Is the Enjoyment of God as “Man’s Chief End” Theocentric or Anthropocentric?

  

Yesterday, in our morning service, we talked about what the “chief purpose” of the cross of was. I argued that its’ purpose was to demonstrate that God was righteous and just, even though He gave the appearance of be unrighteous in the Old Testament when He “passed over” sin, as in the case David and so many others.

The Apostle Paul calls this mindset "the mind that is set on the flesh" (Romans. 8:6-7), and says that it is the way the "natural person" thinks.

14 But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. (1 Cor. 2:14)

The chief purpose of the cross was to defend God’s character and prove His holiness. The unredeemed misunderstand all of this because the start from the wrong starting point. They begin from an Anthropocentric beginning point as opposed to a Theocentric starting point. Because their starting point takes off with their own needs and wants in view, they have no hope of arriving at the right conclusions.

Some have even been so bold as to suggest that when the Shorter Catechism tells us that man’s chief end is “to enjoy God forever” that this is, in the minds of some, to promote a man-centered rather than a God-centered motivation for living. It seems to encourage Christians to serve God for what they can get from him rather than for what they can give to him.

This has prompted some to interpret the Catechism’s formulation as follows:

“…man’s chief end or purpose is to glorify God; enjoying God is not in any sense coordinate with glorifying God but simply a by-product or consequence of glorifying God. In other words, we should strive to glorify God altruistically–without any concern for personal benefit. Personal benefit is simply an unsought-for result of pursuing our chief end or purpose for existence.”

I think John Frame offers a more accurate depiction of the Catechism’s (and the Bible’s) teaching:

The Catechism adds a second phrase to its formulation of our chief end: “to enjoy him forever.” At first it is difficult to see how these two phrases fit together. The first is theocentric, but the second appears to be anthropocentric. The first is distinctively biblical, but the second sounds rather like the goal of pleasure in secular teleological ethics.

It helps to notice, however, that even the second phrase is centered on God. We are not to enjoy ourselves, but to enjoy him. So the second phrase call us to find our chief enjoyment in God, not in the world. To embrace the enjoyment of God as the goal of life is to sing with Asaph:

Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
For behold, those who are far from you shall perish;
you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you.
But for me it is good to be near God;
I have made the Lord God my refuge,
that I may tell of all your works. (Ps. 73:25-28).

Although Asaph uses forms of the first person pronoun ten times in this passage, and thirty-three times in the whole psalm, these verses are profoundly theocentric. So when the Catechism moves from the first phrase to the second, it is not moving from God-centeredness to man-centeredness. Rather, it is looking at God-centeredness from two perspectives.

In the end, one cannot glorify God without enjoying him. The goal expressed by WSC, 1, is, in the most profound sense, not two-fold, but one.  The human emerges from and is a result of the accomplishment of the larger, more significant first goal, the glorification of God.

Cited from John Frame
The Doctrine of the Christian Life
(Presbyterian & Reformed, 2008), 302-03, 306.