The Good Life: Part 5
More Than a Cultural Problem
We’ve been talking, in this series, about a crisis. We’ve named what the culture’s best and brightest are seeing in men. We have watched Solomon, the man who tried every remedy the ancient world could offer, document his results in Ecclesiastes. We’ve introduced Jesus as the philosopher of the good life, the one in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden. And we have begun to sketch what a comprehensive Christian life actually looks like: not a religious compartment added to an otherwise secular existence, but a whole way of seeing, knowing, being, and doing.
But there’s something we haven’t yet named directly. Something that sits beneath the cultural crisis, beneath the statistics on male disengagement, beneath the failure of every secular prescription we examined in the early posts of this series. Something the cultural observers are circling without quite reaching, because their framework doesn’t give them the language for it.
The problem is not finally a cultural problem. It’s a spiritual one. It doesn’t stop at the symptoms. It goes all the way to the source.
Before we can talk honestly about the good life and how to find it, we need to talk honestly about what sin has done to the men who are looking for it. Not to pile on. Not to condemn. But because you can’t treat a wound you refuse to name accurately, and because the Christian diagnosis of the human condition is the only one that reaches the actual depth of what is broken.
What We Were Before We Were This
The story begins, as every honest account of what is wrong must begin, with what was right.
In the beginning, God made human beings in his own image. That phrase, imago Dei, is worth pausing over longer than we usually do. To be made in the image of God isn’t simply a poetic way of saying that human beings are special. It’s a description of origin, design, and relationship. We were made from someone, for someone, and like someone. There was a source, a purpose, and a resemblance built into us at the deepest level.
That original design carried with it an ordering of loves. God first. Neighbor genuinely. Self rightly. Creation wisely. Every human desire, rightly ordered, flowing toward its proper object, producing the integrated life for which we were made. The image was not merely intellectual. It was relational, moral, affective – the whole person, oriented rightly, at rest in the One who made us.
And then came the fall.
Genesis 3 isn’t a story about a piece of fruit. It’s the story of a catastrophic reorientation of the human person. The serpent’s temptation was precisely an offer to reorder the loves: to place self at the center, to make one’s own judgment sovereign, to reach for a wisdom that bypassed the wisdom of God. And Adam and Eve took it.
What sin introduced into the human person is not primarily a behavioral problem. It’s a structural one. The image of God in us wasn’t destroyed; human beings retain their dignity, their rationality, their moral capacity, their longing. But it was fractured. The ordering of loves was inverted. The self moved to the center. God was displaced from his proper place. And every desire, every drive, every longing, still real, still pointing somewhere, was now bent toward the wrong objects.
This is what the church has always called original sin, and it’s far more comprehensive than most men’s understanding of Christianity has allowed them to see.
What Augustine Saw
Augustine understood this from the inside. He spent the first thirty-three years of his life in the condition we are describing, a man of extraordinary intelligence and genuine longing, with his loves badly disordered and no framework that could tell him why nothing he reached for would hold.
He tried philosophy. Brilliant minds around him offered sophisticated frameworks for the good life, and they helped, a little, for a while. He tried pleasure. He tried the approval of brilliant peers. He tried a spiritual system that promised knowledge. Each thing he placed his weight on eventually shifted beneath him.
When he finally came to Christ and looked back across those years, he gave the Christian tradition one of its most precise, honest, and prayerful sentences we’ve referenced before: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” But in his Confessions he went further than this famous line. He described sin as precisely the inversion of the right ordering of loves, what he called the ordo amoris. When we love the right things in the wrong order, or the wrong things as though they were the right ones, the whole structure of the person becomes disordered. You aren’t missing an ingredient. You are oriented in the wrong direction.
This is why achievement doesn’t finally satisfy. Achievement is good, but it was never designed to be the object of a man’s deepest love. This is why relationships that are genuinely precious still leave a residue of longing. Relationships are good, but no other person was designed to bear the weight of a man’s ultimate hope. This is why purpose and meaning, even when genuinely found, still feel insufficient at three in the morning when the house is quiet. Purpose is real, but it was never meant to be its own foundation.
Every good thing a man loves is genuinely good. The disorder is in making any of them ultimate. And the disorder is not another bad habit to be corrected. It’s the condition in which every man is born, and it will not yield to self-improvement, because the self doing the improving is the very thing that needs to be reoriented.
What Thomas à Kempis Said About the Mirror
Thomas à Kempis, a fifteenth-century monk who wrote one of the most widely read Christian books after the Bible itself, opened The Imitation of Christ with a sentence that still gets our attention: “What doth it profit thee to enter into deep discussion concerning the Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility?”
He wasn’t dismissing knowledge. He was naming something a man who reads widely and thinks carefully about himself is particularly vulnerable to: the illusion that knowing about himself is the same as knowing himself, or that self-knowledge is the solution to what’s wrong with him.
Men today have more self-knowledge tools available than any generation in history. Personality assessments, therapy, coaches, journaling frameworks, psychological categories for every pattern of behavior. And it’s not that these things are worthless. Honest self-knowledge is a good thing.
But Thomas was pointing at something deeper. The problem is not that a man doesn’t know enough about himself. The problem is the nature of what he finds when he looks. He finds a will bent toward self. He finds loves disordered. He finds a gap between what he knows he should be and what he actually is that no amount of self-awareness can close, because the gap isn’t an information problem. It’s a sin problem. And sin doesn’t yield to insight. It requires redemption.
Thomas’s prescription wasn’t more sophisticated self-examination. It was the imitation of Christ. Not as a technique, not as a self-improvement strategy, but as the reorientation of the whole person toward the one whose image we bear and whose life we were made to reflect. “What doth it profit thee to discourse profoundly of the Trinity, if thou be void of humility?” Knowledge of God, not merely knowledge of self, is what reorients the disordered man.
The Wound That Self-Help Cannot Reach
This is the precise point at which every secular framework, however perceptive, runs out of road.
The cultural analysts we referenced in the early posts of this series aren’t wrong about the symptoms. Men are purposeless, isolated, adrift, hungry for something they can’t name. Many of the observations are accurate. But the secular diagnosis stops at the symptoms because its framework doesn’t include the disease. It sees the disordered loves but can’t (or won’t) name the inversion. It sees the gap between what men are and what they sense they should be but can’t name the fall that created it. It sees the restlessness but can’t identify the One for whom the restless heart was made.
The secular prescription therefore operates at the level of rearranging the furniture in a house whose foundation is compromised. Better habits, clearer purpose, stronger community, these are genuinely good things. But they are improvements to a structure that needs more than improvement. They are good answers to the wrong question.
The right question is not: what does this man need to do differently? The right question is: what has been done to this man, and what can undo it?
And that question has only one answer. Not a program. Not a framework. A person. The one who, as Paul writes to the Corinthians, has become for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption (1 Corinthians 1:30). The one who doesn’t merely offer a better way to order the loves but who, by his Spirit, begins the slow and gracious work of reordering them from the inside. The one who doesn’t merely describe the image of God in which we were made but is himself the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15), the one who shows us what the undamaged original looked like and who, through union with him, begins to restore what the fall fractured.
This is not therapy. It isn’t self-improvement. It’s salvation. It’s new life in Christ. And it reaches depths that nothing else in the world has ever reached.
Head, Heart, Hands
Head: Augustine described sin as the inversion of the right ordering of loves – God first, then everything else in its proper place. Where do you see that inversion most clearly in your own life? What have you been loving as ultimate that was never designed to bear that weight?
Heart: Thomas à Kempis said that self-knowledge without the knowledge of God profits nothing. Reflect on that honestly. Is there an area of your life where you’ve been using self-awareness as a substitute for genuine surrender? Where has insight felt like progress without anything actually changing?
Hands: Read Genesis 3 this week, not as a theological case study but as a man reading his own biography. Ask one question as you go: where do I recognize myself in this story?
This Week
Spend fifteen minutes reading 1 Corinthians 1:26-31 slowly. Let Paul’s description of what Christ has become for us, (wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption), serve as a diagnosis of precisely what the fall took and what grace restores.
This Month
Begin reading the first chapter of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. It’s short. Read it throughout the month and ask: what is he seeing that I’ve been avoiding?
A Closing Prayer
Lord, we’ve spent a long time looking at the symptoms of what’s wrong with us, in our culture, in our generation, in our own lives. We’ve been willing to say that something is off. We’ve been less willing to name what it is. So we confess it now, plainly: the problem is not our circumstances or our upbringing or our culture, though all of those are real. The problem is what sin has done to us. Our loves have been disordered. The image in which we were made has been fractured. We have lived with self at the center where you belong. We cannot fix this by trying harder or knowing ourselves better. We need what only you can provide. Reorder our loves. Repair your image in us. Move us toward genuine repentance, trust, and restoration. Begin in us the work that only redemption can accomplish. In the name of the One who is himself the image of the invisible God, and who is making us new. Amen.
- Christianity is practical because it is true.
- Christianity is practical because it works.
- Christianity is practical because it was meant to be put into practice.
Soli Deo Gloria
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