(I was blocked out of my own account because of security adjustments made by one of my plugins. Sorry for the blackout!)
Growing up in south Jersey I had access to some of the best Italian food on the planet. Even though my family isn’t Italian, we had Italian food for dinner almost every night. One of my favorite Italian dishes to this day is caprese salad. Buffalo mozzarella, fresh basil, and that wonderfully bitter-sweet zing of balsamic reduction glaze. There’s nothing like it! In my house it has a spot in the fridge right next to the ketchup and mustard.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw mom make balsamic reduction. You mix in a bit of brown sugar, bring to a boil, then simmer until it becomes a syrupy glaze. The idea is to cook it down until all that’s left is the good stuff, the potent stuff, the essentials. It’s thick, and it’s divine!
I wonder what it would look like if the church in America was stripped of all of its non-essential elements. Because of the interconnectedness of faith and culture, often times the things we tend to think are essentially Christian are really essentially American. I wonder which parts of the DNA of American culture have grafted themselves into Christian faith. Put another way, I wonder in what ways has the church colluded (accidentally or intentionally) with the consumerism contemporary culture of America that make us mistake the Gospel for the American Dream and vice verse.
I believe that the individualization of faith is largely the result of this. American history and culture, which is deeply shaped by post-industrialist capitalism (elitist corporatism), is built on the core value of the individualization of the citizen and worker. The idea that with the proper education and work ethic, there is opportunity for any individual to move up the socio-economic ladder.
This has translated into American evangelicalism’s tendency to understand the Gospel primarily in terms of the individual over and above the collective. It’s about me and Jesus. It’s about the forgiveness of my sin so that I can go to heaven.
There is no doubt that there is truth here. Yes, the Bible says quite a bit about the benefits of the individual in salvation. Yes, Jesus certainly died for your forgiveness, and for mine. At the same time, the individual is not at the centre of the Gospel message, God is. Furthermore, the Bible puts the good of the society as a whole as priority over the individual. If we can be bold enough to allow the Gospel to confront our own culture, it would mean moving beyond the belief that Jesus died simply to alleviate my suffering. It would mean living out of the reality that his work in my life is means to an end that is much greater than me.
