Cultivation of the Self vs. Cultivation of Community

Below is a transcript of an interview that I love. In it, a New Testament scholar whose work I really appreciate, clarifies a distinction between the books that are in the Christian Bible and those that were not accepted into the cannon.

According to Johnson's reading of the New Testament texts (and I think he's right about this) the Bible focuses more on building up a community than it does on building up individuals. The emphasis on self-less love that Jesus and his followers teach, inherently builds community and, if practiced purely, would prevent any type of spiritual narcissism.

Other non-biblical texts, such as the one popularized by Dan Brown and Elaine Pagels, teach that a person can learn about God by looking inside oneself. This belief is self-centered and ultimately sees humans as spiritually autonomous, since, according to them, we can know God fully through our own God-given capacity without the help from the divine. This notion should raise the eyebrows of anyone who thinks that God is a mystery and cannot be fully understood by our limited human minds.

In the dialog below, Johnson shows how the "cultivation of the self" which masks itself as "spiritual" actually leads to (or stems from) our modern consumer mentality. Great stuff!!

Speaking of Faith: Luke Timothy Johnson: "The Council of Carthage in 397, which is one of our early canonical, or rather conciliar statements concerning the canon, says that only these writings should be read en ecclesia, that is, in the church. And then it lists all of the various texts that now form our Bible. The point of this public reading is that classical Christianity defines itself as a public institution. It is, if you will, a people. It has a sense of communal identity, which can be expressed in creeds, in certain scriptures, in — let's face it — institutions, such as leadership and teachers and so forth.

The critical dividing line there then, in terms of which texts should be read in the assembly, are which ones build the church as a community, as opposed to which ones simply serve as edification for the individual. Many of the Gnostic writings, for example, are highly individualistic in character. They don't even recognize the legitimacy of institution but rather are what we might call today spirituality. That is, they talk about, you know, how to free oneself from the body's trammels and this sort of thing.

Ms. Tippett: Which is possibly why they appeal so much to modern people who are so interested in spirituality.

Mr. Johnson: You got it in one, that spirituality today tends to be defined as sort of a cultivation of the self. And why this — why we are revisiting the second century, which is really what we're doing right now. We're revisiting that…

Ms. Tippett: You mean as a culture?

Mr. Johnson: That's right.

Ms. Tippett: Yes.

Mr. Johnson: …is because, certainly in the United States, the attitudes of individualism and of consumerism has generated a sense of Christianity as a club that we can belong to on our own terms. It is a consumer mentality, you know, the Jesus who fits me, the Jesus who speaks to me. And there's this desire to locate somehow in history a precedent, a legitimation, an antecedent for that particular Jesus. We have lost in America, in particular, the sense of being church. That is, of being a public institutional body that has a creed, that stands for something, that has a specific identity, which requires something of its members, which holds its members to certain kinds of commitments. That's precisely the issue."