"...Our culture and our country deserve to be under the wrath of God..."

THE GREAT EVANGELICAL DISASTER ^ | originally published in 1983 | Francis Schaeffer

[Alex Murphy]

"For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools….Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator……
...Romans 1:21-25

An excerpt from Francis Schaeffer's last book, The Great Evangelical Disaster, published in 1983:

...Having turned away from the knowledge given by God, the Christian influence on the whole of culture has been lost. In Europe, including England, it took many years---in the United States only a few decades. In the United States, in the short span from the twenties to the sixties, we have seen a complete shift. Ours is a post-Christian world in which Christianity, not only in the number of Christians but in cultural emphasis and cultural result, is no longer the consensus or ethos of our society.

Do not take this lightly! It is a horrible thing for a man like myself to look back and see my country and my culture go down the drain in my own lifetime. It is a horrible thing that sixty years ago you could move across this country and almost everyone, even non-Christians, would have known what the gospel was. A horrible thing that fifty to sixty years ago our culture was built on the Christian consensus, and now this is no longer the case.

Once again I would refer to Romans 1:21, 22: "although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools." Verse 18 tells us of the result of turning away from and rebelling against the truth they know: "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness." Man is justly under the wrath of the God who really exists and who deals with men on the basis of his character; and if the justice of that wrath is obvious concerning any generation it is our own. Wrath may come either in the cause and effect of the turning wheels of history, or in the direct action of God.

There is only one perspective we can have of the post-Christian world of our generation: an understanding that our culture and our country deserve to be under the wrath of God. It will not do to say the United States is God's country in some special way. It will not do to cover up the difference between the consensus today and the Christian consensus that prevailed sixty years ago. The last few generations have trampled upon the truth of the Bible and all that those truths have brought forth....

[Alex Murphy]

This excerpt, from the middle of chapter 1 in Francis A. Schaeffer's last book The Great Evangelical Disaster, was written in 1983. Schaeffer died shortly after it's publication. I would encourage you to read the first chapter at the above link to see Schaeffer's remarks in their full context.

[Alex Murphy]

Sorry, all - had meant to post this under the Religion forum...

[LiteKeeper]

SPOTREP

[WackyKat]

Most people today think that the level of morality was higher in 1893.
As Schaeffer shows, people in 1893 thought that morality was higher in 1793.
People in 1793 thought morality was higher in 1693
And so it goes, back into the mists of time....
The Greek poet Hesiod, writing in about 700 BC, complained that his generation was decadent and immoral and that the Greek's ancestors had lived blessed lives of peace and abundance.
My point being, most moralists sorely lack a sense of perspective.

[Maigret]

Your implication is that one time is as bad as another, and I don't believe history confirms your opinion. Does it go in cycles? Certainly, but anyone that was alive in even the first part of this century would be more than astonished at what is now deemed 'acceptable' today. Just tune into TVLand and watch the sitcoms from the 50s and 60s and compare them to the poison that is on every night of the week now, and tell me that our society in the last 50 years hasn't become a cesspit.