Nessie has triumphed over her last ball at the cost of her favorite game. To fetch the ball is the highpoint of the day for Nessie the Wonder Dog. She has no balls now, because over the last three days, she has used her balls as chew toys. She has numerous bones, chew toys, soft toys, but every so often Nessie decides to send the ball to the place where balls go when they are reduced to rubble: our trash can, ball Gehenna.
The purpose of the ball is not the same as the chew toy. The ball can used in fetch, the chew toys not so much. Nessie, being a Wonder Dog, usually gets this right until in her eagerness to play fetch, she begins to gnaw on her ball. People can do better than this with a moment’s thought and since we are rational animals, we should do so.
I look at my house and see what things are designed to do. Wisdom has taught me to read the manual, often helping in discovering intended purposes. Using them as they are designed (generally) promotes their long life and usefulness. Mistakes have been made. Once I had a tack I needed to push further into my wall and used the back of my monitor, propped there, as a hammer. This went poorly naturally. Hammers are good for pushing tacks into walls, but not monitors!
Are we using entertainment devices for spiritual nourishment? Are we substituting information distribution networks like social media for friendships? If we see what a thing or system is for, then we might also notice problems. Perhaps the system is designed to make us angry, isolate, or break our spirits. What is this object designed to do? One can watch an artifact such as Triumph of the Will without glorifying Hitler, but the viewer is fighting the intent of the artist. Thank God for that fight, but the viewer had better be aware of the intent of the motion picture.
A movie built to glorify Nazis will do so. A legal system built around abortion or Jim Crow will keep dehumanizing even if some outer progress is made. In God’s good world, we might not know what a polar bear is for, but this only means pausing before we allow them to be wiped out.
All fair, but there is a difference in the examples. There is a greater moral seriousness in getting actions wrong with living things than with objects. If we kill all of a species, we have done something far worse than misunderstanding how to use some object. If we make a mistake about people, we have done something even worse.
A terrible action, something no other animal can do, is for a human to use any fellow human, a soul created in God’s image.
No human exists for me. Every human exists for God and God’s glory and for the place God has given them. This means that a human is not her job or her role however important that job or role might be. As a boy, I remember the shock of realizing that Ann K. Reynolds was not just my mother. She had many roles, but these roles were ones she chose, put on and off, and that were not the essence of who she was. Mom was human. Dad was human. The teacher was human. As I grew older this helped me understand that no job I had would define me. People who could not gain “valuable work” were no less human and no less to be valued.
All our roles and work should compliment all the other roles and work, but before God, if there were no roles and no work to be done, we would each be beloved of God. The Lord does not need anything from us, so God does not measure our worth by anything other than that Divine Love. We use the gifts God has given us, but fellowship with the people God has made.
May we never misunderstand and destroy the gifts God gives us and may we never use people as means to any end.
Nessie might be trained to differentiate a ball from a chew toy, but if not, we will love her as she is. People can do better than Nessie, we can learn purpose: what things are for by nature (teleology). We pause before ignoring the design plan: a victory over nature is often like Nessie’s triumphant destruction of her last ball: pyrrhic and disappointing. Joy vanishes. Christians are called to be wise about things and their use and loving to people.
May we know the nature of things and treat no person as a “thing!”
(And we are buying Nessie some new balls for fetch. In this way, we hope to image the good God who gives us good gifts even when we do not deserve them!)
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In