Shifting Values

SHIFTING VALUES

We are witnessing a growing extra-Christian philosophy which contends that the current explosion of knowledge calls for an accompanying “broadening” of the base of moral values and spiritual concepts.

For many centuries there were two worlds, the pagan and the Christian: pagan beliefs and practices varied with peoples, cultures and the centuries, while Christian beliefs and practices were fixed, having their basis in the biblical revelation.

No such clear delineation is possible today, for while paganism has been consistently inconsistent, the image of Christianity has been blurred by a gradual equating of human opinions and deductions with divine revelation.

This downgrading of the Scriptures has been effected from without by cultured paganistic philosophy, and from within the theological liberalism built on philosophical presuppositions having to do with the supernatural facets of the Christian faith.

In this context startling scientific breakthroughs have confused Christian thinking because of restricted concepts of God on the one hand and magnified views of man on the other. We live in an age of glorification of human achievements, whether it be on the gridiron or in the laboratory, and the result is that the “humanizing of God and deification of man” is no longer a cliché but a sobering fact.

A contributing factor in the change in moral and spiritual values has been the bold assertion of educators and others that “there are no absolutes.” The absurdity of this statement is found in that it is itself an absolute. But where men have undertaken to live by the philosophy that all things are relative—even the basic values of life itself—the result has been disastrous for the individual and for society.

If adultery is a relative matter, the rightness or wrongness of the act depending on the accepted mores of a given time and place in society, it is immediately evident that the Judeo-Christian concept of marital fidelity has given place to paganism.

If honesty is relative, so that it becomes a matter of expediency built on a foundation of anything other than the rights of ownership, then the law of the jungle has prevailed.

It might prove tedious to examine the Ten Commandments and to affirm their relevancy for today, but the world has found nothing better and it ignores these principles to its eternal undoing.

That God’s moral law is the code for human behavior in the Christian era should be a self-evident fact. Recognizing that the basis of salvation rests solely in the redeeming work of Calvary, the Christian knows his responsibility to God and to man is summed up in the demand to put God first in everything and to love his neighbor as himself.

Even within the Christian community moral and spiritual values have deteriorated to a level little separated from those prevalent in the pagan world.

Realism, relativism, and a rational approach have in such measure supplanted Christian restraints that we find growing around us a confused and beat generation, frustrated by an older generation which pitched its tent towards Sodom and settled for a regimented mediocrity. We deplore the antics of the juvenile delinquent, but we need to confess the sins of the men and women who made such delinquency inevitable.

Ours is not the only age when evil has multiplied on every hand. History tells of many times when moral and spiritual values were at a low ebb. The one outstanding difference between the past eras of decay and our own is that no generation has been blessed of God as has ours. The Gospel has been preached. The Church has borne her witness. On every hand we have evidence of God’s work in the midst of his people.

But despite the Christian witness, we find ourselves caught up in a spreading maze of iniquity. This has not happened overnight. Standards have been lowered gradually, step by step—here a concession, there a concession. Sex has been stressed and exploited until we have lost both the impulse and the ability to blush.

That these are days of lowered moral and spiritual ideals does not need documentation. What does need a new affirmation is that the gospel of Jesus Christ has the answer to all of these problems. The unchanging Christ for an ever-changing world is the message which needs to be preached from the housetops. The Church has become so concerned with secondary and peripheral matters that those which are of basic and eternal import find themselves only too often crowded out of their rightful place.

Let us be perfectly candid—in many churches today the message of salvation through the Cross with all of its implications (blood, atonement, substitution, propitiation, and so forth) is never preached. In other churches, the Gospel is so diluted and changed as to have no recognizable connection with the affirmations of Christ or Paul.

Many of the churches are not to blame. They have never known faith in a completely trustworthy and authoritative Bible. They have never had the opportunity to experience the simplicity of God’s offer of forgiveness of sin through repentance, confession, and faith in the redeeming death of his Son.

America’s greatest need today is not in the field of further scientific breakthroughs. What is needed is a revival within the Church—twice-born men teaching in our seminaries and preaching in our pulpits; men with an overwhelming sense of the sinfulness of sin and the righteousness of a holy God; men who, through the Holy Spirit, go out to preach Christ crucified, dead and buried and risen again; men who reject the suppositions of men for the affirmations of God; and men who realize that the Church is in the world, not to reform but to preach the One who came to redeem lost sinners.

We need such a conviction of sin that men will fall on their faces crying out to God for forgiveness and cleansing.

We need a vision of God which comes only to those who are willing to subordinate everything—mind, will, life—to Christ and to experience the joy which proceeds therefrom.

No one can accurately pinpoint God’s timetable. The hour may be very late. Unquestionably we live in a day when iniquity abounds and flourishes on every hand, and when the love of many waxes cold.

On the one hand, Christians must endure by God’s grace and, in these days of the world’s need, use every means at hand to witness to the saving and keeping power of Christ.

A sovereign God may yet pour out his Spirit in a refreshing stream of spiritual awakening. As at Pentecost, the prophecy of Joel may once more be fulfilled.

For this the Church should pray and to this end she should work.

L. NELSON BELL

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