Finding God's Will

A Response to Jean-Paul Sartre's Vision of Human Autonomy

by Anthony Campolo

Let me describe for you what usually happens at the youth meetings and retreats at which I speak. Almost always, someone takes me aside in a private discussion and asks, "How can I discover the will of God for my life?" Such a question assumes that what a person is supposed to be and do has been already established for him by God. The seeker thinks that his only problem is that he doesn't know how to find this preexistent purpose and meaning. He is convinced that if he could only figure out how to discover God's preordained meaning for his life, he could escape life's ambiguities.

My response is that the Bible does not promise the kind of personal revelation that he is seeking. I argue that the Scripture teaches that living by faith is like being willing to work out, in fellowship with Christ, a plan of action for today. To be a follower of Jesus Christ is to not have a grand plan for the rest of one's life, but to be totally committed to walking with Jesus, daily seeking His will, hourly working out one's salvation with fear and trembling. It is to be open to the possibilities inherent in each existential moment and to believe that commitment to Christ can be expressed today in ways that were totally undreamed of yesterday.

Most of the Christians I know readily testify to the fact that just a few years ago they did not have the slightest idea that they would be doing what they are currently doing. Furthermore, they point out that they are glad they didn't know, for otherwise they might have been overwhelmed with crippling doubts about their abilities to meet their new challenges.

I believe that to be a Christian is to live with a kind of freedom that [Jean-Paul] Sartre himself would have to admire. It is to wake up in the morning and ask God, "Well - what shall we do today?" The Christian does not view life as the acting out of a play that was written a long time ago. Instead, God invites us to collaborate with Him in writing the script, and to lean on Him as the perfect prompter when the time has come to act. Sartre's call to abandon a belief in an essence that precedes existence does not pose as much a threat to my Christian lifestyle as a first reading of his work might suggest.

To summarize my position, I believe that God calls us to make the choices that determine our lives. Unlike Sartre, however, I do not believe that these choices must be made alone. To live by faith is to make life's decisions in the context of a fellowship with One who loves me and gave Himself for me. The Christian is free from the tyranny of a predetermined identity and purpose, although he is not autonomous in the full sense, for he is committed to a realtionship in which God and he, as friends working together, create meaning for his life.

Rather than undercutting the foundations of Christian belief, Sartre's vision of autonomy actually helps us to understand the complex nature of Christian freedom. To all of those Christians who are waiting for God to reveal what He wants them to do, I say choose a course of action from the multiplicity of options that are available to you at the present hour, and as you choose, be sensitive to God's reactions to your choice.