Christianity Today: The Problem of Panic, by Russell Moore (Editor in Chief, Christianity Today):
Over 40 years ago, filmmaker Steven Spielberg terrified theatergoers with a movie that quickly embedded itself in the American cultural imagination. Like most scary stories, Poltergeist first lulled the audience with the familiar—a suburban home in a newly built housing development. It then disrupted that familiarity by injecting ghosts who are not content to occasionally moan or rattle a chain but create havoc and terror.
The malevolent spirits in Poltergeist upend the entire household and drive the family to the point of insanity. In the end, it’s revealed that the placid neighborhood is built on top of desecrated graves. The poltergeists’ goal is to cause panic, to overload the inhabitants’ limbic systems in order to revert the house to a place of deadness.
As I listened recently to a young Christian describe the way he saw the world around him, I wondered whether the Poltergeist story was a generation too soon, and whether that haunted house could be a metaphor for our present moment.
Discussing the statistics around the mental health crises among his age cohort, this man said that he was less concerned about the medical situations of anxiety and depression among people he knew—because those could be treated—than about the fact that the “whole world seems to be going through a panic attack.” He stopped himself and wondered if panic was the right word.
“It’s like everything is in a crazy cycle,” he continued. “We seem to be bouncing back and forth between panic and boredom.” He stopped again, pondering whether cycle was the right word. “I mean, it makes no sense,” he said. “Everything seems out of control and scary—and boring and dead—at the same time.”
This young man is hardly alone in sensing a kind of bored panic and panicked boredom in the world today. But he is wrong in thinking of boredom and panic as two contradictory realities. In fact, they’re closely related. …
Panic is exactly the right word to describe our times. And like most words, panic is a kind of fossil record, embedded with meanings that most of us never investigate but that have shaped our use and understanding of the term. The word is haunted by a poltergeist of significance, and to get at it, we must ask whose grave is beneath our feet.
The word panic comes from the ancient Greek god Pan, the deity of shepherds, herds, and wild places. He was known for his libido, seeking to sexually violate nymphs and to inflame the erotic passions of those in contact with him. He represented wild power, the sort of violence that we see in the scarier aspects of nature. He could also soothe and hypnotize by playing his pipes, freezing listeners in place in ecstasy. And maybe most importantly of all, he could induce mind-scrambling fear. He was, in other words, the god of panic. …
In the military encampments or on the battlefield, when the whole company is thrown into panicked flight, this is the telltale sign of Pan’s effect. It is “his eerie, disembodied haunting cries” that constitute his arsenal. His weapons are essentially psychological: panic acts to dissolve social bonds and turn members of a mob to savagery. …
In our day, the wildness of uncontrolled human impulses and the deadness that comes with technological mastery are not the answers to each other. They are both part of our problem. We are panicking ourselves to boredom and boring ourselves to panic. But why? …
The European pop-pagans may have been piecing together a “made-up” spirituality, but they weren’t wrong about part of the meaning of that location. The place is known to Christians as Caesarea Philippi, but its modern name is Banias, an Arabic version of Panias, after the god Pan. The significance of the varied meanings of this place was highlighted in 2020 when an archaeological dig uncovered an ancient Christian church beneath the site dating to the AD 400s.
This is not surprising. After all, it would make sense to build a church where Jesus promised to do so—upon the rock. But the archaeologists found underneath that church yet another structure of worship, this one dating back to about 20 BC: a temple to the god Pan. A scholar explained to the press that the worship of Pan had happened in that place since at least 300 years before Christ.
When Jesus spoke to Peter in Matthew 16, he did so over this ancient site of Pan. Perhaps no chapter in the Bible is more evocative of our current crisis—and not for the reasons many Christians think.
Handwringing believers will cap off some expression of panic with the words from verse 18, saying, “But we know that Jesus said the gates of hell will not prevail against the church.” This is usually spoken as a kind of forced hopefulness, similar to telling a grieving widow at a funeral, “Well, at least your husband’s not in pain anymore.” But in so doing, we do to these words what we have too often done to other majestic passages: turn them into decontextualized slogans and thus empty the words of their power.
The truth is that what Jesus said matters as much as where he said it. When Jesus stood in Caesarea Philippi and spoke in Matthew 16:13–28, he knew this was a place of panic, of devotion to the god of the pulsing libido and the raging fist. He also knew that this place now belonged to the house of Herod, whose son Philip named it after himself and the Roman emperor. The place represented what again seem to be opposite poles—the chaos of natural wildness and the control of political power, the panic of nature and the panic of history.
But Jesus recognized that human power and natural wildness are not separate things. They are one. The power of Caesar that crucified Christ is represented later throughout the Book of Revelation as humanity aspiring to ultimate, godlike power and control. But in so doing, the truth of Caesar is revealed to be wild and animalistic—in fact, a beast.
Jesus revealed his own power at Caesarea Philippi. But his power is starkly different from both the way of Caesar and the way of Pan. …
[A]t the place of Pan, Jesus marked Peter with his new identity as a “rock.” Yet the stability of this rock was immediately thrown into question. Peter responded to the idea of the Cross with the throbbing impulse of self-protection, threatening to fight off anyone who would attempt an arrest of Christ (v. 22). Peter revealed not only that he didn’t really understand what Christ meant but also that he didn’t know himself well enough to know how he would respond in the ultimate crisis.
Peter would have fought anyone who suggested he was a worshiper of Pan or a sycophant of Caesar. In fact, he had been the first disciple to announce—there at Caesarea Philippi—that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (v. 16). But within a paragraph of this profession, Jesus said to him, “Get behind me, Satan!” (v. 23). This was because, Jesus said, Peter was not setting his mind “on the things of God, but on the things of man.”
More specifically, what Peter wanted was to save his life and the life of Jesus—he wanted a defeat of their enemies and for his life to follow the blueprint outlined in his affections, appetites, and intellect. He emanated the hypervigilance of the panicked, relying on a firing limbic system to assert dominance in the face of threat. Jesus, however, said the answer was not in engineering the future or in defeating enemies or even in guarding one’s own life.
Instead, he said this: “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (v. 25). …
Unlike Peter and his proposed show of force, Jesus overcame the place of panic with his voice. He spoke, and he was heard. The question “Who do you say that I am?” could not be answered by crowdsourcing or cunning or feats of strength. Answered meaning, fulfilled appetites, overcoming danger, even saving one’s own life, all relied on Jesus’ promise alone—an intangible word that cannot be conjured up or revealed by “flesh and blood” (v. 17).
What Hartmut Rosa and other observers of this age call “resonance” speaks to what the Bible tells us about the reality of the world, like deep calling unto deep (Ps. 42:7). We need a voice like Jesus’ in the midst of our panic, someone outside of our control to break in and awe us like a first snow.
In describing the way of discipleship, Jesus used the imagery of sheep with a shepherd—the very sort of nomadic herds that were supposed to respond to Pan. The voice of the shepherd Jesus, though, does not create panic. It destroys it. And the sheep respond to—resonate with—the shepherd’s voice, following him into an undiscernible and uncontrollable future (John 10:3–5). That can also be scary in its own way, but it’s the kind of scariness that leads us out of, not toward, panic.
We cannot do much about the panic all around us. We cannot undo the kind of hot panic that manifests itself as political aggression, seeking to divide the world into friends to be rewarded and enemies to be defeated, powering the libido until we see other people as objects to be sexually or economically exploited. We also cannot do much about the cold kind of panic that prompts people to numb themselves to life with substances, achievements, or the burnout of detached cynics who have yielded to despair.
What we can do, though, is make ourselves reachable. We can pray for what Jesus called ears to hear and eyes to see (Matt. 13:15–16). We can cultivate true meaning through worship, prayer, community, and immersion in the Bible.
Such things cannot engineer meaning or holiness by their own power. But they can place us beside Peter where he once stood in the place of Pan. And there, we can hear the voice that changes everything.
That is itself distressing, just as it was for Peter. We want control and reassurance and predictability, even if such things would only leave us with more deadness. Yet the voice is always just ahead of us, calling us onward not by activating our limbic systems but by renewing our minds.
The story is what it always has been. It’s Peter versus Pan. We can choose to save our lives or to lose them, to indulge our appetites or to cultivate longings for something better, to plan our futures or to entrust ourselves to the unknown. We can choose fleeting wins or eternal salvation.
In this whirlwind of our own Caesarea Philippi, we should deafen our ears to the pipes that are playing all around us and listen for a different voice. The question posed to us is neither how to read the signs of the future nor how to defend ourselves from danger. The query before us is “Who do you say that I am?”
Only when we keep that question in mind can we look down and see the solid rock on which we stand—and recognize that this is no place for panic.
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