MY FRIEND GâJOE told me a while back of an encounter he had with a young clerk at the Speakeasy Clothing store in San Diego. He was killing time for a few minutes before a meeting, and she was friendly and chatty. Given GâJoeâs winsomeness and wit (not to mention his good looks), itâs no surprise she was ready to talk. The conversation ranged from work to race to religionâthe latter prompted by her inquiry of whether GâJoe was a Buddhist. He replied that he was a follower of Christ.
Thinking of C. S. Lewis, GâJoe responded, âI actually believe that my God has given us desire and wants us to know him through enjoying and delighting in his gifts.â Taken aback, the young woman exclaimed, âIâve never heard anyone talk about Christianity like that!â To GâJoeâs glee, she asked, âCould I come to your church sometime?â
The clerkâs reaction reveals an important reality. Like all of us, she desires. God designed us as desiring creatures. We are hungry for relationship, for beauty, for pleasure. Our desires are typically a mix of the noble, the mundane, and the sinful. Our desires are complicated.
But that doesnât mean we should avoid using words like pleasure or beauty or delight when talking about our Christian faith. Jesus was too much a lover of a human life fully lived to justify that. Moreover, the creation, though marred, shouts these words. Simply think of the most recent time you enjoyed a fantastic meal, a stunning sunset, or good sex with your spouse.
Desire isnât the problem. The problem is wrongly ordered desires and desires pointed toward the wrong objects. The problem isnât that we want to flourish. God wants that for us too. The problem is our definitions of human flourishing fall short of Godâs.
SHALOM: HUMANKINDâS DEEPEST DESIRE
We fallen humans need an expanded imagination to help us understand our deepest longings and desires. Augustine, that great theologian of desire, famously reminded us that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. All the food, natural beauty, and sex in the world wonât truly satisfy us because we are made for more. We are made for God and others. Made in the image of the triune God who exists in blissful, loving friendship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we, too, are relational beings.
Indeed, the Bible teaches that we are made for four foundational relationships: with God, ourselves, others, and the creation itself. The Hebrew word shalom captures the notion of peace in these four relationships. Shalom signifies spiritual, psychological, social, and physical wholeness. And shalom is Godâs normative intention for us. Shalom is what we find in his original creation, and shalom is what will characterize the new heaven and new earth in his consummated kingdom. Put another way, God designed us for flourishing. This is because, as Art Lindsley has said, flourishing is simply âshalom in every direction, personal and public.â1
WHAT IS GENUINE FLOURISHING?
This book seeks to urge and equip congregations to seek the flourishing of their communities. The first task in doing that is defining what true flourishing is. Helping people see the difference between genuine flourishing and false flourishing is one of the most important things followers of Jesus can do to serve the kingdom of God and the common good.2
A short history lesson from Yale theologian Miroslav Volf will help us get started on this task. In a 2013 essay on human flourishing, Volf describes three dominant definitional paradigms.3 To simplify, the first is essentially Augustinian. It argues that since God is the source of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, human flourishing arises out of communion with God. We flourish when our lives are centered on the love of God and of neighbor. The second is an Enlightenment/humanist paradigm that reoriented the focus from God to humans. Here flourishing was defined without reference to a higher authority, yet there remained a sense of human communityâthe belief that our flourishing is tied to the flourishing of others. The third, now-dominant, late-twentieth-century paradigm argues that human flourishing is all about an individualâs experiential satisfaction.
For our purposes here, itâs important to highlight the progression in these definitions of human flourishing. Volf explains:
Having lost earlier reference to âsomething higher which humans should reverence or love,â it now lost reference to universal solidarity, as well. What remained was concern for the self and the desire for the experience of satisfaction. . . . [Other humans still matter but] they matter mainly in that they serve an individualâs experience of satisfaction.4
Western Christians today swim within this cultural water. Thick in our imagination is a view of flourishing that assumes the highest goods are individual freedom, happiness, and self-expression.
SIX MARKS OF TRUE FLOURISHING
To dislodge this prevalent view, we need to examine several images of human flourishing provided by the bookends of Scriptureâs grand narrative: creation and new creation.5
The first mark of true flourishing is communion with God. In the ancient past, human beings enjoyed the profound goodness of Godâs fellowship as he walked in the Garden. Our great future hope in new creation is that we will âsee the goodness of the LORD in the land of the livingâ (Ps 27:13) and live eternally with God, who promises to dwell among us (Rev 21:3).
The second mark of flourishing involves beauty and creativity. God is the source of all beauty and creativity. Made in his image, we experience deep joy when encountering beauty and in creatively crafting beauty.
The third feature of flourishing involves learning and discovery. God designed human beings with intelligence and curiosity. He made us thinking beings. He gave us brains to exercise and placed us in an intricate, complex, wonder-full, awe-inspiring cosmos. He commanded us to cultivate and develop his good creation. That command includes a call to pursue knowledge of the worldâto observe, study, contemplate, investigate, experiment, and learn.
Wholeness is the fourth feature of biblical flourishing. In the Garden we enjoyed total physical and psychological health. In the garden-city of the new Jerusalem, we will again delight in bodies free from all disease, depression, and distress. This wholeness will extend to the creation itself. Many of the biblical passages that give us previews of the coming consummated kingdom speak of the healing of the natural world as God restores everything that was once barren. Isaiah 51:3 is representative: âHe will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the LORD.â God will one day set his beloved creation free from all its groaning.
Fifth, in the consummated kingdom we will experience deep, rich, satisfying unity in diversity with other people. We will experience peace and harmony as richly diverse members of Christâs body from every ânation, tribe, people and languageâ join in common worship of King Jesus (Rev 7:9-20). This unity will be expressed in peace. In the new Jerusalem we will enjoy complete security and safety. All violence, injustice, and war will cease.
Finally, when we consider the flourishing of creation and the new creation, we observe prosperity or abundance. In Genesis, God creates a virt...
