Living a Purposeful Life

Searching for Meaning in All the Wrong Places

Kalman J. Kaplan

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781725268821, 9781725268814
• eBook ISBN: 9781725268838
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

While meaning and purpose are often seen as synonymous, this book argues that they sometimes are in opposition, the search for meaning at times suicidal, and living with purpose life-enhancing and invigorating.No people seemed to search for meaning in their lives more than did the ancient and classical Greeks. They were not content with living simple lives but oftentimes took on gargantuan tasks which resulted in a great deal of upheaval and unpleasantness in their everyday lives, and oftentimes to disaster, indeed suicide. The biblical human being, in contrast, is not driven to search for meaning in this way. One's purpose is inherent in daily life. He does not need to search for it. The God of the Hebrew Bible makes the human being, man and woman, in His own image. He then breathes life into man. Life has an inherent purpose. Man must be a steward of God's creation.

1

Two Views of Creation

No people seemed to search more for meaning in their lives than did the ancient and classical Greeks. In his superb book The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family, Phillip Slater tells us much of interest about the ancient Greeks. They were as creative a people as have ever lived and seemed to search for meaning in everything they did. They were not content with living simple lives but oftentimes took on gargantuan tasks which resulted in a great deal of upheaval and unpleasantness, and oftentimes to disaster. Slater puts it this way: “The Greeks were quarrelsome as friends, treacherous as neighbors, brutal as masters, faithless as servants, shallow as lovers—all of which was in part redeemed by their intelligence and creativity.”26 Daily life had no purpose for the ancient Greeks; they were searching for meaning in exceptionally difficult tasks.

The biblical human being, in contrast, is not driven to search for meaning in this way. One’s purpose is inherent in daily life. He does not have to search for it. The God of the Hebrew Bible makes the human being, man and woman, in his own image.

And God said: “Let us make man in His own image; in the image of God, created He him,; male and female created he them.27

He then breathes life into man.

Then the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.28

Life has an inherent purpose. Man must be a steward of God’s creation.29

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.30

A passage in Exodus restates the purposeful nature of life. God has a purpose for everyone.

But I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.”31

The purposeful nature of life is stated again in the first book of Samuel. We find purpose by serving God.

We fulfill our purpose of glorifying God also by living our lives in relationship and faithful service to Him.32

To gains some perspective on this difference, let us compare the creation narrative in Hesiod’s Theogony with that of the Hebrew Scriptures. These two creation stories embody two radically different worldviews. Nature precedes the gods in the Greek version, but God precedes nature in the biblical account. As Bruno Snell argues, the differences in the respective orderings are not just chronological, but logical and psychological as well.33

The Greek Creation Narrative

According to Hesiod, in the beginning there was chaos, which has often been interpreted as a moving formless mass, from which the cosmos and the gods originated.34 The noun xaos refers to infinite space or time or...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Two Views of Creation
• Chapter 2: Parables against Riddles
• Chapter 3: Two Approaches to Life and Death
• Chapter 4: Job against Zeno
• Chapter 5: Purpose versus Meaning
• Chapter 6: Two Clinical Cases
• Chapter 7: The Importance of Hope
• Chapter 8: Living Purposively versus Searching for Meaning
• Chapter 9: Biblical versus Greek Prophecy
• Bibliography