The Anxious Age and the Doctrine it Needs

In 1844, a Danish writer published a short book about a feeling his contemporaries had not yet learned to isolate. Søren Kierkegaard called it anxiety, and he distinguished it from ordinary fear. Fear has an object. You can pinpoint what you fear and fight it, or leave the room. Anxiety has no object. Kierkegaard called it the dizziness of freedom, the vertigo that takes hold of a person who considers everything he might become and finds nothing outside himself to tell him where to stand. A century later, W. H. Auden wrote a poem called The Age of Anxiety, published in 1947 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year. He was diagnosing the condition of an entire generation.

The condition has since grown into an economy: meditation apps sold on a monthly subscription, productivity systems that promise a quieter morning, the wellness aisle, and daily affirmations printed on mugs and phone screens. Much of that industry really only has one message: You are enough. You need only believe it about yourself. That premise has been taught in classrooms since the self-esteem programs of the 1980s and repeated in commencement speeches ever since, and the anxiety it was meant to cure has only increased.

The Self as its Own Foundation

In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote The Triumph of the Therapeutic and he argued that Western culture had exchanged one governing figure for another. The older self understood itself before something larger, a God, a moral order, a community with claims on it, and took its bearings from that. The self Rieff watched emerging instead took its bearings from within and asked of every choice how it made him feel. Charles Taylor later said it was sealed off from any order of meaning it had not chosen, and therefore responsible for generating its own significance out of its own resources. Robert Bellah and his co-authors called the resulting ethic expressive individualism: the conviction that each person carries an original way of being human inside him and that life consists in bringing it to expression. (Thank you Carl Trueman for pointing to these valuable resources in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self).

Put those together and the modern predicament comes into view. If you are the source of your own worth, you are also the court that assesses it. You sit as both the judge and the accused, and you know too much about the accused to trust your own ruling. The vertigo Kierkegaard described is what it feels like to hold that court in the middle of the night when all you have is your thoughts. And then you quickly realize the affirmations won’t reach the anxiety, because its only prescription is more of the disease. It instructs the anxious self to reassure the anxious self, to consult again the one witness already known to be partial. A verdict you issue about yourself carries exactly the authority you already doubt.

A Verdict From Outside

Chapter 18 of the 2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689 addresses the assurance of grace and salvation, and it opens by addressing what the therapeutic age avoids like the plague. A person can feel entirely certain and be entirely wrong. The confession begins with the counterfeit, the “false hopes and carnal presumptions” of those who are convinced they stand in God’s favor and do not. It grants the reality of self-deception before it says one word of comfort.

Having granted it, the confession makes its claim, and then runs in the opposite direction of the therapeutic. Real assurance, it says, is founded on three things held together. The first is the blood and righteousness of Christ set out in the gospel. The second is the inward evidence of the graces of the Spirit, the marks of a life that has actually changed. The third is the witness of the Spirit of adoption, “witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God.” The foundation laid first is a verdict rendered outside you, in a court you did not convene, on the basis of a work you did not perform. Christ kept the law you have broken and bore the sentence you had earned, and God pronounced that finished work righteous. The confession turns the frightened man away from his own estimate of himself and toward that finished verdict, which does not move when his mood moves.

This is why the doctrine reaches the anxiety when the affirmation does not. The affirmation returns a man to his own assessment and asks him to raise it. Assurance, as the confession identifies it, depends on a judgment about him that his assessment cannot revise. To a self worn down by its own endless review, the confession offers the relief the court cannot supply from its own resources: an acquittal entered by someone else, already on the record.

The distinction the anxious age lacks the words for is the difference between the root and the feeling. The feeling comes and goes with sleep, conscience, and weather. The root was planted by someone other than you, and it does not die… Share on X

The Doubting Believer is Still a Believer

The confession then says the thing the anxious most need to hear, and the thing that separates it from every attempt at the supposed power of positive thinking. Assurance, it teaches, does “not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it.” A man’s faith can be genuine while his sense of it is missing. The doubting saint is still a saint. Where peace is located in the strength of your own conviction, doubt can only mean failure, a sign that the thing was never real. The confession treats doubt as weather, real and cold and sometimes long, passing over us in life when we really just want sunshine.

The confession goes further and says that assurance can be “shaken, diminished, and intermitted,” or lost through neglect, through some sin that wounds the conscience, through sudden temptation, or through God’s withdrawing the light of his countenance so that a man who fears him walks for a season in the dark. Thomas Goodwin wrote a treatise titled A Child of Light Walking in Darkness, drawing on Isaiah’s account of the man who fears the Lord and walks in darkness with no light. Goodwin writes that “in all the word of God there is not a more comfortable and seasonable word to one in such a condition to be found.” Underneath the lost light, the confession says, the believer is never “destitute of the seed of God,” from which assurance may, in time, revive. The distinction the anxious age lacks the words for is the difference between the root and the feeling. The feeling comes and goes with sleep, conscience, and weather. The root was planted by someone other than you, and it does not die when the feeling does.

A Ground Older Than the Self

Chapter 17 of the confession addresses perseverance, or the truth that those whom God has accepted, He keeps to the end. Assurance is the felt knowledge of that fact. A man can lose the felt knowledge and keep the fact. The doctrine can comfort rather than terrify because it never makes your standing depend on your awareness of it.

The confession’s assurance reaches back before the believer existed. Its final ground is the state of a covenant God formed before the world, an agreement among the persons of the Trinity in which the Son undertook to redeem a definite people and the Father promised to give them to him. That eternal covenant is worked out in time at the cross and applied by the Spirit, who seals the redeemed as sons and testifies with their spirits that they belong to God. The security of an anxious man is anchored in a decision made before he drew a breath, and his own wavering self-estimate was never part of the transaction.

The Marrow of Modern Divinity defended the free offer of Christ against a scheme that required the sinner to qualify himself before he came. When Thomas Boston recovered the book in Scotland in the following century, and a group of ministers defended it, the General Assembly condemned it in 1720, and the ensuing argument clarified something about assurance. A gospel preached as a bargain, as grace held out on the condition that you first make yourself fit, cannot yield assurance, because the condition is never met to the conscience’s satisfaction. Sinclair Ferguson retells the episode in The Whole Christ and concludes as the Marrow men did: the cure for a frightened conscience is Christ himself, offered whole and without price. Assurance grows where Christ is preached as a gift held out for nothing.

The dizziness Kierkegaard described is what a self feels when it looks for a floor beneath its freedom and finds only more of itself. Christians can often feel pressured to answer that dizziness by adding their voice to the affirmations and tell the frightened self that it is, after all, enough. To do so would surrender what the church holds that cannot be manufactured: a floor the self did not lay and cannot pull up, and a verdict spoken over it from outside. The confession and the Bible’s word to an anxious man remind him that his certainty is to be placed where it cannot be undermined. You may be sure, because Christ is enough, and the verdict on his finished work has already been determined.