I love New Years because it is a time of reflection. We recognize a dissonance between who we are and who we want to be. Rather than vagabonds we are pilgrims in pursuit of a goal. We want to change some aspect of our lives for the better, so we strive to accomplish a certain end.
I have been thinking a lot about what it means to have an end goal in life. This stems partly from Immanuel Kant who said that people should never treated “merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” Jesus also spoke of having an end goal by repeatedly referring to a future reality that we should all be working towards and fighting for, namely the kingdom of God. However, rather than try and explicate what our end should be, today I want to discuss three examples of things we often mistake for an end goal.
The first is money. 
As far as I can tell the pursuit of money should never become an end in and of itself. It should always be the means to an end. To better explain, take the practice of filling up your car with gas. We drive to the gas station and “fill ‘er up” to accomplish something else, such as picking up groceries, meeting up with friends, or going to work. And each of those different activities might be an end or a means themselves. We go to work in particular to make money, but we make money in order to live. It is a necessity of life. When we make money an end rather than a means to an end, we will invariably treat people as a means to accomplish our goal of attaining more money. Such a treatment of people is misplaced and wrong.
Secondly, we often place the growth of an organization as an essential end goal. This can be seen easily in business when profit and increased stock prices motivate people to treat others as commodities. Churches as organizations are no exception. Christians often assume that evangelism – the sharing of the story of Jesus – is an end goal to pursue. However, evangelism should always be considered a means to an end. Jesus repeatedly taught that our goal is to love, and when we treat people as objects for conversion we have failed to love them as people. They then become numbers, and “evangelism” morphs into a self-serving enterprise. First and foremost, we are to love; evangelism and marketing should always be a means to that goal.
Lastly, I want to argue that entertainment should also be treated as a means to an end and never as an end itself. This one, I feel, is less cut and dry. For one, I would want to divide entertainment from art, which immediately starts to blur the lines. Music, painting, acting, story and joke-telling, I believe, are all worthy goals to pursue. They, I think, are ways of connecting with that which is beyond us. Further watching TV can often be a time of relaxation or relationship building. But in these examples, entertainment is a means to accomplish something else. Entertainment by itself leads to selfishness and apathy. It does not encourage change, growth, or love but rather stagnation, and so it cannot be an end pursuit.
All in all New Year’s resolutions revolve around questions of “Why am I doing this?”, “What do I want to do instead?”, or perhaps, “Have I mistakenly substituted a means for an end?”
In close, I am curious if you have any critiques of the three examples above. I know they are not airtight arguments, but I am very much open to your thoughts. Or, if other examples of misplaced means come to mind, share them. I am very interested. Most of what we do is a means, and so it is easy to lose our way. However, we must regularly remember our end goal and realign ourselves in the right direction. God bless you in the journey.
January 2, 2012 at 6:46 pm |
Thanks, Nate. Well written. Good reflection. Thanks for your letter about your goal of writing a blog each week. I wonder if writing a blog is “an end” or “a means to an end”? Perhaps the deeper quesstion is to what degree will the blog help you clarify your role in the kingdom of God and develop the priorities of God? What are other reasons for your writing? These are questions with which I am struggling.
Blessings,
Gailyn
January 4, 2012 at 10:05 pm |
This ‘Kant’ have been a bad post if it gave me reason to get out one of my favorite little books ever, St. Augustine’s On Christian Teaching (I’ve heard of it as On Christian Doctrine too.). Book 1 is about 20 pages of pure gold.
To quote my holy African buddy:
“There are some things which are to be enjoyed, some which are to be used, and some whose function is both to be enjoy and use. Those which are to be enjoyed make us happy; those which are to be used assist us and give us a boost, so to speak, as we press on towards our happiness, so that we may reach and hold fast to the things which make us happy. And we, placed as we are among things of both kinds, both enjoy and use them; but if we choose to enjoy things that are to be used, our advance is impeded and sometimes even diverted, and we are held back, or even put off, from attaining things which are to be enjoyed, because we are hamstrung by our love of lower things.
To enjoy something is to hold fast to it in love for its own sake (Comment: A more robust version of Kant’s idea of treating a thing as an end.). To use something is to apply whatever it may be to the purpose of obtaining what you love—if indeed it is something that ought to be loved. The improper use of something should be termed abuse. Suppose we were travelers (Comment: He tells us now the different between, as you put it, a vagabond and a pilgrim.) who could live happily only in our homeland, and because our absence made us unhappy we wished to put an end to our misery and return there: we would need transport by land or sea which we could use to travel to our homeland, the object of our enjoyment. But if we were fascinated by the delights of the journey (Comment: Maybe your idea of ‘entertainment’?) and the actual travelling, we would be perversely enjoying things that we should be using; and we would be reluctant to finish our journey quickly (Comment: And the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.), being ensnared in the wrong kind of pleasure and estranged from the homeland whose pleasures could make us happy. So in this mortal life we are like travelers away from our Lord [2 Corinthians 5:6 Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord.]: if we wish to return to the homeland where we can be happy we must use this world [1 Corinthians 7:31 (The time is short. From now on) those who use the things of the world, (should use them) as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away.]not enjoy it, in order to discern ‘the invisible attributes of God, which are understood through what has been made’ [Romans 1:20] or, in other words, to derive eternal and spiritual value form corporeal and temporal things.”
So far, so good. But after that, Augustine points out my main objection to your post. He says next:
“The things which are to be enjoyed, then are the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the Trinity that consists of them which is a kind of single, supreme thing, shared by all who enjoy it—if indeed it is a thing.”
The great gulf between means and ends is not between animals and humans or humans and angels. The gulf is between our Creator and we created things. The Incarnation complicates this whole issue quite a bit because our merciful and majestic Jesus chose to become a thing and laid down His glory to jiggle around in Mary’s womb. The one end of all things chose this world to be His end on the cross. But we can’t follow Jesus in that. He can make us His end because He Is love. We wouldn’t have ever been created in the first place, according to traditional Christian doctrine, if it weren’t that the Trinity’s unity is a unity of infinite, mutual self-giving that cannot help but overflow. He couldn’t help but give Himself to us in Covenant, Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, and Counsel. We, however, must struggle with the taint of sin and strive for the glory of His face which is our true joy. So when we love others, be they neighbors, friends, family, or even spouses, what we seek is to see God in their beauty and know God by being like Him in giving ourselves to each other. And when they love us, they see God’s face in us and become like God in graciously giving themselves to us. Christian means, like Christ, we above all gave himself to people, Mary, Joseph, the 12, Mary, Martha, Lazarus, the woman at the well…and invited them to make Him their way of life.
As for your specific arguments against idolizing money, organizations, and entertainment, I thought the bit about organizational idolatry, especially the sort churches are prone to, was particularly insightful. If I had to add one tempting end, it would be time. We hoard it like we hoard money and since we have no real use for time (in the Augustinian sense) we end up spending it on the sort of vapid entertainment you object to, which is to say the same thing as we use (again in the Augustinian sense) it for nothing.
Happy New Years!
January 11, 2012 at 4:11 pm |
I found the paragraph about evangelism as a self-serving enterprise to be particularly observant. Well said!