Individuals in Community

Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Tony Payne and Phillip Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).

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This podcast on Romans 12:3-13 touches on two ideas that our society finds hard to hold together: individualism and communalism. 

What’s the basic truth about us? Is it that we are unique, sovereign individuals who should have the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness in our own particular way? Or are we necessarily and primarily herd animals, who can only exist and flourish when the needs of the community as a whole are prioritised? 

And do we have to choose? 

Romans 12 teaches us to think rightly about ourselves—as individuals and as members of a new community. Read (or listen) to find out how.

For more on Romans 12 listen to one of Phillip’s sermons Human Transformation.

The next episode is What is government for? The previous episode is When God Changes His Mind.

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INDIVIDUALS IN COMMUNITY

And why our world finds it hard to affirm both.

Phillip Jensen: Individualism and communalism are both important, because they are both in the Bible (including in our passage today). In Romans 5 we’ve seen the communal idea that in Adam, all have sinned. Whereas in Ezekiel 18, it says that the soul that sins is the one that will be condemned. 

Both individualism and communalism are a part of life. I am myself, but I’m also the son of my parents. You can’t really be just a lone individual. We’re not just isolated atoms called humans, but at the same time, we do have individual responsibility. But Satan is a liar and he perverts and distorts the reality that is there, which leads people to push individualism and communalism too far, and creates all kinds of distortions in human behaviour.

Tony Payne: It seems to me that in the West, we often find it a lot easier to see the dangers of pushing communalism too far. Just to get in our regular reference to The Gulag Archipelago, I’ve finally finished reading it, and even though it was only the abridged version, you can’t read that book and not be utterly convinced afterwards of the oppressive horrors that ensue when communalism is taken too far—when the vision of the communist state is taken to what is really its logical conclusion.

PJ: Because in that state, the individual doesn’t matter. The individual is there to serve the community, and the decisions are for the higher good for the community, so that you can mistreat individuals and deny them any rights of existence.

TP: In fact, it’s a necessity. Ideologically, they were saying it’s necessary to either eliminate, re-educate or otherwise reduce the influence of all kinds of individuals and all kinds of groupings of people for the progress of the revolution itself. Because the progress of the revolution was in everybody’s interests, it’s morally legitimate to destroy vast numbers of individuals for the sake of a communal goal in the future.

PJ: And so you get the monsters Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao Zedong. Nowadays, it looks different. We have cameras as the current intrusion into the lives of individuals. Our traffic lights have cameras photographing us for the sake of the community. And I understand in China, there’s this facial recognition through which points are being awarded to people for their social behaviour, and points awarded against people for their anti-social behaviour, because the society is everything and the individual is unimportant in comparison. From our perspective, that’s creepy at best, evil more likely. 

TP: It’s interesting, though, we talk about the oppressiveness of that kind of political communalism, but in the small-scale communalism of how we love our families, they can also be oppressive when pushed too far as well.

PJ: Absolutely. Communalism shifts from ‘right and wrong’ to ‘shame and disappointment’. Once you have a family structured around shame and disappointment, there is the capacity for the parents to manipulate the children, to punish the children not because they’re guilty and have done something that is wrong, but because they have brought shame upon the parents. The shame culture is a communalist culture, and right down to the family level, can be really oppressive and difficult.

TP: I suspect that because individualism is so baked into our culture and our way of thinking about ourselves and the world as Westerners, we perhaps find it a little harder to see its evils and to see its distortions as opposed to communalism. 

PJ: Absolutely. It just seems normal to us because of how we’ve been raised. But it’s becoming more extreme. I was sent a couple of songs from a parent who was concerned about these songs and the education that was happening in their child’s preschool and kindergarten. The songs were about “I can be anything I want to be. I can be a star, I can be thin, I can be tall, I can be whatever I want to be.” It’s one thing to let kids have an imagination, but teaching children that they can be whatever they want to be, is just patently nonsense. It’s a lie, because I can’t be an Olympic gold medalist. 

TP: I think that time has passed. Although there are masters games now, Phillip, Olympics for older people where you can still compete. 

PJ: I suppose.

And then there’s another one they were singing about the child’s rights. The child has the right to be healthy. The child has the right to be happy. I have a right to be ‘me’ in whatever ‘me’ I want to be. Who has the right to be healthy? You either are or you’re not. It’s not a matter of rights. But now children are learning these songs by heart. This is the language that they are being given. Another primary school teacher spoke to me about a 7 or 8-year-old boy who swore at the teacher in fairly extreme vulgarity, and the teacher told the boy not to say that to the teacher and to sit down. And the boy replied, “You can’t make me. I can do what I want to do.” Well, I think he’s learned the kindergarten lesson very well. 

TP: He’s been singing those songs for years. And it’s not just in the songs of education system; it’s the way our whole culture is structured around the fulfillment of individual wishes and individual wants. In fact, our whole economy is built on persuading people that they need to do more, buy more, be more, to associate themselves with certain things and experiences in order to be the person they want to be, to become the identity that they crave. 

PJ: Yes. A report came in recently from the NSW State Department of Education that 12% of children from our schools have been suspended during the last 12 months. It’s extraordinary because there’s no internal disciplines anymore that are allowed within the school, that the only way to punish a child is by suspending. 

TP: In all of this, it’s interesting that in the absence of God, in the absence of a reality outside myself that helps me to understand not only myself, but my relationship with others, that we keep collapsing into one or other side–either excessive trust in and an obsession with the community and the state and our collective identity, or a solipsistic, dysfunctional collapse into this individualism that makes no sense and doesn’t work, that separates us from each other, and results in a whole bunch of little individual gods running around asserting their right to to be me. It’s not a recipe for happy families or happy societies. 

PJ: A lot of it comes from ethical egoism, which comes from the writings of Ayn Rand, who has influenced a whole range of people in our society, and who in turn have influenced our society. For example, the writer of Spiderman: Steve Ditko. He was an Ayn Rand follower, and one of his less famous cartoons–Mr. A–captures his philosophy a lot more than Spiderman does. He says, “Justice recognizes a man for what he is and treats him accordingly. Mercy treats the guilty better than he deserves; therefore, the victim less than he deserves. The guilty cry for mercy. The victim asks for justice. Mercy can only be granted to the guilty at the expense of the victim, and therefore the conclusion is, good is justice, evil is mercy.”

Suddenly you see where individualism leads: no mercy, no forgiveness, no pardon. It’s very different to the gospel at this point, isn’t it? And there have been all kinds of famous people who have imbibed Ayn Rand and who express her philosophy in different ways, such as one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, or Neil Peart (the drummer and lyricist of the band Rush) who was bringing in all these values and views, or Alan Greenspan who was the chair of the Federal Reserve for 20 odd years. Greenspan was a personal friend of Ayn Rand. So our current capitalistic individualism is built out of a philosophy of individualism. About a year after Greenspan retired from the Federal Reserve, we had the global financial crisis created by American individualism. So Ayn Rand’s extreme philosophy is still featured in our culture today. 

TP: It sings in tune with the whole direction of Western philosophy that has been prioritizing the subject and the individual for a couple of hundred years. It’s the inexorable direction that starts with ‘man as the measure of all things’. The power of the individual to do what they want ends up becoming the ‘good’ (whether that’s following Nietzsche or Ayn Rand) because there’s no other criteria for assessing ‘good’. 

PJ: That’s right. But of course, it’s a very old sin. And what you mentioned is echoing the ancient Greek quote from Protagoras:

Man is a measure of things, the things that are and the things that are not. 

That’s very human, that’s the nature of sin. How does Christianity then deal with individualism without going to that extreme, and with communalism without going to that extreme? 

TP: I have a feeling we are finally getting to Romans 12. 

PJ: Yes. Romans 12:1-2 tells us to not be conformed to this world and to be transformed by the renewal of the mind. Verse 3 tells us what this renewed mind is going to be thinking like.

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 

So verse 3 is picking up that very idea of verse two that we are going to be different to the world, different to this age, through right thinking. And it’s interesting that right thinking about ourselves is to not think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment. And the last clause is a little difficult for us to grasp–each according to the measure of faith. It’s not saying there’s different measures of faith to different people; it’s saying each according to the faith that has been measured out to us, that has been assigned to us. You’ve got to think from the point of view of faith, the faith that God has given, when you are thinking about yourself. 

TP: We think of ourselves with sober judgment in verse 3 because we trust in God, and understand ourselves in light of God. We see that we are not an autonomous individual, but that God is God, and that he determines who we are. So our sober judgment and thinking about ourselves is immediately in relation to something outside of ourselves, that is to God. Presumably in the context of Romans, this means thinking in terms of where we stand with God, the fact that no one is righteous before God, but that now in Christ, we are righteous before God. This completely makes me change the way I think about myself, with thanksgiving, and with a sober judgment about who I really am. 

PJ: Yes, that is how we’re to be thinking from chapter 5 onwards. The ‘sober’ there is not referring to abstaining from alcohol. The Greek word is wisdom to think wisely of yourself. It’s the wisdom of God that comes in the gospel. That’s why it’s by the grace given to him that he’s able to say these things, and we’re to think in the measure of faith that God has given to us, as members of each other. 

Verse 4 then follows with the same construction, explaining our individuality in community: 

For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 

TP: So it’s also something outside of ourselves that changes the way we think about each other and our community. What binds us together, what makes us one body and therefore with an inextricable connection to each other is Christ. We’re one body in him, and so it’s through Christ himself that we come into a community with others, and it helps us understand what it means to be in a community. 

PJ: Yes, but the beauty of Romans is it doesn’t leave you there. I’m in one body, but I’m individually members of it. 1 Corinthians 12 talks in that language that the church is a body, and just as a body has different parts—hand, eyes, nose, legs—we are like that, different parts of the one body. But just like in 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12 goes on in the next verses: 

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

We do not all have the same function. The gifts God has given to us are functional gifts, and the functional gifts are to be used for one another, for the sake of the many, and as we use them for one another, so we build the body. So by serving you and you serving me with whatever gifts you have and whatever gifts I have, as we serve one another, the body of Christ is growing into its full maturity. So my individuality is given for the service of others, not for the service of me, the individual. 

TP: And my communal identity is given to me, not through something we’ve decided, or even something that I have in common with other people, race or blood or mutual interest or demography. The thing we love in common is Jesus Christ, and because we love him in common, we love each other in common. 

PJ: Our community in Christ is not something we have manufactured in Christ. It’s something that Christ manufactures in us.

TP: Yes, and that is very different from most human communities that arise from within, such as our family, which comes from something we have in common that is intrinsic to us. But God comes and loves us from outside. He comes and unites us to his son, and it’s in his son that we become a community, and in his love for us and our love for him, we find a new love for each other. 

PJ: And just as 1 Corinthians 12 teaches us about the one body with the different members being united in that one body, our individual gifts unite us as we serve one another. It leads into 1 Corinthians 13, which is, of course, the great chapter of the Bible on the subject of love. And here in Romans 12, we have something similar. The next verse says: 

Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.

If we’re to be members of one another, serving one another, using our individual gifts for the benefit of the whole, then what really marks our kind of communal existence is love. That’s what holds us all together. It is the love of God that we have in Christ Jesus, that we now have in our love for one another. 

TP: It’s interesting to me too, that in 1 Corinthians 13, you have these descriptions of love, what love is, what love isn’t. And here too, I think the way that the Greek is structured in those first two phrases—abhorring what is evil and holding fast to the good—these are qualifying phrases on genuine love. Genuine love is like the heading here, and then there’s all these participles that flow on about what genuine love is like. I think those first two are very significant because that’s what real love is. Real love sees what is good and holds fast to it and seeks it and wants it for you, wants you to experience this good, this affection, this honour, and at the same time, rejects and finds no joy in evil, avoids evil. You can see the echoes there of 1 Corinthians.  

PJ: It’s very clear, isn’t it? I’m not sure “outdo one another in showing honour” is a particularly helpful way of saying it, because it sounds like it’s a competition. But that is not what is being meant. It just means that showing honour is something really big. We have to honour each other, not being slothful in zeal, but fervent in spirit, serving the Lord. It’s a way of life now, and so the mind that is transformed and renewed both individually and communally—to be thinking of ourselves not more highly than we should, because whatever gifts God has given me, he has given them to me for you. Love is built into the very nature of personal identity. So individuality and communality are held together in the gospel of Jesus—but the world keeps on pulling them apart and making them extreme.

TP: It is a beautiful picture. I also like the way 1 Corinthians 12 talks about honour and the different functions and different gifts and recognizes there are different kinds of people with different gifts, some seemingly more honourable, some seemingly less honourable. We give a special pride of place to the more dishonourable.  We don’t seek status. It’s a different kind of community and a different kind of honour. It’s not honouring all the best people or all the brightest shining stars. It’s showing honour to one another in all sorts of ways, because of who we are in Christ and because we don’t think of ourselves more highly than we ought. 

PJ: And so instead of teaching our children, “you can be whatever you want to be”, which is unhelpful and untrue, we can be teaching our children, “you can serve others, whoever they may be”. It’s a different way of life altogether which transforms life and transforms society. 

TP: Amen to that. 

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