The Denial of Self

One of the great doctrines of ancient Church lies in their teaching that death cannot separate the ekkelesia of God from itself. Indeed, this is one of the great doctrines of Pauline theology if we read Ephesians carefully enough. Death cannot alienate us either from the love of God or from fellowship of one another. The church, the community of Christ, is so solidified, so fused together, and so intertwined that the feeble attempts of our “final enemy” to rupture our bonds of faith are fated to failure.

Oh, but what death could not accomplish American individualism has achieved. The same church Paul commands to be “united in Spirit” and “contending as one soul for the faith of the gospel” has been torn asunder like the pitied girl whose corpse was cut in 12 chunks and mailed to each of Israel’s most powerful mob families. Individualism’s insipid doctrine of self-autonomy and self-betterment have all but made the church a privatized social club calling for no accountability and possessing no prophetic voice. And when you have a group of self-oriented people attempting to do life together, factions and schism are inevitable – it’s like sticking a bunch of 2 year olds in a sandbox together; it’s not going to be long before it becomes a human litter box despite the protests of those who know better.

From where does this individualism emerge? Surely not form within the biblical text with its persistent call for communal unity. And surely not from church tradition which stresses that there is no salvation apart from the church community – that is, one cannot claim to be a Christian and not participate in the redeemed community.

But it would be too premature a jump for me to say that it arises out of some secular-liberal agenda clandestinely subverting the church and its "Christian" culture. In fact, this would be the easy answer wouldn’t it? After all, aren’t those “leftists” to blame for all our problems? It certainly couldn’t be that we’ve swallowed our own red pill, could it?

Sociologist Max Weber actually traces American individualism back to….wait for it….Protestantism (specifically it’s early American Puritan version). In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ,Weber argues that the Calvinistic theology of early American Protestantism focused largely on individual election and the signs thereof. That "God has predestined me, personally, to eternal salvation is manifested in the fact that he has prospered me with material gain” was the thought of the hour, and has stayed around long after Puritanism died under the weight of its own self-righteousness.

For me, this assumption is largely what our little community will challenge. I want my materialistic, self-focused Christianity to be tossed out the window like a bad grade card on the bus ride home from school. I want to proceed from avarice to abnegation and learn to think of others more highly than I do myself. I want to learn to blame myself first for community conflict instead of assuming others are always asinine. I want to purge the materialistic, privatized, self-absorbed religiosity from my soul, that somehow I might know Christ and the power of his resurrection in a more meaningful way. I want to confront and be confronted with sin. I want to lay my soul bare before others so that there remains no crevice left for falsehood to fester.

Dear God, I must be insane…