In a meeting of the School in Theology Committee in September 2010 subjects were under discussion for the next year’s event. The sad religious and moral state of the United Kingdom prompted a desire that some sort of analysis of where we are and how we arrived here should be addressed from the perspective of the Bible. The title proposed was ‘Romans 1 and the Collapse of the culture’ and these articles are the fruit of the paper given. At the time the subject was proposed there were many things in our culture symptomatic of its demise, but as the conference date approached significant events both in England and Scotland sharpened our focus and gave the subject a new significance. The Scottish Parliament opened a consultation on the issue of ‘Same sex marriage’ with the prospect of legalising such relationships. South of the border, riots erupted in London and spread to other major cities, the sheer scale and mindlessness of the violence catching many by surprise.

Those riots brought the subject of our cultural collapse into the mainstream media. Journalists and commentators from all shades of the political spectrum weighed in with their opinions on the cause. On ‘the left’, the problem was identified as poverty and widespread unemployment which had left young people feeling trapped in a future with no prospects. On ‘the right’, the riots gave further evidence of widespread social breakdown that must be counteracted by the recovery of ‘traditional values’, and of course ‘stiffer sentencing’ for the perpetrators of such anarchy.

Toby Young, writing in the Daily Telegraph blog at the time, came closest to an accurate identification of the cause. In an article entitled ‘Moral relativism is to blame, not gang culture’, Young wrote:

As we witnessed in England’s cities earlier this week, moral relativism does not lead to peace, love and understanding but to a kind of Hobbesian nihilism. Far from propping up the procedural values we’ve come to depend on, moral relativism has left them fatally weakened ... Unless we reject the moral relativism that has led to this sickness, they’ll be breached again.

His diagnosis was correct. He penetrated beyond the symptoms to the root cause but just like all the others he could offer no solution to the problem. What standard would he critique moral relativism by if he was to avoid being part of the problem himself? Where could he get the basis for the moral absolutes he recognised our country desperately needs?

It was therefore a relief to read an article by Dominic Stathem of Creation Ministries, ‘Why is England Burning?’ Stathem asserts:

What is happening in England is the inevitable consequence of a nation rejecting God and His Word. Instead of believing what God has said, people readily believe the modern academics and politicians, who assure us that the Bible is no more than a book of myths, that we can forge a better society based on secularism. Accepting this view has led to there being no final authority, no absolute basis for morality and no clarity about who or what we are.

The warnings in the Bible about the consequences of ignoring God are sobering. In Romans 1:21–23 and again in vv 28 & 29 Paul describes those who ‘did not like to retain God in their knowledge’ as ‘being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness...’ Unless the British people turn back to God soon, the latest riots may well turn out to be just a foretaste of what’s to come.

Romans 1 is the chapter in the Bible which gives the most concentrated critique of why cultures and civilisations collapse. In these articles we will open up what Paul teaches in this chapter before tracing its application to the degeneration of British culture over the last one hundred and fifty years. Particular focus will be given to the acceleration of this demise from the 1960s to the present, after which we will draw some lessons for life for Christians who are called to live and witness in such a society.

An Exposition of Romans 1⤒🔗

Paul’s letter to the church in Rome is the book of the Bible which more than any other, expounds the Gospel of Christ. Its message is summarised in Chapter 1:16-17:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, the just shall live by faith.

God manifests His mercy to sinners in the Gospel, a Gospel that gives to sinners the righteousness the Law demands and which they cannot provide for themselves. This provision is made in the gift of Christ who lives and dies for His people and who becomes theirs through faith.

That is God’s good news for man, but why does man need it? From chapter 1:18 through to chapter 3:20 Paul shows that all need the Gospel because all men are condemned in sin. He introduces this in terms of another ‘revelation’. ‘The righteousness of God’ is revealed in the Gospel (v 17) because the ‘wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness and ungodliness of men...’ (v 18). In this way he begins to establish man’s guilt and from here he develops a three-pronged argument that he repeats three times in vv 18-32. Each time he presents the argument it is like a wave that grows in size and force to its climax in vv 29-32.

The first prong of the argument is, What man has done. The second is, What God has done. The third describes the awful consequences for man.

1. What Man Has Done←↰⤒🔗

Paul describes what man has done in vv 18, 23, 25 & 26-7. From these verses it is clear that man has abandoned God and that he does this in two ways.

The first way man abandons God is by suppression. In v 18 Paul says they ‘hold the truth in unrighteousness’. This does not mean they hold the truth in the way a man may hold an opinion. The word he uses means to hold down or restrain. ‘The truth’ he speaks of in v 18 is identified in vv 19-20. God has revealed Himself in natural revelation ie in creation and conscience, so that all men know there is a God. This innate knowledge of God is still hardwired into the consciousness of fallen man but because man is fallen, he spends his life suppressing the truth he knows because he hates it.

The 20^th Century American philosopher Thomas Nagel gave us a very frank and honest example of this suppression when he wrote, ‘I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, I hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that’.

Paul continues. Having rejected God by this suppression, men then give themselves over to futility and foolishness vv 21-22: ‘...(they) became vain in their imaginations and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise they became fools’.

The truth of God is allowed no place in their thinking with the result that every worldview they construct, having abandoned God, is grounded in irrationality. Yet they call it wisdom.

The second way man abandons God is by substitution. We have already seen that wisdom is replaced by foolishness vv 21-22, but in v 23 Paul shows how the worship of the true God is replaced with idolatry: ‘And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four footed beasts, and creeping things’.

Man was created in the image of God and therefore human nature is unavoidably and inherently religious. For this reason when man rejects God he must then turn to substitutes to fill the void left behind. Paul’s thought in v 23 is that instead of glorifying the incorruptible Creator, men reject the Creator-creature distinction and set the adoration due to God on something created. This is also the folly of it. Paul leaves us in no doubt concerning the madness of the exchange. Not only do we replace this glorious God with the likeness of corruptible man, it gets worse. Man will deify all sorts of things such as four footed animals and insects, like the scarab beetle and the cat which were both revered in ancient Egypt, or Dagon the fishtailed god of the Philistines (1 Samuel 5).

Having refused to worship the true God man will worship anything. Paul wants us to see how ridiculous this is and to conclude from it that only spiritually blind men — fools — would make this exchange. We might feel somewhat detached from the crude idolatry on display in these verses of Scripture but are the secular religions of the 21^st century any more sane? Like the ubiquitous cult of celebrity, mediated by a priesthood of journalists and paparazzi, leading millions to worship at the altar of some sports star, pop singer, Hollywood actor, or communist despot.

This is what man has done. He has abandoned God and attempted to replace Him with something else.

2. What God Has Done←↰⤒🔗

Paul introduces the second prong of his argument in v 24, vv 26-27 and again in v 28. We saw man abandoning God, now God in turn abandons man.

In v 24 God ‘gives them up’ to uncleanness or to sexual sin. In v 26 He gives men up to ‘vile affections’. In this verse and those that follow the sexual sins get worse. It is specifically homosexual sin that is in view. Then in v 28 God gives men over to a ‘reprobate mind’. The word he uses to describe this mind is adokimos which means a mind disapproved by God and void of judgment, a mind so warped that it cannot discern between things which are obvious in nature.

Paul presents this abandonment of man by God as a judgment for man’s rejection of Him. He gives men over to enslavement to the dominion of sin. On the one hand this judgment is wilful on the part of man because man chooses the sin that he is given up to and so gets what he wants. On the other hand it is judicial on the part of God. He does not merely passively permit man to continue on this course, he positively abandons him to it. Charles Hodge comments on v 24:

This abandonment of the heathen to the dominion of sin is represented as a punitive infliction. They forsook God, wherefore he gave them up to uncleanness. This is explained (by some) as a simple permission on the part of God. But it removes no real difficulty. If God permits those who forsake him to sink into vice, he does it intelligently and intentionally. The language of the Apostle as well as the analogy of Scripture, demands more than this. It is at least a judicial abandonment. It is as a punishment for their apostasy that God gives men up to the power of sin.

So the ‘demoralisation’ of a man or culture is at the same time man’s deliberate choice and God’s judicial act. We give God up for our lusts and God gives us up to our lusts.

3. The Awful Consequences←↰⤒🔗

This is again referred to three times in the main argument, each time with greater emphasis to the climax of vv 29-32 where Paul lists twenty-three vices that will become increasingly prevalent in a society as the culture becomes ‘filled’ with them. The consequences of man’s abandonment of God can be summarised as follows.

The First Consequence is Permissiveness←↰⤒🔗

In v 24 man is given up to ‘uncleanness’ which refers to the spread of sensuality and sexual sins. This aspect of man’s abandonment could not have escaped Paul as he wrote to the church in Rome. He was writing from Corinth which has been called the Sodom and the San Francisco of the Roman Empire. Such ‘uncleanness’ walked the streets of Corinth and was widely available in the rich supply of temple prostitution where one could freely indulge immorality and idolatry together. Thankfully in the United Kingdom we have been spared temple prostitution for the meantime, yet the ‘uncleanness’ of which Paul speaks walks our streets too. During a week of outreach in Ayr in August 2011, I had opportunity to witness to a girl of 13 and another of 15 who stopped to talk with me. The whole concern of the girls was whether or not it was okay for them to be sexually active under the age of 16 years. Both were only too forward in revealing that their virginity had been given up before the onset of their teenage years. Tragically teenagers like these are symptomatic of our permissive society.

The Second Consequence is Perversion←↰⤒🔗

Coming to vv 26-27, Paul still has sexual sins in view but there is progression both in his argument and God’s judgment.

Not being content any longer with normal sexual sins, sexuality in a culture that has abandoned God becomes perverted and the incidence of homosexuality which is ‘against nature’ (v 26) rises.

From the structure of Paul’s argument, as its force increases, we should note that homosexuality is one of the chief evidences, if not the chief evidence of a culture that has been given up by God. John Piper has recognised this and drawn attention to the way the Apostle shows how the folly of man’s abandonment of God is illustrated in God’s abandonment of man to his perverted lusts. First, Piper considers the rejection of God by man and how this is the most unnatural breach of the most natural of all relations between God the Creator and man the creature. This relationship is symbolised in Scripture by marriage between one man and one woman (Gen. 2:24 cf Eph. 5:31-32) and its breach is described in terms of adultery and immorality (Hosea 2). It is no surprise, Piper notes, that God visits the adultery of man’s idolatry on him by giving him over to sensual sin (Rom. 1:24). The issue of man’s rejection of God is not merely adulterous. Our idolatry is an exchange of the Creator for the creature as Paul demonstrated (vv 23-25). Now man worships in a sense like for like, something the same as him. This exchange is replicated in the next wave of the argument as God gives men up to the un-natural perversion of homosexuality in which men lust after those of the same sex, ‘men with men’ (v 27) or like for like. Man’s most un-natural abandonment of God is therefore returned on him in one of the most un-natural sins you can think of.

Whether or not one is convinced by Piper’s argument, it should yet be self-evident that homosexuality is one of the clearest expressions of a reprobate mind that can no longer judge things that are obvious in nature. Further, that it is a sin which naturally accelerates the collapse of a culture as it of necessity destroys the family and with it the whole fabric of society.

The Third Consequence is Profanity←↰⤒🔗

We use this term to summarise the catalogue of twenty-three vices Paul lists in vv 29-32. It is not our intention to consider these in any detail but simply to note that with the erosion of truth and the rejection of authority among other things identified by Paul, comes the growth of crime, the fading of civility, the increase of violence and brutality and the lack of mercy that has come to characterise so much of contemporary society.

The awful consequences of man’s rejection of God are permissiveness, perversion and profanity. We do not need to look long at 21st century British society to find evidence that we are a culture that appears to have been given up by God. It is not only that we are ripe for judgment because of our sins, though we surely are. We are already under the judgment of God. When our young people are sexually active and promiscuous from the age of 12 and under; when homosexuality is promoted in all forms of media and proudly advertises itself in street marches with the full protection of the law, then understand in terms of Romans 1 that we are a culture given up by God. Worse still, when such sins are not only tolerated but sanctioned by the church in the life of its ministers, recognise that we are a culture and a civilisation which without the intervention of God is on its last legs.

This is how cultures collapse. They give up God so He gives them up, and evidence of His abandonment is seen in the demoralisation of society and the increasing prevalence of the sins noted here.

An Explanation of Britain←⤒🔗

In this article we will take what we have learned from Romans 1 and try to understand how Britain has arrived where it is today. In doing so it is important to realise that when a culture or civilisation collapses it does not happen overnight. It is not like the controlled demolition and instantaneous collapse of a tower-block. It is more like the slow dereliction of an abandoned building or a castle ruin — it happens over time. Decades, and as we shall see, centuries may pass. Nor is the decline uniform. There will be periods of stability along the way and then periods of accelerated collapse like when whole walls of a ruin might crumble into the sea. In the end, however long the collapse of that society takes, it will be as obvious that the culture is ruined as the castle is destroyed.

To consider the collapse of British society in this way the first thing required is an understanding of what it was like before its demise. While our culture in the past was far from perfect, it is beyond dispute that Britain once had a culture firmly established upon the Judeo-Christian worldview of the Bible. From the time of the Reformation of the 16^th Century this became more thoroughly the case than ever before. At that time the authority of the Bible was recovered in church and state, together with the purity of the Gospel. Through the preaching of the Gospel the lives of countless people were transformed and society was impacted at every level. A new work ethic spread; scientific investigation was motivated; political freedom and liberty advanced through Europe and America with Scotsmen like Samuel Rutherford in the vanguard of the movement.

One example of the influence of the Bible on the culture of those nations influenced by the Reformation was encapsulated in a 1905 painting by Paul Robert entitled ‘Justice Lifts the Nations’. Situated in the old supreme court building in Lausanne, Switzerland, it poses and answers the question, ‘How shall the judges judge?’ Francis Schaeffer describes Robert’s design in the painting as follows:

Robert wanted to remind them that the place that the Reformation gave to the Bible provided a basis not only for morality but for law. Robert pictured many types of legal cases in the foreground and the judges in their black robes standing behind the judge’s bench. The problem is neatly posed: how shall the judges judge? On what basis shall they proceed so that their judgment will not be arbitrary? Above them Robert painted Justice standing un-blindfolded, with her sword pointed ... downward toward a book, and on the book is written “The Law of God”. This painting expressed the sociological base, the legal base in northern Europe after the Reformation.

It is from this kind of culture that Britain, and with it, the major part of western civilization, has fallen. We will trace its demise now in three areas.

1. The Philosophical Shift←↰⤒🔗

The Protestant Reformation of the 16^th Century can be described simply as a return to the Bible as the sole authority of faith and life. Many began to say with Martin Luther, ‘I am bound by the Scriptures ... my conscience is captive to the Word of God’. The philosophy of this movement was that God is the Creator and Redeemer of men and men are dependent on Him to interpret the world we live in, to understand our place in it and to learn how we are to live.

Another movement that grew and developed alongside the Reformation was the Renaissance. In contrast to the Reformation the Renaissance was a recovery of the Classical Humanism of ancient Greece and Rome. The Philosophy of this movement was: there may be a God, but even if there is, man is the measure of all things. Thus man was the god-definer or god-maker which is interesting to us in relation to Romans 1:23, 25 where men rejected the true God and invented their own gods.

Renaissance thought developed through the 17^th Century and by the 18^th Century had given us the Enlightenment. This was an elite cultural movement of European intellectuals which made the power of reason and scientific investigation the sole arbiters of truth and knowledge. If these were the only ways knowledge could be acquired and the means by which we could be sure we know what we know, it followed that the Bible was undermined and rejected for its supernatural content which was allowed no place in the new world. The Enlightenment faced the church with a dilemma. The authority of Scripture which had been recovered at the Reformation now appeared to be undermined by science. Her response was to accommodate to the philosophy of the Enlightenment by fashioning a new Deistic religion in which God created the world but left it to its own devices to make its own history by the power of ‘nature’.

In 1859 when Charles Darwin published his Origin of the Species it was just what the world of the Enlightenment had been waiting for. He proposed a theory that did not need God at all, not even to wind the world up at the beginning. On the back of Darwin, the atheistic philosophers of the late 19^th Century like Marx and Nietzsche got busy proclaiming the death of God. Again we must think of this in the context of Paul’s teaching in Romans 1. Men do not like to retain God in their knowledge, they suppress the truth they know, but what happens to a culture that does this? It collapses.

No doubt culture began to decline from this time. However, it took one hundred years for the implications of a Darwinian worldview to be more consistently embraced. This came to fruition in the 1960s when there was a rapid acceleration in the decline of British culture. By this time, the rationalism of the Enlightenment had lost its shine. The failure of the Communist experiment on the back of two world wars had put paid to that. Meanwhile science, while it had aided progress barely imaginable just a century before, was still unable to give answers to the deep questions of the human spirit.

The search for absolutes in a world without God had proved fruitless with the result that men became disillusioned and abandoned the search altogether. In the place of the old rationalism, a new conscious irrationalism was championed in which there were no absolute standards of right and wrong. Truth was what you wanted to believe. Morality was what you wanted to do, so long as it felt right for you. Yet in all this an echo from the Garden of Eden is heard. In the temptation Satan made to Eve he promised ‘Ye shall be as gods knowing good and evil’ (Gen. 3:5). He promised that to break God’s command and eat of the tree would liberate man to become his own god. The original sin involved not wanting to retain God in our mind, His law in our heart but rather the right to be our own God, setting our own limits, defining our own reality and ruling our own world. This would be the message of the 1960s.

The New Search for the Transcendent←↰⤒🔗

Returning to the message of Romans 1, when man rejects God by suppressing the truth he knows, he then needs a substitute to fill the void left behind. The transcendent God is shut out but man is unable to consistently live in an impersonal world like that, so he looks for some transcendent reality to give meaning to his existence. Enter men like Aldous Huxley, best known as the author of Brave new World but author of a lesser known work The Doors of Perception. Huxley wrote this book to encourage experimentation with mind-altering drugs to modify the state of consciousness in order to break free of the dark reality of life. He believed this was a deeply spiritual experience and advocated that with the assistance of such drugs one could participate in a ‘common being’. Others would promote drugs like LSD as a path to touching the face of God.

The irony of the new search for the transcendent illustrated in the life and work of Aldous Huxley is that his grandfather was Thomas Huxley who, a century before, won the title, ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ for his role as chief propagandist for the evolutionary theory. Now his grandson was trying desperately to break out of the world his grandfather had trapped him into. Further to this, the effect of Huxley’s promotion of drug use in the 1950s and 60s is itself tragically illustrated in the life of Jim Morrison. Morrison was so taken with Huxley’s book that he named his rock band ‘The Doors’ after it. A line from one of their songs ‘Break on Through to the Other side’ sums up the new philosophy of transcendence. Morrison influenced many with his strange, often outrageous behaviour before he died in 1971 at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose.

Drug use later became part of our society’s recreational hedonism, but it should not be forgotten that in the 1960s there was a conscious attempt by the drivers of the movement to substitute the transcendent God who has revealed himself in Scripture, with another transcendent reality.

Concurrent with the introduction of the drug culture in the 1960s was the rise of what became known as the New Age Movement. This was a distinctly Western spiritual movement which constituted a mixture of Eastern religion and occultish practices. It sought to establish a spirituality without the restraints of dogma with emphasis upon unity throughout and with the universe. The drug culture and the New Age Movement both grew and developed throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s to help bring us to where we are today.

2. Theological Surrender←↰⤒🔗

The second area that caused the collapse of our culture happened within the church. The church abandoned the Bible. We noted earlier how the rationalism of the 18^th century Enlightenment had led many into Deism. Darwinism in the 19^th century shook the church further and as a consequence of her confusion she was unable to withstand the assault of the Higher Critical movement. Historic orthodoxy was abandoned in favour of a new syncretistic religion of baptised humanism. While the Bible remained in the churches, and the historic Creeds were kept in form they were emptied of all content. As J G Machen pointed out all was retained and at the same time all was denied, because it was retained as merely useful but not true.

The mainline Christian churches had on a large scale denied the Gospel and had no authority for faith and life anymore. From the late 19^th century the church had become part of the problem rather than the cure. Instead of preaching the Truth of God and resisting the inroads of false ideologies, which would have served to preserve the culture, she took a sledgehammer and began to assault her own foundations. It is in this context that the current furore over homosexuality in the Church of Scotland (and other mainline denominations) should be evaluated. The big issue for many in that Church and outside it is the Rev Scott Rennie cohabiting with his male partner in an Aberdeen manse. Rev Lynn Brady has also announced she is set to enter into a civil partnership with her long-term-lesbian lover and all this comes with the sanction of the Church’s General Assembly.

Yet homosexuality in the Church of Scotland is really just the latest symptom of her chronic disease. Commenting on the decision of Rev Brady to enter into a civil partnership, the Rev Dr John Cameron exposes the real problem while attempting to give a defence of his colleague’s relationship. In his view the proposed partnership is: ‘absolutely fine... (because) It is actually against the law to discriminate against gay people ... and the church must obey the law.... People who cannot accept it really need to go off and form their own sect’. Dr Cameron went on to say it was ‘spurious’ to cite Biblical disapproval as grounds for concern as: ‘The Bible, if you go back to the original text in Greek and Hebrew, is actually very ambivalent about the issue ... However, many modern translations are from groups that are pretty much homophobic’.

There is the real problem: a Church with a Bible and the same time without a Bible. A Church that must obey the law of the land and move with the times irrespective of what the Word of God says. This is why Carl Trueman is correct in getting to the true cause of the problem in his article, ‘Why you should not buy the Big Issue’. After stating his opposition to homosexual marriage and those involved in such relationships holding office in the Church, he says:

But then again I also consider denial of the Resurrection, the trashing of Scriptural authority, the mocking of the death of Christ and the casual trampling of any number of cardinal theological truths also to be at odds with Scripture and equally pastorally cruel and callous. For me, homosexuality is not the issue; it is rather a symptom of our failure in these other areas; and to treat this as some kind of Rubicon is to misread the signs of the times. Check Romans 1: homosexuality is not a provocation of God’s judgment so much as a sign of God’s judgment. Do not think that we evangelicals in the northern hemisphere are going down the theological pan because of homosexuality; the problems we face with homosexuality indicate the process of collapse and decline that has been underway for many years.

There has been a theological surrender in the mainline Christian churches but while this was happening modern evangelicalism has suffered its own capitulation. It has fallen to the new Romanticism of Post-modern culture. We described the movement in the mid 20^th century from a proud rationalism to a conscious irrationalism with its conviction that truth is what you want it to be. Sadly, evangelicals shifted to accommodate this worldview by emphasising experience at the expense of truth in the Christian life. A new brand of Christianity was marketed designed to cater to the desires of men so that one can be regularly offered an evangelical religious experience today which is far from Biblical Christian experience.

As Paul wrote of pagan Gentiles in Romans 1, ‘They did not like to retain God in their knowledge’. The professing church of Christ followed suit and began to lead our culture in its abandonment of God, while provoking God’s abandonment of the culture.

3. The Cultural Slide←↰⤒🔗

Ideas have consequences. The practical effects of the philosophical shift and the theological surrender we have looked at have been catastrophic for our culture. God has proven the truth of His Word and given us up to a reprobate mind.

From the 1960s the moral collapse accelerated. Those involved in the movement recognised and encouraged it. Bob Dylan described what was happening in his 1964 protest song ‘The Times they are a Changin’. Dylan said of it himself, ‘This was definitely a song with a purpose’. He describes in verse how there was nothing politicians or parents could do, they should not criticise or oppose it, they either accepted the direction society was going or face being drowned out to sink like a stone. In the fourth verse Dylan wrote:

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin.

His words proved correct as many parents were powerless to stop their children growing up to become the people they warned them about. The progress in just five years was astounding. In the period between 1962 when the Beatles appeared crisply dressed singing ‘Love Love me do’, and 1967 when dressed like luminous hippies they sang ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,’ a moral revolution took place which had far greater influence than the French Revolution two centuries before.

What Happened in the 1960s?←⤒🔗

The moral and cultural slide that occurred in the 1960s can only be accounted for when we understand the decades that preceded them. In the first half of the 20^th Century the philosophy had shifted and the church had rejected the Bible yet the Western moral conscience remained largely shaped by the teaching of the Bible which was still deemed useful if not true and authoritative. However, in the 1960s a generation rose up who realised their inherited moral code had no authority and that the emperor of their social order really had no clothes. They loudly declared it to be so and lived accordingly. Kenneth Myers comments on this moral explosion, ‘Hell had been waiting in the wings for over a century; it finally broke loose in the 1960s’.

Every institution was despised for whatever Christian character it manifested. Every authority was challenged (see Rom 1:32). Sexual permissiveness and free love were promoted (See Rom 1:24). Those who lived through it experienced the formal conversion of a culture where once Christianity had prevailed into one in which humanism dominated and the future development of the revolution from that time, bar the intervention of God, was a formality.

What Happened from the 1960s?←⤒🔗

The 1960s as a period of time came to an end and the revolutionary nature of things calmed down but the revolution that had begun, continued. The people on college campuses and at the rock festivals who had embraced the message of the 60s got all dressed up and went out into the world, taking their new worldview with them. They became the parents, teachers, lawyers, politicians, prime ministers and presidents of the next generation. They fashioned the culture we presently live in today, a culture characterised by the following four things (among others):

Depravity←↰⤒🔗

Contemporary society is a sexualised society where there are few if any rules. It is a culture where the incidence of promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, teenage pregnancies, adultery, divorce and single parent families has risen rapidly. An interesting feature of 21^st century Britain that was not so much a feature of the 1960s is homosexuality. It was still very much closeted and remained illegal until 1967 as was abortion. Yet the foundations were laid in the ‘do what you feel is right’ morality embraced at that time, so that we now have an aggressive homosexual agenda being forced on us and an abortion holocaust.

Distraction←↰⤒🔗

In many ways the new substitute for the transcendent is popular culture with its TV, video game, ipod, mobile phone, films, music, and internet; the constant buzz of thoughtless distraction which attempts to avoid thinking about who we are, where we have come from and where we are going. While this is pervasive in modern society it is by no means a new phenomenon. In the 16^th Century the sceptic Michel de Montaigne had proposed that for doubt not to lead to despair when facing a world without faith and God, one must find some means of near perpetual distraction. Kenneth Myers aptly comments on Montaigne’s proposal: ‘Montaigne would probably have been one of the first in his neighbourhood with a satellite dish to pick up zillions of TV stations. Such a level of diversion would have rendered him safe’.

Despair←↰⤒🔗

All our distraction may keep us busy but no matter how hard we try it cannot ultimately quieten the conscience and satisfy the soul. It is not surprising then that a common feature of modern society is restlessness and despair. As we encounter men on the streets when engaged in outreach work it is hard to miss the nihilistic hopelessness projected in the lives of many people. It is seen in gardens full of rubbish, doors and gates off hinges, it is written on faces and articulated in the frequently uttered phrase, ‘What’s the point?’ It is uncovered by the drug use and alcoholism through which many try to escape the reality of a pointless life, and it is seen in the incidence of suicide because they don’t want to live with that reality any more, or they simply don’t care.

Death←↰⤒🔗

Suicide is just one feature of a culture of death. There is the popularity of mindless violence as a form of entertainment which is then often played out on our streets. Abortions continue to rise and more recently there has been mounting pressure to legalise euthanasia. Interestingly, back in the 1970s, Francis Schaeffer predicted this would be the outcome of abortion legislation. He had witnessed Humanism gaining the cultural upper hand and he knew where it would lead. He warned, ‘There is an inherent death wish of humanism ... the impulsive drive to beat to death the base which made our freedoms and our culture possible’.

Humanism leads to death in the total culture and society because, as God says of His wisdom ‘all they that hate me love death’ (Prov. 8:36). The life of Abbie Hoffman seems to illustrate this point. He was a symbol of youth rebellion in the 1960s and boasted like Nietzsche a century before him ‘God is dead and we did it for the kids’. Just like Nietzsche he was wrong too. God was not dead. But his proposed abandonment of God destroyed the young people and killed the culture just as he killed himself on 12^th April 1989.

Application to the Church←⤒🔗

As Christians we should not forget that God is in complete control of history and He has appointed the 21^st century to be as it presently is and that we should live and witness to His truth in this day and age. Our calling in good days and bad remains the same: to labour to see the kingdom of God come and His will being done on earth as it is in heaven. To this end the following points of application are vital.

1. The Church must Unashamedly Preach the Full or Bed Gospel of the Glory of the Transcendent God←↰⤒🔗

In a culture that seeks the Transcendent elsewhere, or tries to feed its spiritual craving with the buzz of constant distraction, we must bring men face to face with the glory of the one true God and His authority over them. The correct diagnosis of the human condition is a mercy the church needs to extend to a broken culture. Men must learn that their real problem is alienation from God and the only solution is to have that relationship restored through Jesus Christ. This alone can satisfy the longing of the human heart and all the inquiry of the mind.

In striving to do this, Christians should never succumb to social pressure compelling them to dilute the message of the Gospel. Although our culture has abandoned ‘absolute’ truth claims we must nevertheless confront men, in love, with the absolute claims of Christ in the Gospel. There can be no dilution, nor must there be any attempt to hoodwink men into the church with another Gospel, a feel-good message to cheer people up and help them with problems in this life only. We preach the Word of God with its bold declaration of God’s Sovereignty, man’s need and God’s answer to that need. When Jesus says in John 14:6 ‘I am the way’ he means the only way men can know God. When He says ‘I am the truth’ he means He is the absolute truth. When he says ‘I am the life’ he means all human existence lived in separation from Him is death.

In a society like ours where such a worldview prevails, there is a mass of uncertainty and meaninglessness which presents an opportunity to the church to preach the Gospel. In the midst of all the uncertainty is hidden a deep longing for the meaning and certainty that only the declaration of the absolute claims of the Gospel can address. As Curt Lovelace says, ‘Seeking some kind of spiritual fulfillment, men and women are casting about trying to find some good news’.

It is therefore a time for the church to preserve and preach that Good News by holding fast to the inspiration and authority of the Bible and confessing the faith set down in the creedal statements given to us through many generations. It is no time to give these up.

2. Understand the Culture and Export our Worldview←↰⤒🔗

As the philosophical shift and theological surrender was taking place in the 19^th and 20^th centuries and a corresponding decline was seen in all aspects of culture, Evangelicals did not respond well. As the institutions of society were becoming increasingly ungodly in character, many Christians decided withdrawal was the best policy but this only accelerated the decline. Our main social institutions were left in the hands of unbelievers while evangelicals adopted a siege mentality and retreated into their own small cultural ghettos, shunning most cultural pursuit and social involvement as ‘worldly’.

If we take art as one example, from the early 20^th century it was clear to Christians that something was terribly wrong. The abstractions of artists like Pablo Picasso were revealing a worldview in turmoil and modern art was becoming non-art. Yet it was not until the 1970s and Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, that an evangelical publisher offered any critique of the demise. Meanwhile the enemies of the truth were exporting their worldview and taking over the culture.

We must stop our cultural retreat. As we do so we do not wish to become obsessed with ‘culture’ as some have done. Nor do we want to let the culture shape us as others have done. Our aim must be Biblical, then we will desire to understand the culture and seek by our Christian life and influence to bring it into captivity to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 10:3-5). We ought to be like the men of Issachar who understood the times and knew what Israel ought to do (1 Chron. 12:32). Instead of continuing our retreat we need to get out into our depraved society and let our light shine in every area of life. As Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey write: ‘We must be men and women who will dare to wrest Christianity free from its fortress mentality, its sanctuary stronghold, and establish it again as the great life system and cultural force that acknowledges the Creator as sovereign over all’.

It might be hard to believe, but for this reason Christians are the most important people in British society. God has not commissioned us to wait for heaven, hiding under a bushel. Nor has He sent us to take moral sniper shots at the big issues like homosexuality and abortion, before retreating to our bunkers again. We are to take the field in the whole of life and live to the glory of God so this culture of ours can see a Biblical counter-culture and steps are taken to restore a social order that is ordained by God and enjoys His blessing.

3. Expect Persecution but trust in God’s Power←↰⤒🔗

If we as Christians live and preach as outlined above, in a culture like ours, we can expect persecution. Modern society prides itself on being liberal, multi-cultural, inclusive and tolerant but the one thing it appears incapable of tolerating is Christianity with its absolute truth claims and principles of universal morality. As a consequence the faithful church and Christian who fulfil their calling in this environment are destined to meet increasing persecution. We are already beginning to see more of this. Legislation in Scotland against sectarianism will seek also to silence Christians on the ground of incitement to religious hatred. Attempts are being made to force churches to comply with equal opportunity employment laws; Christian guesthouse owners have been prosecuted for denying a room in their house to a homosexual couple. All this may only be the first signs of much worse to come.

The church however has been this way before, not least in the period of the Roman Empire when she endured successive waves of the most violent persecution for her faithfulness to Christ. When one reads the history of those times one might hastily conclude that the Roman Empire was a most intolerant society. In fact, the opposite was the case. Gene Veith, in his helpful book, Postmodern Times, gives the true character of that culture: ‘The Roman Empire was to say the least a pluralistic society. Though they had lost their ancient virtues, Romans were supremely tolerant. The only people they could not tolerate were the Christians’.

Why then were Christians so obnoxious to Rome? Were they a militant group of revolutionaries who precipitated civil unrest? Did they refuse the responsibilities of citizens or evade their duties to pay taxes? It was for none of these reasons they attracted the wrath of the empire. Rather as Veith says: ‘One of the main reasons the early Christians were persecuted so cruelly was that they claimed to possess exclusive truth’. It was not because Christians were religious, nor even because they worshipped Christ as God that they faced wild beasts and the fires of persecution. It was because they would not worship the Emperor as well as Christ, or give legitimacy to other religions, that they were marked for martyrdom. They were a people who had the conviction to preach and live out the principles of God’s absolute truth and many of them died for the truth they professed. I will not go so far as to say that Christians will be killed for their faith in the near future in the United Kingdom, but I will say that the church should prepare itself for an intensification of persecution against her as the price of preaching and living the Christian life in this culture.

While facing up to this solemn reality we must also be encouraged to live in faith, and hope that we possess the answer to Britain’s present demise. It was into a culture as bad as ours and worse that the early church went out to witness, and with the blessing of God, they turned the ancient world upside down (Acts 17:6). We began with an explanation of Romans 1 as Paul set out to convince the world of sin. Yet he did this to show the importance of the main theme of that chapter stated in vv 16-17 and expounded in the rest of his epistle: ‘For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth; to the Jew first and also to the Greek’.

Romans 1 tells us how and why our culture has collapsed. More importantly it tells us how our culture can be transformed again. Preach the Gospel and live the Gospel and the wilderness of British society can blossom as the rose again.