Dave Bish posts a link to an interesting and thought-provoking article by Jonathan Leeman titled “Individualism’s Not the Problem–Community’s Not the Solution“.
I think Leeman does a good job of showing why communitarianism alone is an inadequate solution to individualism: replacing the rebellious individual with a rebellious community doesn’t solve anything.
But the article makes the common mistake of turning something that’s both/and into an either/or. He attacks communitarianism as always being anti-authority, and hence downplaying God’s majesty and so on. I don’t think that needs to be the case – there’s a proper place for communitarianism. Just as the answer to the abuse of authority is not misuse but right use, the answer to a woolly, authority-less idea of community is not to reject community, but to develop a right understanding of community, which includes a proper place for authority.
Authoritarianism alone won’t necessarily solves all the problems: it’s possible to have a proper understanding of the majesty and authority of God, but to conceive of it in purely individual terms. Evangelicalism has sometimes fallen into the trap of salvation only being about my individual guilt before a holy God – that is, having a sense of authority, but not of community, of God’s plan not just for individuals, but for the whole world, the whole cosmos, through the Church.
Modernity neglected both community and authority. Postmodernity is mixed bag: it’s an improvement on modernity in that it recognises once more the importance of community, but is worse in that it goes even further than modernity in rejecting all authority. But to understand the Gospel in its fullness, we need to embrace both community and authority.