{"id":54464,"date":"2021-04-13T06:00:23","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T10:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=54464"},"modified":"2021-04-09T20:26:10","modified_gmt":"2021-04-10T00:26:10","slug":"how-christianity-invented-the-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2021\/04\/how-christianity-invented-the-person\/","title":{"rendered":"How Christianity Invented the “Person”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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Yesterday we discussed a Christian perspective on institutions.\u00a0 Today we need to discuss a Christian perspective on the individual.<\/p>\n

Though social institutions are valuable, according to the doctrines of the estates and vocation, and though our current anti-institutionalism is not healthy, institutions can be dysfunctional and even idolatrous.\u00a0 And though God created us to be social beings\u2013\u201cit is not good that the man should be alone\u201d (Gen 2:18)\u2013it is individuals, not social institutions,\u00a0 who are saved and will enjoy eternal life.\u00a0 So, in an important sense, the individual has priority over social institutions.<\/p>\n

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As C. S. Lewis observed<\/a>, \u201cThere are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations\u2014these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit\u2014immortal horrors or everlasting splendours\u201d (\u201cThe Weight of Glory<\/a>\u201c).<\/p>\n

Most Americans value individualism to a fault.\u00a0 But it was not always this way, and in many cultures it still isn\u2019t.\u00a0 Cameron Hilditch has written an excellent essay entitled The Christian Invention of the Human Person.<\/a><\/p>\n

He points out that the word \u201cperson\u201d comes from the Greek word prosopon<\/em> and its Latin equivalent persona<\/em>.\u00a0 These words meant literally \u201cmask,\u201d referring to the mask that actors would wear in a play, reflecting the role they were supposed to assume.\u00a0 In the ancient world, a \u201cperson\u201d was defined solely by the social role that they played. \u201cDifferent social stations were thought almost to be different species, sharing nothing in common,\u201d says Hilditch, \u201cand no one was thought to have any kind of individual existence apart from the role they played in the state.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0Some people, though, were so socially insignificant that they had no status whatsoever.\u00a0 In Rome, slaves were defined as \u201cnon habens personam.\u201d\u00a0 They were \u201cnon-persons,\u201d having no rights or social status, being little more than tools.<\/p>\n

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Hilditch quotes scholars who underscore the point:<\/div>\n
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As they themselves saw it, people in the ancient world really existed only to the extent that they participated in some larger project, whether on the stage or in the city, which constituted their \u201cground and final justification.\u201d As [John]\u00a0 Zizioulas goes on to write, \u201cidentity\u00a0<\/em>\u2013 that vital component of the concept of man, that which makes one man differ from another, which makes him\u00a0who he is\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 [was] guaranteed and\u00a0provided\u00a0<\/em>by the state or by some organized whole.\u201d For this reason, the historian Larry Siedentop writes that in the ancient city, \u201cthere was no notion of the rights of individuals against the claims of the city and its gods. There was no formal liberty of thought or action. . . . Citizens belonged to the city, body and soul.\u201d If the individual had any value at all, it was only by reference to some organized collective.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n
Christianity, though, would change all that:<\/div>\n
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\u00a0The advent of Christianity overturned this old order of the ages, which had reigned more or less unchallenged since the dawn of civilization until the first Easter morning in Jerusalem some 2,000 years ago. The proclamation of the first Christians \u2014 that God had become man \u2014 obliterated the conception of personhood that predominated in the ancient world. If Jesus is a \u201cpersona,\u201d as the apostolic and patristic fathers of the Church maintained, and he has died and been raised as a representative of the entire race, then we are all more than society and the state would make of us. A gap opens up between our identity and our social obligations. The individual sets foot on the stage of human history for the first time. \u201cThere is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.\u201d [Galatians 3:28]<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Hilditch worries that this concept of the value of the individual person may not survive the current decline in faith.\u00a0 Already, he says, we are increasingly identifying ourselves and other people in terms of the groups that we belong to.<\/div>\n
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We see each other increasingly as flattened-out avatars of abstract collectives from which we derive our sense of solidity and meaning. We are Republicans, Democrats, anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, pro-lifers, pro-choicers. The unique and unrepeatable person that lies buried underneath all of these labels, the pre-political person that Jesus delivered to each of us upon the cross, is being crowded out and suffocated. Furthermore, we have no reason to believe it will survive our cultural abandonment of the faith that brought it to birth.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Americans today may distrust institutions, but they are replacing them with other \u201ccollectives,\u201d such as race, sex, gender, and political ideology.\u00a0 \u201cIdentity\u201d has become a common buzzword, but today it has reference not to a person\u2019s distinct individuality but to what group a person belongs to.\u00a0 That is a reversion to the pre-Christian notion of \u201cpersona.\u201d\u00a0 Today we need to recover not only institutions, in their proper sense, but also what it means to be an individual.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Image by\u00a0Gerd Altmann<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0Pixabay<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The word “person” derives from the Greek and Latin word “persona,” which means mask. The ancient world saw individuals solely in terms of their social role. Christianity, though, introduced the concept of individual identity and the intrinsic value of each person. Today, though, with the loss of faith, “identity” once again refers to what group you belong to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":54575,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8,10,11,12,20,35,37],"tags":[6905,3691,1082,10666,10669],"class_list":["post-54464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-america","category-bible","category-christ","category-church","category-culture","category-history","category-philosophy-2","category-psychology","tag-christian-cultural-influence","tag-identity","tag-individualism","tag-person","tag-value-of-the-individual"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Christianity Invented the "Person"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The word "person" derives from the Greek and Latin word "persona," which means mask. The ancient world saw individuals solely in terms of their social role. 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