Wisdom for Cultural Challenges about Human Flourishing
The things we pass every day tend to fade into the wallpaper of life. My Christian elementary school in Wheaton, Illinois had a cornerstone with an inscription: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” (Proverbs 1:7) What I passively absorbed as a child walking by that cornerstone, others actively pursued with patience and perseverance as a way of formation. The school moved to a larger campus a decade ago, and so too the old cornerstone, prominently displayed. It is a physical reminder of the school’s core principles, a list that begins with: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge.”
For many years this familiar proverb remained an unexamined truth for me—more wallpaper than way of life. By adulthood I could testify to its truth from observation. But over the past few years I’ve been reflecting on how it is true. That is what proverbs are supposed to do: they work on us as we work on them. Their meaning grows in us as we grow in our knowledge of God’s word and the world around us. But Proverbs and other wisdom literature don’t just shape us cognitively. Wisdom is a tuning fork that brings our thoughts, our habits, our actions—our whole lives—into resonance with God’s design for us as human beings.
Dislocated from Design
We live in a culture dislocated from that design. At an individual level, this dislocation is manifest in struggles ranging from opioid addiction to gender dysphoria. At a social level, our most heated policy debates involve challenges to truths taught in the first chapters of Genesis, about what it means to be human: we are created, in the image of God, male and female; we are made for each other in marriage, made for right relationship with God, our fellow human beings, creation, and ourselves. A biblical theology of humanity begins in Genesis, and all the Scripture that follows gives us some insight into the subject. Rather than trying to summarize the vast biblical data on anthropology, I will focus on a practical theology of being human, with wisdom as its central idea. I offer it as a preamble or prolegomenon to a deeper biblical and theological exploration of what it means to be human. As preamble, it also forecasts the end for which we undertake such study: a theology of humanity shows us how to be truly human according to God’s design.
This approach grows out of reflecting on the book of Proverbs as a source of wisdom for public life during the challenges of the last year. I heard Wisdom’s urgency as she stands at the crossroads and calls out at the city gates. She sees human lives passing by, dislocated from their created design. She’s urgent about her message for their sake. Wisdom’s relation to God’s character and creation yields unique insight into our human existence and purpose. It offers coherence and meaning that elude so many of us. It shows us how we relate to God, to our neighbors, and to the rest of reality. Proverbs presents wisdom as an active pursuit that ought to engage us continually. It is a deliberate path of formation. Biblical wisdom is the way of true flourishing, and the way to convey true flourishing.
It is worthwhile to consider three ways that wisdom works to sharpen our focus on being human. First, wisdom shapes us to be truly human. Second, wisdom can restore a vision of true human flourishing. Third, wisdom directs our cultural engagement in a society with fragmented ideas about what it means to be human. Christian wisdom beckons a world dislocated from its design back to a flourishing that it cannot generate on its own. Amid cultural challenges to human flourishing, Christian educational institutions can offer wisdom, and, specifically, formation in wisdom. This is a unique and irreplaceable service that the church, institutions of Christian formation, and individual Christians can render to public life.
Wisdom
What is wisdom? Wisdom is a way of life, and it leads to true human flourishing. Wisdom is an organic combination of character and worldview that generates know-how for the here and now. It is correct knowledge properly applied in real-time. The complexity of our cultural moment calls for such discernment. But biblical wisdom also addresses the simple and mundane. To focus on wisdom for the complex but to neglect it for the mundane is one of the mistakes or follies that Proverbs warns against. Wisdom is living well. It brings our character and our discernment about the world into alignment with the way God has made the world for our good and his glory. It is comprehensive in its implications for our lives.
Where is wisdom to be found? True wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord; that is, hearing and embracing the Word of God. Before Scripture becomes the object of our theological investigations of what it means to be human, it needs to shape us as subjects, to be truly human by being rightly related to God. Wisdom is also found in God’s work in creation and providence. Proverbs tells us to consider ants (6:6, 30:25), oxen (14:4), charging bears (28:15), and vomiting dogs (26:11). Each of these show us something about God’s wisdom woven into creation, either by reflecting his design (e.g., how ants and oxen go about their work), or by showing the effects of sin (e.g., angry bears and vomiting dogs). Close observation ingrains the habit of looking for God’s purpose and design in all His works. It forms in us the conviction that we exist in a world of coherence and meaning not chaos and nihilism. Experience teaches us wisdom as well. The weathering of life demands we learn the limits of our temporal nature. These are the contours of our freedom; respecting them allows us to flourish. Wisdom grasps the critical distinction between Creator and creature, and what that implies for a life rightly related to God and the world he has made.
So, wisdom is found in the Word of God, the works of God, and in the weathering of life. One way these three come together is when experience teaches us what John Stott called “double-listening”—i.e., listening to the Word and the world.[1] The habit of hearing God’s Word should make us better listeners, so we hear the aspirations and frustrations of our neighbors. Walking in the way of wisdom gives us opportunity to testify—and not just with our words—to what satisfies deep human longings.
How Does Wisdom Work?
Most proverbs are shorter than the average tweet—and far more weighty. They’re short and concrete in order to stick with us, so that we puzzle over them and ponder how to apply them. Like any puzzle, they force us to look at a problem from multiple angles. Thus the proverb teaches us the habit of looking for the inter-connectedness of reality. It pushes us to see beyond a scatterplot of data points to the patterns that reflect purpose in the world.
Alasdair MacIntyre begins his book After Virtue with a dystopian catastrophic scene. The modern scientific infrastructure has been wiped out. Scientists, laboratories, academic literature and programs—everything is gone. Shards of information are all that remain of science. A later generation that lacks the knowledge to properly connect these remnants nevertheless goes about the business of what it calls “science,” oblivious to the fact that it is missing the framework that made it all cohere as a system that reflected reality. This parable introduces MacIntyre’s diagnosis of incoherent modern moral thought, which exists as “fragments of a conceptual scheme.”[2] In other words, contemporary society’s moments of moral consciousness no longer share a consistent framework of “first principles.” Public life today is characterized by conflicting moral impulses, particularly about what it means to be human. Public rhetoric pledges allegiance to human dignity, but policy undermines it by sanctioning abortion and physician-assisted suicide, for example.
In an age professing concern for the whole person, we flounder in addressing both the material and immaterial aspects of human existence. On the one hand, antipoverty policy has generally reduced human material needs while neglecting the breakdown of relationships that coincide with material hardship. On the other hand, gender identity policy proposals insist that a person’s most fundamental identity is disembodied and immaterial.
Cultural Challenges
Policy is connected to the personal. Journalist Abigail Shrier recently documented the sudden rise in the number of American adolescent females identifying as transgender. She calls it an “epidemic” that is affecting many girls who never questioned their biological sex before encountering “trans-influencers” and joining friends in declaring themselves transgender.[3] What Shrier is documenting are extreme responses to a couple of very basic questions that everyone faces: Who am I? How do I fit?
These are questions that we all ask in one form or another throughout life. We agonize about them as adolescents. At some point, we reach a degree of confidence and comfort about our answers, only to have that disrupted by the next life change—and on it goes. Much of life is wrestling, consciously or subconsciously, with how to be comfortable in one’s own skin.
Lieutenant Dan, the character in the novel and subsequent movie Forrest Gump, wrestled mightily in this way. In the movie, Gary Sinise’s Lt. Dan hangs on a shrimp boat mast in a violent storm, verbally raging against nature and the Almighty. A Vietnam veteran, he’d lost both legs in an ambush, rescued by the heroic Forrest Gump. Rather than grateful, Lt. Dan is bitter that he was not left to die in the fight. He is living what he considers a “useless” life without his legs. In the storm, Lt. Dan looks for a showdown with God—and he gets it. The storm is a turning point. In the next scene, calm has settled on the water—and on Lt. Dan. He finally thanks Forrest for saving his life, flashes a smile, jumps out of the boat, and floats peacefully on the water. As Forrest tells us, “He made his peace with God.”[4]
The elements of this placid scene communicate the holistic peace of existing in right relationship—with God, with self, others, and the created world. This is the substance of a life of wisdom and a life of true flourishing. These restored and harmonious relationships overcome humanity’s dislocation from design. Wisdom responds to the questions of who am I? and How do I fit? with answers that are true to reality and satisfying to our souls. Who am I? is a question that tries to make sense of individual existence and how different aspects of our nature and experience relate. How do I fit? is a question that looks to the social level to sort out how to live together. These questions are central to human flourishing.
Lt. Dan’s story reminds us that we never have the luxury of answering these questions in the abstract. They’re always embedded in the context of life experiences, which—like his—can be full of hardship, suffering, and bitterness. They’re deeply personal. And we always encounter them amid prevailing cultural winds.
As for today’s cultural wind patterns, two are particularly powerful in dislocating human flourishing. The first are the concepts of control and autonomy. Taken to the extreme, these ideas have legitimized abortion and physician-assisted suicide. The desire for control has also propelled the transhumanist defiance of the limits of human nature, e.g., through cryogenic preservation with the goal of revival one day. A second set of cultural winds emphasize material aspects (as in antipoverty policy) or immaterial aspects (as in gender identity policy) to the neglect of the other. These unbalanced priorities fragment our view of human nature. We could list other examples in these categories. But if these two currents dislocate our understanding of flourishing as individuals and society, how can wisdom restore it?
Wisdom Restores Flourishing
Wisdom can reestablish a vision of true human flourishing in at least two ways: first, by affirming the dignity as well as the limits of human identity, and second, by focusing cultural engagement on doing justice to that identity.
Human Identity: Dignity and Limits
To be born is to have limits. We are not here because of our own agency. There is a givenness to our existence. Many of the facts of our lives are settled long before we can take responsibility for our actions. Part of true flourishing is personal reconciliation to the reality of this givenness. The drama of life plays out in the tension between what is fixed and what is free in our human nature. All of us experience this conflict regularly. But for some people at some times, this tension between what is fixed and what is free becomes a crisis of identity. These deep personal struggles can become policy challenges when they inspire demands for public approval or material support of the rejection of created existence’s givenness, e.g., the push for mandated provision of gender transition medical treatments.
On a universal level, the tension from our human limits is nowhere more acute than in the prospect of our own death. Dying and death are outside our control. It is this loss of control that has provoked the push for physician-assisted suicide. The fear of losing autonomy and becoming a burden to loved ones are the top reasons given for seeking a medically aided end of life. Physician-assisted suicide denies the givenness of dying and death by seizing control and hastening them. Transhumanism, on the other hand, strives to delay death indefinitely. It seeks to circumvent the dying process, at a minimum. Physician-assisted suicide and the transhumanist quest for immortality are sparring with God as they bid for control over life’s limits.
In sharp contrast to this, the wise person makes peace with God about the boundaries of dying and death. Birth does not merely bring limits. We are also created for transcendence, a transcendence that, despite our sin, is a reality, because our Creator has become our Redeemer. This gives us a whole new approach to death. It allows us to embrace a theology that perceives aging as a “sign and preparation for Sabbath rest.”[5] “Sabbath rest” is the phrase that the book of Hebrews uses to describe eternal existence in glory. Sabbath rest is the ultimate calling for those united to Christ, and aging is preparation for that calling. This outlook can see the good in accepting limits because it keeps its sights set on transcendence. Recognizing these boundaries makes us value our days differently. It encourages us to prioritize and make commitments to people and projects in consideration of eternity.
The ESV “Daily Bible Reading Plan” has Psalm 90 scheduled for December 31. This especially poignant psalm for the passing of the year reckons with the passing of our lives. It also ties this practice of reckoning with our limits back to wisdom: “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” (90:12) The psalm begins where wisdom begins: by acknowledging our Creator. “Lord you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. You return man to dust and say, “Return, O children of man!” (90:1-3) Accepting our created dependence includes acknowledging not only God’s control of the number of our days but also our capacity for joy during struggle. “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil.” (90:14-15)
This kind of formation in wisdom shapes us and our cultural engagement in ways that will have public impact. One of the most significant things we can do to counter the cultural challenges mentioned above is to age well. Each day that we grow older with grace and peace, each day we cultivate communities that see aging as a sign and preparation for Sabbath rest, is a day that shows how to live with limits while looking forward to the reality of transcending them.
Across the life cycle, every long struggle with disease or disability, every refusal to abort a child with Down Syndrome or other genetic imperfections becomes another opportunity to tell the old, old story, the story of creation groaning under the effects of sin and death, beginning to be renewed through Christ’s redemption, and headed for glory. This is what makes Joni Eareckson Tada’s ministry so powerful. She has spent her life singing a new song about living with disability and longing for heaven. That is a song we all need to learn.
In the days ahead, as technology advances, we will be pressed to discern and describe more and more particularly what makes us human. Theology, philosophy, and the sciences have important work to do here, as do the humanities and the arts.[6] But perhaps most powerful of all, we need to embody what it means to be truly human, especially in the context of community.
Cultural Engagement and the Character of Community
The character of a community is formed by its view of the human person. Our cultural engagement ought to call on our society to live up to the high view of human dignity that it professes and to accept the limits of being human that it increasingly denies. It is essential that we recognize the material and spiritual dimensions of human life and how they interact in complex ways in many social challenges today. To be human is to be relational, and true human flourishing depends on right relationships, with God, self, others, and the world. What we believe about the image of God in humanity determines the character of community as well.
Herman Bavinck, a contemporary of Abraham Kuyper, was a systematic theologian whose work on the doctrine of humanity, and of creation generally, is very helpful. Bavinck emphasized three aspects of the image that show the fullness of the picture we need. First, the whole human person images God. Second, both male and female image God, individually and relationally. Finally, the whole of humanity, around the globe and through all the centuries of human history, images God. “The image of God is much too rich for it to be fully realized in a single human being,” wrote Bavinck. “Only humanity in its entirety … is the fully finished image, the most telling and striking likeness of God.”[7] This has far-reaching implications throughout our culture and across the full range of policy issues.
If our concept of the human person shapes our communities, those communities shape us as persons as well. Yuval Levin, scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, explores the steep decline in Americans’ confidence in institutions, including religious institutions.[8] His investigation is more than academic because institutions teach us the skills we need to pursue shared goals in community—just the kind of habits that seem so out of reach in our politics right now. Levin suggests that one reason for the decline is that the public doesn’t trust that institutions can form people of integrity who will practice what they preach. If religious institutions are going to restore trust, he says they must exhibit “not that they are continuous with the larger culture but that they are capable of addressing its deficiencies — that they can speak with legitimate authority and be counted on to do the work of molding souls and shaping character.”[9] Yet some institutions seem to have abdicated that role and have instead become forums for the expressive individualism found in the broader culture. They have become, in Yuval Levin’s words, “platforms for performance and prominence.”[10]
To the extent this is true of religious institutions, it has created skepticism that they can express truth with authority. Despite these challenges, Levin sees a critical role for religious congregations and organizations in tackling our society’s loss of trust in institutions. That’s because the experience of religious formation is one of the most promising ways to multiply the kind of commitments our society needs to rebuild trust. These are the habits that deliberate formation in wisdom can teach, in ways that will bear fruit at the personal and the policy levels. At the same time, the freedom to continue to play this role in society is increasingly challenged. That is one more reason why we must preserve religious freedom, in addition to the fact that it is a proper policy recognition of the transcendent aspects of human existence.
Conclusion
Wisdom is a path of formation that leads to true flourishing. As such, it ought to shape us, our institutions, and our cultural engagement. Wisdom combines character, worldview, and the skill to act well in current circumstances. It draws discernment from Scripture, creation, and experience about the way God has made the world for our flourishing. We live in a culture experiencing dislocation and fragmentation: the dislocation of autonomy and fragmentation in its view of the human person. Personal and policy challenges emerge as it becomes more and more confusing to answer basic human questions about who am I? and how do I fit? People need answers about individual and social existence that are true to reality and satisfying to the soul.
In relation to this, Christian schools, as institutions committed to formation in wisdom, have two critical tasks. The first is to establish a witness to true human identity that affirms human dignity and accepts temporal limits while aspiring to transcendence. The second task is to focus our cultural engagement on calling our communities to do justice to this understanding of human flourishing. These two aspects—individual identity and society’s reflection of it—also offer a way of organizing our approach to the many topics that deal with anthropology. There is much more work to be done in theology and across the disciplines on what it means to be human. Much of it will in fact need to be interdisciplinary—theology and philosophy working together, for example.
Christian education is uniquely poised to undertake this work because it begins with the conviction of the coherence of all the academic disciplines, and of the coherence of human existence. As a primary step, this conviction must first form us and our institutions. May God’s wisdom shape us so that we faithfully witness to biblical truth about being human.
[1] John Stott, The Contemporary Christian: An Urgent Plea for Double Listening (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1992).
[2] Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2013), 2.
[3] Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2020).
[4] Robert Zemeckis, Forrest Gump (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1994).
[5] Autumn Alcott Ridenour, Sabbath Rest as Vocation: Aging Toward Death (London: T&T Clark, 2018), 47.
[6] One of the first publications of the President’s Council on Bioethics, launched by President George W. Bush in 2001 was a literary anthology on anthropology: Leon Kass, ed., Being Human: Core Readings in the Humanities: Readings from the President's Council on Bioethics (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004).
[7] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation, vol. 2, ed. John Bolt and trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 577.
[8] Yuval Levin, “The Case for Wooden Pews,” Deseret Magazine, 1:1, January/February 2021, 64-73.
[9] Ibid., 66.
[10] Ibid., 69.
JENNIFER PATTERSON
Director of the Institute of Theology and Public Life | Reformed Theological Seminary
This essay was originally delivered as a plenary address at the 2021 IACE Annual Conference.