Good News for Anxious Christians, epanded ed.

Good News for Anxious Christians by Phillip Cary

Professor Phil Cary is a smart, wise, and nice man. You can get a real sense of all three dimensions by watching Professor Cary's The Great Courses lectures [ https://www.thegreatcourses.com/search/Cary ] on “Luther,” “Augustine,” “Philosophy and Religion in the West,” and “History of Christian Theology.” Professor Cary is a philosopher with a deep knowledge of history. As a Catholic, I appreciate his even-handedness when dealing with controversial issues within Christianity; Protestants like to think that Catholics are anxious about “doing enough,” but Protestants are anxious about having enough – or the right kind of - faith. I treasure one of his observations that every Christian tradition has its own inherent anxiety. His Luther course gave me deep appreciation for Luther's erudition and industry.

This book reveals a pastoral side. Professor Cary came to write this book because of his experience with young Christian students who had their own anxiety about having the right kind of faith. As a Catholic, I am not well acquainted with the particular issues that he describes; Catholic religious hang-ups generally slide in other directions. On the other hand, there are commonalities that span the two traditions and, moreover, what Professor Cary describes seems to be the heresy of “modernity” that is a common threat to all orthodox religious traditions.

Professor Cary describes the mindset his students are facing as the “new Evangelical theology” (hereinafter the “NET.”) Even though I am not an Evangelical, what he describes as NET sounded to me like orthodox Evangelical theology, or, to put it another way, the theology I am deficient in not espousing. However, according to Professor Cary, the NET is a new phenomenon. It would not have been known to our parents or even to our younger selves if we happened to grow up in the 1970s (and assuming we grew up in Evangelical culture.)

The Net teaches things like “God is found within you,” “you should hand your life over to God,” and “listen to God's voice within you.” Young evangelicals are told these things repeatedly and actively try to put these ideas into effect. The problem is that these ideas lead to cognitive dissonance because they are not true. If you listen to God's voice within you, you are actually listening to your own voice and not God's. God doesn't want you to turn your life over to him in the sense that God makes all of your decision; God wants you to make your own decisions guided by His teachings. There has always been a way for Christians to find God's guidance; it is called the Bible.

The thread that seems to run through the NET is a turn away from the intellectual. Professor Cary blames this development on Christian marketing. Pastors want to be successful, and they find success in selling new experiences. They don't want their consumers questioning them, which might happen if they were taught to think for themselves. Professor Cary explains:

“Ever feel like you're not being transformed often enough? It's one of those “what's wrong with me?” kind of feelings, essentially a new type of guilt. It's indicated by clichés that didn't even exist when many of us were young: you're unwilling to go “outside your comfort zone,” you're afraid to think “outside the box,” you're unable to “move on with your life.” What's wrong with you? You keep wanting to do the same old thing, the thing you're good at, as if life was about being faithful to what's past, not getting on to something new.

My suggestion is that this is the guilt a consumer culture wants you to feel for not being a good consumer. What makes a good consumer is a short attention span, meaning that you quickly get tired of the same old thing and keep wanting to get new things—lots of new things. People who are content to stay within their comfort zone are not very useful to the many organizations that are intent on expanding their share of the market. So if you're one of those people who likes to be faithful and hang on to old things—old doctrines, old people in your life—then major cultural forces will be marshaled against you.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (pp. 153-154). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Joseph Ratzinger predicted the anti-intellectual turn as one of the moves that Christianity might make in response to modernity:

“Both procedures have something frighteningly contemporary about them. In a situation in which the truth of the Christian approach seems to be disappearing, the struggle for Christianity has brought to the fore again the two very methods that ancient polytheism employed to fight—and lose—its last battle. On one side, we have the retreat from the truth of reason into a realm of mere piety, mere faith, mere revelation; a retreat that in reality bears a fatal resemblance, whether by design or accident and whether the fact is admitted or not, to the ancient religion's retreat before the logos, to the flight from truth to beautiful custom, from nature to politics. On the other side, we have an approach I will call for short “interpreted Christianity”: the stumbling blocks in Christianity are removed by the interpretative method, and, as part of the process of thus rendering it unobjectionable, its actual content is written off as dispensable phraseology, as a periphrasis not required to say the simple things now alleged, by complicated modes of exposition, to constitute its real meaning.

Introduction To Christianity, 2nd Edition (Communio Books) (pp. 81-82). Ignatius Press. Kindle Edition.

“Interpreted Christianity” is modern liberal Christianity which can interpret gay marriage into the Bible. The “retreat from the truth of reason into a realm of mere piety, mere faith, mere revelation” seems to be the NET.

The NET seems to be a retreat into narcissism. Modernity seems to cultivate narcissism, which carries with it a confusion of God and the individual. In the 2020s, this confusion includes the belief that people can be born in the “wrong body,” a difficulty that can be rectified by “identifying” as the selected gender.

Is this very far from the belief that God can be found by turning within themselves? Orthodox Christianity has always insisted on a distinction between God and world, between believer and God. Even mystics caught up in religious ecstasies, who lose themselves in God, still see God as something larger in them that they are joined to and disappear within. They do not see God as a tiny, quiet part of them. The NET turns narcissism into solipsism:

“By undermining your sense of the reality of God—the reality of someone who exists outside you—the new evangelical theology undermines your faith in the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Instead of learning what God says about himself in his word, you have to dance with shadows in your own heart and figure out which of them to call God. And when your experience with the shadows disappoints you, you pretty much have to declare yourself disappointed with God. The new evangelical theology thus sets you up for a kind of consumer disappointment, when the elixir it's selling turns out not to have the magical properties it claims. It doesn't make your life turn out the way you want and it won't make you immune from suffering and sadness. That's not what the man on the cross promised.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (pp. 240-241). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Narcissism keeps us from growing up. We grow up by doing things and using our judgment. God does not want us to turn control of our lives over to him as if we were to be on autopilot waiting for instructions. God wants us to be worthy sons and daughters. How do we know this? Because God has said so:

“To do the good works that God has commanded us to do is obedience, which is the heart of traditional Christian morality. To see the difference between this Christian obedience and the very untraditional notion of “letting God take control,” we can look at our Lord's parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14–30). You know the story: the master is going on a journey and leaves three of his servants in charge of his wealth. The wealth comes in the form of talents. A talent is a measure of weight, about seventy-five pounds. So a talent of silver is a lot of money. And that's the least he hands over to his servants; the most capable servant gets five talents, and another gets three. And when their lord returns they must give an account of what they've done with their talents—just as we must give an account of what we've done with our lives on the day of judgment. So the talents become an image of all the abilities and resources God has put into our hands, which we are responsible to use for his glory.

The first thing to notice here is who's giving control to whom. The servants do not give control to the master, but the other way round. He has put a certain number of talents in their control, and they're the ones who have to do something with what's now under their control. So they're in no position to just “let the lord take control.” That would be getting things completely backward! Just imagine how the master would respond if any of his servants tried to give control of the talents back to him, saying, “I'll let you do it all, Lord. I give control to you. I surrender all—I yield it all to you!” That's not a way to honor him: it's disobedience, an out-and-out refusal of the work he has given them to do. What will the lord do with such foolish servants?

So the parable of the talents gives us a picture of Christian obedience that is the exact opposite of “giving God control.” It's as if our Lord Jesus wanted to tell us in advance precisely what's wrong with the new evangelical theology. If we realize that the parable is about us, we will see that for us to “let go and let God” is to refuse responsibility, to pretend that the work God has given us is not ours to do. The truth is we're not letting God work; he's letting us work. He has let us have a certain number of talents and he expects us to work with them.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (pp. 67-68). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This is a great point.

The solution is a reorientation that recognizes the truth that God exists outside of the believer. God is an external reality, a person. We don't access other people as “experiences.” We access them as people by getting to know them and learn about them. We access God through the mind, which means knowing doctrines about God. Professor Cary explains:

“Christian faith is about Christ, not about experiencing Christ. There's a difference and it matters. We put our faith in a person, not an experience. I want to insist on this difference because many Christians have been led to believe that what makes faith personal is that it's experiential. In effect, they confuse “experiential” with “personal.” But I think that what makes Christian faith personal is that it's about a person. We do experience Christ in our faith and that's a very good thing, but it's not the really important thing in Christian faith or even in Christian experience. The person in whom we have faith is the really important thing in Christian experience.

That's why Christianity, more than any other religion, makes a big deal about doctrine. “Doctrine” simply means teaching, and Christianity needs teaching because it's about Christ. Most religions are fundamentally a way of life, but Christianity is fundamentally a faith, because it's centered not on how we live but on what we believe about how Christ lives (and died, and rose again, and reigns at God's right hand, and is coming again in glory). Since the focus is on a person, not a way of life or an experience, the crucial thing to say is not how to live or what the rules are, as in other religions, but rather what the story is about this one person, Jesus Christ. And it's important to get the story right, to tell the truth about Christ, or we won't know who he really is. So the soundness of doctrine matters a great deal: without it we can't do a good job telling Christ's story.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (pp. 220-221). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Joseph Ratzinger pointed out that one of the inadequate Christian reactions to modernity, mirroring the defeatism of ancient paganism, was “the retreat from the truth of reason into a realm of mere piety, mere faith, mere revelation.” In modern Christianity, mere piety and mere revelation means the “Christian experience,” which has the salutary value of being non-falsifiable. Professor Cary points out that historically, mainstream Protestantism attempted to hold onto its Christian identity by emphasizing Christian experience:

“Liberal Protestantism has been a failure for quite some time now. It originated as a response to modern crises of faith in the nineteenth century, when many European and American theologians tried to help churches hang on to their Christian identity even after they felt they could no longer hold on to orthodox Christian doctrine. It was a kind of historical delaying tactic, postponing the move to a post-Christian future. Liberal theology is a strategy that develops when you can't believe in Christian doctrine anymore, but you want to keep being a Christian, so you base your faith on Christian experience instead. But the strategy only appears to work for a few generations, and by now the liberal Protestant churches are becoming more and more clearly post-Christian, though not all their members have fully realized this yet.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (p. 224). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

These churches eventually became Unitarian and completely lost their Christian identity.

Evangelicalism is following the same path:

“Although the underlying motives are not exactly the same, evangelical Christians do seem eager to make the same mistake as liberal Protestants. Just think how many Christians you know would answer the question, “What is your faith really about?” by saying something like, “It's about experiencing God working in my life.” It's an answer that does not require Christ or mention his name. In a church where that is the expected answer, Christ is in the process of disappearing from view, so that the experience they're talking about is becoming less and less Christian with every generation.

And I've learned from my students that this is the kind of answer members of the younger generation of evangelicals think they're supposed to give. It's not like they've decided on their own to become anxious narcissists concerned more with their own experiences than with Jesus Christ. They were taught to be that way by their churches and Christian media and various programs and ministries. Or not exactly taught—that would be something like doctrine—but rather, made to feel guilty and inadequate and unspiritual when they didn't feel and talk that way. (Can't you just hear it—devastating words spoken in tones of great concern: “You mean you're not experiencing God working in your life? What's wrong?”) So they've come to feel that if they don't talk this way, there must be something wrong with their Christian life.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (pp. 228-229). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Professor Cary's answer to the problem is to teach – preach – about Christ, about Christian doctrine. People innately want to know things. They want to know about other people. They can learn from repetition. More significantly, people don't thrive on “relevance” or “practical sermons.” Religion is not practical. Going to church on Sunday is not practical. People do these impractical things because of the message and the promise of the Gospel. Professor Cary offers this analogy:

“To see what I mean, try this thought experiment. Imagine you're someone who likes poetry and drama, and you're looking at courses being offered at a local community college. Two courses have caught your attention, one titled “The Poems and Plays of Shakespeare” and another titled “The Relevance of Shakespeare to Our Lives.” Which one would you rather take? I figure that if it's poetry and drama you really want—if you're eager to encounter the beauty and power and wisdom in Shakespeare's poems and plays—then you'll avoid the second course. You want to take in Shakespeare's words, not listen to some professor going on for a whole semester about how they're supposed to be relevant to you. At least that's what I'd choose. When I want to learn something interesting or beautiful, the last thing I want is a series of lectures on how that thing is relevant to my life. I want to encounter the thing itself: literature or history, math or biology, music or the gospel, all of which move me because of their beauty as well as their truth.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (p. 209). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

And:

“Only encountering the beauty of Christ in the gospel is likely to change their hearts so that they learn to love the subject matter of the gospel, which is Christ himself, and thus become like a bride waiting eagerly for her Beloved. Whereas trying to make Christ “relevant” means giving up hope that the people in the pews might come to be interested in something besides their own lives.

Cary, Phillip. Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed. (p. 210). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

This is a very accessible book. Professor Cary is a warm and engaging writer. If you want a book that provides an insightful analysis of how things have gone wrong and how you can avoid getting trapped into habits that won't help you, this is your book.