Partners, Not Puppets

Read Psalm 138

I recently read a book by Michael Schur called How to Be Perfect. Schur was the principal writer of The Good Place, a TV show that, if you’ve seen it, you know it combines hilarious comedy with speculative moral philosophy in a remarkably creative way, and if you haven’t seen it, stop reading this reflection immediately, go to Netflix (subscribe if you have to!), and start watching it from the beginning. When you come up for air after helplessly binging several episodes, you’ll thank me.

Schur’s book is a more in-depth version of the themes he explores on The Good Place. He discusses the “big three”: Aristotle’s virtue ethics, the deontology of Immanuel Kant, and utilitarianism as championed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. He employs these three schools of ethical thought to decide the correct course of action when it comes to things like whether to tell your friend her new shirt is ugly or not, or whether to take your shopping cart back to the rack or leave it on the parking lot. Along the way he brings in other approaches, such as consequentialism and contractualism, to explore these and more serious moral quandaries.

As I read Schur’s section on existentialism, I thought of a line from Psalm 138, and something clicked in my head. In verse 8 the psalmist writes, “The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me.” Kind of a run-of-the-mill observation by biblical standards, but utterly preposterous to a hard-core existentialist like Jean-Paul Sartre. He was a strict materialist and believed human beings have no “props”—no God, no religion, not even any conventional moral standards. We are all alone in the universe, which sounds pretty bleak, but Sartre says that very aloneness makes for ultimate freedom. The free-agent human, liberated from all illusions and delusions of outside powers at work in her life, is utterly free to create her own reality in the existential moment of choice. This aloneness also forces us to take responsibility for the consequences of the choices we make.

I’m no hard-core existentialist by any means, but there is an uncompromising, “no excuses” element to it that appeals to me. Some people read a verse like “[God] will fulfill [God’s] purpose for me” and conclude that everything is in God’s hands, and all we have to do is to go along for the ride. It’s this attitude that results in the unconscionable slogan, “Everything happens for a reason,” which gets dragged out at the most inopportune times, such as moments of deep grief or the aftermath of a tragedy. My response to this claptrap is, “If everything happens for a reason, somebody’s got some serious explaining to do.” To say that God will fulfill God’s purpose for me does not relieve me from my responsibility in that existential moment of choice. Nobody is pulling my strings, no matter how much I might desire such a cop-out from time to time.

I believe God does have a purpose for me, but I view that purpose in a cooperative way. God and I are in a kind of partnership (at God’s invitation, mind you) in which my choices are essential. I can facilitate God’s purposes, or I can thwart them, depending on my decisions. Other people’s choices also come into play. I may feel strongly that such-and-such is God’s will for me, but if somebody else has some say in the matter, that will can still be thwarted. In my theological and philosophical understanding, God does not force God’s will upon any of us. God is in the business of persuasion, not coercion, leaving us the freedom to cooperate or disrupt.

Such freedom can be scary. It’s more comforting to think that everything is in God’s hands and everything happens for a(n ultimately good) reason. But God respects us enough to treat us as partners, not puppets. It makes life into an adventure, and it gives our choices an added “oomph” that they would not have were we mere marionettes. So I say give God the glory—by making genuine choices in partnership with God—and together weave a tapestry that portrays God’s purpose for your life.

Grace and peace,
bob