WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?
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Well, here it goes. This one’s a doozy. It’s the proverbial “big question.” It’s one of those questions where the stakes are high (your life) and the scope is vast (everything). Where can we even begin?
When asking a question about Christianity, the best rule of thumb is to start with Jesus, so that’s what we’ll do. Now, when Jesus talked about the kind of life that is truly worth wanting, the kind of world truly worth hoping for, the sort of existence that we could truly describe a flourishing, he tended to talk about “the kingdom of God.” He didn’t mean a particular territory that is God’s in the same way that the United Kingdom could be said to be Elizabeth II’s. Instead, “kingdom of God” names creaturely (meaning part of the creation or created world)—and most especially human—life as God intends it to be.
So that’s a serious candidate for a Christian answer to the question of the meaning of life: “the kingdom of God.” But this isn’t a totally satisfying answer. It’s still pretty abstract. What does it actually look like? How does it cash out?
To help get at least a little more specific, we can break down the “life” in the “meaning of life” question into three aspects, each of which has its own sub-question. First, most human beings are in some sense agents, actors in the world. Our lives don’t just happen to us. We lead them. (That’s not to say we have unlimited freedom to shape our lives however we wish. It’s just to say that we are in some important sense responsible for at least some of our actions and traits.) A meaningful life will most likely be one that is, among other things, led well. The question of what makes life meaningful should include the question, “What does it mean to lead our lives well?”
Second, our lives are fundamentally—in fact, overwhelmingly—formed by the circumstances we encounter and that befall us. We are never pure doers; we are always “done to.” Our lives are shaped, often misshaped, by what happens to us and the character of the places and times we find ourselves in. So it is relevant to ask, “What does it mean for our lives to go well?” (1)
Third, sitting somewhere between our agency (our ability to lead our lives) and our circumstances (things that happen to us) but not reducible to either are affects (feelings and emotions) that attend our experiences. So we can ask, “What does a good or meaningful life feel like?”
Three aspects of life and three corresponding questions to help us get a better grip on the question of the meaning of life:
Agency – what does it mean to lead our lives well?
Circumstance – what does it mean for lives to go well?
Affect – how does flourishing feel?
Now, how does all that interact with what we were saying about the kingdom of God?
Jesus taught about the kingdom of God quite a lot, and that teaching usually took the form of short stories or sketches called “parables.” We could learn a lot about a Christian response to the question of the meaning of life by digging into those parables, but for a compact description that nevertheless touches on all three aspects (agency, circumstance, and affect), it’s better to turn to a letter that the Apostle Paul, one of the first people to spread the good news about Jesus around the Roman Empire and the first major Christian “thinker,” wrote to Christians in Rome.
In the course of that letter Paul writes, “The kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17). Each of the key terms in this sentence is an apt shorthand for characteristic Christian ways of addressing each aspect of life and its meaning:
Righteousness (being morally upright before God) answers the question of a life led well. It is a broad term that sums up all right action and character through reference to God’s character as well as God’s ways of relating to creatures, especially in making and keeping promises. The fundamental characteristic of righteousness from a Christian perspective is love. Jesus says that the whole law of God follows from the commands to love God wholeheartedly and love your neighbor (which is to say, anyone your life can touch) as yourself (Matthew 22:34–40). Paul says that love is “the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10).
Peace designates what it means for lives to go well. More than mere absence of violence, peace entails a whole array of flourishing relationships, from intimate to all-encompassing—between people and God, between individual people, between groups, between humans and the rest of creation.
Joy names the characteristic emotion of flourishing life and a dimension of such positive emotions as contentment and gratitude. Joy in this sense is not simply an exceptionally happy feeling. It is the emotional attunement between a person and some feature of the world (or even the world as a whole) experienced as a blessing. (2)
It is significant that Paul qualifies righteousness, peace, and joy with “in the Holy Spirit.” God (the Spirit is God) does not relate to the kingdom of God as a distant lawgiver but a life giving “environment” in which all creatures live and which, like air we breathe, lives in us. Such presence of God dwelling in and among us is an essential feature of God’s kingdom.
So, what is the meaning of life? The kingdom of God, understood as righteousness, peace, and joy whose source is the Spirit, the Giver of Life.
Wait a minute, though—that’s all well and good as far as it goes. But does it really go that far? Can we seriously talk about peace in a world that isn’t even close to justice? How can joy be the meaning of life when there’s so much cause for sorrow—or when depression and anxiety sap every hope of seeing the world as a blessing? And righteousness seems either to be much more than we could pull off, or else to suggest a shallow arrogance about our own goodness. Do we really want to exclude suffering, struggle, pain, fragility, and failure from the meaning of life?
In short, no. Christians have generally hoped for a fulfillment of life’s meaning that is yet to come, perhaps after death or at “the end of world.” But this isn’t the much-derided “pie in the sky by and by.” At least, it doesn’t have to be.
The fullness of the kingdom of God is “not yet,” but its reality still bears on us here and now. Indeed, in Jesus it has already entered the world. There are reflections and anticipations of its fullness even now. But they are transposed and take on a different tone in the world as we know it and live in it, with all its pain and injustice and brokenness. This kind of disjuncture between life as it ought to be and life as it is, underscores in red a key feature of meaningful life we were describing. Living the life of the kingdom isn’t just enjoying the life of the kingdom, but striving for such a life — for ourselves, for our near and distant neighbors, for the entire world. We can have meaningful lives in a Christian sense only in the unity of enjoying and striving. That’s true under the condition wholeness, the world’s and our own. And that’s especially true under the condition of brokeness, our own and the world’s.
In this context—our context—the love of a life led in righteousness is (not always, but all too often) a love that suffers. It is the love that makes one willing “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). It is love that extends even to enemies (Matthew 5:44).
Likewise, peace is only ever partial, relative, and unstable. And it is often not in our hands to have and enjoy peace. It is, however, in our hands to be peacemakers.
Joy, for its part, cannot be the only way that a good, meaningful life feels because the goodness of the world is marred. Even when we do not have immediate cause for sorrow ourselves, it would be callous and unloving simply to rejoice even as our neighbors weep. Flourishing lives are thus those that both “rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15). What’s more, joy in a world such as ours becomes, often enough, an act of resistance against a death-dealing world. (3)
The meaning of life, on this kind of Christian account of things, is not at bottom the meaning of a tragedy. But it does not depend on a naïve denial of how things actually are. Meaning, here and now, dwells precisely in the tension of anticipating a yet-greater meaning to come.
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In May of 1373, an Englishwoman named Julian experienced a series of visions that she believed came from God. For fifteen years, she waited and wondered and puzzled over what they meant. And then she received an answer:
'Do you want to know what your Lord meant? Know well that love was what he meant. Who showed you this? Love. What did he show? Love. Why did he show it to you? For love. Hold fast to this and you will know and understand more of the same; but you will never understand or know from it anything else for all eternity.'
“This,” she wrote, “is how I was taught that our Lord's meaning was love. And I saw quite certainly in this and in everything that God loved us before he made us; and his love has never diminished and never shall. And all his works were done in this love; and in this love he has made everything for our profit; and in this love our life is everlasting.” (4)
We have discussed the kingdom of God as “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.” But not all the terms have an equal footing. Julian’s answer is a prime example of the priority that love holds in many Christian answers to the question of the meaning of life. It also points to the fundamental reality that God’s love precedes all that is not God. God’s love comes first. One early Christian leader wrote to a community under his care, “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us” (1 John 4:10). God loved us before creating us, as Julian says. God loved us and so rescued us from Sin and its consequences. God loves us and so draws us into love: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
But the God who first loved us is love (1 John 4:8). God’s love is God’s life. It should be no surprise then that life as a communion of love is God’s aim for creatures.
The fact that God loves us first dramatically shapes the answer to the question of the meaning of life.
There are certainly tasks that fall to us. There are certainly responsibilities. But the meaning of life is not a product or an accomplishment. It doesn’t lie behind life or beyond it. It is not really something other than life at all. The life that flows from and corresponds to the God of love is its own meaning. It is, ultimately, the life of delighted love in a world of love that enjoys the fullness of peace, and precisely because it is love and peace, it is also a life of surpassing joy. But it is also life on the way to that delighted love: A life of love’s arduous work in a world of gone awry, the world of mourning, discord, and unrighteousness.
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As with any question about Christianity, so also with this one: There’s plenty of disagreement. Not all Christians would sign on to how we’ve responded or the approach we’ve taken. Our hope is that the broad strokes of the approach and the response are recognizable as a vision of life that accords with the good news of Jesus Christ.
The “life led well”/”life going well” distinction comes from the Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff.
This is a paraphrase of Miroslav Volf’s definition.
Willie James Jennings, “Gathering Joy,” faith.yale.edu/media/gathering-joy.
Julian of Norwich, Long Text §86, trans. Elizabeth Spearing.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz is Associate Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. His most recent book is The Joy of Humility: The Beginning and End of the Virtues, co-edited with Evan Rosa and Drew Collins, and he appears regularly on the For the Life of the World podcast.
Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and is the Founder and Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. His most recent book, co-authored with Matthew Croasmun, is For the Life of the World: Theology that Makes a Difference.