Well-Being and Ontology

Part 8, The Ontological Is Not the Affirmational

Okay, so what has this series been about? What am I chasing?

Well, ever since Hunting Magic Eels, and especially with The Shape of Joy, I’ve been making arguments about the relationship between faith and mental health. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, faith and spirituality have been consistency shown to be positively associated with well-being. As I’ve succinctly put it, God is good for you.

And yet, whenever I’ve made this argument I’ve kicked up some worries.

One worry we’ve already talked about in this series, the well-being of those who don’t believe in either Jesus or God. Happy and flourishing atheists would seem to be a counter example to the claims I’ve made.

In response, I’ve made two arguments in this series. First, I appealed to Maximus the Confessor’s view that all virtue comes from God. And by virtue I don’t want to restrict the conversation to the moral. By virtue we mean arete, the excellences that point us to eudaimonia, the good life. If God is our ontological ground then living with the grain of the universe would be deemed “excellent” and “virtuous.” This is walking in attunement with the Tao, following the sophiological path of Wisdom, and living in integral harmony with the Logos. Basically, any goodness and flourishing we witness, no matter where we find it, is necessarily a participation in God. Joy comes from no other source.

The second argument I’ve made borrows from Karl Rahner’s description of anonymous Christians. Given that God addresses every human person in their inmost reality, everyone has dealings with God. This is true no matter who you are or what you believe. For Rahner, being addressed by God defines what it means to be human. We cannot exist outside this supernatural relation. But this does not imply universalism. We can ignore, repress, or deny God’s self-communication in our innermost being. We can shut our ears to the still small voice speaking within our soul.

Many, though, choose live in relationship with the transcendent call they experience within themselves and permeating the cosmos. Life is sufficed with truth, beauty, and goodness. In the face of our failures and guilt we do not forgive ourselves but experience ourselves as both seen and forgiven. We know our lives to be valuable and meaningful. We express cosmic gratitude for the gift of existence and feel ourselves blessed. We believe love is our highest calling. And where such experiences and convictions have yet to coalesce into propositional belief we are, nevertheless, Christian in our ontological direction and trajectory.

The second worry I’ve encountered is one we’ve yet to talk about in this series, but it’s the concern that has motivated me to write these posts.

Specifically, whenever I’ve expressed the conviction that “God is good for you” I’ve routinely encountered a concern that I am reducing God to the therapeutic. Now, what might this mean, that God is therapeutic, and why is it a worry?

Much of the worry, and I’ve written about this before, comes from Christian Smith’s description of what he calls “moralistic therapeutic deism.” According to Smith, moralistic therapeutic deism has come to be the default creed of many Christian youth. A basic tenet of this creed is that God wants us to be happy. This happiness is achieved by feeling good about yourself. God’s main role in your life, therefore, is “therapeutic.” That is to say, God doesn’t make demands of you and God doesn’t judge. God wants you to feel good about yourself and to help you solve your problems.

The point I’ve raised with Smith is his choice of the word “therapeutic” to capture the worldview he is describing. I think Smith should have chosen a word like “affirmation” rather than “therapeutic.” Medical therapy is about curing disease. And psychotherapy isn’t about affirmation. Psychotherapy involves taking an honest look at your dysfunctional patterns and doing the hard work of getting yourself straightened out. In both cases, medical and psychological, the goal is change, not the acceptance of a diseased status quo.

Still, due to Smith’s coining of the phrase “moralistic therapeutic deism,” great suspicion exists about how we come to use God for self-affirmation and the pursuit of a shallow happiness. So I’ve had to clarify what I mean when I say “God is good for you.” By “good for you” I don’t mean that God traffics in cotton candy and daises, smiling benignly and beneficently upon our every choice and desire. God is good for you, but that goodness flows out of an attunement with our ontological ground. And attunement is different from affirmation. In fact, if you go against the grain of the universe you’re going to harm and injure yourself. That’s a sophiological inevitability. The ontological ground of being doesn’t change in response to our whims. The Tao doesn’t change in response to our preferences. Our preferences must conform to the Tao.

The point here should be obvious. When I say “God is good for you” I’m speaking ontologically rather than therapeutically, as Christian Smith uses that term. Simply put, the ontological is not the affirmational. God is good for us because God is the source of being and our ontological ground.