The Many

Man, when treated as a figure in a sum, does not try to go back to his uniqueness and singularity.
-Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

This immediately calls to mind the 99 percent movement. Someone stands up and says, look, all you 99 percenters, we are being oppressed by the one percent. They have stuff we deserve!

None of the 99 percenters responds, speak for yourself; I’m an individual. I have enough and I’m satisfied with it. (of course, a 99 percenter reading something like this might…) No, they jump right in, perfectly happy to be part of this great fickle, protesting mass.

Why?

Man was created in the image of God. “Let us make man in our image.”
Man is created for society. “It is not good for man to be alone.”

We need society. We need brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and coworkers and fellow worshippers. We run into the embrace of society because it is right and necessary for us to do so. The need is so fundamental that man will run and cling to any society, even (especially?) to blatantly wicked or harmful ones. We must belong.

We will either belong to the city of man or the city of God. This, of course, is why it’s so important for the church to be a rightly-oriented, embracing society. The church must be open and inviting,

“Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!
To him who lacks sense she says,
Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Leave your simple ways, and live,
and walk in the way of insight.”

This cannot be done on man’s terms; I’ll come if I can bring my sin in with me. God says the sin must die. You have to kill it. To be part of the new humanity, you have to kill the old man, the man of sin. The new humanity is freedom from that slavery, freedom from the oppressive tyranny of sin. It is the freedom of the risen Christ, not of wallowing in the grave of sin. There can be no compromise. So, let us all press into the embrace of the new society, the new humanity in Christ.


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