Content area
Abstract
What Charles Taylor has called the "ideal of authenticity"—the idea that each human being has a particular way of being human and ought to unearth, articulate, and express it—holds significant power in many cultural contexts today. So too does the sense that humans need recognition in one form or another. A human being is not an isolated individual, but a social being, and as such she seeks the recognition of who she is and of her value. The convergence of the ethical categories of authenticity and recognition with contemporary capitalist cultures is evident in a cultural phenomenon known as "personal branding," a genre of business literature that instructs its readers to think of themselves as analogous to consumer brands and provides techniques for the discovery and expression of one's own successful brand (see chapter 3). Given the prevalence and power of these categories, engagement with these cultural currents is vital to Christian witness if indeed the gospel's call places a claim on the hearer's entire life.
But what are the theological categories to which we might appeal and which might shed light on the stances Christian faith calls for in contexts marked by the ideal of authenticity and intense competition for interpersonal recognition? I argue that the category of humility, rightly understood, is a critical resource for faithful engagement with cultures of authenticity and recognition. The appeal to humility gains its plausibility in great part from the fact that recognition and authenticity are partial ideological successors of the formerly central categories of honor and glory (chapters 1-2). Since Christian scriptures and significant theological voices regularly appeal to humility when considering normative stances toward various ethics of glory and honor, the category suggests itself for contemporary engagement with successors of these ethics.
There is not, however, a ready-to-hand, widely agreed upon Christian account of humility to bring to bear on the ideal of authenticity and the attendant phenomenon of intense competition for interpersonal recognition (chapter 4). A critical assessment of extant conceptions (also chapter 4) and a constructive proposal for how best to understand humility and its implications for cultures marked by the ideal of authenticity and competition for interpersonal recognition (chapter 5) are needed. I propose that humility is a mode of tenacious devotion to God's will for and work in the world, especially as one submits the desire for honor, glory, privilege, and/or social standing to that devotion and is thus ready to bear dishonor, shame, loss of social standing, etc. and to forego or not insist upon the honors, status, etc. that one is (actually or supposedly) due. Such humility comes under especially intense pressure in the cultural contexts analyzed in chapter 3, but so too does it offer especially intense promise, the promise of contributing to an ethic of discipleship that resists the distortive force of sinful economies of recognition, is free to champion what is good in the ideals of authenticity and interpersonal recognition, and witnesses to Jesus Christ, who in humility took on humanity and went even to the cross for our sake.
