In the immediate post-war period, the writers representing Flourishing 1.0 primarily examined the crises of flourishing within the interior life—questions of meaning, selfhood, and the courage required to live amid despair. Yet they were also attentive to the broader cultural forces that produced such crises. Tillich, for example, warned that political systems such as Communism and Nazism demanded the surrender of selfhood for the promise of security, demonstrating how entire societies could fall into patterns of collective anxiety and spiritual distortion (xviii).
Building on this recognition, the second movement shifts focus outward—from how individuals stay whole in a damaged world to the social and moral conditions that allow communities to thrive. The question moves beyond just how the self endures meaninglessness, to what is necessary for human life together to embody the wholeness of shalom.
In The Human Condition, the philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) asks not merely how individuals survive under repressive political conditions, but what kind of world makes fully human life possible. She examines how modern societies become capable of systematic dehumanization through the rise of mass bureaucracy, the reduction of politics to technical administration, and the erosion of public spaces where citizens can act meaningfully together.
Arendt argues that this transformation produces what she calls “worldlessness”—a loss of shared meaning and memory. When stable institutions and common spaces weaken, individuals retreat into private life or conform to mass society. The result is not simply personal alienation but the collapse of the public realm necessary for human plurality and agency.
Central to her argument is the distinction between labor, work, and action. Labor concerns biological necessity and survival; work produces the durable artifacts of civilization; action, however, is the uniquely human capacity to initiate something new in the presence of others. Modern society, she contends, elevates necessity and production while marginalizing action—the political activity of speaking and acting together in public. When labor and consumption dominate, the space for shared responsibility and collective meaning diminishes.
Yet Arendt offers hope in the concept of natality—the idea that each birth carries the possibility of new beginnings through action and speech. For her, progress matters less than preserving institutions and public spaces where plurality—people gathering together in common life without surrendering their distinctiveness—can flourish. Human thriving requires not merely inner resilience, but a world structured to sustain shared meaning. Flourishing, therefore, is not primarily an individual achievement but a collective and structural reality.
Decades later, theologian Cornelius Plantinga Jr. and philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff turn explicitly to the biblical concept of shalom to ground such ultimate meaning. Plantinga focuses on sin as disordered shalom, whereas Wolterstorff emphasizes shalom in the context of justice, exploring how Christians can pursue and live in a world guided by God’s shalom.
In Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, Plantinga begins not with sin but with its opposite—shalom, the biblical vision of “universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight” (10). Shalom describes the right ordering of creation: the harmony of God, humanity, and the created world in relationships marked by justice, fulfillment, and peace. It is not merely a condition of individual well-being but an interwoven reality in which human life, communities, and the natural world exist in proper relationship before God.
Against this vision, Plantinga defines sin as the culpable “vandalism” of shalom. Sin is more than the breaking of divine law; it is the disruption of the goodness God intended for creation. Human wrongdoing damages relationships with God, with others, and with the created order. While cultural forces can shape behavior, Plantinga insists that human beings remain responsible moral agents whose actions distort the flourishing they were created to nurture.
Yet sin is never purely private. It spreads through habits, institutions, and cultural patterns, embedding itself in social structures that perpetuate injustice and disorder across generations. In this way, the disruption of shalom becomes both personal and systemic, shaping the moral and social environments in which communities live.
Plantinga’s account ultimately moves beyond diagnosis to prescription. God’s grace calls human beings to participate in the repair of creation. Flourishing, therefore, requires both personal repentance and the patient reweaving of relationships that sin has torn apart.
If Plantinga shows how sin vandalizes shalom, Nicholas Wolterstorff asks what justice must look like if shalom is to take concrete form in communal life.[1] In Until Justice and Peace Embrace, he argues that justice is indispensable to the realization of flourishing. Drawing on the biblical vision of peace in Isaiah, Wolterstorff describes shalom as life lived in right relationship—with God, with oneself, with others, and with the created world.
For Wolterstorff, justice is both God’s gift and humanity’s calling. It requires more than avoiding wrongdoing; it calls people to actively seek the good and cultivate the conditions in which communities can flourish. Justice therefore involves a double task: resisting injustice while also nurturing the goods that sustain human life together.
Because human life is relational, justice cannot be understood as an individual achievement. The flourishing of persons depends upon the recognition of mutual claims that arise from our shared humanity. These claims take shape within communities whose institutions and practices either sustain or undermine the possibility of shalom.
Yet Wolterstorff also insists that the pursuit of justice ultimately depends upon God’s initiative. Human efforts alone cannot bring about the fullness of peace the prophets envisioned. Instead, God’s people pursue justice in hope—trusting that God’s redemptive purposes extend beyond their own efforts. In this way justice becomes a central expression of flourishing. To seek justice is to participate in God’s work of restoring the wholeness intended for creation.
Arendt, Plantinga, and Wolterstorff shift the discussion of flourishing from the interior life of the individual to the moral and institutional structures that shape communal life. Arendt diagnoses the fragility of the public world, Plantinga exposes sin as the vandalism of communal shalom, and Wolterstorff calls communities to pursue justice as its restoration.
The first movement wrestled with existential survival in a fractured world. The second movement reasserted God’s purposes for creation through justice and communal repair in the presence of sin. Yet neither movement focused primarily on personal well-being. That shift would emerge at the turn of the twenty-first century with the rise of positive psychology, which sought to understand flourishing through empirical studies.
[1]. See also Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Teaching for Shalom: On the Goal of Christian Collegiate Education,” in Nicholas Wolterstorff, Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education, eds. Clarence L. Joldersma and Gloria G. Stronks (Eerdmans, 2004), 10–26.
