Eric Youngblood: Fear Is Not A Christian Habit Of Mind

  • Tuesday, November 17, 2015
  • Eric Youngblood

“Fear is NOT a Christian habit of mind.”

I wanted to remind us of that. Few else seem to be. 

A Martian Calvinist

Marilynne Robinson, a Martian of sorts and sublime novelist, reminded me of it recently, again. I say Martian, because, she may as well be. She’s taught in secular academies like Amherst and University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop, and has dwelled in exotic foreign countries like Massachusetts. She has won a Pulitzer price in fiction. But at the same time, she is a Calvinist. 

A Calvinist who actually reads John Calvin. And then, considers what he wrote as if people in other times have demonstrated cleverness or insight into the mysteries of our muddled existences. And then, just to blow all our minds, she actually tells other people about it.

She also apparently considers the Bible a good bit as well, having loitered in it’s neighborhoods, even in the rural parts that no one ever visits any more, like Leviticus. 

It is very bizarre. 

The Great Oprahstasy

Smart people are not supposed to base any actual part of their life on the Bible. They are to yield only to “science” or “reason.” Or perhaps they are “to follow their own hearts.” 

They are, in other words, supposed to stand as their own authority, practicing what sociologist Robert Bellah once reported as ‘Sheilaism” or what Robert Dreher calls “The Great Oprahstasy”, which he defines as “a do- it-yourself faith in which the Self is the authoritative arbiter of all religious truth. It comes from a woman named Sheila Larson, interviewed by Bellah and his co-author in their influential book Habits of the Heart. Sheila said:

“I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice…It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think He would want us to take care of each other.”

Dreher posits that most folks are “Sheilaists” even if donning a Christian brand of it. He also suggests that this is the greatest threat to orthodox faith in our time. 

In those Days there was no King

And of course, it certainly can be seen as the undergirding ideology for helping us understand how we have arrived at a moment “when everyone does what is right in his own eyes.” In the Bible, that description is a moniker of catastrophe, akin to suggesting that a dangerous, insidious plague has proliferated throughout the city. But in the age of Oprahstasy, it is a time of hearty congratulations, cheering what would once have been thought shameful, and constructing lives based on obedience to oneself alone.

There are, however, unintended consequences which arise from the "cleverness" of thinking we are to listen to ourselves alone and to supposing that are living in an un-shepherded universe which, as we all know, just arrived here without Help, because we learned, like Dave Wilcox, “back in science class between the recess breaks that the universe just sort of came together like a big mistake. It started with a bang which sent the pieces flyin’ and then it cooled and twirled into dinosaurs and dandelions...”. 

When clever people adopt such a faith that the blue in our eyes or the curl of our hair, the bend of our knee, or the pulse of our heart is clearly the result of unthoughtful sources and cataclysmic processes of randomness, then there are side effects. 

When sophisticated and enlightened folk with advanced degrees and maxed out 401ks sidestep Christ, “the image of the invisible God...through whom and for whom all things were created, whether things in heaven or on earth, visible or invisible”, there are psychological, physiological, and communal consequences.

You can Forget, but There’ll be Hell to Pay

One pervasive side effect is fear. Plain, bald, crippling terror. Marilynne remembers that God himself told our forebears in redemptive history that they could take the medicine of God-forgetfulness, but there’d be hell to pay, so to speak.

There is always a judgment that comes from living out of accord with reality. All counselors will tell you that the healthiest people frame their lives according to what is, to how things are, and refuse to live in denial. If you drink too much, and pretend it doesn’t matter when you get behind the wheel, your pretending may literally collide with a reality you hadn’t been factoring in. 

God warned that medicating oneself with oneself, rather than with a rich opening up and receiving of the Almighty’s care, instruction, and energizing grace, would make folks jittery. Afraid of their own shadows. High-strung with delusional fear. He warned that drug companies would make a killing on anxiety meds if God-loyalty were absented from any community. 

Ms. Robinson writes:

In the 26th chapter of Leviticus, we find a description of the state of the state the people of Israel will find themselves in if they depart from their loyalty to God: The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues. They shall stumble over one another, as if to escape a sword though none pursues.

Now of course, there are numbers among us who have weapons that would blast that leaf to atoms and feel brave as they did it, confirmed in their alarm by the fact that there are so very many leaves. But the point is the same. Those who forget God, the single assurance of our safety however that word may be defined can be recognized by the fact that they make irrational responses to irrational fears. The text specifies the very real threat that fear itself poses, “you shall have no power to stand before your enemies.” 

Hating Helicoptering out of Love

It’s worth periodically asking ourselves some diagnostic questions to make sure we aren’t primarily listening to the voice of fear. 

Are we fretting and helicoptering over our kids (perhaps in a crippling way for them), obsessing about their futures, their salvation, their habits, their spouses, their health, because we have simply failed to imagine the involvement of and the benefits of adherence to the Resurrected Christ in whom all things hold together? 

Are we posturing ourselves constantly in a defensive pose, whether socially or politically, because we are fearful and nervous about what is going to happen to us or our nation, as if Christ, whom death could not hold, is somehow confused by Supreme Court rulings, wild-haired democrats and uptight republicans?

Are we constructing our lives with a pagan belief that we have to get everything now, every bucket list item checked off before our personal expiration date arrives, every desire fulfilled by age 90, every dream house built...despite the needs around us? In other words, are we failing to appropriate the reality of our interminable lives in Jesus….and that we are the most pitiful creatures on the earth if it is “only for this life that we have faith in Christ?"

Does fear drive our finances, vocations, relational life, or parenting decisions? If so, let us employ the psalmist as an exemplar for our wobbly knees: 

“I sought the Lord and he answered me. He delivered me from all my fears.”

What if it turned out that the best way to teach our children the faith was to constantly tell them that fear-mongering was of the devil?  Was to refuse to be nervous in an uncertain world? 

Was to move in the face of our fears accompanied by our strong Savior into every situation, because we know that we are people who will live forever. Literally. 

Living Like Those Will Live Forever

So there is nothing ultimately to fear. We shall miss out on nothing. We shall never see death (this is what Jesus said). And we shall never be unaccompanied by the presence of God.

But we can certainly live as if none of that is true. And then we give the world the strong suspicion that what we emphatically declare is ultimate reality, is actually embarrassingly inconsequential on Tuesday afternoons where "real" life is happening and frankly, more fictitious that any of JK Rowling’s concoctions concerning Harry Potter and his Hogwartian friends. 

Let us refuse fear. When it comes, because there are real threats in the world, let us conscientiously object to being shrill. Reject the ubiquitous notion that we should be dictated to by it. Instead, let us lean on Christ who had a favorite saying, that he picked up from his Father, "Do Not Fear." Let us depict to a terrified world in frightened times that we know One who “makes us bold and stout-hearted”...good news indeed, because by temperament and circumstance, there is plenty to elicit our cowardice and flimsy-heartedness.

May Jesus himself be the One on whom we rely for boldness, stout-heartedness, and the courage and good sense to obey not ourselves or our fears, but Him who chases all our fears away.

---

Eric Youngblood is the Senior Pastor at 

Rock Creek Fellowship (PCA) on Lookout Mountain. Please feel free to contact him at eric@rockcreekfellowship.org.

Latest Headlines
Church
"Son, I'll Go All The Way With You" Is Sermon Topic At Middle Valley Church Of God
  • 3/26/2024

Middle Valley Church of God, at 1703 Thrasher Pike in Hixson, announced that Pastor Mitch McClure will be preaching on Sunday, in the 10:30 a.m. service. Mr. McClure will be preaching on the ... more

Refuge Assembly To Host Amazing Bible Discoveries Presentation March 31
Refuge Assembly To Host Amazing Bible Discoveries Presentation March 31
  • 3/25/2024

Refuge Assembly, 194 Depot St. in Soddy Daisy, will host Kevin Fisher, son-in-law of the late explorer Ron Wyatt, with Amazing Bible Discoveries this Sunday from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Lunch will ... more

Bob Tamasy: Taking A Brief Look At Life’s Brevity
Bob Tamasy: Taking A Brief Look At Life’s Brevity
  • 3/25/2024

One of the wonders of the English language is how a single word can take on a variety of meanings. Take the word love for example: We can love a spouse, child, friend, job, sports team, a vacation ... more