Want to start an argument? Bring up religion or politics. Want to start a thoughtful discussion? Mention purpose!<\/p>\n
New York Times columnist David Brooks, who was one of Chuck Colson\u2019s favorites, has a new column that I think Chuck would have loved. Brooks, who is on a tour promoting his new book, \u201cThe Road to Character,\u201d says that people he meets are searching for purpose.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey feel a hunger to live meaningfully,\u201d he writes, \u201cbut they don\u2019t know the right questions to ask, the right vocabulary to use, the right place to look or even if there are ultimate answers at all. I find there is an amazing hunger to shift the conversation. People are ready to talk a little less about how to do things and to talk a little more about why ultimately they are doing them.\u201d<\/p>\n
A generation or two ago, Brooks says, there were lots of public authority figures talking about why \u2014 some of them good, others not so much. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel were household names. Author Harry Emerson Fosdick and philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre led very public discussions on the meaning of existence or the nature of evil. And Brooks forgot to mention Billy Graham! Back then there was an appetite for street-level philosophy \u2014 and maybe there still is.<\/p>\n
Also, schools back then were more than job training programs. There was a coherence to the educational process that, as Neil Postman wrote about a few decades ago, has been replaced by the acquisition of skills. So education no longer pursues a purposeful vision, it pursues a career alone.<\/p>\n
This is largely the result of knowledge becoming ever more specialized. \u201cIntellectual prestige,\u201d Brooks writes, \u201chas drifted away from theologians, poets and philosophers, and toward neuroscientists, economists, evolutionary biologists and big data analysts. These scholars have a lot of knowledge to bring, but they\u2019re not in the business of offering wisdom on the ultimate questions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chuck Colson used to ask four \u201cultimate\u201d or \u201cworldview\u201d questions, critical tools that we can use in searching for purpose. Question one: Where did I come from? Two: What\u2019s wrong with the world? Three: Is there a solution? And Four: What is my purpose? As Vaclev Havel observed, it\u2019s not that we aren\u2019t finding answers to these questions. It\u2019s that these questions are no longer being asked.<\/p>\n
Of course, questions about purpose can only be answered in the One who purposed us. As Augustine said, \u201cYou have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Our hearts certainly won\u2019t find rest in money. Gallup did a survey of 132 countries and found those with lower per capita economic output actually had higher rankings for meaning. And generally lower suicide rates, too. Why, when so many of us in the West equate wealth with happiness? Well, it turns out those countries are more religious, giving people a sense of purpose. Even among wealthier countries where religion plays a more prominent role in people\u2019s lives, we report higher levels of meaning.<\/p>\n
Increasing numbers of Americans, of course, are going outside of organized religion, seeking to construct their own meaning. Yet those self-made answers rarely quiet our restless hearts. As Pascal said, \u201cIt is in vain, oh men, that you seek within yourselves the cure for all your miseries. All your insight has led to the knowledge that it is not in yourselves that you discover the true and the good.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Christian worldview, based on biblical revelation, answers all four of Chuck\u2019s questions, explains both our human dignity and our depravity, and points us to a fixed reference point by which we can orient our lives: God Himself. \u201cMan\u2019s chief end,\u201d the Westminster Shorter Catechism states, \u201cis to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.\u201d<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
Copyright (c) 2015 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. “BreakPoint” is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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