In
ancient Israel, when the nation had turned from God and from his truth and
commands as given in Scripture, the prophet Jeremiah cried out that there was
death in the city. He was speaking not
only of physical death in Jerusalem but also a wider death. Because Jewish society of that day had turned
away from what God had given them in the Scripture, there was death in the polis,
that is, death in the total culture and the total society….
Humanists
have been determined to beat to death the knowledge of God and the knowledge
that God has not been silent, but has spoken in the Bible and through Christ –
and they have been determined to do this even though the death of values has
come with the death of that knowledge.
We
see two effects of our loss of meaning and values. The first is degeneracy….The marks of ancient
Rome scar us: degeneracy, decadence, depravity, a love of violence for violence’s
sake. The situation is plain. If we look, we see it. If we see it, we are concerned.
But
we must notice that there is a second result of modern man’s loss of
meaning and values which is more ominous, and which many people do not
see. This second result is that the
elite will exist. Society cannot stand chaos. Some group or some person will fill the
vacuum. An elite will offer us arbitrary
absolutes, and who will stand in its way?
Will
the silent majority (which at one time we hear so much about ) help? The so-called silent majority was, and is,
divided into a minority and a majority.
The minority are either Christians who have a real basis for
values or those who at least have a memory of the days when the values were
real. The majority are left with
only their two poor values of personal peace and affluence.
With
such values, will men stand for their liberties? Will they not give up their liberties step by
step, inch by inch, as long as their own personal peace and prosperity is
sustained and not challenged, as long as the goods are delivered? ….Much of the church is no help here either,
because for so long a large section of the church has only been teaching a relativistic
humanism using religious terminology.
I
believe the majority of the silent majority, young and old, will sustain the
loss of liberties without raising their voices as long as their own life-styles
are not threatened. And since personal
peace and affluence are so often the only values that count with the majority,
politicians know that to be elected they must promise these things. Politics has largely become not a matter of
ideals – and truth – but of supplying a constituency with a frosting of
personal peace and affluence. They know
that voices will not be raised as long as people have these things, or at least
an illusion of them.
Edward
Gibbon (1737-1794 in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire said that
the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury
(that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very
poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a
single nation); third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts,
masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth,
an increased desire to live off the state.
It all sounds so familiar. …….we
are back in Rome.
(Excerpted from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and
Decline of Western Thought and Culture by Francis A. Schaeffer, Published by
Fleming H. Revell Company, 1976. Chapter 11, Our Society – pgs. 226- 227)
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