6. The fulfilment of our aspirations
Chapter 6
THE FULFILMENT OF OUR ASPIRATIONS
The sixth reason why I am a Christian can be simply stated. It is this: all human beings have a number of basic aspirations or longings, which (I am persuaded) only Jesus Christ can fulfil. This is not just a theory; it is a claim validated by millions of Christians, among whom I think and hope I could include myself. There is a hunger in the human heart which none but Christ can satisfy. There is a thirst which none but he can quench. There is an inner emptiness which none but he can fill. As Augustine wrote at the very beginning of his Confessions, ‘You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.’1
But, as we investigate this claim, two immediate objections are likely to be raised. The first is that Jesus Christ is evidently a crutch. ‘He’s fine’, people say, ‘for lame dogs who need a helping hand, but for able-bodied, strong-minded people who can manage on their own, he is entirely superfluous.’
I begin my response by agreeing with the criticism. Jesus Christ is indeed a crutch for the lame, to help us walk upright, just as he is also medicine for the spiritually sick, bread for the hungry and water for the thirsty. We do not deny this; it is perfectly true. But then all human beings are lame, sick, hungry and thirsty. The only difference between us is not that some are needy, while others are not. It is rather that some know and acknowledge their need, while others either don’t through ignorance or won’t through pride.
The second objection that is sometimes raised is that Jesus Christ is evidently a fiction of our own mind. Some people put it like this: ‘The belief that Jesus Christ meets our human needs gives the game away. He’s nothing more than a figment of your imagination. You feel unloved and unwanted; so you create your own heavenly father figure. You feel spiritually hungry; so you invent Jesus Christ as the bread of life.’
My response to this second objection is that the argument lacks logic. Does the fact that food satisfies our physical hunger make us suspicious of food? Does the fact that love brings us a sense of well-being rouse our suspicions about love? Then why should the fact that Christ fulfils our human aspirations rouse our suspicions about Christ? No, the correspondence between our aspirations and their fulfilment in Christ is due not to a fantasy of our own minds, but to a reality that God has established. C. S. Lewis put it with his customary clarity: ‘Our life-long nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, our desire to be on the inside of a door which we have always seen from the outside: this is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.’2
Having considered the two commonest objections which people raise to our claim that Christ fulfils our human aspirations, we are ready to look more deeply into the claim itself. And this leads us to the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the Colossians: ‘For in Christ all the fulness of the Deity lives in bodily form’ (verse 9); ‘and you have been given fulness in Christ’ (verse 10).
Common to both these astonishing statements (the first about Christ, the second about us) are the word ‘fulness’ and the expression ‘in Christ’. In Christ God’s fulness dwells permanently, and in Christ (united to him) we ourselves have come to fulness of life. Everything essential to the divine being is in Christ, and everything essential to our human being is in us if we are in Christ. To be a Christian, then, is not to be an oddity, condemned to perpetual eccentricity; it is rather to be truly and fully human, to have come to ‘fulness’. Conversely, to reject Christ is to become to some degree subhuman, because it is to forfeit experiences indispensable to authentic humanness.
What, then, are these experiences, these human longings? My thesis is that human beings have three basic aspirations that only Jesus Christ can fulfil.
1. The Quest for Transcendence
‘Transcendence’, until fairly recently, has been a rather pedantic word, little used and little understood, largely restricted to institutions of theological learning, which distinguish between ‘transcendence’ (meaning ‘God above us’) and ‘immanence’ (meaning ‘God with and among us’). Nowadays, however, particularly because of the craze for transcendental meditation, everybody has some idea what transcendence means. The quest for transcendence is the search for a Reality that is above and beyond the material order. It arises from the conviction that Reality cannot be confined to a test tube or smeared on a slide and subjected to microscopic examination. There is something else, something more, something awesome, which no scientific instrument is able to apprehend or measure.
One author who has given eloquent expression to this contemporary loss of the transcendent is Theodore Roszak, whose statements are all the more striking because he is not a professing Christian. His best-known book, following The Making of a Counter Culture (1968), is probably Where the Wasteland Ends (1972), which is intriguingly subtitled ‘Politics and Transcendence in a Post-Industrial Society’. He bemoans what he calls the ‘coca-colonization of the world’.3 We are suffering today, he says, from ‘a psychic claustrophobia within the scientific worldview’,4 in which the human spirit cannot breathe. Roszak goes on to castigate science (I think he means pseudo-science) for its reductionist assault on human life and its arrogant claim to be able to explain everything. He speaks of its ‘debunking spirit’5 and its ‘undoing of the mysteries’.6 The materialistic world of objective science is not nearly ‘spacious enough’ for the human spirit.7 Without transcendence ‘the person shrivels’.8
Whether Roszak realized it or not, he was only echoing Jesus who, quoting Deuteronomy, said that human beings do ‘not live on bread alone’ (Deuteronomy 8:3; Matthew 4:4). In other words, we are more than material bodies needing food; we are spiritual beings needing God, needing transcendence.
Several other examples could be given of this disillusion with secularism and this loss of transcendence. The distinguished sociologist Peter Berger has offered the ‘simple hypothesis’ that the current occult wave ‘is to be understood as resulting from the repression of transcendence in modern consciousness’.9 Richard North, environment correspondent of The Independent, confesses that ‘an awful lot of us just need to worship something...we are all falling in love with the environment as an extension to and in lieu of having fallen out of love with God’.10 More surprising still is A. N. Wilson. Although he affirms that he has now ‘discarded any formal religious allegiance’, which he dismisses as ‘that moribund combination of superstition and deceit’, he nevertheless acknowledges that he still has ‘strong religious impulses within himself’, and that he experiences ‘feelings of nameless humility before the mystery of things’.11
Yet more striking than these individual confessions is the overthrow of Marxism. Trevor Beeson has written that ‘the basic doctrines of Communism have neither convinced the minds, nor satisfied the emotions, of the intelligentsia or of the proletariat’.12 What Solzhenitsyn called the ‘Communist steamroller’13 was unable to crush the human spirit and its quest for transcendence.
So wherever transcendence has been lost, people are longing for its recovery. They seek it through mind-expanding drugs and the so-called ‘higher consciousness’, through the speculative fantasies of science fiction, through music and the other arts, through sex (which Malcolm Muggeridge used to call ‘the mysticism of the materialist’), through yoga and other expressions of eastern religion.
Most remarkable of all recent religious trends is perhaps the rise of the New Age movement in the West. It is a bizarre assortment of diverse beliefs, including religion and science, physics and metaphysics, ancient pantheism and evolutionary optimism, astrology, spiritism, reincarnation, ecology and alternative medicine. David Spangler, one of the movement’s leaders, is the author of Emergence: The Rebirth of the Sacred.14 In it he writes that ‘from a very early age’ he had himself been ‘aware of an extra dimension’ to the world around him, which, as he grew older, he came to identify as ‘a sacred or transcendental dimension’. ‘The rebirth of the sense of the sacred’, he says, ‘is at the heart of the new age.’15
Our Christian reaction to the New Age phenomenon, and to every other expression of the quest for transcendence, should (it seems to me) be one of understanding. For we should be able to grasp what is happening. When the apostle Paul stood before the philosophers in Athens and responded to the extreme religiosity of its citizens, he described them as reaching out for God (Acts 17:27), groping for their Creator in the darkness.
Christians believe, moreover, that this is a fundamental human aspiration that only Jesus Christ can fulfil for, though sin alienates us from God, Christ died for our sins in order to reconcile us to God (1 Peter 3:18). And, once reconciled to God through Christ, everything changes. We walk each day with God. We live in his presence. It becomes natural to listen to his voice as he speaks to us through the Bible, and it becomes equally natural to speak to him in prayer. For basic to our Christian discipleship is the cultivation of a personal relationship with God. God becomes the great reality of our lives.
Then, on the Lord’s Day (as the New Testament calls Sunday), together we bow down before him in that mixture of awe, love, wonder and joy that we call worship. For as we come to meet him, he comes to meet us. In fulfilment of the promise of Jesus, that whenever even only two or three have met in his name, he is there among them (Matthew 18:20). He also makes himself known to us both through his Word (as it is read and expounded) and through Holy Communion (the bread and wine dramatizing visibly the promise of his forgiveness). Indeed, Christian public worship is the peak and pinnacle of Christian experience. Not always, of course. Sometimes church services are ritual without reality. But Jesus condemned this kind of formalism. Quoting Isaiah the prophet (29:13) he said: ‘These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me’ (Mark 7:6). But when worship is real, our hearts and minds are transported beyond time and space to join the whole church on earth and in heaven in the worship of God. Then we know what Jacob meant when he said, ‘Surely the LORD is in this place’, and sometimes unbelievers coming in will fall down and worship with us, saying, ‘God is really among you!’ (Genesis 28:16; 1 Corinthians 14:24–25).
To me it is a great tragedy that many modern men and women who are seeking transcendence turn to drugs, sex, yoga, cults and the New Age instead of to Christ and his church, in whose worship services true transcendence should always be experienced, and a close encounter with the living God enjoyed.
2. The Quest for Significance
There is much in contemporary society that not only smothers our sense of transcendence but also diminishes (and even destroys) our sense of personal significance, our belief that life has any meaning. Three tendencies may be mentioned.
First, there is the effect of technology. Technology can be liberating, of course, in so far as it frees people from domestic or industrial drudgery. But it can also be dreadfully dehumanizing, as men and women feel themselves to be no longer persons but things, ‘identified not by a “proper name” but by a serial number punched on a card [or, as we would say, converted into a barcode] that has been designed to travel through the entrails of a computer’.16
Secondly, there is scientific reductionism. Some scientists from different disciplines have argued that a human being is nothing but an animal (Desmond Morris’s ‘naked ape’, to be precise), or nothing but a machine, programmed to make automatic responses to external stimuli. It was statements like these that prompted the late Professor Donald MacKay to popularize the expression ‘nothing buttery’ as an explanation of what is meant by ‘reductionism’, and to protest against every tendency to reduce human beings to a level lower than the fully personal.
To be sure, our brain is a machine, a highly complex mechanism. And our anatomy and physiology are those of an animal. But this is not a complete account of our humanness. There is more to us than a body and a brain. It is when people affirm that we are ‘nothing but’ this or that, that they make a serious and dangerous mistake.
Thirdly, existentialism has the effect of diminishing people’s sense of significance. Radical existentialists may be said to differ from humanists in general by their resolve to take their atheism seriously and to face its terrible consequences. As we saw in chapter 4, because (in their view) God is dead, everything else has died with him. Because there is no God, there are no values or ideals either, no moral laws or standards, no purposes or meanings. And, although I exist, there is yet nothing that gives me or my existence any significance, except perhaps my decision to seek the courage to be. Meaning is found only in despising my own meaninglessness. There is no other way to authenticate myself.
Bleakly heroic as this philosophy may sound, there must be very few people able to perform the conjuring trick of pretending to have significance when they know they have none. For significance is basic to survival.
This is what Viktor Frankl found when, as a young man, he spent three years in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He noticed that the inmates most likely to survive their ordeal were those ‘who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfil’.17 He quotes Nietzsche’s assertion that ‘he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how’.18
Later Frankl became Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology in the University of Vienna and founded the so-called ‘Third Viennese School of Psychiatry’. He postulated that, in addition to Freud’s ‘will to pleasure’ and Adler’s ‘will to power’, human beings have a ‘will to meaning’.19 Indeed, ‘the striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man’.20
So he developed what he called ‘logotherapy’, using logos to mean neither ‘word’ nor ‘reason’ but ‘meaning’. ‘The mass neurosis of the present time’, he wrote, is ‘the existential vacuum’,21 that is, the loss of a sense that life is meaningful. He would sometimes ask his patients, ‘Why don’t you commit suicide?’ (an extraordinary question for a doctor to ask!). They would reply that there was something (perhaps their work, marriage or family) that made their life worthwhile for them. Professor Frankl would then build on this.
Meaninglessness leads to boredom, alcoholism, juvenile delinquency and suicide. Commenting on Viktor Frankl’s work, Arthur Koestler wrote:
It is an inherent tendency in man to reach out for meanings to fulfil and for values to actualize...Thousands and thousands of young students are exposed to an indoctrination...which denies the existence of values. The result is a world-wide phenomenon – more and more patients are crowding our clinics with the complaint of an inner emptiness, the sense of a total and ultimate meaninglessness of life.22
According to Emile Durkheim, in his classic study of suicide, the greatest number of suicides are caused by anomie, which could be rendered ‘normlessness’ or ‘meaninglessness’. And ‘anomic’ suicide takes place when somebody either has no goal in life or pursues an unattainable goal, whether power, success or prestige. ‘No human being can be happy or even exist unless his needs are sufficiently proportioned to his means.’23
Now I venture to claim that Jesus Christ can fulfil this second basic human aspiration. He gives us a sense of personal significance, because he tells us who we are. To begin with, he took over from the Old Testament that great affirmation that we have already considered
God created man
in his own image,
in the image of God
he created him;
male and female
he created them.
(Genesis 1:27)
That is to say, as we saw in chapter 4, the Creator endowed us with a cluster of rational, moral, social and spiritual faculties that make us like God and unlike the animals. Human beings are God-like beings and the divine image in us, although it has been marred, has not been destroyed. Hence Jesus spoke of our value. He said that we were of much more value than a sheep (Matthew 12:12) or than many sparrows (Matthew 10:31; Luke 12:24).
He not only taught it; he exhibited it. His whole mission demonstrated the value he placed on people. He treated everybody with respect – women and men, children and adults, the sinner and the righteous. For he was the good shepherd, he said, who missed only one lost sheep and risked danger and death to find it. So he went to the cross, deliberately and voluntarily, to lay down his life for his sheep. Nothing can convince us of our personal significance like the cross of Christ. As Archbishop William Temple put it, ‘my worth is what I am worth to God, and that is a marvellous great deal, for Christ died for me’.24
Christian teaching on the dignity and worth of human beings is of the utmost importance today, not only for our own self-image and self-respect, but also for the welfare of society. When human beings are devalued, everything in society tends to turn sour. There is no freedom, no dignity, no carefree joy. Human life seems not worth living, because it is scarcely human any longer. But when human beings are valued as persons, because of their intrinsic worth, everything changes. Why? Because people matter. Because every man, woman and child has worth and significance as a human being made in God’s image and likeness.
3. The Quest for Community
The technocratic society, which diminishes and even destroys transcendence and significance, is destructive of human community as well. Ours is an era of social disintegration, especially in the West. People find it increasingly difficult to relate to one another or to find love in a loveless world. I choose three very different people as witnesses to this.
It seems appropriate to begin with Bertrand Russell, since his rejection of Christianity was the springboard for this book. In the Prologue to his autobiography he wrote with moving candour:
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy...I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible loneliness in which one’s shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss...25
My second witness is Mother Teresa. Born in Yugoslavia of Albanian parents, she left for India when she was only seventeen years old. Then in 1948, after about twenty years of teaching, she gave up this profession in order to serve the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, and became an Indian citizen. So India was her home for well over sixty years, and her voice and vision were those of the Third World. This is what she wrote about the West:
People today are hungry for love, for understanding love, which is...the only answer to loneliness and great poverty. That is why we [sc. the sisters and brothers of her order] are able to go to countries like England and America and Australia, where there is no hunger for bread. But there people are suffering from terrible loneliness, terrible despair, terrible hatred, feeling unwanted, feeling helpless, feeling hopeless. They have forgotten how to smile, they have forgotten the beauty of the human touch. They are forgetting what is human love...26
I remember that, when I first read this assessment of the western world, I was a bit indignant and considered it exaggerated. But I have since changed my mind. I think it is accurate, at least as a generalization.
Woody Allen is my third witness. For all his acclaimed brilliance as an author, director and actor, he seems never to have found either himself or anybody else. In his film Manhattan (1979) he quips that he thinks people ought to ‘mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics’, but he appears unable to follow his own precept. He confesses that all his films ‘deal with that greatest of all difficulties – love relationships. Everybody encounters that. People are either in love, about to fall in love, on the way out of love, looking for love or a way to avoid it’.27 His biographer ends his portrait of him with these words: ‘He is struggling, as we are surely struggling, to find the strength to found a life upon a love. As the character says in Hannah and Her Sisters, “Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the only answer...”’28
Here then are three people of very different backgrounds, beliefs, temperaments and experiences, who nevertheless agree about the paramount importance of love. They speak for the human race. We all know instinctively that love is indispensable to our humanness. Love is what life is all about.
So people are seeking it everywhere. At least since the 1960s, some have been breaking away from western individualism and experimenting with communal styles of living. Others are trying to replace the nuclear family (typical in the West) with the extended family (traditional for centuries in Asia and Africa). Yet others are repudiating the age-long institutions of marriage and family in an attempt (vain and foolish, Christians believe) to find in this way the freedom and spontaneity of love. Everybody seems to be searching for genuine community and the authentic relationships of love. For ‘love, love changes everything’, as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s lyric runs in Aspects of Love.
And our sincere Christian claim is that only Jesus Christ can fulfil this third basic human aspiration, for love. To be sure, I am not suggesting that love is absent outside the Christian community, since, there too, love binds parents and children, brothers and sisters, husband and wife. But there is a yet deeper dimension of love that flows from Christ. As the apostle John wrote in his first letter: ‘this is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us’. Again, ‘this is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us’ (1 John 3:16; 4:10).
And although, alas! there are many Christian communities and fellowships that fall far short of the divine ideal, there are others that beautifully approximate to it. They enable us to affirm that God’s purpose is not just to save isolated individuals, and so perpetuate our loneliness, but rather to build a new society, a new family, even a new human race, that lives a new life and a new lifestyle. Bishop Stephen Neill expressed this well:
Within the fellowship of those who are bound together by personal loyalty to Jesus Christ, the relationship of love reaches an intimacy and intensity unknown elsewhere. Friendship between the friends of Jesus of Nazareth is unlike any other friendship. This ought to be normal experience within the Christian community...where it is experienced, especially across the barriers of race, nationality and language, it is one of the most convincing evidences of the continuing activity of Jesus among men.29
Here, then, is the threefold quest on which all human beings are engaged. Although they may not articulate it in this way, I think we may say that in looking for transcendence they are seeking God, in looking for significance they are seeking themselves, and in looking for community they are seeking their neighbour. For this is humankind’s universal search – for God, for neighbour and for ourselves.
Moreover, it is our Christian claim (confident I know, humble I hope) that those who seek will find – in Christ and in his new community. For he died to reconcile us to God; he demonstrated through his life and death our fundamental worth; and he introduces us into his new society. That he thus fulfils our human aspirations, and so brings us to fulness of life, is a further reason why I am a Christian.