radical new kind of independence, or a depressing totem to our self-absorption?

 

Paul and the Christian life (3) Timothy Gombis

Another rich chapter in The Apostle Paul and the Christian Life: ethical and missional implications of the New Perspective is by Timothy Gombis of Grand Rapids Theological Seminary. (His Paul: a guide for the Perplexed is excellent by the way).

Just to reiterate the context of this discussion: the big question of this book is how does Paul the Jew – now a follower of Jesus the Messiah – envision a life pleasing to God? How does he see the relationship with Jewish belief and practice of his day [shaped around the Torah] and what it means for both Jews and Gentiles to live a life worthy of the gospel? What are the implications of these questions for living the Christian life in the 21^st century?

Gombis’ essay is called ‘Participation in the New Creation People of God in Christ by the Spirit’

He comes at the issues via two angles: first, how, for Paul, the Christian life is situated and framed by the overarching narrative of Scripture; second the dynamic of the Christian life originates and is sustained by the Spirit.

Narrative:

Gombis summarises the biblical storyline up to the coming of the Messiah like this:

The Scriptures, therefore, present a scenario in which “salvation” must take place. Israel needs to be restored to God so that the nations of the world can be reclaimed and taught to worship the God of Israel. And this is necessary so that the God of Israel can truly be seen as the creator God—the one true God whose glory fills the entire creation. God’s work of salvation will be complete only when the state of affairs ruined by Adam and Eve has been restored—humans worshiping God by imaging him throughout the whole of creation. Looking ahead, this narrative trajectory shapes how Paul conceives of the Christian life, both its theological orientation (restoration of worship) and its direction toward others (restoration of communal relations)

Jesus comes (dramatically) to be understood by Paul as the centre and fulfillment of this Scriptural narrative. Christology is at the heart of Paul’s entire theological vision.

Jesus is the true human who renders to the creator God a faithful obedience embodied by a life of self-giving love for others. Jesus Christ, then, and his relation to the entire range of God’s redemptive purposes, becomes the context within which the Christian life takes place and the template for what it involves.

• Jesus redeems the failed story of Adam and Eve.
• Jesus is the true seed of Abraham
• Jesus is the true Israelite who, uniquely, fulfils Israel’s vocation to be al ight to the nations and source of blessing to the nations
• Jesus’ self-giving life of love forms the model for the Christian life
• Jesus’ presence fills each church community through the pouring out of his Spirit. These communities are empowered to be a new humanity (Eph 4:24)

The big point Gombis is making here is that a NT vision of the Christian life does not emerge out of nowhere – it is fully consistent with God’s agenda to redeem and restore (save) his original creation order.

And the Christian life is lived out in community – the new body, the body of Messiah Jesus. The paradigm shift here is that it is made up of both faithful Israelites and faithful non-Israelites.

Spirit

It is the Spirit who unites believers to Christ – in his death and resurrection. Gombis sketches three ways the Spirit and the Christian life are linked for Paul:

First, the Spirit is the promised eschatological presence of God among his people. The new age has come, the kingdom of God is here and evident within his people who are new creations in Christ.

Second, churches are made up of individuals baptized into Christ, united to him, where the very presence of God dwells. See church as temple here (1 Cor 3:16-17)

Third, since churches are made up of people united to Christ, they are united to each other (the body of Christ) – members of one another (Eph 4:15).

How then to describe the Christian life? Gombis puts it corporate language that challenges popular Protestant individualist soteriology:

The Christian life is participation in the new creation people of God, the church, made up of all people in Christ … Paul’s conception of the
Christian life cannot be extricated from his vision of the church. In fact, while much of Protestant theology has focused on the individual in abstraction from the church, we can say quite confidently that Paul would have almost nothing to say about the Christian life if he had to speak of it apart from the church.

And this

Paul’s conception of being Christian is thoroughly wrapped up in and
shaped by the communal experience of being the corporate people of God. At the same time, Paul doesn’t diminish the individual in favor of the community, so it may be better to say that Paul conceives of individuals-in-community. This runs counter to the typical Protestant starting point of the individual as the recipient of salvation and the object in whom God is producing the character of Christ through sanctification. That is, it is somewhat typical to conceive of salvation as worked out in individuals who then must also reckon themselves part of a church made up of other individuals who are also having salvation worked out in them. This theological perspective comes not from Paul’s texts, however, but from a Western tradition shaped by individualism.

All this means that the idea of the Christian life being one where the lone individual ‘lives out’ his or her own choices is a modern creation. For Paul, the Christian life is communal through and through. Believers are bound together so much so that the Apostle’s aim in writing his letters is always that they, as individuals-in-community  “participate in community life to reflect the reality that they are communities of the kingdom of God.”

And it is modern individualism that has shaped popular interpretation of Paul’s teaching on life in the Spirit. The ‘Flesh’ and ‘Spirit’ contrast of Galatians 5 is not some internal individual struggle but two competing realms of power. The command to be ‘filled by the Spirit’ in Ephesians 5:18 is not to individuals but to the corporate body of the church.

The ‘shape’ of this corporate life is cruciformity. The letters of Paul are not detailed templates of ethics, but are better understood as exhortations and encouragements to live a certain way – the way of Jesus, the way of the cross, the way of self-giving love (Phil 2:5-11)

The consequence or fruit of such a life is unity. And this is where the New Perspective kicks in as a useful corrective to Protestant individualism. Gombis says

Protestant, and especially Reformed, interpreters bristle at the suggestion that Paul employs the notion of justification by faith in an effort to unify Jewish and gentile Christians in Rome. When one follows the grammar of Paul’s argument, however, it is difficult to deny that this is what Paul is doing. He writes to a church (or network of churches) in Rome to unify them in the face of developing division. He argues in Romans 1:18–3:20 that all those in the Roman churches were equally condemned under sin—not just gentiles—and in 3:21–31 Paul claims that all Christians have been justified by faith without any reference to ethnic identity.

Justification by faith is vital for Paul, but it functions as a doctrine for the unity of the church, vindicating the saving and redeeming purposes of God.

‘Unity’ means concrete things – loving one another; treating the poor with dignity and respect (1 Cor 11); forgiveness; carrying each other’s burdens; mutual care and multiple similar examples.

And it is the Spirit who empowers Christians to live such a life. Gombis makes an interesting point here relating back to the New Perspective and criticisms of it by some Reformed scholars worried that it somehow imports our ‘works’ into individual salvation

The Christian life as the participation (along with others in Christ) in
God and thus enjoyment of divine empowerment ought to relieve Protestant concerns about potential anthropological optimism. That is, many have objected to a “new perspective” approach to Paul on the grounds that it does not share a critique of works and works of law that reflects the complete inability of humans to adequately obey God or the Mosaic law. We may admit that Paul is not necessarily optimistic about humanity, but he is also not reticent about the necessity of all humanity to obey the one true God revealed in Jesus Christ. This is likely because he discerns the reality that all those who obey God in Christ can do so only because of the divine empowerment enjoyed by all those who have been united to Christ by the Spirit.

I agree with him – too much popular Protestant spirituality is shaped by an overly-pessimistic view of the Christian life (‘we are justified sinners’ or ‘we are simply beggars telling others beggars where to find bread). Note, I did not say an overly-pessmistic anthropology. It seems to me that Paul is (rightly) negative about humanity’s lostness – just look around. But he is also hugely confident about God’s ability to transform that lostness through the empowering presence of the Spirit.

Comments, as ever, welcome.