Travelers

Our Shifting Anxieties

In The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich offers his overview of three ages of Western thought and the cultural shifts these eras produced. His purpose is to explore the nature of Christian faith in each time, and so he identifies the nature of the fundamental human fears during those periods.

Antiquity, he claims, was characterized by two main anxieties: fear of death and one’s fate. Would you die from war or disease, and what would your fate be as determined by the gods? The ancient understanding of fate was that no matter what one did, fate would have the final word. While these were not the only fears of the time, they were dominant and external in nature.

Christianity emerged in late antiquity and resoundingly rebutted these two fears. It declared death had been conquered, “O death, where is your sting, O grave, where is your victory” (1 Corinthians 15:55), and that human destiny was to share in the glory of God (John 17:22). The haunting anxieties of life in the ancient context were decisively overcome in the gospel of what God had done in Jesus.

This Christian worldview triumphed in the ensuing centuries, and the old pagan system collapsed. A new age, the medieval one, emerged and brought its own anxieties, ones which turned inward and became moral in nature.

As Christianity became the default worldview in the West, being a Christian was a given into which one was born. Everyone was Christian. Personal dedication and piety were generally very low. People were Christians because they were French, English, Italian, or German. Everyone was.

The church, in an attempt to foster greater adherence to Christianity, emphasized, whether intentionally or not, two new fears: that of guilt and condemnation. Hell became prominent. Portrayals of torture at the hands of demons, the damned consigned to eternal misery, as graphically depicted in art, became the staple.

The dominant fears were not anymore that barbarians would appear at the gates or that there was a fate the old gods have in store, but that one was morally guilty and under condemnation. The gospel of death destroyed and of participation in the life of God through a divine kingdom, still made salvation possible, but the fear stoked by church was doubt over whether one would indeed be spared damnation.

Eventually, due to its flaws, the medieval worldview gave way, and in its place rose the modern age. The religious movement which came from this shift was the Reformation in the West.

Why did the reformers speak about the security of the believer, salvation by faith alone, and the priesthood of all believers? We can view their focus as addressing the overwhelming medieval anxieties of guilt and condemnation. They offered greater assurance of salvation to lay people, who were passive and at the bottom of the rigid and extensive spiritual hierarchy of the medieval church.

Today, significant portions of the church continue to employ the medieval fears of guilt and condemnation, but with diminished success, if palpable terror can be considered a good outcome consistent with the gospel. The shadow of the failed medieval age is long, but our deepest human anxieties have shifted.

As long as the church today continues to emphasize that the gospel is primarily about salvation from moral condemnation, it must first try to instill that sense of profound guilt. Many people simply no longer feel the crushing burden of guilt of the previous age. But they also do not have the existential fears of antiquity. The question, which Tillich addresses, and that I will explore next week, is what are the dominant fears of the modern era and how does the gospel speak to contemporary culture?