Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Part I

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A Crisis of Existential Crises: Outside of Christ, Everything is an Existential Crisis

We all know that every day brings a battle of the headlines, but we also know as Christians in particular that there are fundamental issues underneath the headlines. And sometimes these don’t make the headlines at all. In one strange case, one big issue did make the headlines. It’s an article by Andrew Hartz published in The Wall Street Journal. Hartz is a clinical psychologist and the founder of the Open Therapy Institute.

So I’m going to say right up front, he and I see the same problem. We’re going to see this problem in very different terms, but I want to give him credit for publicly raising an issue. The headline in his article is fundamentally important. He asked the question, “Why is everything an existential crisis?” And this is something we just need to note about the common vocabulary around us. The media catches onto these things. Celebrities, intellectual elites, they settle on these terms. The next thing you know, you’re hearing them all the time. Climate change is an existential crisis. Income inequality is an existential crisis. Questions about government, claims about autocracy, international situations, war, famine. All of these represent what are described as existential crises or existential threats.

And of course, in this particular case, in the Wall Street Journal, you have someone who is a therapist, a psychologist, asking the question, is everything really an existential crisis? Now, I want to point to the fact that there’s not even a common agreement about what this means. And so even as many people hear the term existential crisis, they also hear existential threat. And you have had all kinds of alarmism over the course of the last several decades, especially after the end of World War II.

All kinds of apocalypticism has come into popular culture, all kinds of claims that disaster is right around the corner. One of the most infamous of these, of course, was the claim that the future of humanity was threatened by a population bomb, a massive increase of population, birth rates, sky high, threatening famine, poverty, and all the rest. Of course, it turned out that on both of those points, that particular headline was fundamentally wrong.

Number one, the great threat to human existence is not too many babies, it is too few, and a country by country that is becoming alarmingly clear. The second thing is, that famine turned out to be something that was largely, at least in terms of material form, largely overcome in the 20th century. Now, that is not to say that famines don’t happen, particularly in the wake of political or some kind of natural disaster, but it is to say that the planet is producing enough food to feed all the inhabitants of this planet, and that is something that arguably didn’t take place until the second half of the 20th century.

And so you have people saying, “Well, this is an existential threat. That’s an existential threat.” But this is the term existential crisis. So an existential threat, it’s often used in political terms in order to say, “This is threatening the very existence of the planet. It is threatening life as we know it. It is threatening the future of humanity.” But this term existential crisis is sometimes confused with the existential threat. And if it sounds somewhat, well abstract to you, let me make it concrete.

In the middle of the 20th century, many on the intellectual left, in Europe in particular, this bled over into the United States and into the Anglosphere, but it really began in Europe and more than anything else, it began in France, no surprise there, in the post-war period. And you had the rise of a philosophy known as existentialism. And existentialism had several prophets. You had Camus, you had Jean-Paul Sartre, and you had these major figures who said on the other side of the crises of the 20th century, and in particular that meant two world wars and obvious threats to civilization, they came back with the argument, “There is no objective morality. Life is absurd.” And Sartre went so far as to say the existentialism was just the working out of what it meant to live without God. He was an avowed atheist. He built his worldview on that premise. He argued that existence precedes essence. And that’s going to sound very abstract. And I can think right now there’s some listeners to The Briefing who are asking, “Where is this going?”

Well, let me just tell you, the entire biblical worldview is based upon the opposite. So if you say existence precedes essence, and I say, “That’s absolutely wrong,” I am saying that essence precedes existence, which is to say that God is the creator who brought the entire cosmos into being. He created us and our existence is because we have a divine creator who made us and indeed made us in his image.

He created the entire cosmos. He fills the cosmos with his glory. He structures the entire cosmos with his truth. But if you don’t believe in God, and this is the breaking point in the 20th century, so many in the intellectual elites just stopped believing in God. That comes with consequences. And one of those consequences is that you have to decide whether human life can have any meaning if there is no divine creator.

Existentialism was this philosophy that came up in the second half of the 20th century, primarily as I said, with Jean Paul Sartre and others in which he said, “God is dead, but life can still be meaningful.” How is it meaningful? It is because in working out our existence thus existentialism. In working out our existence, we act. And in acting, we create moral truth.

Now, what he was saying is that there is no objective moral reality, and he understood that that came immediately after understanding his claim that there is no God. If there is no God, then guess what? There is no objective morality. There is no right and there is no wrong. There is no beautiful and there is no tragic. It is all just meaning. We read onto things, which is the very point. Existence precedes essence.

In other words, forget objective reality. It’s just how you subjectively appropriate it and experience it. And thus, how do you just make clear your own existence in a morally empty universe? Well, you act out, which is exactly what the existentialists did. Jean-Paul Sartre, lifelong partner, Simone de Beauvoir. And what you had was a culture of licentiousness, immorality, rampant sexual activity going in just about every direction imaginable. And of course, you also had Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s partner, who was the author of the famous thesis book of modern feminism, second wave feminism, The Second Sex.

So it all really fits together, but it’s interesting that now you have Hollywood celebrities saying they’re experiencing an existential crisis. You have high school students showing up in an existential crisis. You’re not cool on campus in a major college or university if you have not or are not now experiencing an existential crisis.

This is where Hartz comes in, “So-called existential risks seem to be everywhere, climate change, artificial intelligence, nuclear war, pandemics, and more threaten to return us to nothingness. Most people using this term aren’t consciously evoking the philosophy of Sartre or Camus. Still, they may be drawing on associations with existentialism more than they realize and unconsciously expressing deeper concerns about morality and meaning.”

I want to come back and say, I think that’s absolutely right. I think that when you hear people talk this way, they’re trying to create an artificial morality because they’ve denied the existence of a real morality. And that’s exactly what’s going on in terms of so many of the cultural elites around us. And quite frankly, all of this is seeping into the larger culture. And now you’ve got high schoolers as I say experiencing an existential crisis.

You could put a footnote there and say, adolescence is itself an existential crisis. That’s another story. Okay. Let’s look at the article by Hartz. Here’s something else he says. And he says, “A robust body of evidence indicates that when people are reminded of their death, they try to boost their self-esteem, take steps to create a legacy and defend their worldview, be it secular or religious.”

He goes on to write, “An extension of this theory is that people cope with anxiety about death by focusing their fears into something more tangible, such as a current political cause. That cause can then become emotionally loaded with all their anxiety and distress about mortality. This temporarily makes their anxiety feel more manageable, but it is likely to contribute to fanaticism and emotional dysregulation around politics.”

So just forget the therapeutic categories there. And what are we looking at? Well, we’re looking at teenagers claiming that climate change means that they don’t have a future, that they’re never going to get married, they’re never going to have children, because life as we know it is simply coming to an end because of climate change. You also have the same kinds of people just this past weekend who showed up at protests to say, “The current American president, the current American government, represent this kind of existential crisis.”

You’re not cool if you’re not having an existential crisis. But even as we’re thinking about this, I just want us to understand that Christianity has engaged this worldview from the very beginning. And even as you now have a therapeutic specialist trying to respond to it, we need to have a theological response to this. It all begins where Sartre began with the denial of the existence of God. If God doesn’t exist, then guess what? You need to have an existential crisis. You are an existential crisis. Human existence is an existential crisis, but if there is a God and he speaks, and he redeems us by the blood of the lamb, then everything is different.

If there is a creator and he made us in his image, then everything is different. And of course, this also leads to a fundamental clash, and that’s a clash between the Christian worldview and this modern secular, atheistic existentialist worldview because it comes down not only to the question of whether or not there is a God, but whether or not there is a right and wrong. And here’s where things got really interesting in the last part of the 20th century.

Many of these existentialists said, “There is no morality. There is no right or wrong. So you can have sex with anybody or, well, in any context, and you don’t even have to have any limits on that. As a matter of fact, putting limits on that is a limit upon self-expression and existence.” No, there is no God. There is no objective morality, so all the rules are off. You can’t make any moral judgments. But what did the existentialists do? They turned around and made moral judgments.

Francis Schaeffer, the major Christian apologist in the second half of the 20th century pointed out that that’s exactly the contradiction of Jean-Paul Sartre. He signed a manifesto against French imperialism in Algeria. He sided as a Marxist with an Algerian revolutionaries. He said their cause was right and liberation was a moral mandate. Well, wait just a minute, Jean. You denied that there is any true morality, that there is any objective truth. You said there is no real right or wrong until all of a sudden it was cool to sign a manifesto saying that imperialism is wrong.

Sartre, by the way, was one of the fathers of post-colonial theory goes all the way down to critical theory in the present. I just want to point to the fact that all of this through popular culture is now being well parroted by people who walk into stores and who populate campuses and who create the cultural products that America watches. Existentialism has now worked its way into the entire society. No wonder everyone in that society seems to be looking for therapy.

Part II

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Is Burning the Koran a Crime in the UK? A Strange Alliance of Secularists and Christians are Questioning a Ruling in the UK

Another very interesting, coming from across the Atlantic in this case, we’re going to go to Great Britain. And The Economist, one of the most influential periodicals in the English-speaking world, has run a news report about fire and furor having to do with a public burning of the Koran. Now, here’s where things get really interesting. As The Economist reports, “It takes a lot to get religious lobby groups to agree with the National Secular Society, but such an alliance has emerged since Hamit Coskun was convicted on June the second of a religiously motivated public order offense after setting fire to a Koran. He was fined 240 pounds.”

We’re then told, “On February the 13th, Mr. Coskun had stood outside the Turkish consulate in London holding a burning Koran aloft while shouting, ‘Islam is the religion of terrorists.’ He was attacked by a man brandishing, a large knife who said he was going to kill him and kicked by a passing delivery man. The whole encounter was filmed and circulated on social media.” So let’s just get the facts straight before we go further here you have a man who decided to criticize Islam by burning a Koran, an intentional act of desecration.

Now, just remember that when it comes to the Koran, you take, say, the Christian understanding of the divine inspiration of Scripture, and you have to understand that’s not the category. It is a divinely dictated book through Muhammad who didn’t even understand what he was writing at the time, but rather was a passive conduit. Very different than the biblical understanding of inspiration. But the point is the Koran is venerated in Islam in a way that the Bible is not venerated in Christianity. It’s a very different thing.

And so what does it mean to burn a Koran? Well, I can just say that most Christians wouldn’t think of doing it. That’s the first thing to say. And it’s not because Christians, that is to say biblically-minded Christians don’t understand the challenge represented by Islam and the Koran, but it is because just out of love of neighbor, we would want to winsomely and sometimes indeed courageously, sometimes in the view of those to whom we witness abrasively, share the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Burning a Koran in itself certainly does not accomplish that purpose, but is it a crime? Very interesting question. Is it a crime in the United Kingdom? Well, it turns out that evidently, well, to some degree it’s a crime because he’s been convicted of it and he’s been sentenced and he’s been fined. But it’s also interesting to know that the UK Crown Prosecution Service had to change its story. He was originally charged with the offense of offending “the religious institution of Islam”.

Well, is that a law in the United Kingdom? Can you not offend Islam? Well, almost immediately you had Christians and secularists, and there’s the unique combination or alliance that was referenced in the of this article. You had both Christians and secularists who said, “Wait a minute, Britain got rid of his blasphemy laws. If you get rid of your blasphemy laws, you can’t consistently charge someone with a criminal offense of blasphemy.”

And evidently, the Crown Prosecution Service said, “Well, that makes sense, so we’ll charge him with something else.” So they charged him with what amounts to a hate crime, an exercise of a hate speech with an act correlative to it, and they found him guilty. And again, he has been found guilty of a serious public disorder. And well, you do have this strange alliance now of Christians and secularists who are saying Britain took the blasphemy laws off the books.

Now, that in itself is interesting. It tells you that there once was a time when Britain as of course, a state with a state church, the church of England, with the king as the defender of the faith, an official title, by the way, first given by the Pope to King Henry VIII. The Pope regretted doing that, but the monarchy kept the title. But nonetheless, if Britain doesn’t have blasphemy laws, you can’t be guilty of violating those blasphemy laws.

This does tell us a whole lot about how we need to watch this kind of thing. This story will unfold in the United Kingdom. But for Christians, the interesting thing to think about here is that you have anti-blasphemy laws that are off the books. So what’s on the books are “feeling laws.” Laws that say you can’t offend someone. This man was first of all charged with blasphemy basically, an offense against Islam.

But after all, how in the world is England, Britain going to adjudicate that? And so it came back and said, “No, it’s basically about hurt feelings and it’s about hate speech and an action that was taken with it.” All of this comes as a warning to us. A secular age doesn’t really stop believing in blasphemy. It doesn’t stop believing in desecration. It doesn’t stop believing in sacrilege. It just translates the sacred to something secular. And in this case, that’s exactly what we see in the United Kingdom. The same logic in the cultural elites on this side of the Atlantic as well.

Part III

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President Macron is Posturing: The Big Problems with the Calls by France’s President for a Palestinian State

All right, very interesting worldview dynamics in a story coming out of Paris, has to do with French President Emmanuel Macron. The French president has been very clear in calling for a Palestinian state, even threatening that France would recognize a Palestinian state. Of course, the problem is when it comes to that declaration, there is no Palestinian state. It is clearly a form of posing, and that’s not unprecedented in international affairs. The United Nations has been about this kind of thing for a long time. And especially many nations, more on the geopolitical left, especially those who would criticize, and if not openly oppose the existence of Israel, they have claimed that there is not only a Palestinian people, but there is a Palestinian state, or must be a Palestinian state.

They’ve even recognized they claim a Palestinian state, even in international kinds of agreements and settings—some formal, some informal–they will create a representative of what they claim to be a Palestinian state. But the New York Times recognizes that President Macron is in a difficult position concerning recognizing a Palestinian state. And that the French president, who by the way, is pretty much a prophet of secularity himself and kind of the modern European elite creation of meaning.

He nonetheless believes that it would be politically significant to demand the existence of a Palestinian state. But when the New York Times says that this is for Macron and France a dilemma, well, the problem is that there isn’t actually a Palestinian state. And the point I want to make is this, it is important from a Christian theological understanding to see that there are certain fundamentals, there are certain prerequisites, there are certain things absolutely needful for the existence of a nation or a state.

And we’re just going to have to realize that becoming a state is an achievement. One of the biblical warnings we have, and this becomes very clear, even in the Book of Genesis itself, the situation we should seek to avoid at all costs is chaos. It is a disordered world. That is a sign of absolute rebellion. God’s glory in the sequence of creation is bringing order out of disorder. And it was perfect order in the garden, human sin, the reality of that sin, the impact of that sin, the result of that sin, God’s judgment on that sin brought about the constant threat of order giving way to disorder.

When you have in human society, when you have throughout human history, the achievement of something as an ordered nation, an ordered society, an ordered state, that is a remarkable achievement. And in the 20th century, one of the great ambitions of so many internationalists was that you could create a world in which you had just a vast collection of stable states, and they could be at peace with one another, and there could be international bodies that would transcend those national states. And those international bodies such as the United Nations, they could settle all of these issues.

But the dilemma that is described here for the French president and his nation, and I think at this point the French are trying not to say anything about Israel’s quite necessary effort to knock out the nuclear capacity there in Iran, one of the great threats to destabilization in the entire world order. But it’s also clear that given the fact that he has, by the way, in France, the largest Muslim population outside the Arab world. And that’s very much a part of French politics, and just having been in France, and especially in Paris, you see this.

And we’ve known now for decades that there are entire neighborhoods in France where the French police don’t even go. And so a lot of these theological issues just burst into the headlines. And even as Macron wants to recognize a Palestinian state, the problem is there isn’t one. All you have are Palestinian people. And of course, in many cases, they are severely persecuted. They are victimized by many of their own leaders. They have been for a very long time. And at the top of that victimization is Hamas, an Islamic terrorist group.

And with Hamas still an ongoing threat, it’s just impossible at this point to imagine there could be any kind of workable Palestinian state. But quite honestly since 1948, it has been pretty clear that it would be very difficult to justify calling anything a Palestinian state, not so much because of the territory, that’s problematic in itself, but because there are fundamentals that are required. And by the way, the greatest testimony to this is not what Israel says. The greatest testimony to this is not what say the United States and our allies say, the greatest testimony to this is what the Arab nations around the Palestinian people say.

Not so much with what they say with words, but what they say with actions. Those Arab nations are very publicly in support of a two-state theory, and they’re very supportive of a Palestinian state. They’re very supportive of it, but they do not want it ever to exist. Just blame Israel and the United States. But we need to see the deeper reality, which is that without certain fundamentals, you can call something a state, but you can’t by calling it make it a workable state.

Part IV

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The Non-Existent European Constitution: The 20th Anniversary of the European Vote for a Written Constitution That Failed

But hold on, you may have missed an anniversary, but it’s one of those anniversaries you probably would’ve missed because it’s an anniversary of something that didn’t happen. What didn’t happen 20 years ago? Well, it follows in the line of what we were just talking about. What didn’t happen 20 years ago was a unified written constitution for Europe. It was the grand ambition of many of the founders of the European Union that there would be a written constitution. And at the time, so many of the leaders of the EU said it would be tantamount to the American Constitution, to the US Constitution.

It would establish a certain kind of federalism above the nation states and would create a people, and it would be this common written constitution that would bind Europeans together. It would be a “we,” and the we would be not so much the French people, the German people, the Belgians, just go down the list, but rather we Europeans. But here’s an interesting thing. It turns out that the people who live in Europe overwhelmingly do not see themselves first as Europeans. They see themselves first as Portuguese or Spaniards, or Italians, or Germans. And there’s a reason for that and it is because one of the foundational issues in terms of a workable society is that you have enough commonality in worldview, yes, in language, yes, in literature and culture and all the rest, that you have some kind of stable basis for nationality. The European elites were huge in their investment in this idea of a common constitution.

Valery Giscard d’Estaing who was the former president of France, was the chairman of the group to put this together. And he was even as The Economist, says, “Haughty even by the standards of former French presidents.” Now from Britain, that is a massive put down. When you say that this former French president was haughty even by the standards of former French presidents. Yes, it’s not just the English Channel that separates the British and the French. But it turned out that 20 years ago, just about 20 years ago, exactly over the course of the last couple of weeks, that particular ambition failed.

And it didn’t fail because the elites gave up, it failed because the people had a vote. And guess where it failed hugely? It failed in France. On May the 29th, 2005, the margin was 55 to 45, which is in any political context, a landslide. The French people turned down, even the constitution offered by a former French president. They said very eloquently, “We are French and intend to remain French.”

Now, theologically, one of the interesting things to note here is that even when you look at Genesis and you look at the development of nations, you look at ethnicities, you look at language groups, and all the rest, there is a commonality that has to be recognized. That commonality helps to coalesce an entire society, a workable society. And of course, that becomes most formalized in the nature of a state. That is to say a nation state. 

So isn’t it interesting that at the time, so much of this is going on, and so many of the elites have not given up. And by the way, The Economist recognizes this. The people of Europe basically said, “We don’t want a written constitution.” So you know what? The EU engineers decided to put it all in hundreds of pages of treaties. But it is still true today that the French consider themselves French. Every bit as much, I would argue as Americans consider ourselves Americans. I was just there and I can tell you the greatest evidence of this is that the French people will tell you exactly that.

In other words, with all these headlines and all these big issues exploding all around us, lean into biblical truth. In other words, don’t have an existential crisis.