Oxfam, Prosperity Gospel and the Meaning of Life

Whilst in London recently, a good friend of mine raised an important and interesting question: what is the meaning of life? His answer, with which i have an enormous amount of sympathy, is that there is none, that life is meaningless. But rather than being something that causes pain and existential angst, he (and I) saw it as something profoundly liberating and empowering, for if meaning is to exist at all we must create, and in that lies a challenge, a spark for creativity, and a mandate for innovation. I agreed with my friend’s suggestions, and developed them in my own way, modelling my own understanding of how I adopt an innovation of meaning.

I suggested that the meaning of life was to learn to know oneself, and to be the person that you are, whoever it is. Through a process of continual discovery, humans become themselves.

I will fill out these comments a little more.

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I consider myself to be a Christian, though many Christians have deep problems with my understanding of faith being labelled ‘Christianity’. Why, then, as someone who considers life to be essentially meaningless, and that meaning must be created rather than simply absorbed from its legitimate source outside of the self, do I adhere to a particular religious tradition?

The answer is quite simple, and results from a simple matter of fact: Christianity is the understanding of reality that I am most acquainted with (having spent rather a lot of time in churches, gone to a faith school, studied Christian theology for 4 years and lived in a ‘Christian’ country all my life). I see doctrine as, in some sense, providing a narrative in which to live – the half-written pages of a book that inform and shape the writing of the other half as I live the doctrine out. Christianity is about living the story, and using the historic resources of others who have lived the story to inform one’s own journey. Through this living, contextualised within the doctrinal and scriptural traditions of the Church, one learns to become oneself.

My understanding, I suggested, can be placed in Christian jargon (ie, given a symbolic representation using the language and conceptuality of Christian tradition) through the use of concepts of humanity being made in the image of God – the task being to discover and engage with this inward godliness.

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A further part of my answer talked about the process of discovering who one is through giving of oneself. I will use three images to explore this a little.

1. The Prosperity Gospel

The prosperity Gospel is a rather wicked teaching that suggests that as people give (usually to televangelists or already wealthy churches) they will receive financial blessing from God as a result. A few passages from scripture are used to offer some legitimacy to this position.

2. Oxfam

Oxfam have a new slogan as part of their ‘Be Humankind’ branding package: ‘Get Rich Quick. Give.’

3. The Crucifixion of Christ

Christ’s death models the principle of finding one’s identity through self-giving and self-sacrifice, rather than simply receiving and taking from others. Christians throughout history have found liberation and freedom in commitment to this pattern of giving; and when placed in Christian cosmology, in which Christ gives himself ‘for us’, people have committed themselves to a response of giving. This is found in what I think is one of the most searching verses of Scripture, Galatians 2:19b-20:

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Committing oneself to the pattern of Christ’s self-giving results from the narrative of Christ’s death being for the benefit of others, and one responding to this be enjoining oneself with the crucified Christ, in order that others may benefit from this commitment to self-giving.

In this sense the prosperity Gospel has something right: through giving of ourselves we receive. Oxfam’s slogan gets this about right, I feel – or at least, rather better than those Christians who talk of it. The Christians advocating this position construe giving and receiving in narrow, overly financial terms: financial giving is a means of acquiring further financial wealth. Perhaps, though, suggesting that we may discover ourselves through the process of giving rather than simply receiving enacts the reciprocity drama in far more accurate and far more interesting terms than the prosperity bunch.

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In conclusion, the meaning of life is that there is no ultimate meaning that exists independently of our creation of it. My created meaning is one of finding oneself and being oneself, and the context of religious tradition may be a helpful means of achieving this. Of particular importance is the notion of finding oneself through giving of oneself – enacted through the death of Christ, prophetically taught by Oxfam, and wildly misunderstood by prosperity Christians.