Editorial
From the Newsletter of Revesby Presbyterian Church
October 2008
Rev Dr Peter Barnes
Where the Christian revelation is despised, there will be a consequent decline in our apprehension of beauty, goodness and truth. In other words, ungodliness will lead to moral decay, and the result will be a greater poverty and perversity in how society operates. Life will become coarsened and cheapened, and relationships will be degraded. Whether one turns to front of the newspaper and reads about the state government, or to the back and reads about the Broncos football team, the story is much the same.
In August 2008 the mayor of Malia on Crete moved to rid the seaside resort of young British tourists on the grounds that their behaviour was simply disgusting: ‘They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit.’ Theodore Dalrymple reports on one British woman who had nine children by five different fathers, gleaned $50,000 in welfare benefits a year, took off to India with eight of her children, and then went on a trip while leaving her 15 year old daughter in the tender care of a tour guide whom she had only just met. Before long, the girl turned up dead on the beach – raped, and riddled with drugs and alcohol. British child rearing experts in the Guardian and Observer warned against taking a judgmental attitude to this event as Rod Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Mick Jagger have all adopted similarly promiscuous lifestyles. Presumably, anybody who is famous cannot possibly be criticised.
The results of this whole approach to life were reinforced to me on a train trip back from the city on Tuesday 23 September. There was a fellow with a loud voice sitting behind me, next to two girls. I was trying to read a somewhat difficult book on the theology of Athanasius, but the whole carriage was treated to this fellow’s discourses on his life of alcohol, drugs, and free sex – all delivered in the coarsest possible language. Finally, the genius found some reason to announce that he had no religion. We have made a radically wrong turn in defining what life is all about. As Dalrymple laments: ‘Our society has lost the most elementary common sense about what children need.’
There are more British children with televisions in their bedrooms than with their biological fathers at home. In 2007 about a quarter of British teachers were assaulted by their students. Pandering to perversion has become public policy all across the Western world. In mid-2008 Sydney’s Wesley Mission was fined $10,000 for refusing the application of a homosexual couple who wanted to be foster carers. We have slid into a highly technical version of the Dark Ages. Morale is low, and there is a massive loss of nerve in every area of life. Most of our political leaders seem to believe in little except trying to stay in power or trying to get there. Society possesses little ability to correct itself to prevent a descent into T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland.
Samuel Johnson declared that ‘The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things – the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.’ That is no longer an aim in much of what passes for modern educational theory. One can only lament with G. K. Chesterton: ‘It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.’ Never has more communication been possible; never has so little worthwhile communication been achieved.
What has gone wrong? Many complicated answers could be suggested, but the Bible says quite simply that people who worship the wrong god end out descending into spiritual and moral poverty and perversity. At Peor, the Israelites first of all sacrificed to the Moabite gods, then indulged in sexual immorality (Num.25; see 1 Cor.10:7-8). In the dark days of the book of Judges, there is a pattern of spiritual decline, moral decline, and then political decay (Judges 17-21). The rot begins when the true God is worshipped the wrong way, by means of a carved image (17:3-4). People still believed in the blessing of God but not His revelation (see 17:5, 13), and the contagion spread. The result is moral decay. Judges 19 tells of sexual promiscuity, selfish and uncaring lifestyles, rampant sodomy, moral cowardice, and the collapse of what has been called ordinary human decency.
This never happens in a vacuum. On 2 November 2003 Gene Robinson, a man who had divorced his wife and left his two children and went on to adopt a homosexual lifestyle, was consecrated as the Episcopalian bishop of New Hampshire – supposedly a successor to Jesus’ apostles. One cannot abandon spiritual truth without its having moral consequences.
Judges 20 and 21 tell of social disintegration, where a society is held together only by sordid social engineering. This is the outworking of a failed belief system. Those who worship the creation instead of the creator (Rom.1:21-23) find not that they have given up God, but – far worse – God gives them up to the lusts of their hearts, to dishonourable passions, and to a debased mind (Rom.1:24, 26, 28). With no concept of the true God, they fall for an unnatural and debased lifestyle, typified by homosexuality.
In 1983 the prize-winning novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (who died in 2008), sought to explain why the communist experiment in what was then the USSR went so barbarously wrong, leading to the murder of some 60 million of its own people. Solzhenitsyn’s diagnosis was simple and compelling, albeit not popular with Western liberals: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’
With warmest regards in Christ,
Peter Barnes