Purpose

Man's Chief End

Essential to the heart of the Reformation was the honor and glory of God over and against man’s distorted views and perverse behavior. The glory of Christ was revealed from the unleashing of God’s word. Through the preaching of the gospel, hearts were transformed in regeneration, resulting in lives that delighted to please God. Worship as a way of life was recovered.

A century after Luther, the Westminster Assembly gathered the whole of that recovery into a single question and answer. Michael Reeves and Tim Chester call it a neat distillation of “just over a century of Reformation theology.”1 It is the first thing a child in a Reformed home was taught, and it is the shortest summary of the Reformation worldview ever written:

What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.2 The Westminster Shorter CatechismQuestion 1 (1647)

Every phrase in that answer was chosen against something. “Chief end” is singular: man has one purpose, not a ladder of lesser and higher ones. “Glorify God” sets that purpose outside of man altogether. “And to enjoy him” refuses to set God’s glory against man’s happiness. “For ever” joins this life to the next without a purgatorial gap between them. The proofs the Assembly attached tell the same story. For the first clause they gave “whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31) and “of him, and through him, and to him, are all things” (Romans 11:36); for the second, “Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire besides thee” (Psalm 73:25). And the very next question explains where such an answer comes from: the Word of God “is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him.”3 Man’s purpose could only be recovered when the Word was.

The Old Answer

The medieval church also taught that man was made for God, and that his final happiness lay in the vision of God. The difference lay in how that end was reached and when it could be known. The road ran upward by merit. The Council of Trent anathematized anyone who denied that the justified man, by good works “performed by him through the grace of God and the merit of Jesus Christ,” does “truly merit increase of grace, eternal life, and the attainment of that eternal life.”4 The end of man was a prize at the top of the climb, and the higher rungs belonged to those who withdrew from ordinary life. Thomas Aquinas read the story of Mary and Martha as teaching that “the contemplative life is more excellent than the active.”5

On those terms the end could be aimed at but never enjoyed with confidence. When Joan of Arc was tried in 1431, her judges charged her with sin because she said she was as certain of Paradise as if she already possessed it, “seeing that on this earthly journey no pilgrim knows if he is worthy of glory or of punishment.”6 The logic was consistent. If heaven is the reward of a worthiness achieved, no one can be sure of having achieved it, and the enjoyment of God is postponed to a future that may never arrive. Trent insisted that nothing in its doctrine of justification “is derogated from the glory of God”7; the question between Rome and the Reformers was never whether God should be glorified, but whether a system that left the sinner’s hope resting partly on himself could glorify Him as the Giver of everything.

Born First of All for God

The Reformers turned the question around. Writing to Cardinal Sadoleto in 1539, Calvin answered a long and eloquent appeal to seek eternal life with a rebuke that goes to the root of the matter:

It is not very sound theology to confine a man’s thoughts so much to himself, and not to set before him, as the prime motive of his existence, zeal to illustrate the glory of God. For we are born first of all for God, and not for ourselves. As all things flowed from him, and subsist in him, so, says Paul, (Rom. 11:36,) they ought to be referred to him.8 John CalvinReply to Sadoleto (1539)

This was not a cold exchange of man’s happiness for God’s honor. In the very next sentence Calvin added that God, “the better to recommend the glory of his name to men, has tempered zeal for the promotion and extension of it, by uniting it indissolubly with our salvation.”9 Man’s good was not abolished; it was moved. It no longer stood at the center with God as its means, but within God’s glory as its fruit. Herman Bavinck named the error the Reformers rejected, in which religion becomes “a means to the adornment of our human nature, as though God were there for our sake and we were not here for his sake.” True religion, he said, is “to serve God with all your mind, with all your soul, and with all your might… to trust unconditionally in God as the rock of our salvation and of our portion in eternity.”10 Timothy George observes that for Calvin man is by nature a worshipping being, and that “the problem of human existence is that this immense appetite for the divine has been tragically misdirected, turned in on itself, satiated with transient goods.”11

To Glorify God, and to Enjoy Him

The genius of the catechism is the little word “and.” Reeves and Chester call the glory of God and the enjoyment of Him “inseparable, twin truths” that were “guiding lights for the Reformation.”12 Thomas Watson, preaching through the catechism a generation after Westminster, held the two together in a single movement: “If we glorify God, he will glorify our souls for ever. By raising God’s glory, we increase our own: by glorifying God, we come at last to the blessed enjoyment of him.”13 Calvin had said the same in his own way, commenting on Hebrews: “whatever the philosophers may have ever said of the chief good, it was nothing but cold and vain, for they confined man to himself, while it is necessary for us to go out of ourselves to find happiness. The chief good of man is nothing else but union with God.”14

John Piper has pressed the point further still. Pondering the first question, he asked, “Is it just and? What does ‘and’ mean? Isn’t the chief end of man to glorify God by enjoying him forever?” His answer, drawn from Paul’s “to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21), is that “God is most glorified in us — or Christ is most magnified in us — when we are most satisfied in him.”15 Whether one says “and” or “by,” the Reformation conviction is the same. God is not glorified by joyless duty, and man is not satisfied by anything less than God.

Enjoyed Now, Not Only Then

Because the end is given rather than earned, it can be enjoyed now. Watson distinguished “a twofold fruition or enjoying of God; the one is in this life, the other in the life to come.” And he located the first in the ordinary means of grace: “It is a great matter to enjoy God’s ordinances, but to enjoy God’s presence in the ordinances is that which a gracious heart aspires after.”16 Cornelius Van Til described the same reversal in the language of ethics. Since the sinner cannot take even the first step toward the perfect ideal, “the kingdom of God, as man’s summum bonum is presented as being a gift of God. The Aufgabe has become a Gabe”: the task has become a gift.17 That is the difference between the old system and the new in a single phrase.

And a gift can be known. Richard Sibbes argued that the joy Scripture commands is impossible without the assurance Rome called presumption:

God enjoineth us to rejoice. “Rejoice, and again I say, rejoice,” Philip, iv. 4. Can a man rejoice that his name is written in heaven, and not know his name is written there?18 Richard SibbesA Heavenly Conference

The psalm the Westminster divines chose as their proof says the same. “My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever” (Psalm 73:26). A portion is something already possessed.

A Silver Thread through All of Life

If the end of man is God’s glory, then no part of life lies outside it. “The glory of God,” wrote Watson, “is a silver thread which must run through all our actions,” and he added a line worth carrying into any pulpit: “He had better lose his life than the end of his living.”19 Calvin, reading the story of Mary and Martha in its natural sense, refused the old ranking of contemplation over work: “It is, therefore, a foolish attempt of the monks to take hold of this passage, as if Christ were drawing a comparison between a contemplative and an active life, while Christ simply informs us for what end, and in what manner, he wishes to be received.”20 That is what the opening paragraph above means by worship recovered “as a way of life.” The kitchen and the field, the study and the sanctuary, are all places where God may be glorified and enjoyed. Two centuries later Johann Sebastian Bach, an heir of Luther’s Reformation, still signed his scores S.D.G., soli Deo gloria, “glory to God alone.”21

To Him Be Glory

The Reformers did not invent a purpose for man. They recovered the one Scripture had always given, and in recovering it they overturned a whole way of life built on another. The end of man is not a reward climbed toward and never sure, but a God freely given in Christ, glorified in every ordinary duty, enjoyed now by faith, and enjoyed for ever by sight. The verse the Assembly set beneath their first answer is the right place to end, because it is where everything ends: “For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen” (Romans 11:36).

Worldview Next:

Sources

  1. Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), chap. 3, n. 63. ↩
  2. The Shorter Catechism, Agreed upon by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, with the Proofs from the Scripture (Edinburgh, 1648), Question 1. The Assembly’s proofs: 1 Cor. 10:31; Rom. 11:36 (to glorify God); Ps. 73:25–28 (to enjoy him). ↩
  3. The Shorter Catechism, Agreed upon by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, with the Proofs from the Scripture (Edinburgh, 1648), Questions 1–2 and proofs. ↩
  4. Council of Trent, Session VI (January 13, 1547), On Justification, canon 32, in Theodore Alois Buckley, trans., The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (London: Routledge, 1851). ↩
  5. D. G. Hart, Still Protesting: Why the Reformation Matters (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), chap. 5, “Vocation: Spirituality for Ordinary Life”, citing Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 182. ↩
  6. The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc, trans. W. P. Barrett (New York: Gotham House, 1932), 320–21, quoted in Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), chap. 11, “Joy and Glory: Does the Reformation Still Matter?” ↩
  7. Council of Trent, Session VI, On Justification, canon 33, in Theodore Alois Buckley, trans., The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (London: Routledge, 1851). ↩
  8. John Calvin, “Reply by John Calvin to Letter by Cardinal Sadolet to the Senate and People of Geneva” (1539), in Tracts Relating to the Reformation, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844). ↩
  9. Calvin, “Reply to Sadolet,” in Tracts Relating to the Reformation, vol. 1. ↩
  10. Herman Bavinck, Christian Worldview, trans. and ed. N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), chap. 3, “Becoming and Acting.” ↩
  11. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chap. 5, “Glory unto God: John Calvin.” ↩
  12. Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), chap. 11. ↩
  13. Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity (1692), part 1, “Man’s Chief End.” Online at CCEL. ↩
  14. John Calvin, Commentary on Hebrews, on Heb. 4:10, quoted in Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), chap. 11. ↩
  15. John Piper, “What Is Christian Hedonism?” Desiring God, August 1, 2015, desiringgod.org. ↩
  16. Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity (1692), part 1, “Man’s Chief End.” Online at CCEL. ↩
  17. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed), chap. 4, “The Christian Philosophy of Behavior,” §3, “The Kingdom of God as Man’s Highest Good.” ↩
  18. Richard Sibbes, “A Heavenly Conference,” in The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1862–1864), 6:479–80, quoted in Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), chap. 11. ↩
  19. Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity (1692), part 1, “Man’s Chief End.” Online at CCEL. ↩
  20. John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, on Luke 10:38–42, quoted in D. G. Hart, Still Protesting: Why the Reformation Matters (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), chap. 5, “Vocation: Spirituality for Ordinary Life”. ↩
  21. Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), chap. 11. ↩