Everything in the contemporary world is situated under the sign of crisis, not only the social and the economic, but likewise also a cultural, but likewise also a spiritual, everything has become problematic. This is moreso acutely obvious in Germany, and about this much gets written. How ought a Christian to relate to the agony of the world, how ought one to regard it? Is this only a crisis of a world external for the Christian and anti-Christian, having betrayed the Christian faith, or is this likewise a crisis of Christianity? Christians also share in the fate of the world. They cannot purport the view, that within Christianity, within the Christian world everything is just dandy and that nothing in the world irritates it. And upon the Christian world, upon the Christian movement there falls heavy a responsibility. Upon the world is being wrought a judgement, and it is likewise a judgement upon historical Christianity. The ills of the modern world are connected not only with the falling away from Christianity, with a chilling down of faith, but also with the age-old ills of Christianity on its human side. Christianity is universal in its significance, and everything is situated within its orbit, nothing for it can be fully on the outside. Christians ought rather to perceive the spiritual condition of the contemporary world from within Christianity itself, to define, what the crisis of the world signifies as an event within Christianity, within the Christian universality. The world has come into a frightful condition, no longer within it are there firm institutions, it is living through a revolutionary epoch both outward and inward, an epoch of spiritual anarchy. Man lives in anguish (Angst) more than ever before, under an eternal threat, he hangs suspended over an abyss (the Grenzsituation of Tillich). Modern European man has lost the faith, which he tried in the last century to substitute for the Christian faith. He believes no longer in progress, in humanism, in the saving power of science, in the saving power of democracy, he is conscious of the injustice of the capitalist order and he has lost confidence in the utopia of the contemporary socialist order. Modern France is afflicted by cultural scepticism, and in modern Germany the crisis dispels all values. The whole of Europe is shaken by the unbelievable events happening in Soviet Russia, under the grip of a new faith, a new religion, hostile to the Christian religion. Characteristic to contemporary Europe is the rise of new forms of pessimistic a philosophy, in comparison with which the pessimism of Schopenhauer comes off as comforting and innocent. And thus there is the philosophy of Heidigger, for whom being as regards it own essence is fallen, but from no one is it fallen away, the world is hopelessly sinful, but there is no God, the essence of being in the world is anxiety.
Within Western Christianity there has become weakened the faith in man, in his creative power, in his aspect in the world. In the social-political movements prevail principles of coercion and authority, with a diminishing of the freedom of man -- in Communism, in Fascism, in National Socialism there triumphs a new victory of materialism both economic and racial. Man as it were has grown tired of spiritual freedom and is prepared to renounce it in the name of power, with which to order his life, both inward and outward. Man has grown tired of himself, of man, has lost the confidence in man and wants to leap off to the supra-human, even though this supra-human be a social collective. Many of the old idols have been toppled in our time, but many new idols have likewise been created. Man is so constituted, that he can live either with a faith in God, or with a faith in ideals and idols. In essence, man cannot consistently and ultimately be an atheist. Having fallen away from the faith in God, he falls into idolatry. We can see the idol-worship and the fashioning of idols within every sphere -- in science, in art, in statecraft, and in national and social life. And thus, for example, Communism is an extreme form of social idolatry.