wise words from SL Johnson
Mike Abendroth
Men have for a long time been trying to understand our troubled age. The solutions have been manifold. “For Karl Marx,” Samuel Miller wrote, “it was the millennial age of the proletariat; for Spengler, the twilight of civilization; for Whitman, the age of the common man; for Henry Adams, a dismal fate. For Nietzsche it was decadent and yet the door to new possibilities; for Dostoevsky it was dangerously demonic; for Bury, the age of liberty; for T. S. Eliot, a wasteland; for Ortego, the upward rise of the barbarian; for Kafka, a nightmare; for Auden, the age of anxiety. For politicians, it was the age of democracy; for scientists, of space travel and unprecedented power, and for artists a new loneliness and a deeper exile.” l
Miller went on to write, “If we have had our difficulty in deciding what the age was really like, it is not strange. Its man-made wonders were spectacular; yet so were man’s crimes. If we handled nature like giants, we handled ourselves like idiots.”2
One could obtain some general agreement that our age is an age characterized by a great deal of secularity. Spiritual forces are no longer the unifying bond for art, politics, history, and philosophy. Birth, puberty, marriage, sin and death, once pivotal points of great spiritual significance, are now natural, biological, social, and primarily clinical. As for advertising, it is the religious expression of the secularity of the age, placarding the superficial glory of the material products of our age. No longer are we to be saved by grace; we are to be saved by gadgets, which become ours by the sufferings of monthly payments. In this way we may expect, so we are told, to lose our money but gain our soul.
Miller is right, “Salvation was never more ardently proffered by the church in its most fervent evangelism to save the world than it is ·now by frenetically hepped-up hucksters, who promise the full delight of heaven to those who are bored in their chrome-plated hell, by giving them more of the same sort of thing.”3
The sad thing about it is that now the evangelists of a fairly orthodox gospel (but generally Arminian, not the pure gospel of sovereign grace) are using the same methods, deceiving the simple-minded saints and extracting from them their giant sums of money for their evangelical conglomerates. How gullible the saints are!
Thanks.
Thomas Watson, "[Jesus] alone is the Prince of Preachers. He alone is the best of expositors."