Shayne Looper: Hope wins in the battle of worldviews
The battle for worldviews — religious, atheistic, and materialistic — is nothing new. Today, it is dominated by monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, along with materialistic atheism, and the postmodern rejection of absolute truth. In the first century, the big players were Epicureanism, Stoicism, and the newcomer Christianity.
Epicureanism’s influence was already faltering by the time Christianity emerged. Its proponents were religious skeptics who believed, like Carl Sagan, that “the Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” Based on this foundation, Epicureans believed that pleasure or happiness should be the goal of life, and that required the absence of fear and pain.
The Stoics’ worldview was ascendent in the first century. Like some scientists in our day, they believed in an inflexibly deterministic universe. But unlike some scientists in our day, they believed that people could choose how to respond to predetermined events. They taught that virtue was the highest good, and that virtue depended on reason. Score one for Mr. Spock.
There is much to be admired in both Epicurean and Stoic philosophy. Epicureans, unlike the modern caricature of them, believed that a life of moderation, not wild indulgence, would lead to the greatest happiness. The Stoics chose not to be governed by unruly passions, but to seek good feelings like joy, goodwill, and moral integrity. People who adopted either of these ancient worldviews would make good neighbors and friends.
Why did Christianity, rooted as it is in a thoroughly Jewish worldview, displace these long-established philosophical systems? What was it about Christianity that gave it an advantage over Stoicism and Epicureanism in the battle of worldviews?
The answer to that question requires, and has frequently received, a book-length treatment to do it justice. The Christian understanding of life and reality prevailed in part because of its belief in a creator who remained actively engaged with his creation, something that both Epicurus and Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, denied.
Further, Stoicism relied on a person’s ability to reason in order to achieve virtue and experience the good life. But those denied an education or shackled by a poor upbringing were simply excluded. Zeno’s good news was only good for the educationally and culturally advantaged, while Christianity, with its promise of supernatural aid, offered the good life in God’s kingdom to all.
Epicureanism taught people not to fear god or worry about dying and assured them that even terrible things are easy to endure. But people found these instructions not only unnatural but impossible. For example, enduring terrible things has never been easy for anyone, not even Epicurus.
Perhaps the biggest advantage Christianity had over its competition in the worldview ring had to do with hope. People, whether Epicureans, Stoics, or Christians, lived in a world filled with injustice. They experienced tragedy. They lost children, lost fortunes, lost their health. They lived through wars and famines. It was in this setting, in the real world as opposed to the ivory tower world of the intellectual, that Christianity shone brightest.
The Epicurean, faced with sorrow and tragedy — the death of a child, for example — would say that it was all meaningless. The Stoic would tell a parent that their emotional response was unreasonable. But the Christian, steeped in Judaism’s view of creation, would lament the tragedy, trust God to destroy death itself, and raise the child in the resurrection. The Christian would, in a word, have hope.
That hope extended beyond what would happen in the world to what would happen in the Christian himself or herself. The virtue which the Stoic sought through reason alone would be granted to the Christian through grace-enabled effort. Christians, unlike Stoics, were not left to achieve this on their own.
The hope of a world set right and peopled with men and women made new was one that neither Epicureanism or Stoicism — or any of today’s ideologies — could dream. The life others sought was being experienced by the freshly spirited people of Jesus. Christians saw the pain of the world, which Epicureans and Stoics must ignore or deny, as the birth pains of a new, just, and beautiful cosmos. It was hope that won the day.
It still does.
— Shayne Looper is a writer and speaker based in Coldwater, Michigan. Contact him at salooper57@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Shayne Looper: Hope wins in the battle of worldviews
