Dr. Heinrich Emil Brunner (1889-1966), a Swiss Reformed theologian, published his Gifford Lectures in Christianity and Civilisation (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, NY, 1948 & 1949). Chapter V in Brunner’s first lecture series (The Foundations) is titled: The Problem of Meaning. “If we ask what is the most urgent and burning problem engaging Western man in our time, the answer cannot be in doubt. What disquiets and torments him most is the problem of the meaning of life.” (page 60) For many young adults today, purposeful work is their meaning of life. The transition from the teenage years into adulthood can be the most stressful rather than the most hopeful period of life. Some find no meaning in life. “Mankind experiences the dawning of the fearful and disastrous thought that life probably has no meaning at all.” (page 68) When humans do not seek an answer to the meaning of life, “human life is about to perish in a sub-human, animal existence.” (page 62)
Brunner defines meaning as “totality, wholeness.” He uses the example of different letters forming a word that has meaning while the individual letters contain no meaning. This concept is what the ancient Greeks named “Logos, implying by that word what we call meaning.” (page 60) Greeks found meaning in human reasoning, the highest form of life. Brunner then explains that human reasoning brought destruction and evil into the world. “We need not bother any more about this tempting but illusory and fantastic idea of universal progress. History itself has given judgement on it. The negative powers of human nature, which threaten to destroy all the meaning of life, even the bare physical existence of humanity, have shown themselves with such naked brutality that the idea of universal progress as the solution of the problem of meaning is utterly discredited.” (pages 72-73)
Brunner then reverts back to the Greek word logos and places it within a Christian context of the meaning of life:
“According to Christian faith, the meaning of life is not in man – neither in his rational nature nor in his rational or cultural work – but comes to him as a divine gift, as the Logos, which is the revealed Word, and as that Word which is the self-revealing God. Meaning, then, comes from transcendence, out of the mystery of divine being, the Logos, that (as the fourth Gospel says) ‘was in the bosom of the Father.’ This mystery does not remain in its transcendence; it reveals itself, it communicates itself. This Logos is the self-communicating Love of God, which in itself is personal being: the Son of Love. It is in Him, through Him, that human life receives its true humanity, its goodness and truth. … Man’s life has no meaning in itself and in his own creation, but has to receive it.” (page 71)
God gave humans the ability to reason for a purpose: to understand God’s purpose for our lives and to be good stewards of God’s creation. Human reasoning is a good gift but can be an instrument of evil. “Human reason as such, spiritual activity as such, can be both good and evil, godlike and diabolical. There is a godlike and there is a godless use of reason. Therefore there is a possibility of culture being according to God, and also of its being quite godless. The possession of reason, of intellectual activity as such, is no guarantee of truth, goodness, and true humanity. The principle of the truly human, of goodness and truth is higher than reason.” (page 69)
It is up to humankind to decide how to use God’s gift of reason to find meaning. Brunner believes that humans should not look within for the meaning of life, but to receive it as a gift from God. “True reason would be that which receives the divine, not that which thinks it has the divine in itself, or that it is, in its depth, the divine. True reason, then, would be only that which does not think it has the meaning of existence in itself but is ready to receive it from God.” (page 70)
I believe that Brunner’s post world war writings are even more applicable to our post-modern world. “Christian faith has become, as it has never been since the first centuries of the Christian era, a matter of personal decision. … In our time the frontier line is the alternative to a philosophy of despair, hidden in a number of more or less subtle evasions of the problem. Apart from these disguises, the question placed before man in our time is quite simple: Despair and pay the price of despair, or believe the Gospel and pay the price of believing!” (page 73)
