One of the most ambitious attempts to answer the question of human flourishing appears in Tyler VanderWeele’s A Theology of Health: Wholeness and Human Flourishing. An epidemiologist whose work has helped shape contemporary research on flourishing, VanderWeele engages many of the themes explored by earlier writers—meaning in the face of suffering, justice within community, and the empirical study of well-being—but he approaches them from a distinctly theological starting point. For VanderWeele, flourishing is not merely a psychological state or a social condition, but the wholeness of a person created and redeemed by God.
Building on his global empirical research on flourishing, VanderWeele defines the health of a person broadly as human wholeness: a state in which the major domains of a person’s life are good (21). Within the health of a person, he identifies seven interrelated domains—bodily health, happiness, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close relationships, good community, and spiritual well-being.
While the first six have appeared in contemporary flourishing research, most notably in the 2025 Global Flourishing Study that VanderWeele has co-directed,[1] A Theology of Health explicitly centers spiritual well-being as indispensable rather than merely instrumental, because it orders the rest toward their ultimate end in communion with God. Empirical research may illuminate the structure of flourishing, but theology defines its telos. Human flourishing therefore encompasses bodily, relational, and social goods, but ultimately finds its center in one’s relationship with God—described as communion, love, charity, or friendship with him (22). As VanderWeele writes, “the love of God is the foundation for our restoration to wholeness” (201). Within this vision the categories of health extend beyond the body: wholeness and brokenness, sin and salvation, and right communion with God and with one another all become questions of health. God appears less as judge than as healer, and sin less as a legal penalty than as a disordering of the human person and a separation from God’s purposes.
The book revisits many of the themes explored by the above authors. Like Frankl, May, and Tillich, he reflects on the meaning of life, the experience of suffering, and the relationship between physical health and the deeper questions of human existence. Like Arendt, Plantinga, and Wolterstorff, he recognizes that flourishing depends upon the health of communities and the justice of the institutions that sustain them, while also acknowledging how sin disrupts the shalom of God’s creation. And aligned with Seligman, Haidt, and McMinn, he affirms that happiness, meaning, purpose, character, virtue, and religious practice contribute measurably to well-being. Yet VanderWeele does more than gather these insights together. By integrating theological reflection with empirical research, he situates them within a broader account of flourishing in which suffering, sin, healing, and restoration are part of the larger movement toward the wholeness—or shalom—of the person before God.
VanderWeele develops this vision by carefully defining the domains of flourishing and showing how each is intertwined with the others. Flourishing cannot be reduced to any single dimension of life; bodily health, relationships, character, meaning, community, happiness, and spiritual well-being are mutually reinforcing. A flourishing community, for example, depends not only on healthy structures and leadership but also on people of character, meaningful relationships, and a shared sense of purpose (58). Sin, understood as a disordering of the person and of creation, disrupts each of these dimensions and the relationships among them. Healing, therefore, is not merely a bodily condition but a process of restoration that unfolds as individuals and communities are drawn back toward God’s purposes.
Yet flourishing in VanderWeele’s account does not imply perfect wholeness in this life. The restoration of God’s creation to its intended purposes remains incomplete, and illness and suffering remain part of the human condition. Even when one domain is diminished—such as bodily health—other domains of flourishing may deepen. Physical illness, for example, can give rise to stronger relationships, greater insight into life’s meaning, stronger character, and deeper communion with God (166). In this way, the domains of flourishing remain dynamically related. Loss or suffering in one area reverberates across the others, sometimes diminishing them, yet at other times drawing individuals and communities toward deeper forms of flourishing.
To develop this argument, VanderWeele structures this book in a manner reminiscent of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, presenting his case through a series of propositional statements. The book unfolds in three movements, echoing creation, fall, and redemption. In the first section he argues that health should be understood as the wholeness of human flourishing. The second examines sin and ill health as disruptions of that wholeness, while the third turns to healing and salvation as the restoration of the person to right relationship with God and others. Each section advances its claims through concise propositions and brief explanatory sub-propositions, typically one or two pages long. In using this propositional structure, VanderWeele repeatedly emphasizes that flourishing depends upon the proper ordering of all dimensions of human life, each influencing and sustaining the others.
VanderWeele writes in a style accessible beyond the academy while grounding his work in extensive scholarship. The text itself is direct and readable, while detailed footnotes provide theological, philosophical, and empirical literature that informs his argument. Although his theological framework draws heavily from Aquinas and Catholic social thought, the themes he explores—health as wholeness, the restoration of relationships with God and others, and the pursuit of human flourishing—resonate across Christian traditions. Because much of his work emerges from public health research, he invites scholars and practitioners alike to consider the role of spiritual well-being in fostering human flourishing. In doing so, he suggests that discussions of health, whether in medicine, psychology, ministry, or social policy, cannot be fully understood apart from deeper questions of meaning, virtue, community, and humanity’s relationship with God. Seen in this light, his work can also be understood as a response to the many intellectuals who have shaped the modern conversation about flourishing.
The authors considered in this review illuminate its many and varied dimensions. Frankl, May, and Tillich remind us that flourishing must confront suffering and the search for meaning. Arendt, Plantinga, and Wolterstorff show that flourishing cannot exist apart from justice and the health of communities and institutions. Seligman, Haidt, and McMinn demonstrate that practices, relationships, virtues, and habits of life contribute measurably to flourishing. Each perspective reveals an important part of the picture, yet each by itself remains incomplete.
What VanderWeele offers in A Theology of Health is a framework that holds these dimensions together. Meaning in suffering, justice in community, empirical insights about well-being, and spiritual communion with God are not just individual accounts of flourishing but interwoven expressions of the wholeness Scripture calls shalom.
For those engaged in Christian ministries, including colleges and universities, devoted to the well-being of individuals and communities, this insight carries an important implication. It is possible to pursue many good things—education, economic opportunity, healthcare, or community development—while still losing sight of the larger vision that gives those efforts coherence. When these goods are treated as separate objectives rather than as interconnected dimensions of flourishing, the pursuit of shalom becomes fragmented. Wholistic ministry therefore requires more than addressing individual needs; it requires seeing how the goods of human life fit together within God’s purposes for creation.
Jeremiah’s exhortation remains as relevant today as it was for the exiles in Babylon: seek the shalom of the city. Such flourishing is personal and communal, spiritual and material, grounded in the recognition that God’s redemptive purposes extend to every dimension of life. The challenge before us is not merely to identify and invest in the individual elements of flourishing but to discern how they belong together within the larger work of God’s restoration. VanderWeele invites us to see flourishing not as the pursuit of isolated goods but as participation in God’s restoring work—the shalom he intends for his creation.
[1]. Tyler J. VanderWeele, Byron R. Johnson, Piotr T. Bialowolski, Rebecca Bonhag, Matt Bradshaw, Thomas Breedlove, et al. “The Global Flourishing Study: Study profile and initial results on flourishing,” Nature Mental Health 3, no. 6 (2025): 636–53.
