The Culture Wars, Round IV

The Church Makes Itself Irrelevant to the West

Historians have told us that the twentieth century represented the bloodiest and most lethal hundred years in all of known human history. But the wonder is not that in the past hundred years, the world saw the bloodiest century in its history to date, but that it was not more so. Most of the bloodshedding was European in origin and course. So much for the coming new Age heralded at the end of the nineteenth century. And the bloodletting is likely not over. It will not cease until the West swallows its vaunted pride and returns humbly, once again, to the Prince of Peace. We fear that unless that happens, the twenty-first century may well turn out to be more bloody still.

But the faithlessness of our fathers, on the one hand, and the willing promotion of the gospel of peace, prosperity, and plenty for all, on the other, meant that when the apocalypses of the Great War, the Depression, Nazism, and Communist totalitarianism did come, the West doubly rejected the Church and the Christian faith. “You Christians promised much—but you lied,” was the reaction.

The twentieth century was ushered in with a false Gospel of optimism and progress, underpinned by the idolatry of Enlightenment rationalism. Shailer Mathews, Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School, aptly represented the new false faith. According to George M. Marsden,

In Matthew's view, human religious experience provided the data for the scientific study of religion. The Bible, accordingly, was not a source of facts or true propositions about God, but "a trustworthy record of a developing experience of God which nourishes our faith." Similarly, the doctrines of the church were the products of group religious experience.

Christianity "Is the concrete religious life of a continuous ongoing group rather than the various doctrines in which that life found expression." The goal of the modernist (Mathews's term for "modern, up-to-date Christianity") was "to carry on this process of an every growing experience of God."
George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 177

God is to be found and known not through the Scriptures, but through the growing understanding of believers as they experienced God through Nature or society. For Mathews, and most of the Church in the West,

the needs of modern society, which after all is where God is found today, should therefore properly set the agenda for Christians. The principle that God was immanent and revealing himself in the modern world, was at the heart of the modernist impulse.

. . . The answer was above all a moral and a practical one. ["Christianity"] brought a "full moral life" which was impossible without God. Ultimately it introduced "goodwill" which, "though never fully realized, is of the nature of God, and is the law of progress, the foundation upon which human society can safely be built. . . ."
Ibid., p. 177

This is the "Gospel of the Enlightenment" in a nutshell. God is banished and made irrelevant to the universe; therefore Nature is substituted for god; reading the "Book of Nature" enables us to see and know this god. As we live a moral life, we will co-operate with the law of the progress of Nature, and society will become better and better. Man, Nature, and god are now to all intents and purposes indistinguishable. This had now become the accepted, mainstream "christianity" of the West. It mattered not in what particular denomination or ecclesiastical system you were found. All imbibed deeply from the trough of the new religion of Man.

That is why thousands upon thousands of people lost their faith in the trenches. Their faith all along, it seems, had not been in Christ, but in Man and his wondrous glory. When Man began tearing up the place, their so-called faith in Christ—Whom they foolishly believed would continue to bless them while they worshiped at the altar of human rationalism, made their compromises with the world, and nursed their embarrassment and shame of the Son and His God and Father—their “faith” collapsed. Their christ had merely been their servant to warrant their forlorn hope to be able to live coseted privileged prosperous lives. When "he" failed them, they rejected him.

It was not the evil they witnessed that led millions to turn away from God. They had already stopped actually believing in the Living God. But they used the pretext of evil to make their Unbelief justified. Christ, if He was true, and if He existed, had allowed the evil to happen. In other words, in their heart of hearts, these so-called Christians really believed that human kind did not deserve what was happening at Verdun and the Somme. This, more than anything else, showed that they were more jealous over Man than the Living God. They did not believe in their own sinful wretchedness. They, underneath it all, really did believe the crapulous Enlightenment doctrines of man's goodness and perfectibility through sweet reason. They did not see Verdun or the Somme as a divine judgement upon them; they turned it into a judgement upon God.

Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Church came to be ruled, led, and dominated by false prophets, whose screech was “peace, peace”, but there was no peace. Those faithful prophets who instead spoke of the glory of the Living God, of man's depravity and proclaimed Christ alone as the Saviour of man through his blood shed at Calvary—these were deemed by the Church to be foolish antiquaries, madmen, extremists, primitives, fundamentalists, and simplistic uneducated rustics. The West preferred to believe the false prophets, because their message was what the entire community had come to believe in any event. The inate goodness of Man. The inevitability of progress. The identification of society as their god.

However, when their message of humanistic optimism was proved to be a terrible lie by the Great War, the Great Depression, the tyranny of the Soviets and the Facists, and the Second World War, and their aftermaths, the population in general became yet even more sceptical of the Church.

Now, looking back, how stupid, venal, foolish, and profoundly unfaithful were those preachers, theologians, teachers, and church leaders who counseled common cause with Unbelief, who sought to make the faith acceptable to the other side; and who craved and curried the favour and intellectual approbation of non-Christians. How treacherous were those in Jerusalem who sought to conduct the great Culture War by fawning obsequiousness and unconditional surrender. How insidious and serpentine was their embarrassment over the Risen Lord, the Living God. One is reminded of the words of our Lord: they have already had their reward, and it has been in this life.

Yet, their curse lives on even to our day. It is a singular phenomenon that scepticism, atheism, and materialism were turbo-charged as a result of the two world wars. How did that happen? Why did not these terrible conflagrations turn people back again to God? For many professing Christians who had been fed by their false shepherds upon the lie of humanistic optimism, the horrors of the wars shattered the veneer of their false faith, exposing only the actual scepticism and atheism underneath. The god of whom they had once heard and in whom they had once believed was obviously false—the horrors of war had proved it beyond doubt. Atheism and the lust for material comfort was the reflex position. It was all that was left or could be salvaged.

We did not deserve the suffering of the Somme, they said. These horrors proved only that God did not exist. The Church had spoken falsely of a glorious world about to come. It was all a lie. But what was not a lie was that Man is the master of all things. If I can decide for myself that God does not exist, then to all intents and practical purposes, I am a god. Nietzsche was right. Let me now be honoured and glorified with trappings appropriate to my status. Prosperity in this world is my right.

Like Pharaoh, the plagues that fell upon the West throughout the twentieth century have only served to harden Unbelief, and make its hold more vicelike. But, also like Pharaoh, this has set the West up for an even more devastating judgment to come.