Renewing the Evangelical Mission

Richard Lints, Richard Lints

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781467437523
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The "culture story" of evangelicalism during the second half of the twentieth century has been well told. It is important now to think about the theological mission of the church in an ever-increasing post-Christian and post-partisan context. What is the theologian's calling at the beginning of the third millennium? How do global realities impact the mission of evangelical theology? What sense can be made of the unity of evangelical theology in light of its many diverse voices?This collection of essays draws together a stellar roster of evangelical thinkers with significant institutional memory of the evangelical movement who nonetheless see new opportunities for the evangelical voice in the years ahead. Contributors:
Os Guinness
Michael S. Horton
Richard Lints
Bruce McCormack
Mark Noll
J. I. Packer
Gary Parrett
Rodney Peterson
Cornelius Plantinga
Tite Tienou
Kevin J. Vanhoozer
Adonis Vidu
Miroslav Volf

PART ONE

Renewing the Global Mission

Human Flourishing

MIROSLAV VOLF

HOPE, IN A CHRISTIAN SENSE, is love stretching itself into the future. When I hope, I expect something from the future. But I don’t hope for everything I expect. Some anticipated things — like a visit to the dentist — I face with dread, rather than welcoming them in hope. “I speak of ‘hope,’” wrote Josef Pieper in his Hope and History, “only when what I am expecting is, in my view, good.”¹ And yet, even all good things that come my way are not a matter of hope. I don’t hope for a new day to dawn after a dark and restful night; I know, more or less, that the sun will rise. But I may hope for cool breezes to freshen up a hot summer day. In our everyday usage, “hope” is, roughly, the expectation of good things that don’t come to us as matter of course.

Christian faith adds another layer to this everyday usage of “hope.” In Theology of Hope Jürgen Moltmann famously distinguished between optimism and hope. Both have to do with positive expectation, and yet the two are very different. Optimism has to do with good things in the future that are latent in the past and the present; the future associated with optimism — Moltmann calls it futurum — is an unfolding of what is already there. We survey the past and the present, extrapolate about what is likely to happen in the future, and, if the prospects are good, become optimistic. Hope, on the other hand, has to do with good things in the future that come to us from “outside,” from God; the future associated with hope — Moltmann calls it adventus — is a gift of something new.² We hear the word of divine promise, and because God is love we trust in God’s faithfulness, and God brings about “a new thing” — aged Sarah, barren of womb, gives birth to a son (Gen. 21:1-2; Rom. 4:18-21); the crucified Jesus Christ is raised from the dead (Acts 2:22-36); a mighty Babylon falls and a New Jerusalem comes down from heaven (Rev. 18:1-24; 21:1-5); more generally, the good that seemed impossible becomes not just possible but real.

The expectation of good things that come as a gift from God — that is hope. And that is love, too, projecting itself into our and our world’s future. For love always gives gifts and is itself a gift; and inversely every genuine gift is an expression of love. At the heart of the hoped for future, which comes from the God of love, is the flourishing of individuals, communities, and our whole globe. But how is the God of love, “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17), related to human flourishing? And how should we understand human flourishing if it is a gift of the God of love?

Human Flourishing

Consider with me a prevalent contemporary Western understanding of human flourishing, how it differs from some previous understandings, and what its consequences are.

Satisfaction

Many people in the West today have come to believe — to feel in their gut, might be a colloquial but more accurate way of putting it — that a flourishing human life is an experientially satisfying human life. By this they don’t mean only that the experience of satisfaction is a desirable aspect of human flourishing, so that, all other things being equal, people who experience satisfaction flourish in a more complete way than people who do not. Energetic and free of pain, for instance, we flourish more than enveloped in sadness and wracked with pain (even if it may be true that pain can be a servant of the good and exhilaration can be deceptive). Though some ancient Stoics believed that one can flourish equally well on the torture rack as in the comfort of one’s home, most people from all periods of human history have thought that experiencing satisfaction enhances flourishing.

In contrast, for many in the West, experiential satisfaction is what their lives are all about. It does not merely enhance flourishing: it defines it. Such people cannot imagine themselves as flourishing if they do not experience satisfaction, if they don’t feel “happy,” as the preferred way of expressing it goes. For them, flourishing consists in having an experientially satisfying life. No satisfaction, no flourishing. Sources of satisfaction may vary, ranging from appreciation of classical music to the use of drugs, from the delights of “haute cuisine” to the pleasures of sadomasochistic sex, from sports to religion. What matters is not the source of satisfaction but the fact of it. What justifies an activity or a given life-style or activity is the satisfaction it generates — the pleasure. And when they experience satisfaction, people feel that they flourish. As Philip Rieff noted in The Triumph of the Therapeutic some decades ago (1966), ours is a culture of managed pursuit of pleasure, not a culture of sustained endeavor to lead the good life, as defined by foundational symbols and convictions.³

Love of God and Universal Solidarity

Contrast contemporary Western culture and its implicit default account of human flourishing with the two dominant models in the history of the Western tradition. Fifth-century church father Augustine, one of the most influential figures in Western religion and culture, represents well the first of these two accounts. In his reflections on the happy life in his major work on The Trinity, he writes: “God is the only source to be found of any good things, but especially of those which make a man good and those which will make him happy; only from him do they come into a man and attach themselves to a man.”⁴ Consequently, human beings flourish and are truly happy when they center their lives on God, the source of everything that is true, good, and beautiful. As to all created things, they too ought to be loved. But the only way to properly love them and fully and truly enjoy them is to love and enjoy them “in God.” Now, Augustine readily agrees with what most people think, namely that those are happy who have everything they want. But he adds immediately that this is true only if they want “nothing wrongly,”⁵ which is to say, if they want everything in accordance with the character and will of their Creator whose very being is love. The supreme good which makes human beings truly happy — in my terminology: the proper content of a flourishing life — consists in love of God and neighbor and enjoyment of both. In the City of God, Augustine defines it as a “completely harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God, and each other in God.”⁶

Around the eighteenth century, a different account of human flourishing emerged in the West. It was connected with what scholars sometimes describe as an “anthropocentric shift” — a gradual redirection of interest from the transcendent God to human beings and their mundane affairs and a birth of new humanism. This new humanism was different “from most ancient ethics of human nature,” writes Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, in that its notion of human flourishing “makes no reference to something higher which humans should reverence or love or acknowledge.”⁷ For Augustine and the tradition that followed him, this “something higher” was God. Modern humanism became exclusive by shedding the idea of human lives centered on God.

And yet, even as the new humanism rejected God and the command to love God, it retained the moral obligation to love neighbor. The central pillar of its vision of the good life was a universal beneficence transcending all boundaries of tribe or nation and extending to all human beings. True, this was an ideal which could not be immediately realized (and from which some groups, deemed inferior, were de facto exempt). But the goal toward which humanity was moving with a steady step was a state of human relations in which the flourishing of each was tied to the flourishing of all and the flourishing of all tied to the flourishing of each. Marx’s vision of a communist society, encapsulated in the phrase “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his need,”⁸ was historically the most influential and most problematic version of this idea of human flourishing.

In the late twentieth century another shift occurred. Human flourishing came increasingly to be defined as experiential satisfaction (though, of course, other accounts of human flourishing remain robust as well, whether they derive from religious or secular interpretations of the world). Having lost earlier reference to “something higher which humans should reverence or love,” it now lost reference to universal solidarity, as well. What remained was concern for the self and the desire for the experience of satisfaction. It is not, of course, that individuals today simply seek pleasure on their own, isolated from society. It is also not that they don’t care for others. Others are very much involved. But they matter mainly in that they serve an individual’s experience of satisfaction. That applies to God as well as to human beings. Desire — the outer shell of love — has remained, but love itself, by being directed exclusively to the self, is lost.

Hope

One way to view the three phases in the conception of human flourishing — love of God and neighbor, universal beneficence, experiential satisfaction — is to see them as a history of diminution of the object of love: from the vast expanse of the infinite God, love first tapered to the boundaries of the universal human community, and then radically contracted to the narrowness of a single self — one’s own self. A parallel contraction has also occurred with the scope of human hope.

In the book The Real American Dream, written at the turn of the millennium, Andrew Delbanco traced the diminution of American hope. I am interested in it here because America may be in this regard symptomatic: it would be possible trace an analogous diminution of hope in most societies or their elites, which are highly integrated into globalization processes. A glance at the book’s table of contents reveals the main point of his analysis. The chapter headings read: “God,” “Nation,” “Self.” The infinite God and the eternal life of enjoying God and one’s neighbors (at least some of them!) was the hope of the Puritans who founded America. American nationalists of the nineteenth century, notably Abraham Lincoln, transformed this Christian imagery, in which God was at the center, into “the symbol of a redeemer nation.” In the process, they created a “new symbol of hope.”⁹ The scope of hope was significantly reduced,¹⁰ and yet there still remained something of immense importance to hope for — the prospering of the nation which itself was a “chosen people,” called upon to “bear the ark of the Liberties of the world,” as Melville put it.¹¹ In the aftermath of the 1960s and 1980s, as a result of the combined hippy and yuppie revolutions, “instant gratification” became “the hallmark of the good life.” It is only a minor exaggeration to say that hope was reduced “to the scale of self-pampering.”¹² Moving from the vastness of God down to the ideal of a redeemer nation, hope has narrowed, argues Delbanco, “to the vanishing point of the self alone.”¹³

Earlier on I noted that when the scope of love diminishes, love itself disappears; benevolence and beneficence mutate into the pursuit of self-interest. Something similar happens to hope. This is understandable if hope is love stretching itself into the future of the beloved object, as I have suggested at the beginning of this text. So when love shrinks to self-interest, and self-interest devolves into the experience of satisfaction, hope disappears as well. As Michael Oakeshott rightly insisted, hope depends on finding some “end to be pursued more extensive than a merely instant desire.”¹⁴

Unsatisfying Satisfaction

Love and hope are not the only casualties of placing the experience of satisfaction at the center of human striving. As many have pointed out, satisfaction itself is threatened by the pursuit of pleasure. I don’t mean simply that we spend a good deal of our lives dissatisfied. Clearly, we are dissatisfied until we experience satisfaction. Desire is aroused, and striving begins, goaded by a sense of discontentment and pulled by the expectation of fulfillment until satisfaction is reached. Dissatisfied and expectant striving is the overall state, fulfillment is its interruption; desire is eternal, satisfaction is fleetingly periodic.¹⁵

More importantly, almost paradoxically, we remain dissatisfied in the midst of experiencing satisfaction. We compare our “pleasures” to those of others, and begin to envy them. A fine new Honda of our modest dreams is a source of dissatisfaction when we see a neighbor’s new Mercedes. But even when we win the game of comparisons — when we park in front of our garage the best model of the most expensive car — our victory is hollow, melancholy. As Gratiano puts it in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, “All things that are, are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.”¹⁶ First, marked as we are by what philosophers call self-transcendence, in our imagination we are always already beyond any state we have reached. Whatever we have, we want more and different, and when we have climbed to the top, a sense of disappointment clouds the triumph. Our striving can therefore find proper rest only when we find joy in something infinite. For Christians, this something is God.

Second, we feel melancholy because our pleasure is truly human and therefore truly pleasurable only if it has meaning beyond itself. So it is with sex, for instance. No matter how enticing and thrilling it may be, it leaves an aftertaste of dissatisfaction — maybe guilt, but certainly emptiness — if it does not somehow refer beyond itself, if it is not a sacrament of love between human beings. It is similar with many other pleasures.¹⁷

When we place pleasure at the center of the good life, when we decouple it from the love of God, the ultimate source of meaning, and when we sever it from love of neighbor and hope for a common future, we are left, in the words of Andrew Delbanco, “with no way of organizing desire into a structure of meaning.”¹⁸ And for meaning-making animals as we humans ineradicably are, surd desire to satisfy self-contained pleasures will always remain deeply unsatisfying.

Accounts of Reality, Conceptions of Flourishing

For the sake of the fulfillment of individuals, the thriving of communities, and our common global future, we need a better account of human flourishing than experiential satisfaction. The most robust alternative visions of human flourishing are embodied in the great faith traditions. It is to them — and the debates between them as to what human flourishing truly consists in — that we need to turn for resources to think anew about human flourishing. In the following, I will suggest contours of human flourishing as contained in the Christian faith (or rather, one strand of that faith).

Centrality of Human Flourishing

Concern with human flourishing is at the heart of the great faiths, including Christianity. True, you cannot always tell that from the way faiths are practiced. When surveying their history, it seems on occasion as if their goal were simply to dispatch people out of this world and into the next — out of the veil of tears into heavenly bliss (Christianity), out of the world of craving into nirvana (Buddhism), to give just two exa...