The Louisiana Quaker eLetter

ISSN 1523-4924—Vol. 1, No. 8

"WHY WE DO IT  (PART I)"

There was a time when I thought that the most important question on earth was: Why is there something rather than nothing? Now I think the most chilling of questions has to be this: Why do we bother getting up in the morning?

It is not enough, surely, that there be a world and that we live in it. It must have meaning for us. Some of us go about with the many small purposes given to us; some of us make our own meaning—we literally create a reason to get up in the morning. To serve someone, to make things, to work, to eat, to play, to spend, to frolic, to enjoy. Rarely do we not have a choice. We could go further and say, too, that we can get meaning from several natural sources: biology and culture. We can get purpose from biology by merely heeding our animal nature: hunger, thirst, sexual desire, all the pleasurables that are presented to us by sense experience. We get purpose from culture by heeding the pleasurables that our social nature prescribes: television, music, cars, houses, money, clothes, gadgets, rituals, laws, etc., etc. From one standpoint, one could construct a perfectly natural human being from biological parts and from social parts. This is what humanism states.

A critical flaw of humanism, though, is that it never leads to any purpose beyond either the biological or the social, for within humanism there really is nothing beyond the merely human. We exist, we have purposes, and we can create for ourselves—individually and collectively—sundry other purposes. But we can never legitimately fashion for ourselves any plausible purpose beyond the merely human; the attempt to do this yields only more psychological phenomena. Thus spirituality, religiosity, higher moral aims—these are mere natural expressions of psychic needs and wants. From one perspective, then, one might argue that the logical consequence of humanism is always a type of existentialism: Life is absurd; we exist, but there is no reason for it.

I wish I could claim credit for having discovered this, but, curiously, such is the very point made by the author of Ecclesiastes. From a humanist perspective, absolutely everything is inevitably meaningless: Real estate and wealth [Ecc. 2, 4, 5:8-20, 6], secular wisdom and folly [Ecc. 2, 7], the natural order of things [Ecc. 3:1-8], inductive science [Ecc. 7:27], occupational labor [Ecc. 2,4], pleasure in accomplishments [Ecc. 2], perfunctory religious behavior [Ecc. 5:1-7], positions of power [Ecc. 5:8-9], honor and prosperity [Ecc. 6], success [Ecc. 9:11-12]. So, too, oppression, loneliness, hard work [Ecc. 4]. Death, the ultimate fate of human life after the fall, also fails to give our life meaning [Ecc. 6, 9].

In a fallen world, separated from God, we will always be frustrated in our search for genuine meaning in anything—for it is not there. As humanists, what we find instead are mere facts, pointing to nothing beyond themselves. Only as a gift from God does our life derive its meaning. Indeed, we have as a gift God's revelation, giving us a stalwart tradition of his presence in our lives. We have as a gift the resurrected Jesus Christ, for through Christ we are released from the meaninglessness of the fall. We have as a gift the Holy Spirit, by means of which we are sanctified [John 17:17; Rom. 15:16; 2 Thess. 2:13; 1 Peter 1:2], taught, and reminded of Christ's teachings [John 14:26]. And, as a gift, we have meaning for every aspect of our life.

This, says Paul, was a part of the great plan: "The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God." [Rom. 8:19-21]

In the end, whether from an Old Testament or from a New Testament perspective, our duty as Christians is to do as the author of Ecclesiastes himself advises [Ecc. 12:13-14]:

"Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.
For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil."

In other words, we are to fear God, obey his commandments, and look for the coming judgment.

But how do we escape the humanist charge that this is religion, arising out of a bio-psychological need for meaning in an absurd world, pointing inevitably to nothing beyond a natural impulse to create meaning where there is none? We escape this because we have not created God. He has created us, and revealed himself to us—through Adam, the patriarchs and Prophets, and Jesus Christ—and continues to reveal himself through the Holy Spirit. We are not of this world, and neither is the meaning of our lives.

—Merle Harton, Jr., The Louisiana Quaker

All biblical references are NIV unless otherwise noted.

BOOK for the month:

Streams of Mercy.  By Mark Rutland. Vine Books/Servant Publications, 1999. ISBN 0-89283-998-8.

Here is a simple syllogism: God is merciful. We are called to be like God. Therefore, we are called to be merciful. Logic notwithstanding, we may well understand the first two parts of the argument, but we seem never to follow through with the conclusion. If nothing else, we appear to be a merciless race of beings. Even as Christians, we rarely behave mercifully toward our brothers and sisters of faith. Mercy is one of those things that no longer figures largely in our vocabulary, it is not often a subject of theological discourse—and it is not often practiced.

Mark Rutland lays blame for this less on our forgetfulness than on our blindness. It is not just that we have forgotten what mercy is, but rather we are blind to the continuing mercies of God in our lives. Drawing on Scripture, personal anecdotes, modern parables, and finely crafted pieces of short, original fiction, Rutland takes us up and down a long, winding stream of God's mercies. This is not a theological study of mercy, but rather a gift of presentation, a genuine show-and-tell.

The Pharisees, expecting justice and not mercy, hated Jesus because he performed miracles for those who were in need—not because they were deserving. But this is an abiding theme of Rutland's reflections; we need mercy, all of us, but we do not deserve it. Rarely is there anyone in Scripture who deserves it: Adam, Lot, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Manasseh, Peter—all human to a fault, but still recipients of undeserved grace from a patient, loving God.

Rutland spends the first part of his book on cataloging some of God's mercies, including the miracle of day-to-day mercies, the ones that keep us going every day. He spends the final two parts presenting the many ways we too can be merciful: Mercy for our children, for the family, mercy for ourselves, mercy within our faith communities, mercy in our culture, giving mercy because we have it. And he spends many fine literary moments on our need to stop trying to perfect our children, spouses, and friends—to learn how to let things go, to lighten up, learning to laugh, learning to forgive, moving beyond hang-ups and rage to a true, demonstrable expression of Christian love.

This is a book every Christian must read. The real point of what Rutland wants to achieve here is to make sense of Jesus, who showed mercy to people who deserved to be hated. Rutland wants to take us from the many mercies of God to how mercy can be realized in our daily lives, from merciful God to merciful man, reflecting in our lives the immense love in God's wide stream of mercies. - MCH

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Copyright © 1999 by Merle Harton, Jr.