Scarcely anything in our modern society is so unwelcome as a moral judgment or a spiritual pronouncement. Evils of all sorts must be explained without reference to ethics or to God. This has reached a point close to absurdity whenever AIDS, for example, is referred to in the media. There is a studied attempt to prescribe ways of curtailing the spread of this disease which avoids all open reference to the real moral and evil in man’s life. None, it seems, dare to grasp the nettle by saying that there is a Cause behind the curse. To suggest, as Paul does in Romans 1, that God has visited man’s irregularity of life with a condign punishment is to commit a social crime and to raise Cain. So a veil of dissimulation has to be thrown over all the scandals of modern life. Anything which might look like a divine judgement is thus processed and conveniently laundered into nonethical and non-judgmental categories.
One besetting sin of many religious spokesmen is their readiness to play this very same charade which the unbelieving world bas invented. The main rule of the game is to avoid upsetting anyone’s conscience. To be successful at such modern religious ‘communication’ (the term so much in vogue) one must become an expert in shadowboxing and beating of the air with ecclesiastical fists. It reminds one forcibly of men jousting with balsawood lances or combatting with buttoned swords that cannot draw blood.
A perfect specimen of how to fence and always miss your mark is to be found in the two ARCIC statements which have been recently drawn up as a basis for marriage between the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. There ought to have been issued with these sophistical statements a key to tell the reader how to transpose the sweetness and light into theological truth and historical reality.
The tortuous steps backwards, forwards, up and down, in and out, to and fro, now this side and now that, are the only things that betray the unmentionable fact that the two dancing-partners are neither used to one another’s embrace nor trustful of one another’s movements. The whispered conversation between the two lovers would amuse us if there were not stupendous issues at stake: Here we both are at long last—you and I. In the past we bad great disagreements, of course. But that was all because we did not truly understand one another. Now we know that we both really meant the same things all the time. Let us both talk in carefully-coded speech and our people will never know what we are doing till the deed is done. You will not really mind the Pope being at the head, will you? What, one wonders, would a Robert Browning have made of such a scenario?
There is among all sorts of persons a crying need to take a dose of moral courage. The need is not for more cleverness or more education, not for more analysis or more research into man’s problems. It is for more straightforward speaking. It is for more openness. It is for more boldness to call things what they are and to set them in the light of God’s Word. The man who will courageously refuse to play the popular game of deception is the man who will win the title of prophet to this generation.
This is what every pulpit should be doing. It is the glory of the pulpit that there a man speaks as the interpreter of heaven’s mind, no matter what the world may say. Our people come to God’s house weary. There minds have been numbed by the secular argument which eliminates God and anaesthetises moral judgment. When they come to the congregation, they thirst for renewed ethical and spiritual rearmament. The task of the pulpit is to sharpen blunted convictions in those who hear us and to renew their confidence in the things they have believed out of God’s Word.
There are many things which may make a preacher tone down his message. He may be afraid of those denominational leaders who wield the cudgels of power. Or he may have a cowardly fear of disturbing the peace, though he knows perhaps that beneath the surface of the congregation there lies an abundance of rottenness and death. Or he may be a career-man who wants to climb to the top at the price of treasonable silence. Every age spawns such men.
Whatever weakness a minister may have, however, let him not be spineless. A spineless prophet is a contradiction in terms and an unnatural monster. Society and the modern church alike both need to hear the prophetic voice of men who call evil and sin by their proper names. They need men whose sermons will lift their hearers above the hear-and-now to the great transcendental realities of God’s ultimate judgement, and will in that way show the conscience what God thinks of His wayward world. The pulpit’s task is to declare the sinfulness of sin and the one divine remedy for its removal.
It may be wondered whether one pulpit in a thousand is doing its God-given work as it should. There is too little thunder. The lion’s roar is absent. Too few sermons smite with the fist of biblical certainty or call for a break with conventional religious vices. Most sermons of the day suffer from chronic anaemia and betray too much the taste of this present world.
What is the malady that has left the churches dumb while moral and spiritual wickedness is so rampant? Is it not at two points that this disease must be examined?
Firstly, the Christian needs to be reminded that there is no loss on earth more deadly than the loss of religious conviction. It is not enough that truth be held in the head. It must be held in the heart and in the soul. That is what makes all the difference. Are we ready to suffer for the truth? Have we loved the truth? It is love of the truth which God demands of his people (2 Thess. 2:10). That is what real Calvinism and real Puritanism stands for. Indeed, that is what real Christianity itself is.
Secondly, the Christian needs to be reminded that if ever men forsake the love of the truth, they fall under God’s judgment. There is a sore punishment for disliking the truth. God sends upon such people a ‘strong delusion, that they should believe a lie’ (2 Thess. 2:11). When men are judicially blinded in this manner, they become fit to turn black into white. The Roman mass can now be interpreted as only the Holy Eucharist under an alien name. Mary becomes the Mother of God and Mediatrix of our salvation. The ministry becomes the priesthood. All churches are just one. So truth stands on its head and theology is made to seem nonsense. Our Protestant Reformers now simply ‘misunderstood’ the teaching of the Council of Trent concerning Justification! And the Church of Rome anathemised the teaching of the Reformers because they did not quite appreciate their nuances! Similarly, society today fudges the ethical questions relating to AIDS, abortion, marital fidelity, the guilt of criminal behaviour . . . . The list is endless. The plague is already begun.
0! for a dose of moral courage! Let preachers take the lead and let the people follow. And may God arise in His grace to deliver us all.
Reprinted from the April 1988 BANNER OF TRUTH.