Summum Bonum

This is an excerpt from Tim Keller's "The Reason For God: Belief in an age of skepticism," which I highly recommend to everyone! If you've ever struggled with your faith (we all have), or wished you knew how to respond to the difficult issues people have with Christianity, Keller's book is very informative and logical, and it will help you to gain greater perspective on why Christianity is really the most logical way of interpreting the world.

In "The Nature of True Virtue," one of the most profound treatises on social ethics ever written, Jonathan Edwards lays out how sin destroys the social fabric. He argues that human society is deeply fragmented when anything but God is our highest love. If our highest goal in life is the good of our family, then, says Edwards, we will tend to care less for other families. If our highest goal is the good of our nation, tribe, or race, then we will tend to be racist or nationalistic. If our ultimate goal in life is our own individual happiness, then we will put our own economic and power interests ahead of those of others. Edwards concludes that only if God is our summum bonum, our ultimate good and life center, will we find our heart drawn out not only to people of all families, races, and classes, but to the whole world in general.

How does this destruction of social relationships flow from the internal effects of sin? If we get our very identity, our sense of worth, from our political position, then politics is not really about politics, it is about us. Through our cause we are getting a self, our worth. That means we must despise and demonize the opposition. If we get our identity from our ethnicity or socioeconomic status, then we have to feel superior to those of other classes and races. If you are profoundly proud of being an open-minded, tolerant soul, you will be extremely indignant toward people you think are bigots. If you are a very moral person, you will feel very superior to people you think are licentious. And so on.

There is no way out of this conundrum. The more we love and identify deeply with our family, our class, our race, or our religion, the harder it is to not feel superior or even hostile to other religions, races, etc. So racism, classism, and sexism are not matters of ignorance or a lack of education. The real culture war is taking place inside our own disordered hearts, wracked by inordinate desires for things that control us, that lead us to feel superior and exclude those without them, and that fail to satisfy us even when we get them.

This is the essence of living a life of worship! Finding our ultimate purpose and self, our summum bonum (latin for "highest good"), in God, leads to our earnest pursuit of him through prayer, his Word, serving, reaching out to the lost, singing his praise, etc.

Now, if I could only fit "summum bonum" into a worship song...

Any ideas?