Greetings friends!
A bit of housekeeping: you are now receiving this blog/newsletter through Substack. I moved us over from Mailchimp due to some of the neat benefits that come with Substack. Notably, it is a great place to house both the blog posts and new podcast episodes all in one place (you can check it out here: opentotruth.substack.com)
It is also a way to be in community with other podcasters/bloggers that the Mailchimp system doesn’t really afford. As always, you can always opt out of this, but I’d love it if you’d continue with us! Thank you so much for your support so far.
Substack also allows (~forces) you to name the blog - so we’re calling it “Stay Curious”! I thought that’d be appropriate given the content and ethos of what we’ve been doing with it: 4-5 minute reads on topics that matter most in theology, philosophy, and culture to get you thinking.
And now, I invite you to join me in thinking about a phrase I’ve been stewing on for a few months now: eschatological trauma.
I’m no psychologist, but a bit of digging on the etymology of the word “trauma” yields that it comes from the Greek “traumatikos,” which had the texture of “pertaining to a wound” - so, pretty broad, right? Apparently, it took until the late 1800s for “trauma” to carry some psychological meaning as well, beyond the physical trauma one might experience from bodily wounding. The Online Etymology Dictionary has the helpful, “psychic wound, unpleasant experience which causes abnormal stress.”
And then, “eschatological”, as you might know, is a word used as a catch-all for things pertaining to the end times or last days, particularly in theology circles.
So, the phrase “eschatological trauma” would be a kind of unpleasant, wounding a result of interaction with certain eschatological ideas in a way that leads to ongoing, abnormal stress. For the record, I first heard this term used on an episode of the Bible for Normal People, where the guest Dan Koch discussed this idea and is working on a Ph.D. in psychology with this as his focus - hopefully, we could have him on OTT at some point to discuss it in more depth.
At one level, I can feel the eye-rolling that might happen upon hearing that one might use the same word “trauma” to describe hearing about certain theological ideas and also to describe truly horrific experiences like rape, abuse, war and other PTSD inducing events. I get it - I don’t want to lump it in with those either.
But, I’ve experienced it to a degree and I know many others who report having ongoing stress about the implications of certain theological claims - and just so there’s no mistake - those claims are having to do with the pre-mortem requirement to have genuine faith in Jesus as God/Savior/Lord lest you experience eternal, conscious torment in hell. The notion that such an unthinkable, nearly indescribably terrifying possibility is on the table, and that there is something that you need to do in order to avoid it, and that you could be uncertain about the efficacy of the thing you are asked to do, is a perfect cocktail for a pretty brutal anxiety about your afterlife situation - in a way that really does spill out into how you live and think.
For better or worse, I recall moments of chilling fear running down my spine as I thought of the possibility that my parents might be raptured away mid-drive as I helplessly am left behind in a car that is now driverless and headed toward calamity. Or just even the passing thought that my previous declarations of Jesus as my Lord and Savior were, just possibly, not quite sufficient enough to “count,” and thus, it would infinitely behoove me to fire off a salvific prayer and to redouble my efforts toward godly living (if one’s certainty of saving-faith is bolstered by the “fruit” in one’s life of righteous living). My childhood Cerberus of fear, Pascal’s Wager, and my theological predilections sunk its fangs deep, leading to wanton salvation-praying in my younger years.
Now, in all fairness, such a story about hell could be true, and if so, one should be genuinely afraid and averse to going there. (I mean, of course, right? It’s almost definitionally the worst possible fate for a human being). And hence, one might argue, fear could be an appropriate and perhaps effective tactic to get people to make decisions to give their life to Jesus, because the threat is no joke - it’s real and could happen to you.
But, if this story is not quite right, and such a fate isn’t really on the table, or there’s a different way of thinking about what happens to those who don’t consciously and genuinely make the decision to make Jesus their Lord in this life, then proliferating this story is producing quite a bit of unnecessary anxiety and stress in people.
Stress that sometimes doesn’t go away - even when you have changed some key problem-generating theological commitments.
Because, again, I might also be wrong about these new ideas. I’m not infallible. It is certainly logically possible that the traditional hell story is correct. And this mere fact of its logical possibility, due to how bad of an outcome it portends to be, can sometimes be enough to inject even the most healthy relationship with God with deep fear, especially for those who grew up steeped in that kind of theology.
I understand there are those that read Stay Curious (our new name for the blog!) and hold the eternal, conscious torment view of hell. And I know that some of you would not want people to experience eschatological trauma as a result of exploring certain theology, but rather the overwhelming, beyond-words beauty of Jesus and his love for us. I’m sure there are ways of presenting the gospel faithfully and fully, along the more traditional view, that don’t *have to* lead to someone experiencing eschatological trauma.
And yet, sadly, I suspect it does happen more often than we might think. After all, it can be an awkward thing to confess to your church peers (and maybe even more so to your non-church peers) that you routinely question your salvation, worry about going to hell, and fret being left behind by a rapture.
Whatever your persuasion on the relevant theological topics, I hope musing on the idea of “eschatological trauma” is helpful and interesting to you. I’d love to hear what concerns, questions, and comments come to mind. As it happens, a fair bit of the theology in question is inspired by the writing in the book of Revelation. In this week’s episode of OTT, we discuss the challenges and best practices in interpreting Revelation. You can watch it here or listen to it on your favorite podcatcher.
Stay Curious!