No announcements found.No announcements found.No announcements found.No announcements found.“Death creates an economy that makes life precious. One of the ways of naming that preciousness is friendship.”
Stanley Hauerwas
Stanley Hauerwas
Some Remarks on the Nature of Happiness
D. A. Hagner
The problem of a definition
Happiness is not easy to define. The trouble with many available definitions is that they reflect a very shallow notion of happiness, frequently mirroring with what I call “Hollywood happiness,” that focuses on wealth, luxury, power, beauty, youth, sexual gratification, and a highly exotic notion of romantic love. At the centre of it all seems to be pleasure. Increasingly psychologists and social commentators are seeking to explode the myth that these things lead to happiness and to show that there are plenty of people with these things who are unhappy and plenty of people without them who are happy. Some recent psychological studies have provided us with a scientific basis to conclude something we suspected all along, namely that money cannot buy happiness.
There is, in short, an awful lot of confusion about what happiness is.
The complexities of happiness
| Dr. David Myers, a psychologist who has studied happiness, defines it
as “subjective well-being” or “emotional well-being.” He further
identifies this state as “a pervasive sense that life is good,” “an
ongoing perception that this time of one’s life, or even life as a
whole, is fulfilling, meaningful, and pleasant” (Pursuit of Happiness, 23). He also refers to “feelings of happiness” and “satisfaction with life.” But how many people are really happy? Most readers would regard the question as too simple. Happy in what sense? By what definition? The only reasonable answer would have to be framed in a complicated balance of yeses and nos. |
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“If you feel happy, you are happy--that’s all we mean by the term,” according to happiness researcher, Jonathan Freedman (cited by Myers in Pursuit of Happiness, 27). It does seem clear that attitudes are very important to the experience of happiness. But are they in themselves sufficient to produce happiness? Attitudes are after all insubstantial. If we are unhappy, can we fool ourselves into thinking we are happy? Truly bad news cannot be turned around just by thinking differently.
The Bible and happiness
When all else fails, we could I suppose turn to the Bible. The shocker, of course, is that the Bible doesn’t seem especially interested in happiness. It speaks in a more elevated manner using words such as “blessedness” and “joy.” In the main blessedness designates the person who knows and fears God, who considers the poor and does justice and righteousness. Blessedness is for the most part thus directed away from the self, and is the product of being able to participate in what God has done and is doing in the world.
When the Bible speaks of being ‘blessed’, it can indeed be translated “happy,” as long as it is realized that it refers not to a mundane happiness, but to a deep, inner joy on the part of those who have experienced the fulfillment of the promised salvation. This joy emanates from the objective reality of what God is doing. It is ‘the future experienced as joy in the present,’ as Conzelmann describes it.
Herein lies perhaps the main difference between happiness in the New Testament (NT) and happiness in recent psychological research. The latter focuses on the subjective realm−that is, happiness as mainly the result of feelings, attitudes and thinking rather than objective realities. But in the salvation announced in the NT, God has changed things objectively, and in a way that has fundamentally and forever altered the structure of reality as we have known and experienced it.
The problem of the notion of happiness
As we all know, there remains the significant problem that we clearly live in a world full of injustice, violence, suffering and conflict. Believer or not, each of us eventually feels the sting of disappointment, the pain of loss and the wound that each brings. How does this affect our discussion of the joy that is meant to be the experience of the Christian life? Well, the NT will not give up the appropriateness of deep joy for the present time frame. As the book of Acts shows, the early church was characterized by a wonderful joy, and this was despite persecution, hardship, suffering, and death.
The experience of salvation with the deep joy that necessarily comes with it does not and cannot, at least in the present time frame, bring about an unalloyed happiness. And yet the Christian experience is frequently reported as one of deep joy that circumstances cannot take away.
Dr. Myers has nicely shown that “happiness depends less on our objective circumstances than on how we respond to them” (The Pursuit of Happiness, 27). On this matter his conclusions square well with the teaching of the NT. Hollywood happiness clearly neither satisfies nor endures.
I would argue that there can be no happiness worth calling happiness in the end that lacks a transcendent dimension that can give meaning to the present and security in the future beyond death. Participation in salvation, as the Bible portrays it, has the potential for a profound impact on how we assess the small ups and downs in life. To participate in the salvation that God has wrought, and to occupy ourselves with loving God and loving others−perhaps here lies the real secret of happiness.
Professor Donald Hagner is a renowned New Testament Scholar
He taught at Fuller Theological Seminary in the United States
Among his many writings, is the Word Biblical Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (in two volumes)
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