When Faith Hardens

Every year I see it happen among those who begin their theological studies.

They come with bright eyes and firm conviction. You can see it in the eagerness, the way they take notes as if every word will hold. Faith has been a home: steady, safe, clearly mapped. But within months, something starts to shift. Their language falters. Their certainties tremble. The words that once carried life begin to feel thin. And questions multiply faster than answers.

Some feel as though they are losing their faith. Others, though they can’t yet name it, are being led into something deeper: a faith no longer built on certainty, but on trust.

Studying theology is not like studying a phenomenon. It is not a detached examination of God, as if God were an object to be analyzed. It is more like standing before a mirror and realizing how partial, how small, our image of God has always been. Theology, in its truest form, is not the science of God. It is the slow unlearning of everything in us that prevents an encounter with God.

And that unlearning can hurt. It shakes the structures of the mind: our craving for clarity, our fear of error, our need to be right. For many students, that shaking feels like a crisis. But in truth, it is a step toward spiritual maturity: the moment faith begins to grow up.

In the classroom, I see this process take an academic shape: learning to listen to other voices, to understand ideas one does not share, to argue without needing to defend oneself. But beneath the intellectual exercise lies a spiritual discipline: the willingness to let truth be larger than one’s own perspective.

What happens in a classroom also happens in society at large. When fear meets uncertainty, we naturally reach for clarity rather than truth, for purity rather than presence. In Sweden, this surfaced recently in something as ordinary as the debate over Halloween. Darkness itself became suspect, as if naming or engaging it would somehow invite danger. On the surface, it was a quarrel about a holiday, but it exposed an underlying human condition: our instinct to divide the world into what feels safe and what feels threatening.

We see the same pattern in our churches, our politics, even our online conversations: the constant drive to sort, defend, and exclude whenever mystery makes us uneasy. Yet the spiritual life cannot thrive on avoidance. To encounter God is to risk complexity.

Louis Lozowick, City Shapes, Oil on composition board with canvas textured surface, 1922–23. Public domain.

Modern psychology offers a language for what theology has long known: the mind’s first reaction to fear is division.

The psychologist Aaron Beck called this “dichotomous thinking,” the impulse to split reality into absolutes. When we are anxious, our inner life becomes a courtroom. Everything is either right or wrong, good or evil, safe or dangerous.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman showed why this happens. Under pressure, the brain shuts down its slower, reflective capacities and turns instead to instinctive pattern-making. Faced with uncertainty, we cling to whatever restores coherence. The need for control becomes more urgent than the desire for truth.

The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has gone even further. The brain, she says, constructs the world from the concepts it has learned. What we perceive is not the world as it is, but the world as our words and categories allow us to see it. If we have trained our minds to think only in terms of threat and purity, we will encounter reality as dangerous and contaminated – even when it is not.

This is not just a private mental habit; it has become a social architecture. What begins as the human mind’s coping mechanism soon hardens into ideology and politics. We create digital altars to certainty – algorithms that feed us clarity without complexity. Our public life has come to mirror the same neural reflex that once made theology defensive: the refusal to stay with ambiguity.

We see it in political discourse, where opponents are no longer wrong but evil. We see it in the outrage economy of social media, where moral adrenaline replaces moral imagination. We see it in communities, religious and secular alike, where belonging depends on adopting the right tone of indignation.

These are not separate phenomena; they are symptoms of the same human fear. When our nervous systems are flooded with uncertainty, we do not seek understanding; we seek control. And the same patterns that fragment our societies fragment our churches. The same mental structures that make democracy brittle make faith rigid.

It is easy to imagine that this is something happening “out there” – in politics, in culture, in other people. But the line runs through each of us. The mind that simplifies reality to survive is the same mind that constructs walls of belief to feel safe.

When that structure hardens, when an entire society or church begins to live inside it, it turns perilous: a collective rigidity mistaken for purity. Communities begin to speak not with trust but with defense. They turn into closed circuits of protection rather than living bodies of communion. The pattern repeats endlessly: when the inner foundation trembles, the reflex is not curiosity but control.

That is human. But when an entire civilization responds that way, it becomes a spiritual crisis. Once fear defines the boundaries, those who think differently become enemies instead of conversation partners. We stop listening for truth and start policing it. We stop seeking wisdom and start seeking safety.

The church’s real crisis, I believe, is not secularization but something more subtle: a cognitive and spiritual fear of uncertainty that has been mistaken for fidelity. And our world’s crisis – political, cultural, digital – stems from the same fear, scaled up and wired into every system that rewards speed over reflection, emotion over empathy, purity over paradox.

The person who believes that light must be protected has forgotten the nature of light. Light does not fear darkness. It cannot be contaminated by it.

The ancient Syriac tradition knew this well. Ephrem the Syrian, one of the earliest poet-theologians of the church, did not think in opposites but in paradoxes. For him, reality was not divided but woven. The divine reveals itself through the human, light through shadow, life through death. For Ephrem, paradox is not a failure of logic: it is the native language of divine truth. God cannot be captured in definition; God must be sung. Ephrem’s theology is circular rather than linear: it moves in spirals of symbol and song. He does not explain the mystery – he lets it echo.

In such a theology, contradiction is not a threat but a path. Paradox opens what dichotomy closes. It teaches us that reality itself is woven of tension: light and dark, strength and fragility, not as enemies but as rhythms in one creation.

Perhaps that is the wisdom we have lost: a vision of faith and reason that does not fear complexity but is shaped by it. Mature faith, then, is not about holding more firmly to what we already know. It is about remaining present to the question. It knows that mystery cannot be solved, only deepened. It remembers that the Incarnation itself means this: God does not flee from what is human but enters it. To live with such faith is to renounce the binary. It is to see the world as it is: interwoven, broken, and whole at once. It is to understand that our task, whether as church or as society, is not to draw lines between holy and unholy, pure and impure, right and wrong but to bear witness that light and darkness belong to the same creation.

What we see now in our public language – the quick condemnations, the fear of difference, the obsession with purity – is only a surface symptom of a deeper pattern: the confusion of faith with control, of truth with belonging. In every generation, we need to be reminded that the gospel is not about escaping the world but about God entering it.

Perhaps our task today is not to believe more strongly but to believe more deeply. Not to win debates but to rediscover trust. Not to separate light from darkness but to remain in the dark long enough for the light to appear within it.

Faith is not the holding of an answer, but the courage to stay with the question until the light slowly takes form in the dark.