6. The Christian Story and the Meaning of Life
6.
The Christian Story and the Meaning of Life
We cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce—we are meaning-seeking creatures. . . . We seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives—money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.
Jeanette Winterson
In her personal memoirs, the novelist Jeanette Winterson highlights her growing recognition of the significance of the human quest for meaning and its impact on our existence. Human beings actively seek systems of meaning that embrace an understanding of the world, our personal significance, and our capacity to transcend our limits and locations, as we sense we are part of something bigger and greater. And as we have already seen, narratives are ideally suited to explore these deep questions of meaning, not least by telling the story of how individuals find meaning in life and the difference that this makes in the way they think and live.
Empirical research on how people express and apply the idea of meaning suggests that it is helpful to draw a distinction between “global” and “situational” meaning. Global meaning systems weave together beliefs, goals, and subjective feelings of meaning or purpose in life to give a “big picture” of reality. Yet we use this overarching global framework of beliefs, goals, and sense of purpose to structure our lives and to assign meanings to specific experiences—in other words, to determine situational meaning.
The “big picture” thus frames our experiences and helps us work out what they mean. It is not difficult to see how this allows us to think of the Christian metanarrative as “global,” with “situational” or “local” applications. One person might apply this “global” framework to her own situation and come up with a “local” meaning that might be quite different from what someone else might develop—even though both had adopted the same “global” meaning. Why? Because our individual lives and circumstances are different.
A metanarrative that cannot engage the specifics of an individual’s situation will always seem distant and impersonal, in that it cannot secure traction on a person’s deepest cares and concerns. One of the most remarkable features of the Gospel accounts of Christ’s encounters with individuals is that he relates to them in their irreducible individuality—a theme that is echoed at many points in the Christian metanarrative itself.
So why is the question of meaning so important to human beings? Social psychologist Erich Fromm was shocked by the insanity and destructiveness of the First World War and wondered how individuals could cope with inhabiting such a senseless world. How could anyone find meaning within this apparent meaninglessness? His answer lay in developing what he called a “framework of orientation and devotion,” a way of thinking about the world that endows human existence with purpose and significance. Although Fromm developed his own specific framework for coping with this baffling world, what is more important is his recognition that we need such frameworks if we are to live and act in the world without going insane. Living purposefully and meaningfully requires a conceptual frame of reference, a mental map that offers us a secure foundation and focus for our lives.
These insights were further developed by the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, whose experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War led him to realize the importance of discerning meaning if we are to cope with traumatic situations. Whether people survived depended on their will to live, which in turn depended on being able to find meaning and purpose in even the most demoralizing situations, which would otherwise be experienced as overwhelmingly destructive. Those who coped best were those who had frameworks of meaning that enabled them to frame their traumatic experiences within their core narratives. The Christian narrative of a suffering savior resonated deeply with the human experience of suffering, enabling people to cope with adversity and even to grow through it—a well-recognized phenomenon now widely referred to as “post-traumatic growth.”
In this chapter, we shall explore how the Christian metanarrative establishes meaning and how this opens up important apologetic opportunities and approaches. We begin our reflections by considering the distinction between how things function and what things mean.
Meaning and Function: A Crucial Distinction
There is a critically important distinction between understanding how things work and grasping what they mean. Meaning is quite distinct from functionality. The natural sciences are excellent, even outstanding, in helping us discern how things work; indeed, they might even help us to figure out how they might work better. Yet the deeper questions of meaning and value—what Karl Popper termed “ultimate questions”—lie beyond the reach of the methods of the natural sciences. Spanish philosopher José Ortega argued that human flourishing and well-being require more than the partial account of reality that science offers. We need a “big picture,” an “integral idea of the universe” that possesses existential depth, and not merely cognitive functionality.
Peter Medawar, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work on immunology, observes that “only humans find their way by a light that illuminates more than the patch of ground they stand on.” Human beings seem to possess some desire to reach beyond the mechanics of engagement with our world, looking for deeper patterns of significance and meaning. Yet for Medawar, science could not answer questions about human meaning, value, or purpose. These questions lie outside, and would always lie outside, the scope of the natural sciences. To expect science to be able to answer ultimate questions is on the same level as expecting Euclid’s axioms and postulates to teach us how to bake a cake.
As the philosopher Nicholas Rescher has remarked, human knowledge of the “value dimension of experience” by which we judge certain things to be “beautiful or delightful or tragic” remains outside the range of science. These are not empirical questions that can be answered by the natural sciences.
In his 1990 Herbert Read Memorial Lecture at Cambridge University, Salman Rushdie argued that religion has met three types of needs that have not been satisfied by secular, rationalist materialism. First, it enables us to articulate our sense of awe and wonder, partly by helping us grasp the immensity of life and partly by affirming that we are special. Second, it provides “answers to the unanswerable,” engaging the deep questions that so often trouble and perplex us. And finally, it offers us a moral framework within which we can live out the good life. For Rushdie, religion or the “idea of God” provides us with a “repository of our awestruck wonderment at life, and an answer to the great questions of existence.” Any attempt to describe or define human beings “in terms that exclude their spiritual needs” will only end in failure.
Rushdie’s analysis naturally leads us to ask what sort of “answers to the unanswerable” he had in mind. If the natural sciences cannot answer our deepest questions about meaning, value, and purpose through the legitimate use of its methods, how can we answer them at all? The simple answer is this: by not depending on the natural sciences for such answers, but by looking toward other sources of meaning—above all, to Christianity, which sets out a “big picture” of reality, which provides a framework for engaging the ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness. The philosopher Keith Yandell highlights this aspect of faith: “A religion is a conceptual system that provides an interpretation of the world and the place of human beings in it, bases an account of how life should be lived given that interpretation, and expresses this interpretation and lifestyle in a set of rituals, institutions and practices.”
Difficulties in defining “religion”—for example, the existence of “atheist religions” such as Buddhism—have led some scholars to suggest that the notion of a “worldview” is less problematic and potentially more illuminating. Christianity itself can be presented as a worldview, at least in some respects, although it clearly cannot be reduced to this category. A worldview can be understood as a complex set of representations concerning issues of meaning and understanding in relation to “big questions” such as ontology, epistemology, and cosmology. It weaves together a number of themes, gaining its distinct character through both the themes that it incorporates and the manner in which it achieves this. As psychologist Mark Koltko-Rivera observes, “A worldview is a way of describing the universe and life within it, both in terms of what is and what ought to be. . . . Worldviews include assumptions that may be unproven, and even unprovable, but these assumptions are superordinate, in that they provide the epistemic and ontological foundations for other beliefs within a belief system.”
Worldviews that generate meaning are, of course, found beyond what is normally considered to be a religion—for example, in Marxism or in the metaphysically inflated “universal Darwinism” of Richard Dawkins. As the philosopher Mary Midgley has pointed out, this helps us to understand why Marxism and Darwinism—the “two great secular faiths of our day”—display “religious-looking features.”
Yet while the creation or disclosure of meaning may not be a distinguishing feature of religion, setting it apart from everything else, it can certainly be argued that it is characteristic of it. The stories that individual Christians tell about their lives often focus on questions of meaning. This observation is so important that it needs further consideration.
Personal Narratives: The Embodiment of Meaning
Personal narratives of faith are a testimony to the capacity of the Christian gospel to change people, becoming an important part of their lives, so that an objective truth becomes a subjective reality without losing its objective character. These narratives might take the form of the discovery of the Christian faith or the experience of the capacity of this faith to inspire, console, or sustain in times of struggle and despair. While audiences will find these stories interesting, the most important point is that these stories illustrate and confirm the ability of the Christian faith to become part of someone’s life, providing the person hope and meaning.
There are many such narratives, yet all share a common feature: for Christians to tell their own story is for them to speak of how Christianity became real to them as living human beings. It is an affirmation of the truth of faith in the sense of demonstrating its capacity to change life, to give direction and meaning to real people, and to become a transforming reality in an individual’s personal existence. There is ample empirical evidence pointing to the importance of personal narratives as a means of connecting an individual’s life story with a wider frame of reference and hence discovering meaning and significance.
We can speak of individual Christians embodying meaning. The idea of “embodied meaning” needs a little explanation. It refers to the idea that the way in which a Christian thinks and acts reflects the core themes of the gospel. Instead of thinking of the idea of “meaning” abstractly, we think of it in terms of a lived-out life—what someone does, which expresses and enacts his understanding of what life is all about. We have already looked at one good example of this: the way in which Christians cope with hardship, suffering, and trauma, seeing the story of Jesus Christ as something that they can use as both an example and an inspiration. In telling how they cope with suffering, Christians are thus retelling an important element of the Christian narrative and displaying its impact through their lives.
These personal narratives can be institutionalized. A good example of this lies to hand in the “conversion narratives” that were a requirement for admission to Puritan congregations in New England and elsewhere in the seventeenth century. These narratives were intended to give the congregation a convincing testimony of a person’s experience of conversion and the subsequent workings of grace in the person’s life. John Rogers (ca. 1570–1636), the Puritan minister of Dedham, required everyone who was to be admitted to his congregation to give oral testimony to “some experimental Evidences of the work of grace upon his soul.” One of the functions of these narratives was to demonstrate that Christianity was a living reality in the lives of such individuals, rather than some form of notional assent to a set of doctrines.
These observations make clear the apologetic importance of personal testimony. Believers can speak of how they discovered Christianity, how it became real to them, and the difference that it made. They can speak of their inhabitation of faith and how they learned to cope with doubt and uncertainty, develop their moral values, and face difficulties and troubles. In doing so, they are witnessing to the capacity of faith to generate meaning and sustain people in times of need.
The Christian Narrative and the Disclosure of Meaning
As I have argued throughout this work, Christianity is fundamentally a historically rooted interpretative and transforming narrative that gives rise to a system of concepts and values that provide an integrated framework of meaning in life. It establishes connections between God, Christ, and believers that are woven together within a coherent worldview. Substantial research literature points to the importance of finding meaning for human well-being and also illuminates the role played by religious faith in providing a comprehensive and integrated framework of meaning that helps individuals to transcend their own concerns or experience and connect with something greater. Christians, of course, have always appreciated that their faith enables them to live life meaningfully and authentically; recent psychological studies, in confirming this point, have also helped unfold the various ways in which we understand this core concept of “meaning.”
Social psychologist Roy Baumeister set out an influential evidence-based analysis of theories of the meaning of life, in which he identified the themes that had to be engaged and explored before the human quest for meaning could be satisfied. There were, he argued, four fundamental questions that had to be answered convincingly if a worldview was to count as offering a credible account of the “meaning of life”:
Baumeister was clear that psychology could not provide normative answers to these four questions. Questions of meaning appear to lie tantalizing beyond the intellectual horizons and methodological frontiers of the natural sciences. Yet this does not mean that these questions cannot be answered. There are other tools we can use in our search for meaningful answers—including the Christian story.
So how does this Christian “grand narrative” engage with these four fundamental questions? In what follows, we shall reflect on each of these questions, outlining some potential apologetic approaches that emerge from them that can be developed and applied further.
Identity: Who Am I?
It is very easy to give definitions of human identity. We are partly defined by our genetic makeup, by our social location, and by countless other scientific parameters. We can be defined with reference to our race, our nationality, our weight, and our gender. Yet all too often this leads to our identity being reduced to genetic and social stereotypes, so that individual identity has become a matter of an impersonal genetic code.
Many have protested against this depersonalization of human identity. Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965) has argued that purely scientific accounts of humanity reduce people to objects—to an “it” rather than a “you.” It is the “sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our world.” The essence of personal identity, for Buber, is an ability to exist in relationships. We are defined not by our chemical or genetic makeup but by our social and personal relationships. For Christianity, we are given a new identity as a person of significance by the God who has created and redeemed us and called us by name. We are invited to allow our personal narrative to become part of the greater narrative of God.
We have already noted (see “H. Richard Niebuhr on the Retrieval of Narrative” in chap. 2) the importance of H. Richard Niebuhr’s 1941 essay “The Story of Our Lives,” which argues that Christians should focus on the “irreplaceable and untranslatable” narrative of faith that straddles the borderlands of history, parable, and myth. This story is not an argument for the existence of God but rather a simple recital of the events surrounding Jesus Christ and an invitation to become part of that story. How participants understand being part of such a shared history is not framed in terms of a detached scientific explanation of life but rather involves a subjective, committed, and engaged attitude to existence, resting on a set of implicit assumptions that need to be unpacked and given systematic formulation.
Niebuhr’s essay sees a new interest emerge in the capacity of the Christian story to generate moral values and frameworks of meaning. Writers such as Stanley Hauerwas have explored how this narrative recognizes human brokenness and the need for forgiveness and thus acts as the context of corporate and individual formation, inviting Christians to align and connect the stories of their lives—in terms of both their habits of thought and their actions—with the narrative of the Christian tradition. C. S. Lewis has offered an accessible way of visualizing this point in his Chronicles of Narnia, showing how individual characters in the drama allow their personal narratives to become part of the greater story of Narnia itself—a story that they simultaneously inhabit and advance. Their individual identity and value remain; they realize, however, that they have become part of something grander, which motivates and informs their lives and actions.
Identity, however, is social as much as individual. In recent years, there has been much interest in how biblical narratives shape and inform both individual and communal identities. The role of narratives in shaping ancient Israelite identity is becoming increasingly clear, as scholars have used tools such as social identity theory to clarify how such narratives are intertwined with questions of identity. Yet such biblical narratives can also help shape personal and social identity in the present. A particularly good exploration of this issue is provided by Athena Gorospe’s exploration of how the narrative of Moses’s return to Egypt (Exod. 4:18–26) can illuminate the social identity of Filipino overseas workers in an age of global economic migration. Gorospe appeals to Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of threefold mimesis (prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration) to allow the text to connect with contemporary concerns.
The apologist is thus presented with the task of making connections between the Christian story and the audience, aiming to show how the gospel has the capacity to help us discover who we are and who we are meant to be. It is here that apologetics becomes an art, rather than a science, as it requires a series of gifts—such as empathy and imagination—to help others see how the Christian story connects with, and eventually transforms, their own personal stories.
Value: Do I Matter?
In his “Late Fragment,” American poet Raymond Carver speaks movingly of the longing “to know myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.” It is a very human (and very natural) yearning, which helps us appreciate why so many regard personal relationships as being of such significance and find their sense of self-worth affirmed and validated through them. Yet it is a thought that is constantly subverted by reflecting on the apparent insignificance of humanity, when seen in its broader cosmic context.
Sigmund Freud famously argued that scientific advance has led to a radical reevaluation of the place and significance of humanity in the universe, deflating human pretensions to grandeur and uniqueness. Before Copernicus, we thought we stood at the center of all things. Before Darwin, we thought we were utterly distinct from every other living species. Before Freud, we thought that we were masters of our own limited realm; now we have to come to terms with being the prisoner of hidden unconscious forces, subtly influencing our thinking and behavior. And as our knowledge of our universe expands, we realize how many galaxies lie beyond our own. The human lifespan is insignificant in comparison with the immense age of the universe. We can easily be overwhelmed by a sense of our own insignificance when we see ourselves against this vast cosmic backdrop.
This sense of unease is compounded for some by the dominant Western cultural narratives—such as what Christian Smith dubs the Scientific Enlightenment narrative or the Chance and Purposelessness narrative (see “Why Stories Matter” in chap. 1). These portray human beings as simply assemblies of molecules or biological components, devoid of purpose or meaning. This highly reductive approach is found in the writings of biologist Francis Crick, who defined human beings in purely neurological terms. “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. . . . You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” Yet Crick’s highly reductive approach to our human identity assumes that a complex system is no more than the sum of its parts—and that one of these components can be singled out as being of supreme importance. Crick’s bold overstatement is probably best seen as a neurologist’s perspective on human nature, which overlooks the obvious fact that there is a lot more to human nature than neurons. We need neurons to function, but we are not defined exclusively or characteristically in this way.
Others find themselves perplexed by reductive evolutionary narratives of human nature, such as Richard Dawkins’s “gene’s eye” view of human nature, set out in his landmark book The Selfish Gene (1976). This approach, which attracted a lot of attention back in the 1980s, although it has since fallen out of favor, sees human beings essentially as machines that are controlled and determined by their DNA—the complex biological molecule that transmits genetic information. According to Dawkins, “DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.” Our sole purpose in existing is to pass on our genes to future generations. Human beings are just gene-perpetuating machines.
Dawkins himself has misgivings about this narrative, which holds that we are trapped in patterns of thought and action that are ultimately not of our own choosing. He thus proposes a counternarrative, arguing that we are able to assert our autonomy in the face of this genetic determinism. We can rebel against our selfish genes. “We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth. . . . We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” Yet this bold narrative of human autonomy remains located, not entirely consistently, within a narrative of humans as gene machines who are constrained to dance to the music of DNA. Dawkins thus frequently refers to human beings as robots that are programmed to execute the instructions of their genetic masters.
So is our self-worth subverted, if not destroyed, by these reflections? Some would argue that we need to face up to our situation, whether in a bold act of intellectual defiance or a gracious resignation to a bleak emptiness as we contemplate our limited role in the greater scheme of things. Yet the Christian narrative allows us to frame these questions in a very different way than that offered by a bleak secular humanism. By allowing their personal narratives to be embraced and enfolded by the greater narrative of God, Christians see things in a new way—including their own status and identity. We are no longer mere assemblies of molecules, neurons, or genes; we are individuals who can relate to God, and whose status is transformed by God’s love and attentiveness toward us.
Christian writers thus speak of the transvaluation of human life through faith. One particularly good example of this is the notion of being “touched” by God, explored in the writings of English poet-theologian George Herbert. Herbert likens the graceful “touch” of God to the fabled “philosopher’s stone” of medieval alchemy, which transmutes base metal into gold:
This is that famous stone
That turneth all to gold:
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.
Through inhabiting the Christian narrative, we come to see ourselves, as medieval writer Julian of Norwich famously put it, as being enfolded in the love of Christ, which brings us a new security, identity, and value. Our self-worth is grounded in being loved by God.
God is one who relates to us and thence transforms our sense of value and significance precisely through this privilege of relationship. We matter to God. One of the most profound pieces of writing in the Old Testament is Psalm 8, which takes the form of reflection on the place of humanity in the natural world. The psalmist considers the immensity of the night sky, before turning to consider the place of human beings in this vast universe:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor. (Ps. 8:3–5)
The passage locates humanity at a level that is intermediate between God and the beasts of the field.
This insight is supplemented by one of the most significant elements of the Christian narrative—namely, that God chooses to relate to human beings. God chose to enter into human history as one of us, in order to restore our broken relationship with God. The core Christian ideas of incarnation and atonement affirm that we matter to God, that we are sufficiently important to God to motivate this great drama of solidarity, restoration, and redemption. (We considered this point earlier in relation to C. S. Lewis’s sermon about God diving into the world to save humanity; see “Explaining Significance: Narrating the Incarnation” in chap. 3.) To be created in the image of God is a privilege, yet it is a still greater privilege to be redeemed by God. As John Donne put this in one of his Holy Sonnets:
’Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.
Once more, the apologist is called on to explore how best to express and communicate such ideas to a wider audience. What analogies might be used to illuminate these issues? What stories might be told to help communicate the points at issue?
Purpose: Why Am I Here?
Many people regard the search for personal and communal authenticity and fulfillment as being of central and critical importance. The idea that Christianity both articulates and enables such fulfillment was present from its outset. Christianity presented itself not as an enemy of Judaism (within which it initially emerged) but as representing its climax and fulfillment. Christ’s declaration in the Sermon on the Mount was widely seen as a manifesto of this position: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt. 5:17 NIV).
Yet Christianity rapidly established itself in Roman and Greek culture in the late first century, so that its relationship with Judaism gradually came to be seen as of diminishing relevance. Many early Christian writers presented Christianity as the fulfillment of the classic human quest for wisdom and highlighted the way in which Christianity resonated with themes in the writings of philosophers such as Plato and Plotinus. Other early Christian writers located the significance of Christianity at a more existential level.
For Augustine of Hippo, Christianity offered a vision of a God who was able to fulfill the deepest longings of the human heart. This is expressed in his famous prayer: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.” The fundamental theme here is that human beings have some built-in longing to relate to God (an idea often articulated in terms of bearing the “image of God”), so that finding and embracing God is thus about becoming what we are meant to be and experiencing joy and peace in doing so. It is through embracing and entering the Christian narrative that we find purpose.
As might be expected, this theme is found throughout C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. The Chronicles of Narnia resonate deeply with the basic human intuition that our own story is part of something grander—which, once grasped, allows us to see our situation in a new and more meaningful way. A veil is lifted, or a door is opened, so that we enter a new realm. Our own story is now seen to be part of a much bigger story, which helps us both to understand how we fit into a greater scheme of things and to discover and value the difference we can make. Lewis deftly shows how individual narratives acquire both value and purpose through becoming part of a greater narrative. Each character advances the story of Narnia in his or her own distinct way, thus becoming part of an ongoing and unfolding story that discloses and affirms each character’s own distinct purpose.
One of the more disturbing implications of atheist interpretations of the theory of evolution is that we are here by accident, the outcome of a cosmic happenstance. This conclusion is not, it must be stressed, demanded by evolutionary biology itself; it is the outcome of the fusion of the basic themes of evolutionary biology with an aggressive and dogmatic atheism. Yet it is an unsettling thought, even for many atheists who profess to believe it. Some, of course, argue that its metaphysical austerity is an indicator of its truth. When I was an atheist myself, I took a certain pride in believing in such grim and bleak ideas, seeing it as a badge of intellectual courage and integrity. I would have echoed Steven Weinberg’s view that the natural sciences disclose a meaningless universe: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”
Bleakness, however, can hardly be considered to be a reliable indicator of truth. The Christian narrative makes a counterassertion: God is the heart’s true desire, the goal of our longings, and the fulfiller of our deepest aspirations. The philosopher Pascal thus saw human longing as a pointer to our true goal:
What else does this longing and helplessness proclaim, but that there was once in each person a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? We try to fill this in vain with everything around us, seeking in things that are not there the help we cannot find in those that are there. Yet none can change things, because this infinite abyss can only be filled with something that is infinite and unchanging—in other words, by God himself. God alone is our true good.
The Christian narrative provides a rich and deeply satisfying answer to the profound questions that we ask ourselves about the meaning of life. The Christian tradition has developed many ways of expressing this belief. The “chief end” of human existence, according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism (1648), is “to enjoy God,” while giving God glory. The Christian narrative thus gives us a sense of purpose, allowing us to see how we fit into a greater picture of reality and can play a meaningful role in advancing it. It allows us to see ourselves as created by God in such a way that we find joy and fulfillment in relating to God.
The apologist thus has a rich range of narrative resources, above all stories of how individuals have found purpose in life and the difference that this has made to them. Some of the material here may be helpful in taking these matters further; each apologist, however, is best advised to develop her own range of resources as she develops her ministry.
Agency: Can I Make a Difference?
Finally, we need to consider an important yet often neglected question: Can I make a difference? Or am I so insignificant and powerless that I might as well not be here? Or are we, as Richard Dawkins declares, “robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”? The capacity to choose to make a difference is seen by many people as integral to their quest for meaning and purpose. If I cannot choose to make a difference, I might as well not be here. The issue is that of empowerment. Do we have what it takes to make a difference? Or is this something we need to be enabled to do, drawing on something that lies beyond us in doing so?
Michael Horton uses a helpful analogy in reflecting on the Christian “meganarrative,” suggesting that believers “are no longer spectators but are actually included in the cast” of this drama. The point to appreciate here is that through faith Christian believers become part of God’s unfolding story. We must think of ourselves as graciously invited to become part of this cast and thus being made capable of undertaking roles of real importance in developing God’s story, no matter how insignificant these might appear from a purely human perspective. It is within this narrative that our real identity emerges and develops.
To have faith is thus to accept the invitation to step inside this story-shaped world, which both transforms our understanding of our place in the physical world of our habitation and brings about a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17) as we are transformed by grace. We now see ourselves as wayfarers passing through this world, assured of our citizenship and right of abode in the renewed and transformed reality that we call “heaven.” While knowing that we are frail, wounded, and broken, we also know that we are under the care of a healing and restoring God. We know that we do not travel on our own, but in the company of a journeying God who shepherds us through life, remaining with us and being there for us even when we pass through the “valley of the shadow of death” (Ps. 23:4 KJV).
The Christian narrative helps us grasp that human nature is damaged and wounded by sin and not able to achieve its full potential unaided. It is a point made throughout the New Testament, particularly in the writings of Paul: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Rom. 7:18–19). Paul was convinced that he was trapped, unable to break free from the prison of his own limitations and weaknesses. What could be done? In the end, Paul found his answer: “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom. 7:24–25).
This theme was subsequently developed by Augustine of Hippo, who was fully alert to the problem of human weakness, fragility, and brokenness. For Augustine, human beings are damaged by sin, which is like a hereditary disease, passed down from one generation to another, that weakens humanity and cannot be cured by human agency. Christ is the divine physician, by whose “wounds we are healed” (Isa. 53:5 NIV). We are thus healed by the grace of God, so that our minds may recognize God and our wills may respond to the divine offer of grace.
Or, to change the image, sin is like a power that holds us captive and from whose grip we are unable to break free by ourselves. The human free will is captivated by the power of sin and may be liberated only by grace. Christ is thus seen as the liberator, the source of the grace that breaks the power of sin. Or again, sin is a type of guilt or moral impurity that is passed down from one generation to another. Christ thus comes to bring forgiveness and pardon. Using such images, Augustine builds a powerful depiction of human nature being weakened, impoverished, and trapped by sin—but healed and liberated by grace. A Christian account of human agency thus recognizes the importance of seeking to attain virtue, while setting the question of human agency within the dialectic of sin and grace.
Yet some will rightly raise a question here. Does not the notion of divine grace subvert both the idea of human agency and the moral basis of the pursuit of virtue? In a careful and thoughtful reflection on this point, N. T. Wright argues for a virtue ethic that is “generated and sustained by grace,” within which human agency is seen as enabled by grace. He thus excludes “any suggestion that the ‘virtue’ we are going to talk about is something that ‘we do’ through self-effort.” God’s grace enables us to become the people we are meant to be, so that “our journey is not one of achievement but of implementation, not of unaided goodness but of unmerited grace.” Wright sums up this narrative approach as follows: “The Christian teaching and practice of virtue, then, can be understood in terms of the life that is lived within the story whose goal, whose telos, is that complete, redeemed, renewed and perfected human life. . . . Love is not our duty; it is our destiny.”
There is an interesting parallel here with Karl Marx asserting the historical inevitability of socialism while still affirming the important role of individual socialists in bringing this about. Human agency was not abolished nor subverted by the inevitability of this goal; rather, the inevitability of this goal meant that human agents could commit to this political struggle in hope, knowing that their commitment was not in vain.
Although it is inevitable that a socialist revolution will come, it is not inevitable how long it will take for it to come, nor how painful its course will be. It may therefore be rational for revolutionaries to dedicate themselves to the socialist movement, so that they will be in a position to shorten, and to reduce the severity, of the “birth pangs” of socialism.
There are, of course, problems with Marx’s approach, not least in that the “inevitability” of socialism now seems indefensible. It is certainly possible to argue that moral agents can act rationally and responsibly, even when their actions are undertaken on behalf of a goal whose achievement they believe to be inevitable. However, it is questionable that the inevitability of this goal being achieved makes it moral or even appropriate to work for such a goal.
Wright, however, does not see the inevitability of the Christian telos as a justification for human agency; rather, he locates this within an eschatological framework. It is the anticipation in the present of what is hoped for in the future. By setting human agency within a Pauline narrative framework of present grace and future hope, Wright avoids the difficulties Marx encountered. Paul’s concept of the renewal of the mind (Rom. 12:2) thus opens the way to transformed moral behavior through transformed ways of thinking. The Christian believer is not a passive beholder of another’s actions but rather has become an active agent in God’s world.
In this chapter, we have considered four core elements of the human understanding of “meaning” and reflected on how they connect with the Christian metanarrative, noting in particular how this narrative is intrinsically capable of generating and justifying such concepts of meaning. They are not imposed upon this narrative but emerge from within it. Each of the four elements of meaning considered in this section is likely to resonate with different individuals, to different extents. Yet this is the outcome of the richness of the Christian “grand story,” which an apologist should be able to connect with the individual needs and concerns of different audiences, rather than offering a generalized approach lacking any particularization.