one with the living, whether they’re our direct ancestors, the saints in glory, or
even the so-called souls in purgatory. The whole thing is one, just at different
stages, all of it loved corporately by God (and, one hopes, by us). Within this
worldview, we are saved not by being privately perfect, but by being “part of
the body,” humble links in the great chain of history. This view echoes the
biblical concept of a covenant love that was granted to Israel as a whole, and
never just to one individual like Abraham, Noah, or David. This is absolutely
clear in the text; and to ignore it is to miss a major and crucial message.
Christians as late as the 1500s still saw it that way, but I cannot imagine us
adding such a statement to the creed in today’s religious landscape. We are now
too preoccupied with the “salvation of individuals” to read history in a corporate
way, and the results have been disastrous. The isolated individual is now left
fragile and defensive, adrift in a huge ocean of others who are also trying to save
themselves—and not the whole. Christianity is now more of a contest, or even
an ego trip, than a proclamation of divine victory and love.
I suspect that Western individualism has done more than any other single
factor to anesthetize and even euthanize the power of the Gospel. Salvation,
heaven, hell, worthiness, grace, and eternal life all came to be read through the
lens of the separate ego, crowding God’s transformative power out of history
and society. Even Martin Luther’s needed “justification by faith” sent us on a
five-hundred-year battle for the private soul of the individual.* Thus leaving us
with almost no care for the earth, society, the outsider, or the full Body of
Christ. This is surely one reason why Christianity found itself incapable of
critiquing social calamities like Nazism, slavery, and Western consumerism. For
five hundred years, Christian teachers defined and redefined salvation almost
entirely in individualistic terms, while well-disguised social evils—greed, pride,
ambition, deceit, gluttony—moved to the highest levels of power and influence,
even in our churches.
The lone individual is far too small and insecure to carry either the “weight of
glory” or the “burden of sin” on his or her own. Yet that is the impossible task
we gave the individual. It will never work. It creates well-disguised religious
egocentricity, because we are forced to take our single and isolated selves far too
seriously—both our wonderfulness and our terribleness—which are both their
own kinds of ego trips, I am afraid.
One side effect of our individualized reading of the Gospel is that it allows the
clergy great control over individual behavior, via threats and rewards.
Obedience to authorities became the highest virtue in this framework, instead