The eCrozier

I imagine most of us in high school were assigned the essay, Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his essay, Emerson glories in the power and authority of the self. Emerson told us that our creative consciousness was our one source for truth and the one arbiter of our values. Emerson wrote: “Insist on yourself,” and “never imitate” – phrases which challenge Jesus’ teaching. There is an amazing amount of flattery in these words. It’s wonderful to hear that being so self-focused is actually good for you. People have soaked up Emerson for last 150 years and it has distorted the way we read and understand the Gospel.

As some churches have learned from Emerson, you can always draw a crowd when you flatter and entertain your audience (see: Osteen, Joel) while refraining from telling them that the Gospel of Jesus makes demands upon their lives. There’s always a market in the church for snake oil versions of the Gospel that promise the bliss of heaven without the demands of the cross. H. Richard Neibuhr described this snake oil Gospel this way: “A god without wrath, brought men without sin, to a kingdom without judgment, by the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

Emerson preached the authority of the self, but in the process we are left with simply the resources of our own selves. With this in mind, it shouldn’t surprise us that those who advertise on TV have picked up on Emerson. Awhile back, Reebok, a company that makes athletic shoes, ran a TV ad quoting Emerson’s essay, Self-Reliance. In the ad, a fairy godmother, with Reeboks on her feet, shouts quotes from Emerson, “Insist on yourself, never imitate!” And the ad ended with the slogan: “Reebok, lets you be you.” The flattery of the self was obvious. But there was also irony. Reebok didn’t actually want people to insist on themselves. They wanted everyone to imitate because they wanted everyone to buy their shoes. The advertising execs at Reebok knew that flattering the self is successful in America, since the self is almighty. It’s ironic that Emerson, the one who preached the self and individualism, was used to serve a sophisticated ad campaign to manipulate consumer tastes for profit in a mass market.

This is the larger context in which we live and in which we hear Jesus. We’ve been taught to focus on the self, and if we just did that, then we’d discover universal truths for moral, spiritual and communal life. But what we actually find when we focus so much on ourselves is simple selfishness and the desire to acquire more things to please ourselves.

St. Paul tells us that the only truth we will discover by fixating on the self is the truth of sin. He writes: ” Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?” This fixation on the self, this “selfism,” only makes us slaves to sin – the sin of being left to our own devices. And we will only find the truth by spiritually dying to our old self – one that’s fixated on itself and exists only for itself. Then and only then will we truly find ourselves to be loved by the grace and mercy of God.

+Scott