Sermon Tone Analysis

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE

Sean is leading this week.

INTRODUCTION

Context for the Series: Barriers

WEEK 1: Cynicism

WEEK 2: Pride

WEEK 3: Shame

WEEK 4: Tribalism

WEEK 5: Individualism

I would like us first to remember that this series has not simply been about calling out bad behaviors and replacing them with good ones.

It is nothing less than that, but it is certainly more than that.

It was born out of a longing to see the power and presence of God unhindered in our life together.

Reading of Scripture

“Please stand with me for the reading of Scripture”

Change things up: have everyone close their eyes and slowly read these passages over them.

First, pray for God to quiet our minds and open our hearts and imaginations so we will see what God is doing in our midst in this moment.

Pray

WHAT IS INDIVIDUALISM?

What Individualism Isn’t

It isn’t the understanding and acknowledgment that we are actual individuals vs. some sort of shared being or hive mind sentients.

We are indeed individuals with the ability to think, reason, and feel.

Individualism is a Philosophy

Individualism is a philosophy which governs our lives - the way our motives are shaped and the way we think, reason, and feel.

It shapes our ethics, our politics, and even our view of God.

But before I attempt to give a modern definition of the individualism we know today, let me first give a brief history.

A Brief History

Late Iron Age

Individualism shows up here and there in Scripture pretty early, and we can see some early hints of it in the writings of Ezekiel around BC 593 (Ezekiel 4:12-15, Ezekiel 18:2 - use of irony).

It is nowhere near the development we see today, but there are early fingerprints.

One of the reasons for this distinct shift was a major change in social structure.

Society was moving from the nomadic life of the desert to the agricultural and commercial life of Canaan.

The new environment and industries militated strongly against the continuance of the clan spirit and organization.

Land-ownership became individual rather than commercial.

Agricultural life, with its diversity of industry, naturally brought the individual to the front.

The growth of large towns, like Jerusalem, Samaria, and Bethel, furnished greater scope for individual effort and enterprise, and the ever-increasing ramifications of trade and commerce constantly afforded new fields for the development of individual talent.

John Merlin Powis Smith, “The Rise of Individualism among the Hebrews,” The American Journal of Theology X, no. 2 (1906): 252.

Renaissance

The first major development would be during the Renaissance period from AD 1300-1600.

The Renaissance was essentially a cultural renewal that was effected as medieval peoples, institutions, and study awoke from a deep sleep, if you will.

Due to the political, religious, and economic control of Roman Catholicism (one of the only surviving institutions from antiquity) during the Middle Ages, the cultural epicenter of the world at that time became Italy.

It also happened that the Renaissance was predominantly an urban phenomenon, as learning in the city began to impact the surrounding areas and education.

A renewal of the mind raised Europe and the world from the ashes of stagnation.

This movement began in Rome and also concurrently in Florence, in Orleans, and then Naples and Salerno, Italy, and then to a lesser degree in Paris and also London, but through the Renaissance, it occurred there in the backyard of Catholicism.

It was also being partially fueled by orthodox scholars that were fleeing the East from the onslaught of Islam because they were running for their lives and migrating toward the West.

As they did, they found themselves converted into Roman Catholicism and that brought scholarship with it.

Except for that, the movement of the Renaissance was not essentially a Christian movement.

In fact, the spirit of the Renaissance often conflicted with the ideals of Christianity.

It was primarily focused on the physicality of earthly life while Christians were still thinking in terms of the Kingdom of God, which was both physical and spiritual.

The Renaissance leaders (e.g., humanist philosopher Pico della Mirandola, artist/inventor Leonardo da Vinci, poet Dante Alighieri, artist Michelangelo, political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli) were very earthly and for the most part had enough of politicized church (i.e., Christendom) and its excesses because they had seen and been subject to it for several centuries.

As the power of the Holy Roman Empire splintered the world now focused primarily on human life, here and now, and human potential.

One was empowered by a new focus on things like personal identity, rather than a shared identity through the church.

This had not really happened up until this time, but it was now becoming a conviction that the person is the primary unit of reality, that the person, the individual, is the primary unit of worth and value and that every person is an end unto himself/herself.

It is during this period the Reformation and development of the protestant church via Martin Luther took place and felt the effects of the Renaissance.

This is where our understanding of salvation became personal and focused on individual experience rather than seen in light of the community to which one belonged.

The phrase, “Man is the measure of all things.” is a rugged type of individualism that began in the Renaissance, and is the idea that the individual is not inferior to the collective whole.

The individual is not inferior to institutions and is not fundamentally subject to them.

This time of Renaissance was a sloughing off of all the authority and the authoritarian leadership that these people had seen from the previous centuries.

Frederick Cardoza, ED205 Discipleship in History and Practice, Logos Mobile Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016).

Some of this was good in that we start to see the coercive nature of Christendom being challenged and torn down.

However, like any major cultural reaction, there came with it some negative side effects, individualism being one of them.

Enlightenment

The Enlightenment, from AD 1650-1800, really codified the dominant brand of individualism we see and practice today, both inside and outside of the church.

It became a social and ethical motive that would ostensibly dominate all of Western culture to our present age.

It’s philosophical leaders (John Locke, Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Voltaire), were no longer seeking validation in Greco-Roman philosophers like those of the Renaissance, but rather validation in and through rationalism and empiricism.

The political philosophy of the Enlightenment is the birthplace of modern Western liberalism: secular, pluralistic, rule-of-law-based, with an emphasis on individual rights and freedoms.

Note that none of this was really present in the Renaissance, when it was still widely assumed that kings were essentially ordained by God, that monarchy was the natural order of things and that monarchs were not subject to the laws of ordinary men, and that the ruled were not citizens but subjects.

It was the Enlightenment, and thinkers who embodied its ideas, like Voltaire and the beloved Benjamin Franklin, who were the intellectual force behind the American Revolution and the French Revolution, and who really inspired the ideas behind the political documents of the age like the American ‘Declaration of Independence’ and the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’.

As a new social and ethical motive, individualism presupposes an exclusive and self-sufficient individual in all of life.

This becomes the new norm.

It drastically changed the way we raised and educated our children, the way we saw our rights, the way we approached justice, the way we wrote theology, the way we preached in our churches, and even the way we understood the church altogether (i.e., the church went from being who to what/it).

Warner Fite, in his Harvard Theological Review journal entry titled “The Motive of Individualism in Religion”, writes:

It is clear that most of the historic formulations of individualism, especially those of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, presuppose an exclusive and self-sufficient individual.

Mind your own affairs—do as you please—every man for himself—laissez faire—that government is best which governs least—such expressions imply, upon their face at least, that no individual is directly interested in his neighbor.

Warner Fite, “The Motive of Individualism in Religion,” The Harvard Theological Review VII, no. 4 (1914): 479–480.

Which brings us to today...

What Individualism Is (Our Cultural Moment)

A definition of modern individualism...

Modern individualism is an approach to social and ethical theory that suggests the location of decision and action lies in the individual human person, and that people derive their personal identities from the choices that they make as individuals, more than from the groups or communities in which they participate.

Transition

So, I want to first take a brief look at how individualism corrupts and then talk about what it looks like to move away from its corrupting influence to something life giving.

WHAT INDIVIDUALISM DOES

Individualism Corrupts Identity

Identity is about belonging and finding our location in all of creation.

Last week Michel talked about tribalism and how it is a displaced desire for the community God made and wired us for.

How when this desire is corrupted it goes after locating one’s self in groups/tribes based on affinity (i.e., preferential tastes, hobbies, etc.).

But he made a really critical point that even this is influenced and rooted in our individualism.

“I will be a republican or democrat and locate myself in that party/tribe as long as that party/tribe aligns with my personal beliefs, decisions, and actions.”

As Christians our belonging and location is found in the family of God, but this is so very difficult for us to understand because of how deeply we are influenced and governed by individualism.

Individualism strongly reinforces our tendency to compartmentalize church, reduce it to a place or product rather than seeing the church as a family to which we belong and are devoted.

This best explains our propensity to abandon, rather than work through awkward and painful relationships we can often find ourselves in.

Social scientists have a label for the pervasive cultural orientation of modern American society that makes it so difficult for us to stay connected and grow together in community with one another.

They call it radical individualism.

What this amounts to is simple enough: We in America have been socialized to believe that our own dreams, goals, and personal fulfillment ought to take precedence over the well-being of any group to which we belong.

The immediate needs of the individual are more important than the long-term health of the group.

So we leave and withdraw from the group, rather than stay and grow up, when the going gets rough.

~ Joseph Hellerman

We have been trained from childhood to believe personal happiness and fulfillment should take precedence over the connections we have with any group we may belong to and sadly this includes the church family.

So we run from the painful but redemptive relationships God has placed us in.

This goes back to the sin of Eden.

The lie promised was they would “be like God” (Genesis 3:5).