Anxiety Part X - Doesn't the Bible tell us not to be anxious?

There's some thinking and writing hanging around Christian circles these days on the topic of anxiety that I have significant concerns about. It would be easy to ignore if it wasn't being presented under the banner of a movement that refers to itself as "biblical counselling", which implies a sort of indisputable authority and truthfulness. But the work coming out of this school of thought is not just bad psychology, it's bad exegesis.

When looking to the bible for wisdom on anxiety the most frequently cited passages are: Philipians 4:6 ("...don't be anxious about anything...") and Matthew 6:25 ("...don't be anxious about your life, what you will wear or what you will eat...").

In both, the greek word being translated to "anxious" is merimna. This word has been translated to "anxiety" in these two passages but often translated to mean "worry" or  "care", as in 1 Peter 5:7 (..."cast all your cares upon him..."). But merimna really derives from the Greek merimnaō, which is about being separated from the whole. Some scholars suggest that this usage of the word is inferring a dividing and fracturing a person's being into parts. Perhaps a caring about something so much that it divides your soul rather than being a fully whole person. Interestingly, Jesus' words in the Matthew 6 passage are immediately following his teaching on not being able to serve two masters - that a house divided against itself can't stand.

It's a huge leap to assume that what Jesus or Paul, or the authors of the biblical texts meant by the word "anxious" was exactly the same as how we mean it today.

What do we mean exactly by the word "anxiety" today anyhow? This is another problem - we don't even have consistent or precise definitions of anxiety in our popular culture, or even in clinical usage. 

So before you go reading these passages and assuming God is against or displeased with your particular experience of anxiety, we need to slow down a little and admit to a lack of textual clarity.

Moreover, these passages in Phil 4 and Matt 6 are not the giving of commandments. Notice how when Jesus summarizes the law He says: "love the Lord your God and love your neighbour as yourself"....he doesn't add, "and don't be anxious, either". Obviously not all passages of scripture are commandments, some are instructive but within a particular context. When Jesus tell this group not to be anxious about clothing or food, he's talking to a specific context, not necessarily laying down a universally applicable principle. 

The sad thing is, by throwing these verses at people, we've often made them feel like failures for having anxiety, as if to experience this part of humanity is to have sinned. 

John McArthur suggests exactly this in his book: Anxious for Nothing. McArthur comes to the conclusion that anxiety is simply a failure to trust God, no ifs, ands, or buts. If you're anxious, you're sinning, because you're telling God He isn't enough, isn't worthy of your trust, isn't really going to take care of you.

Perhaps this works for McArthur in dealing with his own life, but from where I sit, this is not only terrible theology, it's useless psychology. It only makes people feel worse and keeps them stuck in their anxiousness. Now they're not just anxious, they're also feeling like depraved failures who are spitting in God's face when they worry.

I'm going to avoid a long rant here about so-called "biblical counselling", but this is exactly the kind of dangerous and misguided "advice" that movement is producing. It's dangerous because it pretends to have the authority of the Scriptures to give bad and even damaging answers to people who are in mental anguish. Even worse, its advocates openly state that health care providers not under this banner are giving untrue and ungodly counsel. The largest Christian domination in the United States publicly supports and funds this approach.

But let's not forget, friends of so called "biblical counselling" that Jesus sweats drops of blood the night before He's crucified. A bizarre physiological reaction indeed - but for sure sweating when not exercising is a classic symptom of anxiety. He also calls out to his Father to spare Him from being crucified. This seems like avoidance to me, which as most people know, is associated with....anxiety.  He can't sleep. Well, insomnia does tend to hound the anxious. So if anxiety is a sin, you're going to have to tie yourself in some pretty tight theological knots to explain away how the sinless Son of God is visibly anxious the night before his death. 

And just because you read the bible and quote it doesn't mean you're teaching God's truth. Jesus makes it plenty clear to the Pharisees of his day that they have a perverse way of using the scriptures to impose an agenda on people and that very often they've completely missed the ways God works in the world. So let's get off our Christian high horses and approach this with some humility and honesty about the complex ambiguity of scripture, especially when it comes to many things psychological.

What if we were to accept that anxiety is a natural human experience? An emotion, accompanied by certain kinds of physiological manifestations and certain characteristic ways of thinking?

Remember how years ago the church used to teach that sexual desire was a bad thing? In more recent  years some people of faith kind of came to their senses and realized that sex is a gift, that the desire for it is also a gift, but that the real problem is how we relate to that gift, or what we do with it?

It's time for anxiety to get a similar sort of re-understanding. Anxiety is a gift. It keeps us safe. Unlike almost any other species on earth humans can think ahead and anticipate the terrible things that could happen and plan for how we might reduce the likelihood occurrence. We wear our seat belts in our cars because we have the capacity to be anxious about being mortally wounded in a collision. And if the building you worked in today didn't collapse in a heap of rubble, you can thank human anxiety. Someone else lost sleep trying to anticipate the loads the walls could safely hold up without having a string of collapsed buildings to prove what was safe. We have building codes that require structures to be built in a manner consistent with what our thinking ahead has taught us..."thanks anxiety!"...because we don't have to experience every tragedy before we can plan ahead to avert others. 

Really, when you get down to it, anxiety, as the human experience to anticipate negative outcomes and to be motivated to avoid them, is one of God's great gifts to us as a species. To call the gift of anxiety a sin is absurd. 

What's broken, is our relationship to anxiety, our way of interacting with it.

Which really shouldn't seem so strange when you think about it, because most of our sin is about broken ways of relating to God's creation. The way we relate to each other - broken. The way we treat natural life and our environments - broken. The way we relate to God - broken. The way relate to our sexuality, our vulnerability, power,....broken, broken, and broken. (The attempt to use the Bible as a literal textbook for counselling complex psychological phenomena - also broken by the way) Why should our relationship to anxiety be any different?

So if the sin in this situation is not anxiety but the way we relate to anxiety, what else might these biblical passages have to teach us?

If the greek marimnao is pointing to the kind of experience of anxiety that involves being divided from self, overtaken, preoccupied, or drawn off course, we might have a little better idea as to what kind of relationship we should be trying not to have with our anxiety. It's the kind of relationship in which anxiety takes us away from ourselves: from being fully human and yet formed in the image of the Divine. It's the kind of relationship to anxiety that draws us away from being loving because we are allowing our fear to guide our decisions. It's the kind of relationship in which anxiety is our master, and we answer to it. The kind of relationship in which the gift of anxiety, has actually become something that enslaves rather protects us and leads us to flourishing.

Jesus corrects the Pharisees when they criticize him for healing on the Sabbath. He reminds them that the Sabbath is gift designed to help humankind, and the humans were not made to serve the Sabbath or be enslaved by it observance. The same is true for anxiety. Anxiety has been gifted to us for our flourishing, not to be our master or run our lives.