Josh Hawley devotes the second chapter of his book to outlining what he sees as “man’s purpose.” He promises to answer the question of why men are here, and what they are supposed to do. What does he see as this purpose? And why does his claim to uncover man’s purpose ultimately amount to nothing? Why does Dan describe it as an “empty” account of purpose? And how does this undermine Hawley’s claim that the Bible’s story of man is the only story that can provide meaning and purpose? Check out this week’s episode to find out!
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Axis Mundi Hello and welcome to it's in the code The series is part of the podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
I, of course, am your host, Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Pleased as always to be with you.
And as always, I want to start by just saying thank you for listening.
There are a lot of other things you can be doing, and it means the world that you listen to us.
If you're a subscriber in particular, thank you to you.
If you're not a subscriber, and that's something you would be willing to do, would ask you to consider doing that.
We put out a lot of content.
We're an indie show doing the best we can, and you help us to do that.
And with regard to this series, of course, I am driven in what I do by you and your insights.
Please keep those coming.
Feedback about these episodes, ideas for upcoming episodes, upcoming series.
Daniel Miller Swedge, Daniel Miller, S-W-A-J at gmail.com.
Please keep the thoughts coming.
I love to hear them.
I do not get to respond to as many as I wish that I did.
I do the best that I can, but I do listen to those, and I'm always mapping out future episodes and directions that we're going with the show.
As I say, it is driven by you.
I need you to help me do that.
And if you are a subscriber, please also check out the Discord.
I hover around in there from time to time.
Some great discussions go on, great ideas.
So I want to dive into this today.
I am in a topic that came from a listener.
As you know, if you've been listening, we are looking at Josh Hawley's book, Senator Josh Hawley's book, Manhood, where he lays out what he understands to be the masculine virtues that are missing from American men, the masculine virtues, excuse me, that will save America.
And we're going to be taking a look at those.
Again, we're looking at him because he gives us a window into a discourse that is increasingly pervasive in American society, a discourse about men, about masculinity, about what that means.
And as I say often, we're looking at him not because he has anything unique or special to say.
He doesn't, but we're looking at him because he is an exemplar of that.
And if you've been listening, you know that we're a few episodes in here.
We worked our way through his first chapter where he kind of lays out what he sees as the problem confronting men.
And we started into his second chapter where he starts getting into the substance of the book.
And that is where we live right now.
And the chapter is called Man's Mission.
And this is where he tells us what man's purpose is.
I feel like I need to apologize for saying man's all the time.
I don't think I've ever said man or man or men or man's as many times as I like already have in a few episodes.
And it's just going to continue.
And it's because he's talking about manhood.
When Holly talks about man, he means men.
He means gendered male people.
And of course, he understands gender is fixed and binary and so forth.
So it forces me into a way of talking that I'm not very comfortable with.
Okay.
But we're picking up with his discussion of man's purpose.
What is it that man is here to do?
And we've already talked about this some.
We've talked about how in his account, man's purpose is given in the Bible and the story the Bible tells.
It's a story that he assumes.
He assumes and never defends the view, but it is a story that is authoritative because it comes from God.
Like most conservative Christians, he just cites the Bible and talks about it as if it's obvious that it's an authority, even though for a lot of us it isn't.
I understand I am not his audience.
People he has to try to convince to read the Bible are not his audience.
But I think it's worth noting that he never defends the view.
Part of the reason I think that's significant, as we talked about in last episode, is that I think it's an indefensible view.
You simply cannot defend the view that the Bible is what people like Holly think that it is.
Prior episode, go back, take a listen.
You can talk more about that in email in the Discord.
And if you come to one of our live events, if you like.
But what he says is that the Bible tells a story with which non-Christians and non-conservatives, everybody he calls liberals, and that's what he means.
Liberals, a very broad category for him.
It's all the non-mAGA people in the world.
It's a story that they cannot compete with.
And we're going to get into that more next episode, the competition of stories, what he sees as his story, what he sees as the story or lack of it the liberals are telling and why they can't compete and so forth.
We're going to look at that next episode.
What I want to look at in this episode is his discussion of this purpose, of man's purpose as he understands it.
And the reason is that he has a lot writing on this.
He has everything writing on this.
So here's his gamble.
Okay.
And it's a common one against, excuse me, among conservative, high control religions in America.
Again, we're not looking at Holly because he's unique.
We're looking at him because he's typical.
And his gamble, the bet that he's placed, is typical of this kind of conservative Christian discourse.
And here's what it is.
Only Christianity, as he understands it, can provide human beings and especially men.
His focus is men.
Only Christianity can provide men with purpose and meaning.
Without the Christian message, life is literally meaningless and empty.
Those of us who are running around living our lives without the Christian message are secretly living lives of desperation and meaninglessness and enemy and what have you.
And this is a core commitment among conservative Christians, even if it's often just implicit or tacitly presupposed.
This is a core commitment.
And the idea is that they're making you the promise that Christian faith, if you will just become a Christian as they understand it, that that imbues life with a clear sense of meaning and purpose and is a source of hope for millions.
That's a core commitment.
That's a clear gamble.
That's the bet that Holly is making when he talks about man's purpose.
So he needs to show us that only faith in his God and his articulation of the Bible and his articulation of what the Bible's story is in his Christian vision, that all of that, that only that can provide the meaning or purpose that is otherwise missing from men's lives.
So here's my claim.
My claim is that despite any appearances to the contrary, despite the fact that it's true that for millions of American Christians, they really do believe something like what Holly is claiming.
They really do believe that without Christianity, there can be no meaning or purpose.
I want to make the counterclaim that what he's claiming is actually empty.
It's vacuous.
There's nothing to it.
The claim that Christianity provides this clear sense of meaning that's lacking anywhere else.
Okay?
Even if we were to go along with Holly with regard to everything he says about the Bible, even we said, okay, let's set aside everything we said last episode about how he's looking at the Bible.
Let's set aside everything I've talked about in a whole series about inerrancy.
All the problems I have before you ever get into the discussion with a conservative Christian about what the Bible is, let's just assume that all of that is just, we set it aside.
We'll say, okay, let's say that the Bible is what you say it is.
Okay.
My claim is that the Christian vision still doesn't provide us with the assurance of meaning and purpose that Holly thinks it does.
And this is a point that cuts deep in my mind.
This is a point that cuts to the heart of core claims of conservative Christianity in America.
This is a claim that cuts to the heart of American high control Christianity that essentially is saying you submit to us, submit to our faith vision.
Why?
Because it will provide meaning and purpose for your life.
My claim is that that's a completely vacuous statement.
It in fact does not do that.
Okay?
So let's talk about this.
What is man's purpose as Holly understands it?
Well, he already told us in a shortened form in his first chapter, talked about that in the first or second episode.
We discussed the idea more in the last episode.
And so here it is again in a nutshell.
And he lays it out in more detail here in chapter two of his book.
His claim essentially is that man's purpose, I should point out, he's completely silent about women on this point.
We have no idea what women's purpose are or like why they're there, why they exist if man is supposed to do all the things he's supposed to do.
I'm assuming he's going to tell us.
I've got a pretty good idea.
I know what he thinks women's purpose is.
Well, we'll see.
Again, I'm reading this book as we go.
I'm reading it as I prepare the episode.
So we'll see what he says about women.
So far, nothing, nothing to say about women at all.
His claim essentially is that man's purpose is to be a co-creator and co-ruler with God.
And in developing this point, he once again advances a relatively sophisticated interpretation of Genesis.
I talked about this last time.
I say relatively sophisticated.
That does not mean that I agree with him.
What it means is that compared to some conservative people talking about the Bible, there's a greater deal of sophistication here than there is in some of them.
He is citing conservative Bible scholars.
He's doing some work.
All of that.
I want to give him credit for that.
Okay.
He even in this case, and this is noteworthy, cites the history of Jewish interpretation of Genesis.
He's not reading Jewish interpreters of Genesis.
He's reading other Bible scholars who summarize the views of Jewish interpreters of Genesis, but he's doing that work.
Okay.
And his reading, as far as it goes, is not unconvincing.
That is, if you want to get into like, you know, what does this text mean?
What's the theological message and so forth?
It's not unconvincing.
And for some, it could even be compelling reading.
Okay.
So here's how it goes.
And again, if you're keeping score, we're in chapter two.
I'm not going to go line by line, but if you happen to be reading him or you want to go back and check my work, please do it.
Okay.
By way of reminder, he's working out of the first three chapters of Genesis, and those first three chapters lay out two radically divergent creation accounts.
Talked about that last episode.
And in that, God creates the world, bringing order out of chaos.
And within that world, he creates one particular corner, a garden that is lush and green and cultivated, and it has fruit-bearing plants and animals and all the stuff, the Garden of Eden.
But the rest of the world, as presented there, is not lush.
It is not cultivated.
It is wild and untamed.
God has created it.
God calls it good, but it is different from this garden, this cultivated, literally Edenic paradise, the Garden of Eden.
So when God tells man that he needs to subdue and fill the earth, he is tasking man as the one created in his image and representing him with continuing God's work.
And again, I keep saying, man, most interpreters say he's tasking human beings with this, but Hawley leans heavily into the, he's tasking man, okay?
Again, I don't know exactly what, if any role he thinks women play in this part of his story.
We'll see how it goes as we move forward.
But the idea is that man, created in the image of God, is tasked with continuing and fulfilling God's work.
And this is man's purpose, to continue the work of cultivating the world into God's temple, of extending the garden, essentially of taking this garden that God has created and expanding it into all the world by cultivating it and making it productive and so forth.
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So when he sums up the task that is given to the first man, Adam, in Genesis, Hawley says this.
He says, quote, if Adam is to till, he must till what is not tilled already.
He must subdue what is yet wild.
He must claim land from the wilderness, end quote.
And he also highlights the story of Adam being tasked by God with naming the animals.
So if you're not familiar with Genesis, God creates all the animals and he tells the man to name them all.
And Holly points out correctly that in the ancient Near Eastern context reflected in this story, quote, the right of naming was itself an act of creation, end quote.
It's very symbolically significant that God tasks the human person with naming the animals, that he's essentially giving him a co-creative role in this new created order.
Okay.
Man's purpose then, tying all that together, is to labor with God, completing the uncompleted task of bringing order out of chaos, extending the good of the garden beyond its narrow confines, making the world into a temple for God, and essentially making the world the kind of place God intends it to be.
Okay, that's the task.
Okay, cool.
Man's purpose is to work with God and complete God's work.
Got it?
Good.
There it is.
Here's my question.
If I was sitting here with Josh Hawley and I'm listening and I'm nodding along and I'm being polite, you know, all that kind of stuff.
I have a bad habit of getting too energized when I talk to people and I'll cut them off without meaning to.
So let's imagine I'm talking to Josh Hawley and I'm trying real hard not to cut him off or anything.
Maybe remember he's a senator.
I don't know.
But he pauses and finally like, cool, cool, cool story.
What the hell does that actually mean?
What does it mean then to say that his purpose is to be co-laborer with God?
Okay.
What does that look like?
What the hell does that actually mean?
And the thing is that here, this is where I think the wheels come off for Holly and for conservative Christians, broadly speaking.
Even though they often don't realize it, even though I think Holly certainly doesn't see it, this is where I think things just go sideways for him.
Okay.
So let me talk about why I think that is, because I think it's really important.
The imagery in Genesis, it's all the kind of thing we would expect in a historic period defined by agriculture and animal husbandry.
When this thing is written, you know, half a millennium before the common era, 2,500 years ago, give or take, talked a little bit about the composition of these texts in the last episode, produced by Jewish communities in Babylon at the time.
Okay.
This all makes sense in, you know, 2,500 years ago that this is an image of tilling the earth and growing things and caring for animals.
That's the kind of society that people lived in, a broadly agrarian society.
And the imagery of this kind of God-created space as a lush and green and verdant garden, that that's what a divine dwelling place would be.
That makes a lot of sense in a part of the world that was often not lush and green and verdant, but was dry and unforgiving.
We can think, you know, historically, if you want to think about like the hanging gardens of Babylon, they were one of the wonders of the ancient world.
Why?
Because they're in Babylon, right?
They're in the ancient Near East.
They're in this, this dry region of the world where it's not easy to have gardens and productive agriculture and so forth, right?
And so they stand out as a wonder of the world.
And this is a model of this edemic paradise, the Garden of Eden.
All of this makes sense in the historical context in which this text is produced.
So the thing is that when Adam is told to co-labor with God, it's essentially an agrarian model.
He's told by God to like, go turn the world into a productive farm.
Go turn the world into a garden.
Go and till what hasn't been tilled and fill the earth, meaning like, you know, make it productive, make it produce, make it produce produce.
It's about agriculture and animal husbandry.
Those are the models.
But see, here's the problem.
If you're somebody like Holly reading this, if you're looking to Genesis to tell us what man's purpose is, it's that most of us are not and never will be farmers or significantly involved in animal husbandry.
It's not something most of us will ever do.
And Holly feels this.
In other words, he feels that point of disconnect that God tells Adam to go and like, you know, grow stuff and name the animals.
And we're like, that's cool, but like, I don't, I don't, I don't have a farm and I don't work with animals.
I'd like, maybe I've never been on a farm and I like I had a goldfish once.
Like that's about as far as it goes.
He feels that disconnect.
And that's why he tells the story of his grandfather and how he worked as a farmer.
He opens the book with that.
Tilling the earth and bringing order and productivity out of untamed ground and so forth.
He backs it up further and he tells us about his grandfather's father homesteading and breaking the prairie to till into productive land and the hardships that he and his family endured.
And his grandfather and great-grandfather are like modern day Adams tilling the earth and making it productive just as God commands in Genesis.
Why is Holly telling us a story?
Because he wants to find a way to connect his story with the story in Genesis because he knows that it's a story that's going to be foreign to most people.
But then there's a reason we're hearing about Josh Hawley's great grandfather and his grandfather and not about, I don't know, Josh Hawley or his dad.
It's because they're not farmers.
They are not in any literal sense doing what Adam was tasked with doing.
So he's got to reach back a few generations to try to make it feel relevant to this story that he's telling us.
And that's the point.
The story that he's telling about Adam caring for the animals and tilling the earth is no longer relevant to most Americans.
I looked this up, some light numbers.
In 1850, I don't know when Holly's great grandfather immigrated to the U.S., but I picked out like 1850.
In 1850, two-thirds of Americans made a living in agriculture.
64%, almost two-thirds of Americans made a living in agriculture.
You know what it is now in 2025?
Estimates are that's like 2% of the population.
That's how much modern economic conditions have changed.
2% means 98% of Americans don't make a living on agriculture.
Okay?
So the divinely given purpose described in Genesis just isn't going to resonate with most people now.
Okay, Adam's called to like go and till the earth and subdue it and grow stuff.
Okay?
It's not going to resonate.
Why do I mention that?
Because it brings us to another really important point about how conservative Christians actually use the Bible.
Because here's how it's going to happen.
Holly or somebody like him be like, of course, that's not what most Americans do.
Of course, that's not how most people are going to connect to this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The stories about Adam and farming and tilling, but that's not the point.
But here's the issue.
Okay.
I have said lots and lots of times, if you've listened to this series, you've heard me say it.
People get kind of tired of me saying it.
Other scholars of religion get tired of me saying it.
Okay.
We often hear people say that conservative Christians read the Bible literally.
Conservative Christians understand themselves as reading the Bible literally.
It's a point of pride for them.
When they say the Bible is an errant, they often say that means we read it literally.
It's without error.
We read it literally.
We take it literally.
Even scholars of religion who should know better will talk about conservative Protestants taking the Bible literally.
But what this passage illustrates and the way that Hawley uses it illustrates and that response from conservative Christians, if they were sitting here in the room with me, they would be like, well, of course, it'd be silly to suggest that the Bible is saying that everybody has to go out and farm, that that's God's divine purpose.
The point of that saying that, they're not reading the Bible literally.
They're not taking it literally.
Literally speaking, if you want to be literal about it, Adam's purpose is tied up with an agrarian project that makes sense in the ancient world and makes no sense to most Americans reading it now.
Literally speaking, it is almost completely irrelevant for us now.
If you go and tell 98% of Americans, God's purpose for you is produce.
It's farming and animal husbandry.
It's going to fall on deaf ears.
If the literal story of the point, excuse me, the literal story of the Bible was the point, the way the conservative Christians say, it's completely irrelevant.
Not much of a story to give man purpose if it's irrelevant to 98% of the people, which is why Hawley doesn't actually interpret the story literally.
Instead, he does what every conservative pastor does every Sunday morning.
He essentially turns the Bible into a metaphor that can provide guidance for us now.
They do not read the Bible literally, folks, and he doesn't either.
He turns it into a metaphor.
He makes the Bible provide the guidance that he wants to find in it precisely because he doesn't take it literally.
So how does that work?
He says, well, you know, God's purpose is to be productive, but it's not actually agriculture.
It's not actually to do what Adam did.
Okay.
What Hawley says is that Genesis teaches us that our purpose is to make the world productive, to labor with God, but to be productive in a kind of general expanded sense.
Our purpose essentially comes from labor, and this is not a surprise.
This is a reading advanced by a politician in a party that has championed neoliberal economic policies for half a century.
This is a politician that is part of a party that has reduced human beings to their labor capacity and to their ability to contribute to the U.S. GDP.
That's all humans are good for for conservatives.
That is our only purpose.
He turns purpose into labor.
And he just takes the term productivity and expands it far beyond anything in the text of Genesis.
And somebody could say, well, maybe are you being unfair?
Are you being too hard on Holly?
Are you sure he does that?
Well, he does.
He illustrates this because when he wants to give an example of this, he talks about, wait for it.
Hey, are you ready for this?
When he moves on and he's going to talk about somebody besides great-granddad and granddad, he talks about his nine-year-old son.
This is what he says.
It says it on page 25.
He talks about his son enjoying drawing and designing cars and how his son imagines new features and designs for these cars.
And he invents cars that haven't existed.
And he's got this whole sketchbook and everything.
Okay.
Now, this sounds really creative.
And as a story about his son, I think it's cute and I love it.
And I have kids too.
And I think it's a great story.
And they're boundlessly creative and it's awesome.
Okay.
But here's what Holly has to say about it.
Here's why he tells us the story about his nine-year-old.
He says, quote, I recognize in this boyish work of his the impulse to cultivate and build already apparent at a young age to cultivate.
So cultivating here, it's not actually what Adam did.
It's something radically different.
He's not reading the Bible literally.
So all that language in Genesis about cultivation and tilling and growing and naming, all of that, it's really just metaphors for whatever creative or productive activities we undertake.
My nine-year-old's into drawing cars and imagining new stuff.
Cool.
He's being productive and creative.
Okay.
They just become words like cultivation and tilling and growing.
They're just shorthand for productivity in some general undefined sense.
So I guess extending God's garden can be designing cars.
Nine-year-old drawing imaginary cars.
He's extending God's garden.
You're like, oh, okay.
Like that, that's what it means to co-labor with God.
Okay.
This is just Protestant work ethic 101.
If you know any notion of the so-called Protestant work ethic and that kind of idea, it's just the view common among Protestants for a long time that whatever we do is our vocation.
It is our calling.
Whatever we do is our divine calling.
That's what he's saying.
And this is why I say his claim that our purpose is God-given is actually vacuous.
It is empty.
It is tautological.
Why?
Because the teaching about purpose in the book of Genesis, as he actually unfolds it, is apparently so broad and so metaphorical, absolutely not literal, that whatever we like to do is our purpose.
So, I mean, you can say that it comes from God, but you're like, well, I'm just doing what I like to do.
Well, that's because God made you the way you are with your desires.
And okay, like thanks.
It amounts to nothing.
The claim that God is the person that gives us purpose amounts to nothing if purpose is just whatever we want to do to be productive or creative.
Okay.
And I want to press this further.
I want to try to show how this reasoning works because it's not only empty, but it's circular.
So imagine this conversation.
Here's how it goes.
Imagine, I mean, Holly presents this case of all these law students of his coming to him and seeking guidance and trying to understand their lives and whatever.
So let's imagine somebody coming in and saying, hey, Professor Holly, like, you know, I just feel so aimless and lost.
And like, what do I, how do I know what my purpose is?
How do I know what I'm here to do?
And he says, well, you know, God tells you in the Bible.
That gives us the story that tells us what our purpose is.
That's great.
Tell me more.
Well, just look at the first book of the Bible.
Our purpose is to help God complete and refine his creation.
Oh.
Okay.
Like, sorry, I'm reading this and what?
Like, I need to quit law school and like farm and stuff.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
That's just a specific example.
That's just one example of productivity.
Your purpose is to be productive and creative in whatever way fits you, like my kid who draws cars.
Okay.
But the whole reason I was here, Professor Holly, the whole reason I came to talk to you is that I'm not sure what that is for me.
I'm not sure what that, I'm not sure what my, my car drawing, so to speak, is.
I don't know what that is.
That's the whole problem.
I need some guidance in knowing what my purpose is.
Like, how do I get to that?
Well, hey, I'm glad you just have to listen to God's calling in your life.
Okay, cool.
Professor Holly, how do I do that?
Well, you read the Bible and we've come full circle and we've gone nowhere.
The Bible tells you your purpose.
What is your purpose?
To be creative and to work with God and fulfilling his purpose in the world.
Cool, but like, what is that?
Well, you've got to ask God.
I just did.
I don't know.
It's whatever you want to do, but I don't know what I want to do.
Well, then go ask God.
But like God just says apparently in the book of Genesis that it's co-laboring with him.
We're back where we started.
We've moved in a circle and we've got no answers at all.
This is a very common issue in conservative Christianity.
I would argue, in fact, that this is a core fundamental, like failing flaw in Christianity.
This is going to feel weird.
I'm going to land it in just a second.
I promise.
I'm an Xbox player in an older edition of the Xbox a couple generations ago.
It would have this error message.
It was called the red ring of death.
Around the power button, there were these red LED lights.
And if the right numbers of them lit up, it meant your system, it just had a fatal error.
Couldn't be recovered, couldn't be fixed.
Microsoft was all cagey about what the problem is.
You would have to send it in and just get like a new Xbox.
That was such a failed, fatal flaw that they would just send you a new one.
Happened to me twice, Red Ring of Death, as we called it.
This is a red ring of death, in my view, for conservative Christianity, because part of its big claim is without conservative Christianity, without the Bible as they understand it, our meaning is purposeless, or excuse me, our existence is purposeless.
It's meaningless.
We don't have meaning or purpose.
That's what it promises, but this is how it works.
It defines purpose so broadly and so generically that it doesn't actually provide any guidance.
It doesn't tell us anything about what God's plan for us actually is, which brings me to another point, another way that this works out in popular language.
And I did a whole episode on this once upon a time.
I'm not going to repeat all of this, but this is the language people use when like you're confronting something in your life and you don't know what to do.
And they say, hey, you know what?
You're right where God wants you to be.
And that is intended by millions of well-meaning Christians to be a source of hope, a source of meaning, a source of purpose, a source of assurance.
Wherever you are, you're right where God wants you to do, but that doesn't do anything to tell you what you're supposed to do.
Let's imagine that you're facing a decision.
Do I stay in like a job that I mean, maybe the job is okay, but it's not great.
And you kind of, you've gone as far in it as you can and you're facing the decision, do I stick that out or do I run the risk and maybe start my own business?
Or maybe I quit that and I'm going to have to borrow some money, but I'm going to go to school.
I'm going to get a new credential and hopefully that's going to open up better career prospects for me.
What do I do?
I just don't know what to do.
And somebody says, well, you know, you're right where God wants you to be.
Well, does that mean he wants me to stay the course?
Or does that mean the sense of discontent I have comes from God?
So I'm supposed to do something new.
It doesn't tell you anything.
You can multiply that example a million times with all the decisions we have to make.
It doesn't do anything.
No matter what, it's always going to have to come down to us making a decision about what to do and hoping that maybe it's what God wanted.
This is how Holly's appeal to purpose works.
It turns out that it turns out we need to know that our purpose is God-given, but then we expand the idea of purpose so much because if it can't just literally be what the Bible says, it can't literally be about growing stuff and working with animals.
Otherwise, people like Holly don't have a purpose.
That's not what he does, right?
We expand the idea of purpose so much that anything we do is a calling from God, which means that then directing us to go ask God what it is we're supposed to do doesn't do anything because it turns out God could be telling us to do anything.
Whatever it is we want to do is what God's telling us to do.
You get the idea.
And if you're listening to me, like, wait, that doesn't make any sense.
No, it doesn't make any sense.
And it doesn't make any sense because it's in my, again, it's a system failure in conservative Christian theology.
Okay.
Need to wind this down.
So let me, let me try to tie these pieces together.
Okay.
Holly has a lot writing on this notion that our purpose has to come from God.
His claim early on in the book is we don't have a story.
Men don't have a story that tells them what their purpose is.
The Bible gives them that story.
The Bible tells them what that purpose is.
And his chapter, chapter two, man's mission, is all about laying out what that is.
And it turns out it is being productive and co-laboring with God.
But if you dig into it, it turns out that doesn't tell us anything at all.
Because being productive, creating whatever word you want to put on that, ends up being so broad that whatever it is that we like to do or whatever it is, however it is that we individually end up being productive, that just is our purpose.
It's completely taught a lot.
We don't need a story to tell us that.
The story becomes irrelevant because it's meaningless, because it's vacuous, because it is empty.
That's my counterclaim to Holly, is that his story, it's kind of no story at all because it doesn't do what he says it does.
And if it doesn't do what he says it does, it certainly can't be the only story that does it.
If his story is just going to be whatever you like to do and however you like to be productive is what God wants you to do, there got to be other stories that could tell us the same thing.
And we're going to pick up on that thread next episode.
Until then, again, thank you for listening.
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