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Meaning – in a meaningless age
It seems that mankind has an incessant quest for meaning – the French, I’m told, look for meaning in love, Italians seek it in song, and Greeks in olives and hummus. As for us, we Kiwis want to find meaning in financial security.
History also bears witness to this endless quest. Starting with the Enlightenment, people thought ultimate meaning could be found in knowledge. Then we had modernists, who sought it in science and rational thought. Now we have postmodernists, who haven’t found it in rational thought so they seek meaning in community. Flitting among all these “spirits of the ages,” we have the politicians and religions promising meaning in various mixtures of the same ideals, and a few others as well. But what a pointless quest it is when true and real meaning is staring us in the face the whole time.
Meaning in our own age?
Since we live in this age, let me dwell on postmodernism for a moment longer before getting to my point. Postmodernism is a big, yucky, 25-cent word whose name tells you nothing about what it means except that it is an ideal that developed after “modernism.” At the risk of being simplistic, I will define postmodernism as “the quest for meaning in our relativist age.”
With such a simple definition, postmodernism often seems very confusing – partly because of its starting assumptions. For example, postmodernism assumes that everything is relative, that society is fragmented into groups, that there is no agreement on the answers, that therefore you can’t communicate to someone who doesn’t share your way of thinking (your paradigm), so therefore truth is pointless outside of like-minded groups of people. Furthermore, “truth” is different for each group of people. Toleration is paramount: nobody can possibly be wrong (they just belong to a different paradigm and don’t think like you do). These are what I call the starting assumptions.
All of these ideas are pretty much what our culture thinks. Our teens and twenties certainly think this way, as do many of those in their thirties. All these ideas are accepted as norms under the word postmodernism – more as initial assumptions, than as part of the ideal. They are all just a statement of where we as a culture are at.
Against this cultural background, postmodernism proposes a solution to help us in the quest for meaning. Its solution is to form communities. Communities, that is, of like-minded people. If you are surrounded by people who accept your way of looking at things, you have a fighting chance of actually communicating something to them. As a group, you’ll regard your common way of thinking as “truth” and you may be able to build on it, forming something useful. This group contains people you can work with.
To be fair, it’s not a bad starting point when, by definition, you don’t have anywhere to start, and nowhere to go. Let’s face it: that’s the state we’re in.
Meaning: a simulation or reality?
I’m not merely trying to present the culture we are in. I’m saying all of this to show that we’re still stuck in that pointless, age-old exercise of searching for meaning. And why is it pointless? Because the answer is staring us in the face.
Someone once wisely said “Know thyself.” And he was right, but he only got half-way there. In order to know ourselves, we have to see ourselves in perspective. Where can we stand to see and know ourselves rightly? This knowledge of the whole is called the creator-creature distinction. Only by knowing God can we know ourselves. Only He gives a perspective that contains real meaning, and sheds light on the path of life. He has written, “I am the light of the world.”
This is the opposite solution to postmodernism. Postmodernism recommends that we simulate meaning by isolating ourselves in tiny communities so that we can agree with each other and work together. God’s Word provides real meaning, real knowledge, and real truth. When we know who we are from the Grand Master’s perspective, what we do will take on a whole new world of usefulness and meaning.
Christianity is not just one of the religious ideals mentioned earlier. It is not even one of the many like-minded paradigms of postmodernism. Its distinguishing mark is that we didn’t think it up. Instead, it has been handed down to us. We can’t do a bit of it. It is free. We can reject it with do-it-yourself pride, or accept it with humility.
Our culture wallows in a paradigm of despair. People everywhere are beginning to realize how meaningless their lives really are. Perhaps this diagnosis is the first step toward the solution.
The bottom line is this: Christianity brings meaning in a meaningless age.
But you weren’t reading this to get meaning, were you?