In Paul Tillich’s retelling of changing culture and dominant human anxieties since antiquity, he emphasizes that modernity introduced, for the first time in human consciousness, the self-understanding of the person as an individual. Our identity is no longer merely as part of a collective mass of humanity, of some tribe or people, but we think of ourselves as an individual with our individual rights, and responsibilities. We probably don’t realize how different from earlier ages our perception of ourselves is.
Because of the rise of individual personhood, the dominant fears in the modern era are also individual in nature. The ancient fears of death and fate, though certainly present today, are not the most vexing ones. Neither are the medieval compunctions, moral guilt and impending condemnation, foremost in many people’s minds. Instead, our most profound anxieties are related to doubt and meaninglessness.
Since we no longer have a collective identity automatically bestowed on us at birth, and we are no longer Christians by birth as in the Middle Ages, we have no guaranteed place in the world or life itself. We are individuals, for better or worse, and in our existential aloneness we are plagued by doubt and the specter of meaninglessness.
No one questioned the existence of the gods in antiquity, even if they may have ignored them. Likewise in the Middle Ages, though piety may have been low, disbelief in God was unthinkable. People assumed a foundational reality holding things in a certain order, but no longer is this the case. Anything may be doubted, including ideas of God, which raises the real possibility of meaninglessness.
In many ways, the church, some of it having a medieval hangover, is often struggling to speak meaningfully in the modern era, particularly to those with modern skepticism, cynicism, or despair. Too often the church continues to spend its energy trying to convince people they are in danger of hell, to then share the good news of salvation, rather than articulating anything approaching good news for our pressing existential anxieties.
Future salvation is not resounding good news to those whose prevailing worry is that life is as meaningless as death. Is anything grounding us within this chaotic, arbitrary, and often senseless world?
Profound modern doubts will not be satisfied by shallow platitudes. Repeating “God has a plan” is an attempt to reassure us in a perplexing world, but it does not really relieve the person who fears that everything is haphazard. That mantra simply tries to deny what some perceive, and the modern restlessness of the soul remains. Doubt, by its nature, undermines confidence in the assertion that there is a divine plan.
Tillich opines that faith has often been misconstrued as essentially belief in the unbelievable, which does not help us. To insist that the world and existence is not as meaningless as it often seems, is a denial of the doubts many have. To urge everyone to simply believe that things are not what they seem is to promote a faith which cannot incorporate doubt, but must exclude it. This type of faith cannot handle doubt or subsequent meaninglessness.
In previous ages, the dominant anxieties were not excluded, but overcome by faith. In the ancient era, faith did not suggest “there is no death nor fate,” but rather that both were stripped of power or superseded. People of the time found “the courage to be” despite the presence of these fears.
Likewise, in the Middle Ages people still knew they were guilty, but faith meant accepting that they were accepted by God. Their trust in forgiveness through the church did not deny guilt or condemnation, but overcame those anxieties.
In both those eras no one doubted the very foundation of a reality that offered an order and everyone a place within it. This is not where we are now. We can peer into the abyss of uncertainty, and wonder if there is an order, or if anything is holding everything. We can look up at the vastness of space and wonder if there is meaning to our small, brief existence.
The question is, then, what is the nature of faith, for our time, that can incorporate our modern anxieties and overcome them, rather than deny them?