4. Drifting into Godlessness
4. Drifting into Godlessness
The streams of Western culture are flowing away from godliness. Society is being increasingly secularized: that is, it is undergoing the change which sociologists call secularization, and define as transition from a state in which religious faith shaped community life to one in which religion is just a private hobby for minority interest groups, and community life is controlled by nonreligious considerations. Take my country, for example. Whereas nineteenth-century England was Christian, not indeed always in achievement (horrible things were done), but certainly in intention and public commitment, twentieth-century England, despite Christian forces still operating in national life, is plainly anxious to be a secular rather than a Christian country. What have I to say about that?
Quietly and calmly (for hysteria here does not help) I want to say two things.
First, this drift into secularism was inevitable. Why? Because in the thinking of so many major philosophers, and latterly of artists, historians, social scientists and professional communicators too, God has shrunk to such tiny proportions—almost to vanishing point. No longer are men aware of him as the mighty, worshipful Lord of the Old and New Testaments and of such epochs of faith as the sixteenth-century Reformation, the seventeenth-century Puritan period, and the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century. God has been so thoroughly reduced in size by these thinkers, and their impact on our culture has been so great, that many who see themselves as his servants no longer think of him as ruling his world in providence, or speaking to men in Holy Scripture, or even as being a personal moral being as opposed to an animating cosmic force.
To be sure, any who worship Jesus as Son of God incarnate, come to save the world, have in their beliefs about him an answer to all this. The fulfilling of prophecy in Jesus' life and death, and the achieving of the world's predestined redemption through the apparent accident of a Roman governor being willing to let justice miscarry in order to avoid trouble, prove clearly enough the reality of God's overruling. The fact that the second person of the Godhead became a teacher in Palestine settles the much-debated question whether God gives man verbal instruction. The fact that God incarnate has for nineteen centuries appeared unique among men in both the force of his personality and the moral grandeur of his life and teaching sinks all doubts as to whether God is personal or moral. But clearheaded and thoroughgoing believers are, it seems, a minority, and we should not wonder that when, on top of the work of the God-shrinkers, the knowledge and technology explosions of our time hit us, great numbers of folk were swept away from their Christian moorings altogether.
Some of us remain cultural dinosaurs, still acknowledging the God of the Bible, and believing that the Bible is his Word and Jesus Christ is his Son. Can such old-fashioned beliefs be true? Yes, I think so, but they are certainly not fashionable. Yet now, living as we do in a situation in which the pendulum has swung away from Christianity, there is need to take some action to try to reverse the swing; otherwise, those around us will never know the one and only formula for true humanness. It is no love of our neighbor to keep that concealed from him, little as he may want to hear it.
Second, the current drift into secularism is impoverishing. The Christian tide has gone out, leaving behind it the spiritual equivalent of mud. Three aspects of this sad and unsightly mess call for particular mention.
The going out of the Christian tide has left behind it a world of misunderstanding. Men misunderstand themselves. The human being has always been a problem to himself. He is, and in lucid moments knows that he is, half ape and half angel, a kind of cosmic amphibian, grand in his powers, pathetic often in his performance. Says Shakespeare's Hamlet: "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty [capacity]! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!"
Hamlet is right: do we realize, I wonder, the fantastic glory of our humanity?
But what can man today do when he has given up on God, closed his Bible, and so lost the clue to a truly human way of living? What we do in fact is oscillate. We swing between aspiring to be like angels and consenting to act like apes. That is what is happening in our society: that is what so-called "permissiveness" is about: folk think the way of happiness is to combine idealism with self-indulgence, high-minded altruism with callous sensuality. But this is to misunderstand ourselves utterly.
The truth is that because we have lost touch with God and his word we have lost the secret both of community (because sin kills neighbor-love) and of our own identity (because at the deepest level we do not know who or what we are, or what we exist for). And only when we have relearned our identity as God's sinning and straying creatures, and, in the words of the hymn, "heard the voice of Jesus say, 'Come unto me and rest,' " can we hope to find a satisfactory way of living either with ourselves or with each other. And only then shall we find the deepest of all life's secrets—the secret of contentment.
What does it mean to be content? Contentment, which is directly bound up with happiness, fulfilment and joy, the realities of which I have been speaking, means this: unwillingness to change your lot for all the tea in China or the gold in Fort Knox (or wherever the gold is kept nowadays), because you are conscious of having found and of already enjoying life's best—that which of all things is most precious and delightful. The contented man knows that he has found the pearl of great price and secured the hidden treasure, and that there is nothing better, so he declines to consider exchanging it. One does not exchange the best for something less good.
Now in this sense the Christian is content, for in living with God as his Father and Jesus Christ as his Savior he knows a peace within that is to him more precious than anything else has ever been, and he knows too that he is heir to all the delight he can hold both now and for eternity. But where man's nature is not understood in terms of his relationship with God and his need to be forgiven and changed by grace, such contentment as this can never be known, and we are doomed to continue restless, always seeking something more than we have and never finding what in our hearts we crave for.