“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose” – Viktor Frankl.
Foreword: The Restless Search for Significance
We live in an age where meaning has become both our obsession and our anxiety.
We curate purpose into pixels, branding our lives with statements like “live your truth” or “find your why.” Yet beneath this frantic pursuit lies a quiet dissonance, the more we talk about meaning, the less we seem to know what it is. Every generation inherits its myths, and ours is this: that meaning is something we must make. That if we work hard enough, dream big enough, and self-actualise deeply enough, we might one day earn the right to feel significant. But meaning, unlike success or status, resists production. It is not an invention of effort but an encounter with existence.
Viktor Frankl once wrote that meaning is not something we devise, but something we discover in the midst of what is given to us, especially in suffering. He argued that life continually asks us questions, and our task is not to invent the answers, but to respond to the call that reality itself extends (Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 105–115).
Yet modernity, with its secular, immanent frame, as Charles Taylor described, no longer sees reality as something that calls or invites. The transcendent has been sealed off, replaced by an infinite horizon of personal options (A Secular Age, 539–544). We have been left alone in the echo chamber of our own making, where every meaning must be authored by the self.
And so, a strange weariness has taken root in our souls. We have become experts at meaning-making yet novices at meaning-receiving. We are so busy constructing our identities that we have forgotten how to recognise the one given to us before time began.
Perhaps meaning was never missing after all.
Perhaps it was always there, humming quietly in the background of our busyness, waiting not to be made, but to be found.
When Humans Became the Authors
Every era carries a hidden confession, a central idea so deeply assumed that it no longer feels like an idea at all. For the pre-modern world, that confession was God is the author of meaning. For the modern world, it became I am.
This was the great inversion of the Enlightenment: the quiet dethroning of revelation by reason. It began as an attempt to liberate the human mind from superstition and tyranny, noble in intent, devastating in consequence. Theologians once believed that meaning flowed from the Logos, the Word through whom all things were made (John 1:1–3). But in the Enlightenment, the Logos was replaced by the rational subject, man himself became the measure of all things.
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason sought to rescue knowledge from metaphysics, but in doing so, it rendered God unknowable except as a moral postulate. Jean-Paul Sartre later completed the revolution when he declared, “Existence precedes essence.” Humanity, he claimed, was condemned to be free, to make meaning out of nothing, to become authors of our own essence. In Sartre’s universe, meaning no longer waits to be revealed; it must be constructed from the raw material of personal choice.
But this freedom came at a cost. The more the self became the source of meaning, the more fragile meaning became. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, observed that every paradigm eventually collapses under the weight of its own assumptions (p. 88). What he described in science, modernity embodied in spirit. Once God was removed as the centre of interpretation, every human became their own paradigm, a private cosmos orbiting the gravity of self-belief.
The result? A world full of authors without editors, stories without coherence, lives without transcendent grammar.
And yet, this was not the first time humanity had tried to seize the pen of purpose. In Eden, the serpent whispered, “You will be like God.” The temptation was not merely moral but epistemological, the desire to define meaning apart from the Author. Ever since, humanity has been writing footnotes in the margins of God’s masterpiece, trying to correct the text that once defined us.
What the Enlightenment promised as emancipation became, in time, exhaustion. We have become creative gods in a closed universe, constantly writing and rewriting ourselves, terrified that our next sentence might be meaningless.
The Cultural Moment: Meaning as Manufacture
If the Enlightenment crowned humanity as the author of meaning, modernity has turned us into its factory workers.
Meaning, today, is no longer a revelation to receive, it is a product to produce. We have industrialised identity, branded authenticity, and monetised the soul. Scroll through any social platform and you’ll see it: the performative self, endlessly curated, filtered, and marketed. We no longer merely live our lives; we publish them. The self has become a production company, its content guided by algorithms of affirmation.
The question “Who am I?” has quietly been replaced by “How am I performing?”
Aaron T. Beck’s research in Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders revealed that our minds create maladaptive meaning patterns when we internalise unrealistic standards (pp. 80, 96–97).
Modernity has made that pathology a culture.
We perform because we fear erasure. We achieve because we dread insignificance. We smile because to stop smiling might make us invisible.
Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection (p. 107) describes the result as “suffocated creativity.” When meaning becomes performance, creativity dies, and with it, our capacity for wholehearted living.
We don’t express ourselves anymore; we audition.
And every audition has a judge.
Byung-Chul Han calls this the “achievement society.” In The Burnout Society (pp. 10–17), he describes how the modern individual is both master and slave, self-exploiting in the name of freedom. We are the performers and the audience, the critic and the accused, endlessly measuring ourselves against an invisible metric that keeps moving further away.
The tragedy is that this system does not simply exhaust our emotions; it deforms our ontology. We begin to become the roles we play. Social media, therapy culture, workplace branding, even church leadership models, all reinforce the same silent doctrine: your worth is what you perform well.
But what happens when we can’t perform? When illness, grief, or failure interrupts the show?
Modernity has no language for that.
It simply replaces the performer with a new one. Meaning, once sacred, now functions like a subscription model, temporary, transactional, and disposable. And yet, in this noise of self-production, the human spirit still aches for something enduring. Something that doesn’t have to be maintained by constant effort. Something that simply is, whether we are performing or not.
That is where this story turns, from a culture of production to a theology of revelation.
The Ancient Counter-Narrative
Before humanity built factories of meaning, God walked in a garden.
There, meaning was not manufactured; it was given.
Adam did not need to invent identity, it was breathed into him. The first human did not write a purpose statement; he received one when God said, “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26).
Meaning, then, is not a project but a presence. It does not emerge from effort, but from encounter. The biblical witness stands in radical contrast to modernity’s myth of self-authorship. In Scripture, knowing and being are inseparable from communion. Knowledge without relationship, the knowledge of good and evil apart from God, leads not to enlightenment but to exile. The problem of the Fall was not ignorance; it was independence.
Karl Barth captures this reversal profoundly in Church Dogmatics II/1, §28. God, he writes, is “the One whose being is revealed in divine action.” Meaning is not static essence, but the living movement of divine self-giving. To know God is to be caught up in that movement, to find our meaning not by ascent to heaven, but by being found in the Word made flesh.
This is why revelation, not reason, sits at the heart of theology.
Reason examines reality; revelation personalises it. It tells us not just what is true, but who Truth is. And this is what modernity cannot imitate, the intimacy of divine address.
Paul Ricoeur helps us here. In Interpretation Theory (p. 50), he shows that all meaning contains a surplus, something irreducible to literal interpretation. Just as a metaphor points beyond itself, revelation discloses meaning that cannot be systematised. We encounter God not as an object to define, but as a mystery to respond to. That response, faith, is not blind assent; it is relational knowing.
Faith is what happens when meaning finds us.
In a world that confuses understanding with control, revelation is scandalous. It humbles reason. It requires surrender. It invites us to stop explaining and start listening. It whispers what Beck’s cognitive therapy could only imply: healing begins when we stop trying to fix the world through our categories and allow grace to interpret us.
The Christian claim is daring:
Meaning did not begin in human consciousness but in divine conversation.
“In the beginning was the Word.”
And the Word still speaks.
When Finding Became Making Again
It seems we cannot help ourselves.
Even when revelation meets us, we eventually try to manage it.
We build institutions around inspiration, doctrines around encounters, and brands around belief. What began as grace becomes a system; what began as discovery becomes design. The modern crisis is not that we have lost God, but that we have redefined Him as an experience to possess rather than a reality to obey. Faith, once relational, has become functional, another technology for meaning-making.
Linda Martín Alcoff, in Visible Identities (p. 22), warns that when people cannot gain critical distance from their own cultural traditions, they lose the capacity for rational autonomy. In religious language, this is idolatry; worshipping our own reflection. We mistake the echo of our constructs for the voice of God.
Miranda Fricker, in Epistemic Injustice (pp. 2–3), exposes how power distorts knowing itself. When reason becomes reduction, when all truth is reduced to utility, justice and discernment collapse. She cautions that “the suspicion of reason per se… obscures the distinction between what we have a reason to think and what mere relations of power are doing to our thinking.”
Is that not the essence of our spiritual condition? We declare bias as belief, and power as conviction.
Even theology, when cut off from revelation, becomes a performance of intellect rather than an act of worship. The pulpit becomes a TED Talk; the sacred becomes self-help. And the human heart, left without the horizon of transcendence, folds in on itself.
Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age (p. 542), describes this as life lived within “the immanent frame,” a world where the supernatural has been flattened into psychology, where transcendence has become optional, and the self must bear the unbearable weight of meaning-making.
We can sense this exhaustion everywhere:
In the influencer preaching authenticity while algorithmically curating identity. In the corporate visionary burning out while selling purpose. In the believer who fears doubt, yet secretly wonders why belief feels performative. Thomas Kuhn (p. 88) once observed that paradigm shifts occur when old frameworks can no longer hold new experiences.
Perhaps faith itself, in the modern world, is facing such a paradigm moment, not the death of belief, but the exposure of belief built on self-reference.
And here lies the true fracture:
When we confuse the search for meaning with the creation of it, we lose our ability to receive. We become epistemologically claustrophobic, trapped in the echo chamber of our own construction, where every revelation must sound like us to be heard.
The tragedy of modernity is not disbelief. It is dislocation, the human soul lost in the very universe it tried to explain.
Redemptive Meaning Found Again
Grace is God’s gentle refusal to let us be our own source.
Where modernity manufactures meaning and burns out under its machinery, revelation invites us to rest, to rediscover that meaning is not a task but a relationship.
The gospel does not tell us to make sense of our lives; it tells us that our lives already make sense in Christ. Meaning is not a system to construct, but a Person who calls us by name.
Cornel West calls this “prophetic pragmatism.” In The Cornel West Reader (pp. 151, 310–311), he describes a hope that is not naïve optimism, but active defiance, a creative, communal resistance against meaninglessness. Hope, he writes, is “emancipatory social experimentalism.” It is the practice of love in history’s laboratory.
That is what revelation does, it turns knowing into participating. It is no longer “What is true?” but “Who is truth, and how do I join Him?”
Willie James Jennings reminds us in The Christian Imagination (p. 60) that God’s being is revealed in divine action, that creation itself is the overflow of love, not the projection of power. Meaning, therefore, is not abstract coherence; it is relational participation. To be human is to echo divine communion, to become a verb of love in God’s sentence of grace.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s moral insight now returns transfigured. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (p. 128), he argues that rationality and virtue are inseparable, that we cannot think rightly without living rightly. Revelation makes this ontological: we cannot know rightly without being known by God. The intellect is healed through intimacy.
And so, in Christ, the scattered fragments of human meaning are gathered again. He embodies the coherence we lost, the Word through whom all things hold together (Colossians 1:17).
In Him, reason and revelation no longer compete; they converse.
Faith is no longer a leap into darkness, but a return to light. This is why hope, as we wrote before, is the epistemology the devil cannot counterfeit. Because hope is relational, and evil cannot sustain relationship.
Evil must isolate; hope communes.
Evil manipulates; hope participates.
Evil enslaves the imagination to despair; hope baptises the imagination into resurrection.
To find meaning again, we must stop managing the mystery and start abiding in it. We must unlearn performance and relearn presence. We must cease treating revelation as data, and begin to receive it as dialogue. In the end, meaning is not something we define, it’s Someone we follow.
And the beauty of that truth is this…
When we follow Him, even the meaningless becomes a parable.
Practical Application: Living as Those Who Are Found
If meaning is found, not made, then the Christian life is not a competition of intellect, but a cultivation of attention.
To live meaningfully is to live attentively — attuned to the God who speaks in the ordinary, the overlooked, and the unfinished. We must reclaim the ancient disciplines that train us not to manufacture but to notice:
Contemplation: the courage to listen before we speak.
Community: the humility to learn beyond ourselves.
Confession: the honesty to admit when our meaning-making becomes self-idolatry.
Compassion: the practice of meaning shared; truth expressed as tenderness.
These are not passive postures but active resistances against the empire of noise that tries to make us forget who we are.
Silence becomes rebellion.
Gratitude becomes protest.
Sabbath becomes revolution.
When we practice stillness, we dethrone the lie that our worth is measured by output. When we pursue relational knowing, we resist the myth that reality is ours to define. When we walk in love, we prove that meaning does not collapse under modernity’s cynicism, it expands beyond it. Because, as Gadamer reminds us (Truth and Method, p. 273), even our prejudices can be redeemed when exposed to dialogue. Revelation does not erase culture; it transfigures it. The prejudgments that once enslaved us can become the very places God meets us; when light pierces understanding and turns bias into wisdom.
This is how theology becomes therapy:
When knowing is not an escape from being, but its illumination.
When faith and intellect dance again under the same light.
When the Word ceases to be abstract, because it has taken on flesh, and that flesh now lives in us.
Prayer
Father God,
You who spoke meaning into chaos, teach us again how to listen before we define.
Forgive us for turning revelation into rhetoric, for trying to control what You meant us to commune with.
We confess the idolatry of intellect without intimacy, and the exhaustion of building worlds You already sustain.
Teach us to be found again, not brilliant, but beloved. Let our words arise only from wonder. Let our reason rest inside revelation. Let our hope outlast despair.
Redeem our meanings, Lord, until they sound like mercy. And when we forget again, as we will, remind us that even our blindness is not beyond Your healing.
In the name of the Word made flesh; the Meaning who found us first,
Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen.
TRACK TO ENJOY:
Bibliography
Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Cone, James H. A Black Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1970.
Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988.
Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
West, Cornel. The Cornel West Reader. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999.
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