Defining Contentment: Partial Pictures
Four cultural portraits that overlap with Christian contentment, but ain't quite it
If, as Mary Poppins says, the beginning is a good place to start, fighting for contentment should begin with defining it: what exactly are we fighting for?
The good people at dictionary.com define “content” as “satisfied with what one is or has; not wanting more or anything else.” That’s a good start; I like that they include both the “positive” side of being satisfied with one’s current state, and the “negative” side of not wanting more. Both of those are important, and they’re part of a fuller Christian vision of contentment.
Four partial pictures
We can build on that by comparing Christian contentment to four ideas about contentment popular today. Each has some overlap with Christian contentment, but isn’t quite right. But surveying them can both point us in the general direction of the Christian vision of contentment and help us contrast true contentment with insufficient ideas that might be floating around our minds.
1. Contentment is a feeling of satisfaction.
Some people think of contentment as a feeling or emotion, like happiness. I am content when I’m experiencing the emotion of being satisfied; and if I’m not experiencing that emotion, I must not be content.
There is such a thing as the emotion of contentment – and it’s nice when we have it – but the Christian vision of contentment is often tied to experiencing hardship, lack, or other things that tend to produce negative emotions in the moment. Christianity is clear-sighted about the fact that our emotions come and go, often without us being able to control them. And many aspects of life we associate with emotions in modern times – love, rejoicing, gratitude – are in Christianity choices first. We choose to show love and hope our emotions will follow after, but we don’t need them to do so. When Paul writes, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18), he doesn’t mean, “feel joy and gratitude all the time;” he means, “choose to practice joy and gratitude in all circumstances.”
Christian contentment works the same way. The emotion of contentment is a nice thing to have; but true contentment means choosing to accept that my current state is a good gift from God and that I have enough of what I need to trust him.1
2. Contentment comes through self-acceptance.
The pop-therapy world2 frames contentment as coming from self-acceptance: embracing who I am without judgment, and as much as possible resisting voices from myself or others that insist I might need to change. The more I believe things like “I am enough,” “I am beautiful,” or “I am strong,” the more content I’ll be.
Christian contentment involves some level of self-acceptance. If God created me in his image and guides my life as my good heavenly Father, then many things about me – my body, my family circumstances, my strengths and weaknesses – have come from his hand, and it’s good for me to accept those without becoming bitter or envying others. Even if I seek to improve some of those things, like exercising to get healthier, accepting that God has made me what I am and brought me where I am right now is better than a burning discontent or covetousness.
However, Christianity also teaches that some parts of myself need to be repented of or rejected. “Myself” includes fundamentally selfish and evil desires, thoughts, and habits that I should never be content with. Christian contentment involves fighting things like greed, jealousy, anger, or lust that may feel like “part of me.”
And because of the deep selfishness and brokenness we call original sin, Christians know that we are only accepted by God because of what Jesus has done for us. By ourselves, we aren’t “enough” and can never be; instead, when we commit our lives to Jesus as the ultimate source of our identity, purpose, and hope, God credits us Jesus’s perfect obedience and accepts us on that account.
3. Contentment comes through rejecting attachments and desires.
Another common picture of contentment is from Buddhism, and is often translated “renunciation” or “detachment.” Here’s how one Buddhist author puts it:
The way of the world is the way of desire, and the unenlightened who follow this way flow with the current of desire, seeking happiness by pursuing the objects in which they imagine they will find fulfillment. The Buddha's message of renunciation states exactly the opposite: the pull of desire is to be resisted and eventually abandoned. Desire is to be abandoned not because it is morally evil but because it is a root of suffering. Thus renunciation, turning away from craving and its drive for gratification, becomes the key to happiness, to freedom from the hold of attachment.3
In Buddhism (this form at least), desire leads to suffering, which locks us in the cycle of death and rebirth, and liberation comes from “renouncing” or detaching from all desire as much as possible. In this vision, contentment grows primarily through the “negative” path of detaching oneself from things as much as possible. The fewer attachments I experience, the more I will be content.
Christianity can give a hearty “amen” to some of that. We absolutely agree that some desires are attachments that are simply wrong in themselves, and lead not only to unhappiness but to judgment. Revenge, causing pain to others, and sexual pleasure outside of marriage are simply wrong, and we should renounce any desires we have for them.
We also believe that a neutral or even good thing can take too high a place in our souls and become a functional idol. It can be something concrete, like a family, a job, or health; or it can be something more abstract, like comfort or control. None of those things are inherently evil. But if they become the controlling center of our identity, our choices, or our hope in life, then they’ve become more important to us than God, and we need to repent of them.
The main way Christianity would differ from Buddhism is that we do believe we’re made for attachment – specifically, attachment to God, and then secondarily attachment to others. We’re called to love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Augustine of Hippo described a goal of Christian living as rightly ordered loves, which means having our desires and attachments in their proper order rather than just renounced. So Christian contentment comes not from detaching from desire, but from attaching to God, then managing my other desires under that relationship.
4. Contentment comes through self-mastery and self-sufficiency.
A fourth idea about contentment in the air is of a stoic (or Stoic, if he’s genuinely into the philosophy) dude who don’t need nothin’ from nobody.
Pop-culture stoicism looks like Ron Swanson, who lives in a cabin in the woods, builds his own canoes, and avoids messy things like relationships and emotions as much as possible. He’s generally unflappable, because he does his best to be self-controlled and also to care as little as possible about people or things. Self-mastery and self-sufficiency lead to the solitary, content man (it’s usually a man here).
True Stoicism, an ancient Greco-Roman philosophy which has influenced people through history and is growing in popularity today, has a more robust vision of self-mastery than the Ron Swanson caricature. As one popularizer of Stoicism puts it,4 “The ideal for the Stoic, as with the Buddhist, is to show complete equanimity in the face of adversity.” Stoicism aims at contentment in all circumstances. The New Testament word for “content,” autarkeia, was actually used in Stoic and Cynic philosophy first! Here’s how a scholar describes it:
In Cynic and Stoic philosophy it denotes one who exercises arkeisthai [undemanding satisfaction] in relation to his own inner possibility and who thus becomes an independent man sufficient to himself and in need of none else.5
The Stoic ideal of contentment is an independent and self-sufficient person who doesn’t need things or people. Their contentment is a lonely one.
While Christianity would agree with Stoicism about the importance of self-mastery and self-discipline, our ideal of contentment is relational instead of self-sufficient. Kittel points this out, but look at the two New Testament texts that deal most directly with contentment:
I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. (Philippians 4:11-13, emphasis added)
And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all contentment in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work. … You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way. (2 Corinthians 9:8,11)
The first passage says our contentment comes, not from ourself, but from the strength of Christ, who enables us to be satisfied in both plenty and want. And the second passage, which is about a collection to relieve Christians suffering famine, grounds contentment in depending on others: in generosity and mutual help. Where Stoic contentment is about self-sufficiency, Christian contentment comes through dependence on Christ and generous interdependence with others.
In our next piece, we’ll pull these threads together and give the Christian vision for contentment.
Photo credits: Jakob Owens on Unsplash; Caroline Veronez on Unsplash; Sander Sammy on Unsplash; @rw.studios on Unsplash
As we’re going to see, this doesn’t mean thinking my current state is the best thing that could possibly be happening to me, or doing nothing to make my condition better. We’ll discuss this more in the future!
By “pop therapy,” I don’t mean to demean all forms or schools of therapy. I mean the self-motivation and self-care mindset that’s been popularized by people like Oprah, lampooned by Stuart Smalley, and now has its own life in social media.
From “The Noble Eightfold Path” by Bikkhu Bodhi, emphasis added. Accessed at https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/waytoend.html#ch3
https://dailystoic.com/self-discipline/
Gerhard Kittel, arkeo, in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, volume 1 page 466.