What if individualism isn’t really the problem?
One of the many rewards of running our first Matthias Media USA conference last year was the time spent getting to know our hosts at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington DC—including Jonathan Leeman, who runs the always interesting 9Marks blog, and pulls together their eJournal.
Like all the 9Marks guys, Jonathan is sharp as a tack, has a generous gospel heart, and is blessed with a clear-eyed sense of where the issues lie.
His thoroughly thought-provoking piece in the July/August edition of Modern Reformation is a case in point. Titled ‘Individualism's Not the Problem—Community's Not the Solution’, Jonathan's article examines the increasingly common mantra that the traditional evangelical gospel is too ‘individualistic’, and that we need a more communitarian, relational gospel for the disengaged postmodern self.
While acknowledging and applauding what the communitarians get right, Jonathan insightfully points out that the individualism, consumerism, radical scepticism and alienation of the modern person are symptoms of a deeper problem:
The problem with the modern self is not merely that it's “unrelated”. It's rebellious. Not just disengaged, but defiant. Not just independent, but insubordinate. Where Yahweh, the maker of heaven and earth, described himself to Moses as the self-defining, predicate-less “I AM” (ego sum in the Vulgate), the ground of all reality, Descartes' method effectively shoved Yahweh aside, making his existence (and God's!) a predicate of his own thinking mind (cogito ergo sum) ... Descartes' move, like Adam's, did not merely break a relationship; it broke God's law or Word. The implications are not merely personal, but judicial. It's not just a friend who is cast off; it's a Lord and Judge. The philosophical methods we associate with modernity and postmodernity, in a sense, whisper the same line whispered by the snake in Garden. What the shift from pre-modernity to modernity signified, really, was that this satanic whisper gained a moral and philosophical credibility in the so-called Christian West (even if it had always been believed and practiced). In other words, the Enlightenment did not bring us radical free agency and contractualism. Genesis 3 did. The Enlightenment legitimised it.
Jonathan then proceeds to show how the communitarian/relational emphasis, by often failing to appreciate the deeply theological roots of our modern predicament, ends up re-orienting our doctrine of sin, and of Christ's work, and of church, and ultimately of God. He concludes:
Loneliness is not the problem. A refusal to live on anyone else's terms is. Another way to put all this: we're not dealing with a relationship problem, but a worship problem.
The solution then is not community; it's repentance. The solution is in changing of heart and direction—in the individual! This repentance includes joining a community and making relationships. But it's joining a particular kind of community where self is no longer sovereign and where one is called to obedience to the church as an expression of obedience to God. It's the joining of a community where God's Word and the worship of God are supreme in everything.
It's definitely worth a read (and you can do it here by taking out Modern Reformation's free 30-day trial).
Does any of this resonate with anyone as much as it did with me?
