According to Jewett there is a “Eurocentric” tendency “to project a universal Paul who needs no cultural adaptation.” This tradition of Pauline interpretation “is a culturally specific collection of interpretations purporting to transcend culture.” Cosgrove is part of a project to consider how Paul looks from other cultural perspectives, as set out in the book he wrote with Weiss and Yeo, Cross-Cultural Paul. Cosgrove aims “to approach Paul with questions arising out of the individualistic American ethos, exploring both the resonances of Paul with the American ethos and Paul’s challenges to America”.
In America the supposed virtue of individualism embraces equal individual rights, limited government, laissez-faire, natural justice, equality of opportunity, individual freedom, self-development, dignity, the superiority of the individual over the group, the virtue of self-reliance and the value of social disengagement into private life (Lukes & Cosgrove).
Economic self-reliance is identified as the root metaphor of other kinds of self-reliance. Though Americans are as economically interdependent as people in other societies, they “tend to suppress the truth of their inescapable interdependence in the self-reliance stories they tell about themselves”. Thoreau’s Walden Pond is a classic example of this. A closer analysis shows how this particular story illustrates “the self-deception in much American glorification of self-reliance”. For the Walden experiment in self-reliance required:
- The borrowed land of a wealthy property owner (Emerson).
- Proximity to society. So close in fact that the sound of farmers chopping wood and the passing of the daily steam engine were familiar experiences. We read also of a daily 30 minute walk to town for socialising and shopping, the entertaining of frequent visitors, and eating dinner with friends in town. Indeed, after two years such supposedly “self-reliant” life became so tiresome that a move was made into the Emerson household.
Cosgrove comments:
…the core message of the American self-reliance myth is that when one works hard and virtuously, even against all odds, powers outside our control - a kind of providence of the American system or of the God who blesses America - will see to it that our efforts meet with success in the end.
Yet another myth is that the US is a land of equal opportunity. This demands the success of self-reliance and “encourages us to interpret our society and our own lives in distorting ways.”
The difference between ancient dependency relationships and modern western dependency relationships is the difference between directness and indirectness. In Paul’s day dependency was experienced by people as they lived as clients in the patronage system, slaves, freedmen working for former masters, or as tenant farmers. Such dependence was direct, personal and largely static. By contrast, in today’s modern post-industrial economies dependency is usually indirect, impersonal and interchangeable.
Many Americans are ambivalent about and many very hostile to “welfare”. Americans avoid speaking of their society as a “welfare state”. Most Americans think “welfare” only applies to a relatively small underclass. Insofar as welfare “means financial assistance of some kind or other through state appropriation and restribution of private wealth”, then American society is much closer to being a welfare state than Americans appreciate, benefiting not only poor Americans but also the middle class. Because Americans deem it un-American to depend on welfare of any kind they refuse to use “welfare” to describe middle class assistance - it is at odds with the myth of self-reliance.
Cosgrove considers how to take a Pauline approach to American self-reliance and identifies six topics that particularly throw light on this matter:
- Paul’s “sufficiency” (Phil 4:10-13)
- Earning one’s own living.
- The church as body.
- The collection for the saints.
- The exemplary dependence of the Son on the Father.
- The gracious love of God in Christ.
More on this later, though some points of correspondence and contrast are self-evident in the listing alone.
There are aspects of this treatment which do indeed speak particularly to American individualism. However, Australians will recognise much here that also applies to their own society’s expressions of self-reliance [see my blog Is There Hope for the Self-Reliant?].
Posted October 17, 2008
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