This past spring, I finally finished my master’s program—adviser emailed, final submitted, graduation forms signed. But as an alternative of relief or accomplishment, the first thing I’m feeling is dread. After 50 applications and multiple interviews, my job offer total is zero.
The source of my dread shouldn’t be just my lack of employment, I’m realizing. It’s the sensation that I lack status. I’m reminded each time small talk takes the inevitable turn: So, what do you do? Finishing up a master’s is great, yet I feel like I’m in a clumsy spot—falling behind my peers, not quite where I ought to be, not quite measuring up.
I’m not alone in my craving for status. Psychological r esearch indicates that humans are widely driven by this desire for esteem, respect, or affirmation based on social rank. Psychologists have described status as a fundamental human need alongside safety, love, and meaning. While there’s debate about how deep this need goes, it’s hard to disclaim that the way in which others perceive us influences our beliefs and behaviors. Even if we tell ourselves we don’t care about status, our brains typically do.
And it’s not only status in some absolute sense but status in comparison with other people. For example, a Harvard and University of Toronto study about “air rage”—passengers erupting in indignant suits mid-flight—suggested status comparisons were a significant component. The most typical think about some 4,000 cases of air rage wasn’t delays, fees, or lack of legroom. It was whether the flight had a first-class cabin. Economy passengers were eight times more prone to burst into air rage once they needed to go through the first-class cabin on the option to their seats.
Another study asked subjects in the event that they’d prefer a yearly income of $50,000 while everyone else makes $25,000, or a yearly income of $100,000 while everyone else gets $200,000. Over half picked the lower income—and better status. Riches typically matter lower than being richer than others. What wouldn’t it profit someone to realize the world if their neighbor had two worlds?
Bible translators generally don’t use the word status as we do. You’ll find it in The Message, but conventional translations usually tend to speak of glory, honor, or renown (translating the Greek word doxa), or name, title, or fame (translating onoma).
But status was just as necessary to ancient people because it to us. In the Roman world, honor was such a coveted resource that one philosopher described social life as cursus honorum (a “race for honors”). At private and non-private gatherings alike, hosts seated guests in response to each “ascribed honors” (status inherited from lineage or generational wealth) and “acquired honors” (one’s personal achievements). This offersbackground for James’s correction toward churches that gave nice seats to the wealthy while seating the poor at their feet (2:1–4). Status display was so normalized that it couldn’t easily be left on the church doors.
While every Roman church wrestled with status obsession, New Testament scholar Joseph Hellerman argues the foremost on this vice was Philippi. Known as a “small Rome,” the town had the type of culture where elites would rattle off their honors before public speaking and even emblazon tombstones with lists of achievements.
Writing to this church, the apostle Paul first looks like he’s playing their status game. “If anyone thinks he has reason for confidence within the flesh, I actually have more” (Phil. 3:4), he says. If anyone is winning this honors race, it will be me. Next, following the variety of a Philippian tombstone, Paul lists off ascribed and bought honors: born in the appropriate tribe, at the appropriate time, to the appropriate race; surpassing all his peers in righteousness, passion, and justice (vv. 5–6).
But then Paul reveals his purpose in listing these honors. He’s not doing it to ascertain status but to honor Jesus. Subverting the cursus honorum, Paul declares his honors to be worthless rubbish (within the Greek, skubalon, or excrement) because his standing in Christ is infinitely more priceless (vv. 7–10).
This revelation shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to the letter’s original audience, for by this point within the letter, Paul had already pointed to Christ’s intentional lack of status. Jesus wasn’t concerned with upward social mobility—the drive to build up extra money, prestige, and power as life progresses. If anything, his trajectory was more consistent with what Henri Nouwen called “downward mobility.”
As God, Jesus had countless opportunities to tug rank. But at every turn, he undermined his own status. He could’ve develop into wealthy and famous as a full-time miracle employee. He could’ve been born a prince or magistrate as an alternative of the son of a blue-collar family. He had the identical status as God, Paul wrote to the Philippians, but never used that status to his advantage (2:5–11). Christians, the apostle advised, must have the identical mindset (v. 5).
That’s still a frightening prospect here within the twenty first century, where Christians, like me, try to maintain the pace in one other status-obsessed culture. How can we discipline our limitless desire for status—a desire we may not at all times even recognize for the sin it’s?
Early Christianity had a useful word for this tendency: vainglory. It means anxiety over one’s fame. Vainglory might offer more clarity for this conversation than the term status can: It distinguishes between our wholly appropriate instinct to offer honor and respect to clever elders (1 Tim. 5:1–2) and leaders (Heb. 13:7; 1 Pet. 2:13) and the type of selfish status-seeking Christians should guard against.
Vainglory was taken so seriously amongst early Christian monastics that it was recurrently ranked among the many deadliest of sins. Like lust or greed, the desert theologians taught, vainglory clouded one’s relationship with God and needed to be fought. Some even drafted “battle plans” to isolate vainglorious thoughts and replace them with truth from Scripture—to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).
Everything about our every day experience screams that we should always care more about status: Buy more luxury brands, post more jealousy-inducing photos, at all times be on the hunt for a greater house or job and even partner. But what Paul told the Philippians is that every one these signs of status are irrelevant. We don’t must try to look impressive. We’re already—and only—impressive by virtue of Christ in us.
Griffin Gooch is a author and speaker who recently finished his master’s in theological studies at Fuller Theological Seminary. He plans to pursue a PhD in philosophical theology.
