x wrote

> Christianity has historically been a group religion. 
> Jesus only died alone, for everything else he had
> companions.  He sent the apostles out in groups of two. 
> Paul never traveled alone, etc...; the Church has 
> always been the basic structure of Christianity,
> the structure in which one relates to God.
> Individualism rose in the enlightenment, out of 
> which the reformation came, out of which Kierkegaard
> came.  That fact doesn't make anything about the
> reformation bad, or anything about Kierkegaard bad,
> but on a large-scale history individualism is a trend
> in which much recent Christian thought has been set. 
> That fact alone should indicate that individualism
> is not essential to Christianity.

x hat recht.
Die Apostelgeschichte und der Briefschatz
des Neuen Testaments widerhallen 
mit fast ueberwaeltigender Betonung von Vergesellschaftung,
von der Gruendung und den Ausbau einer Kirche 
zu welcher die Zugehoerigkeit
wenn nicht seligmachend,
so dennoch als Zeugnis und Beweis
fuer die Seligkeit gelten.

Dies kirchengruendende Program laeszt sich
leicht genug auf bestimmte (spezifische) Anweisungen 
zurueckfuehren, welche in dem Bericht
ueber das irdische Dasein Jesu mehrfach zu Sprache kommen.

Doch, meinem Empfinden und meiner Erfahrung gemaesz
sind die ueberlieferten Aussagen Christi
und die absichtsvolle Vergesellschaftung (Gesellschaftsbildung)
der Apostel und der anderen Mitgruender der Kirche
ungenuegend um die Schluszfolgerung zu bestaetigen

Yet, to my mind, and to my experience, the explicit directives
attributed to Jesus and the deliberate association preached
by the apostles and other members of the early church,
are insufficient to permit the conclusion of x
that individualism is not essential to Christianity.
Rather, x has stated with some eloquence a thesis that 
necessarily evokes an antithesis, or an antithesis that
presupposes a thesis.

Christianity is subject to numerous interpretations,
not the least significant, it seems to me,
is that its (subjective) truth and its (objective)
historical success may be construed as an expression
of a dialectical relationship between the individual
as Adam, on the one hand, the sinner in his guilt and shame,
and society, the church, in the other hand, the sanctorum
communio, as the instrument by which God in his wisdom and 
grace confers or offers to confer salvation upon the individual;
i.e. the salvation of the individual is his absorption
and integration into a sanctorum communio, the epiphany
of which are the heavenly palaces and the pastures of paradise.
The salvation which Christianity promises is then the synthesis
in the dialectic between the individual and society.
As x correctly observed, this dialectic has been severely
tested by both the sacred revolution of the Reformation
and by the secular political revolutions that followed the
Renaissance and the ensuing Enlightenment.

I am in respectful but profound disagreement with x
when he writes:" ... individualism is not essential
to Christianity." I would go even further, to argue 
that that individualism is essential to Judaism,
and that Christianity is a rebirth, within Judaism
of individualism, of concern for and care of the soul.

The individual and concern for his soul are essential
to Judaism.  In the beginning God created flocks of birds
and schools of fish, herds of cattle and droves of sheep.
But Adam he created as an individual; it was as an indivdual
that Adam sinned. God identified and saved Noah as an individual,
and it was of Abraham as an individual that God demanded the
sacrifice of Isaac, who was an individual both to his earthly
and to his heavenly father.  Jacob and Joseph and Moses were
individuals; The Ten Commandments, if we may trust the translations,
are phrased not in the plural, but in the second person singular:
*Thou* shalt not ... And are addressed to individuals. David and
Solomon and Job each spoke with his own voice, which was the voice
of an individual.

The apogee of the celebration of the individual in the Old Testament
seems to me to occur in the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, where the 
ndividual is described and defined as being utterly cut off from
his fellow men, and it is this isolation from society which
is the ultimate definition of the individual which is the
prophecy which was fulfilled by Jesus. His very divinity
served to separate him from men. It is true that the Gospels
describe Jesus in a social context. But as I read them
it seems to me that thereis a gap between Jesus and the
disciples which is never bridged.