403 - Doing Your Own Thing

Doing Your Own Thing
By Carl F. B. Henry

IN one of his early letters Henry James writes of "tugging at the relaxed bell-rope of one's brain for a feeble tinkle of conversation."

Stimulating a round of table-banter is less demanding, I suspect, since the host need seldom wonder if hidden tapes are capturing his inanity for posterity, and since even an incoherent ejaculation usually rouses the family clown to some counter-comment. In keeping with the spirit of the age, one need only do his own peculiar thing.

The invitation to do your own thing has, however, some extraordinary ancient precedents. Many of us readily associate this bracing bit of current philosophy, and for good reason, with Greek Sophists who emphasized doing "whatever one pleases." It is surprising, however, that that classic lover of wisdom Socrates also counseled doing one's thing-although he was anything but a champion of ethical relativism. Still more remarkable is the fact that even the Apostle Paul, in ethical teaching which the New Testament anchors in divine revelation, includes an emphasis on doing your thing.

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Protagoras taught that justice is "whatever one thinks is justice." In short, do your own thing: morality is a self-determined commodity. Socrates affirms in the Republic-and he means what he says-that "justice is doing your own thing." "Practice your own thing," writes Paul to the Thessalonians.

But woe to us if we think that Protagoras, Socrates, and Paul are agreed on what doing one's own thing ideally means.

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To the present generation, steeped in celebration of creative individuality, what the Sophists meant is far more intelligible than what the classic Greek idealists and the early Christians understood by this admonition. My own mental docking maneuver to link these disparate thought-modules was delayed, and inconsiderately so, by a pudgy lady tourist ambling through the hotel lobby in ballooning chartreuse pants

Carl F. B. Henry is Lecturer-at-Large for World Vision International and Visiting Professor of Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He was the founding editor of Christianity Today (1956-1968) and has written many books. He has edited Quest for Reality: Christianity and the Counter-Culture (1973) and Baker's Dictionary of Christian Ethics (1973). His Evangelicals in Search of Identity will appear this spring.

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that did their baggiest to keep her from being lost in the environment. After the first momentary shock, no sensitive theologian would want to bridle a preference for personal mores disposed to let everything hang out. The Sophists, however, hardly stopped with social customs. Wandering teachers with wandering minds, they invaded Athens, the center of Greek intellectual life, determined to reduce truth and ethics to individual options. Protagoras' famous dictum was that "man is the measure of all things"; the true and the good, in other words, are whatever seems to each individual to be true or good.

To no one's surprise, Protagoras drew an enthusiastic and approving coterie of followers among the younger generation in pursuit of novelties; his denial of objective truth and morality served their profligacy superbly. As Henry Jackson tells us in his brief Encyclopaedia Britannica essay on the Sophists, "Wherever he went, his lecture-room was crowded with admiring pupils, whose homage filled his purse and enhanced his reputation." It mattered little that Protagoras' epistemic relativism and rancid morality left nothing of lasting value to claim the assent of people everywhere and always.

Just as the Sophists once held a large monopoly in liberal education, so in our century increasing numbers of modern educators influentially echo much the same doctrine. Packaged in outsize chartreuse pants it all seems dramatically contemporary. Rebels against inherited mores and morals often find professional support for their radical and secular theories of life from permissive psychiatrists and psychologists who somehow attract the socially deviant. If not personally then at least professionally, many psychiatrists today are considered morally permissive. Their enhancement of self-awareness and existential relationships lends itself far more to an ethic of self-realization than to a morality of objective principles; so-called therapeutic encounter thus joins ranks with the permissive forces in society. Self-reference becomes the only criterion of behavior and the final standard of judgment in conduct. Perry London, professor of psychology and psychiatry in the University of Southern California, puts it this way: "Therapy says, in effect, do your own thing; drugs give you something new to do," that is, "they provide one means for indulging" (Conference on Human Engineering and the Future of Man, Wheaton College, Illinois, July 21-24,1975).

Many of our American campuses now stagger under a have-your-own-way morality that for a decade has been captivating larger and larger numbers of college and university students. Use of the pill has liberated sex from interpersonal obligations; where intercourse unexpectedly leads to pregnancy, abortion becomes an easy means of birth control. Besides that, more than one teen-age mother in every three is unmarried.

Such attitudes are not unrelated to the reigning philosophy of the classroom. Human beings being its outstanding oddity, the galactic universe is viewed as a colossal gambling casino that sometimes pays

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astonishingly unsuspected odds. Moral imperatives are considered human-made; all notions of truth and right are held to be culture-relative. People, we are told, authenticate their creative personhood by doing their own distinctive thing. "Come of age" people repudiate all supernatural and objective moral principles, evidencing their maturity by consciously deciding for themselves what is good and true and by imposing these convictions upon an otherwise chaotic nature and open-ended history. "Do your own thing" requires maligning as myth the concept that the transcendent will of a holy God is humanly definitive; all the values of home, work, and society channel instead into self-interest.

Long before college many young people are abandoned to moral relativism even at home. Donald W. MacKay of Keele University, England, internationally-known specialist in brain physiology, observes that "until recently it was taken for granted that parents had not only a right but a duty to mould the value-system and character of their children in accord with the best that they knew. In these enlightened days, however, there are many who condemn all this … as 'manipulation' or 'indoctrination.' " Worse yet, even if they wished to do so, many young parents have no stable value system to bequeath to their children. Not a few have themselves become inundated by the all-on-their-own-and-for-themselves credo.

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My dinner partner at a recent conference sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies was a professor of classics. It may have been that I lost the spoon in the salad dressing or spilled the salt; at any rate, I at one point quipped about doing "one's own thing." Was I aware, my colleague replied, that Socrates had used this very phrase? Since I wasn't I gladly credit Douglas D. Feaver of Lehigh University for apprizing me of what I would have noted in the Greek had I troubled to read the original during those many times I'd taught the Republic in ethics classes. Ta hautou (or heautou) prattein occurs several times, the most important reference appearing where Socrates finally states his definition of dikaiosune (righteousness): " . . . 'justice' is doing your own thing(s) and not meddling. . . " (433a).

In other words "doing your own thing" for Socrates means confining your activities to only those for which you have been properly trained or in which you are specially talented. It does not mean "doing whatever you please." The latter, in fact, represents for Socrates an asocial and immoral doctrine, one he resisted and combatted with a vengeance.

Plato's concept of justice involved replacing private interest with public spiritedness and community of feeling, purpose, and action, qualities that in order to realize a divine plan for humanity merge individual aspirations and potentialities into the common good. This ap-

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proach is anything but a socially disruptive individualism. Individualism at heart is blind and self-defeating, destroying the community responsibilities upon which society ultimately depends. By melding their private selves in the welfare of the whole, those who are just gain a fuller and better personhood for both themselves and others.

In the context of the term justice, therefore, individualism is different from letting one's personal propensities run riot. Justice is a foundation principle of universal application that motivates one to do everything well. It enables all people in the social whole to do only their particular business and not another's, and by this distinctive contribution to reveal and express an ordered inner life

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Long before the classic Greek philosophers, and long before even the Greek Sophists, the Bible zeroed in on moral relativism and condemned it as personally and socially destructive. No reader of the Book of Judges can escape the telling lament: "There was no king in Israel but everyone did what was right in his own eyes" (17:6, 21:25). Those were evil days, the Old Testament tells us, despite the fact that Israel already possessed what not even Socrates and the later Greeks attained by wisdom, namely, the knowledge of God's revealed moral law. Notwithstanding that the Hebrews had spiritual prerogatives surpassing those of other nations, men and women lived as they pleased. It was one of those "dark ages" in Hebrew history when the sensuous appeal of Canaanitish religion wreaked defection from Mosaic standards. Political, social, moral, and religious decline went hand in glove.

The lament in Judges implies something also about the moral example and influence of national leaders. Righteous rulers who observe transcendent divine law and defer to divine authority invite public respect and promote moral earnestness in others. On the other hand, when permissiveness characterizes the central authority-be it a king or president, or even a first lady (the more so in an age of women's liberation), a nation is swiftly shortchanged of decency and integrity.

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Prassein ta idea-"do your own thing"-writes Paul to the Thessa-Ionian Christians (I Th. 4:1 1). But he is far from espousing Protagorean relativism or even commending what Socrates taught as an adequate statement of justice, although to be sure be is saying in context, "Busy yourself about your proper concerns."

Idios means simply "one's own." Eis ta idea elthen ("He came to his own") says John's Gospel of the incarnate Christ, kai hoi idioi

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auton ou parelabon ("and his own did not receive him")(1:11). By extension the term can mean one's home (John 16:32), one's cross (19:17), one's cloth es (Mark 15:20), one's teaching (John 7:18), in short, one's own anything.

Prasso means to do, execute, perform, observe, to be engaged in, to occupy one's self with, to practice. Actually the New Testament uses poein much more frequently than prassein and, in fact, never uses the latter when speaking of the work of God or of Christ. When it is used prassein is usually associated with a negative or critical judgment on what is done. There are, however, numerous neutral uses of the term, I Thessalonians 4:11 being one of these: "Be concerned with your own….

Here are some of the English translations and paraphrases: "Do your own business" (KJV); "mind your own affairs" (RSV); "look after your own business" (TEV, NIV); "attending to your own business" (Jerusalem Bible); "mind your own business" (Living Bible). There is no need to go on except to note the interesting Williams translation: "Practise attending to your own business."

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Paul has in view far more than the avoidance of idleness, that is, devotion to duty. One could, of course, exegete the exhortation into a full-blown dissertation on Christian personal and social ethics. There is no need for this, however. Simply a closer look at the context will show us that the apostle not only formulates the fulfillment of Christian responsibility far differently than do Socrates and the Greek idealists but also stipulates specific moral concerns to which Greek philosophical ethics was notably indifferent. Not unlike Socrates, Paul is saying that the behavior and example of one person affects the whole community, that concern for the whole is a requisite individual concern, that each person has particular duties to fulfill. Unlike Socrates, however, Paul sets these emphases within the framework of God as Creator, Redeemer, and Judge of human life; for the apostle, truth and ethics are transcendently revealed, and it is the risen and returning Jesus, head of the body of believers, who alone merits unswerving devotion.

Paul therefore delineates Christian duty in the context of the revealed teaching of God (4:9) and in prospect of the Second Advent (4:12-15). The Risen Lord, who will come again, commands all believers to unbroken allegiance, and it is in his name that Paul gives apostolic instruction (4:1 ff.). Recognizing the Holy Spirit as the agent of sanctification, Paul expresses concern for both the individual and for community; the Christian believer and the new Christian society of which he becomes a member are stationed within the larger world. Paul's concern for human rights-his own as a Roman citizen included-is unmistakable; he shows the relationship between the

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revelation of the righteousness of God and justice (Rom. 3:21 ff.) and the role of civil government as an instrument of that justice (Rom. 13). In First Thessalonians he. applies this concern in a passing reference against wrongdoing to a brother (4:6). But throughout his writings, Paul underscores the indispensable necessity of justification as God's gracious provision for sinful man and spells out the divine provision of regenerate moral dynamics that alone can properly activate and maintain the just society (1:5, 10, 4:7-8).

Located on the great Egnation Way, Thessalonica was exposed to all the bustle and rowdiness of a thriving Greek city. Among its citizens who had heard Paul and his fellow missioners were some Jews who responded to the gospel and "a great number of godfearing Greeks and a good many influential women" (Acts 17:4, N.E.B.). Quite understandably the pagan environment of these people would have left its imprint, and not everything in the Christian message would have been wholly clear. Some of the implications of the parousia, as well as the high challenge of Christian living, were not fully comprehended.

On the whole, however, Paul was grateful for the witness and life of the Thessalonian believers who, as recorded, withstood both temptation and persecution, and the theme of thanksgiving permeates the first three chapters of Paul's message to them. They needed, however, to follow more thoroughly the Way already being pursued (4:1). This involved the correction of two misunderstandings concerning the apostle's injunction to "await" Christ's return with high expectation (1: 10). The fact that some Thessalonian believers had died raised the question whether these would share in the glory of Christ's return; Paul in 4:13-18 consoles troubled fellow-Christians by noting that all saints whether in the grave or alive will share the blessings of the parousia. The other misunderstanding perhaps brought about because of expectations of the imminence of the Lord's return involved the matter of work-ethic (4:12). Paul deals also with some matters of practical morality pertaining especially to sex (4:3-4, 7) and brotherly love (4:9-10).

These practical concerns immediately differentiate Christian from pagan ethics (even at its best) and mirror the greater motivation and vitality of Christian living. The Thessalonian converts came out of an environment where sexual promiscuity was considered normal; Paul enjoins them not only to avoid sexual immorality (4:3), but beyond that also to avoid degrading the marriage relationship by lust (4:6). Furthermore, although exhorting these believers to larger manifestations of brotherly love, the apostle pays tribute to the interpersonal love already evident in their fellowship (4:9-10). He concludes the latter by adding three seemingly incidental injunctions for further exemplifying worthy living (4:11) so that the Christian community may leave its impress upon the public (4:12).

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The Christian-pagan contrast is explicitly drawn. Heathen who are strangers to the living God are prone to lustful passion (4:5); but Christians to whom God has given the Holy Spirit are equipped for holy living (4:7-8). In regard to brotherly love-the term philadelphia occurs very seldom in pre-Christian Greek and then always refers to love for a blood-brother-the apostle recognizes the change that God had already accomplished in their former disposition (4:9). Unfortunately, the western world, as someone has said, is once again becoming a society of manikins, that is, blind to each other's needs and deaf to each other's cries. In the early church brotherly, love was distinctly a Christian virtue and embraced fellow-believers irrespective of family, race, color, nationality, or status.

On closer examination the three apparently incidental exhortations in 4:11 are not as marginal to such contrast as might first appear: "aspire to live quietly, to do your own thing, and to work with your hands, as we charged you" (4:1 1). One need only remember the break-down of modern American society to recognize the perpetual relevance of ethical injunctions concerning not only sexual conduct and interpersonal love but also mental tranquility, diligent work, and fulfillment of whatever lies near at hand as distinctive contributions to implementing God's will in private and public affairs.

All three exhortations-tranquil living, industrious work, and fulfilling one's special role-furnish an illuminating sample of revealed ethics; they also unmistakably contrast Christian morality with ancient pagan and modern neo-pagan ethics. If life in the pre-Christian era was both frenetic and melancholy, one need only think of the pervasive depression in our tranquilizer age. Not unlike the Greeks who considered menial work an evil to be shouldered by the slave class, our welfare society with its distaste for work and dependence upon public assistance has demoralized society.

Several commentators interpret the Thessalonian temptation to idelness not simply as an offshoot of expectation of the Lord's immediate return but also and especially as part of the social pattern that characterized pre-Christian life. If the radically secular and existential emphasis on "doing one's thing" actually brings about self-fulfillment, then no generation in western history has been more tantalized by still-elusive realizations of meaning and worth. If many psychiatrists already a decade ago were encouraging sexual permissiveness as a badge of emotional maturity, their counterparts today are discovering that boredom has replaced sex at the root of many personality problems.

Much the same trend of ennui has filtered into secular university campuses. Many students are wearying with doing their own thing. Having moved full tide in "letting it all hang out," they are discovering the hollowness of life without fixed form and structure. The modern relativistic "do your own thing," like that of the ancient Sophists, ends finally not only in uncertainty over what to do, but also in uncertainty over who and why one is.

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Since Paul specially mentions hand labor it may be that most of the Thessalonian converts were artisans or craftsmen. Faithful performance in the bazaar or at the bench or in the field validated verbal witness concerning Christ's lordship in the life of his followers. No less did peace of mind, that is, calm living, commend the evangelical realities in a raucous, restless, and hypertensive world. Paul's plea to "do one's own thing" calls for disciplined self-control in regard to duties to self, to neighbor and to God. Surely the New Testament does not disjoin it from love for God and neighbor which we are reminded alone fulfills the law. Nor can it be separated from that rare yet favorite koine construct, charisma. Anything that edifies is charisma, everyday secular service no less than spiritual ministry. The gift of salvation (2 Cor. 1:11) does not destroy or thwart the distinctive individual gifts entrusted on the basis of creation, but rather enhances and supplements them with particular spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 7:7) for the mutual edification of others (Rom. 14:19). God gives his gifts for glorifying God, serving the world, and upbuilding the Church as the body of Christ. Paul's exhortation to the Thessalonians to "do your own thing" was good Christian counsel. They were not to be busybodies preoccupied with other people's business, nor were their private affairs to preempt realization of their kingdom-wide vision; like Jesus, they were to be about the Father's business, which through God's saving grace had now also become their own. In fulfilling our duties all of us must doubtless determine their own agenda of urgency. But far from setting the Thessalonians swinging to the world's "have your own way," Paul's admonition instead set them singing to the church's "Have your own way, Lord, have your own way. . . ."