I want to take up this theme of holiness in our cultural perspective. This is a preoccupation that I have to say I think was forced upon me. It is not one that I would’ve willingly taken up myself, at least had I known where it might lead me, because I’m basically your average coward. In fact, on the eve of the publication of my No Place for Truth, I sat my wife down and said to her that this book was coming out. She hadn’t read the manuscript. I said, “You’re going to hear some very harsh things said about me and there come times when we simply have to be willing to be unloved.” I said, “This is, I think, one of those times for me, and you and I need to stick together.”

But I myself trembled a little bit about those things that I knew would be coming my way. But, still, I find that I have to keep reflecting on this, because as I look back on the 30 odd years I’ve been in America, as I compare our situation now and then, I do find some very profound and significant changes which have slowly come over us. I’m not one of those who thinks that the best is always past and is behind us. In many ways, we today in the evangelical world are so much better off than those who came immediately after World War II. We have institutions whose libraries are stocked, whose laboratories are filled with technology and instruments. We have a multitude of ministries that exist today and didn’t exist then. We have publishing presses that pour out their products in an endless torrent, and some of what they produce is good.

You can enumerate the benefits, and there are many, many benefits. I can remember in fact when I first started teaching that profs typically would sign their letters, “Joe Blogs, PhD,” because PhDs were quite rare. Of course, today they are a dime a dozen. We have access to the finest universities and we have seats at the ecumenical table. The situation has just changed.

In the years immediately following World War II, we were on the periphery of this culture, and, religiously speaking, the center was dominated by the mainlines and by the academic establishment that went with them. The tables have been mightily turned, and it is you and I who are now the establishment. The question is whether we’re going to be able to handle the opportunities and the popularity that we now have better than the mainlines who have withered in that bright light.

The Changes in the Evangelical Soul

So this has been my preoccupation. What has been happening to us? What has been changing in the evangelical soul? I come back to some very, very simple things — things which can’t be quantified and things that we all know about, and that’s the hard thing about it. It’s not for the most part that we have lost our grip on the great and central truths. The problem is just the opposite of that: Those great and central truths have lost their grip on us. In their place, we have an influx of alternative ways of “doing church” and “doing Christian faith.”

So I want to try to pick up this theme of the holiness of God. I will tell you nothing about it that you don’t know, but I hope the question that we can ask ourselves afterwards is this: Do we see with greater clarity how important it is to know and to be compelled by and to be filled with a knowledge of God’s holiness?

The Significance of God’s Holiness

We are not in doubt as to what the biblical writers had in mind when they ascribed holiness to God. That really isn’t the question. The issue today is what the holiness of God means to us. Do we have any doubt what David meant when he said, “Extol the Lord because the Lord our God is holy” (Psalm 99:5)? Is that a mystery as to what David was talking about? Are we amazed when in John 17:11, Jesus in his prayer says, “Holy Father”? Is it an insight that bursts upon us with amazement when we open the Book of Revelation and see the worship in heaven, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God”? No. This is not a mystery.

God’s holiness is his absolute purity. It is his incomparable goodness. It is everything in God which stands against, and which reveals for what it is, the wrong and the brokenness and the corruption in our world.

Now as we follow the line of teaching in Scripture on this subject, as I think I’ve suggested, it seems to proceed in two steps. First of all, the people of God are taught that God is elevated, that he is high and that he is lifted up. Then when they’ve gotten that, the reason becomes clearer and clearer as to why this is. The reason that he’s high and lifted up is because of his incomparable purity and goodness. These things are brought together in the passage that Alistair referred to in Isaiah 6, where God is high and lifted up. In the presence of that God, Isaiah feels himself to be all but dead: “I am a doomed man in the presence of that God. Woe is me for I’m a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.”

Overwhelmed with the Holy

We understand that, but I wonder if we really do understand it. I don’t think we can even understand Luther’s experience today. Do you remember Luther before his own justification? Do you remember when he offered up his first mass, and he lifted up the elements and his hands and his knees began to shake and tremble because of the approach of God the Holy? He felt himself doomed. If you read through Luther’s works, you’ll find many poignant, extraordinary statements in which he said, “When I heard the name Christ, I used to tremble and turn pale.” He said he was overwhelmed with this thought that he needed to flee, yet he could not. He found himself trapped in the moral presence of God. This is what eventually led him to his rediscovery of the doctrine of justification. It was, he writes, “as if a gateway to paradise had been opened”.

Now I don’t think we can even understand that experience today. We who are so therapeutically oriented and so psychologically disposed upon whom the moral rests so lightly. We can read these words and in one sense understand them, but our understanding is very minimal all too often. We know what Moses was talking about when he said in Exodus 15, “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, terrible in glorious deeds, and doing wonders?” (Exodus 15:11). God is lifted up and he’s high and elevated, but the reason is because of this abundant, overflowing purity of God. That’s what explains his elevation. It is purity more active than reactive. It is purity more positive than negative. It is God going out in all the fullness of his moral excellence in order to do his will. Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 learned about that the hard way.

But the most profound exposition of it of course comes from the cross, because it was our Lord who, in our place, fell into the hands of the living God and that cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” tells us more profoundly and more deeply what it means when the holiness of God is upon us.

The Fabric of the Christian Life

So I don’t think we’re in any doubt as to what the holiness of God is about, nor do I think that we are in any doubt about its connections to the whole fabric of Christian faith and indeed of life itself. I think we understand these things too, but, nevertheless, let me simply spell it out very quickly and briefly for you.

Supposing we could pull this thread of God’s holiness, what would we have left? Well, without the holiness of God, there’ll be no moral law, for the law is a reflection of his character. Paul says as much in Romans 7 that the law is holy and the commandment is holy and just and good. Without the holiness of God, there would be no moral fabric to life. There would not be that internal law which Paul speaks about in Romans 2, which serves in place of the written law among the Gentiles. That, too, wouldn’t be there. There would, therefore, be no moral norms whatsoever. There would be no appeal to conscience at all. People would do evil in complete innocence. That is a picture of what hell is going to be like.

We get just a little glimpse of it in life today. We get a glimpse of it in the fact that two-thirds of Americans do not believe in moral absolutes and don’t conduct their lives accordingly. We get a glimpse of it in the deadening of conscience all around us, and yet this moral character to our world and to our life is never entirely eclipsed. The image of God is not erased, and the common grace of God is not exhausted. The rebellion against God is never successful. But without the holiness of God, there’d be no moral law. Obviously, without the holiness of God, sin has no meaning.

It’s true. All of the expressions of sin are there. Sin has a thousand faces: murder, rape, hatred, unkindness, unbelief, and you name it. All of these actions and attitudes would be there, but we could make no sense of any of them. They would all be random and meaningless. Inasmuch as only 17 percent of Americans understand sin in relationship to God and his character and his will, we are getting a little glimpse of what it’s like to live life completely separated from God. It’s just a glimpse, but the day will come when that glimpse will become the only vision. What a terrible thing it is to be in a situation in which people cannot say, “Against you, oh God, and you alone have I sinned.” Because in one sense that most terrible declaration is also the most freeing.

The Cross Losing Meaning

Thirdly, without the holiness of God, the cross loses its meaning. Now this is something of a mystery in the church today, not in the evangelical church but more broadly. Judas, in Tim Rice’s and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, really speaks for a lot of people in our society:

“Every time I look at you, I don’t understand, why you let the things you did get so out of hand. You’d have managed better if you’d had it planned. Why did you choose such a backward time and such a strange land?

But it was planned. Christ had no other objective at all in coming into this world to seek and save that which was lost, except to give himself up as the ransom for many. Without that collision between our sin and the holiness of God, the cross is simply incomprehensible, as is the life and death of Christ.

Scripture and the Contrast to Evil

Without the holiness of God, fourthly, you and I would have no confidence in the scriptures. Why would we? But what Paul, in one of his faithful sayings, says in 2 Timothy 2:13, that even if we are faithless, and we are, he remains faithful and he cannot deny or disown himself. So he stands behind his word in all of the full weight of its promises and of its commands.

Finally, without God’s holiness, He simply becomes kind and amiable and harmless. But He is not the God who can deal with evil. That is the preeminent thing that we must have in mind, because is this not the Christian’s hope that the morally ambiguous character of life today in which righteousness is sometimes punished and evil often triumphs, in which there is no balancing of the scales now, is it not our hope that that morally ambiguous character is going to end and there is coming a time when truth is going to be put forever on the throne and error forever on the scaffold? When that happens, the night is going to be no more, we’re told in the Book of Revelation, and we shall reign forever and ever.

Coming to Worship with Awe

Now it’s in view of all of this that when we come to worship, we come with awe. I know that this is radical. I know this may sound amazing. But this is the whole purpose of worship. It is to express the worth and the greatness of the being of God. Whatever psychological relief we may get and whatever fun we may have, these things are simply incidental. The fundamental thing is to come together to express the greatness of God in his character and actions: “Exalt the LORD our God; worship at his footstool! Holy is he!” (Psalm 99:5).

So without the holiness of God, our understanding of the gospel is lost. Without the holiness of God, our living out of the Christian life is lost. I’m going to pick that up shortly. But without the holiness of God, the gospel is lost, because without the holiness of God, grace is no longer grace. It’s grace from the God who, against his own holy nature, has reconciled sinners to himself. Without the holiness of God, there’s no need for the justification of sinners in Christ. Without the imputation of sin to Christ and his righteousness to us, there is no gospel. Without a gospel, there is no Christian faith. And so, without the holiness of God, the whole fabric unravels. It’s this holiness that gives life and urgency and pungency to so much of what we believe. Listen to an earlier writer, P. T. Forsyth. He says:

To bring sin home and to bring grace home, we need that something else should come home, which alone gives meaning to both. It is the holy. The grace of God cannot return to our preaching or to our faith until we recover what is almost clean gone from our general familiar and current religion, and I mean a due sense of the holiness of God. This sense has much gone from our public worship with its frequent irreverence, from our public morals to which the invasion of property is more dreadful than the damnation of men.

Neither love, grace, faith, nor sin has any better passing meaning, except as they rest on the holiness of God, except as they arise from it and return to it, except as they satisfy it, show it forth, set it up, and secure it everywhere and forever. Love is but its outgoing, sin is but its defiance, grace is but its action on sin, the cross is but its victory, and faith is but its worship.

Having said that, I now want to pursue this direction, this theme of the holiness of God, in direct relation to our contemporary culture. What I want to try to explore first is how our experience in the contemporary world tends to empty out of our life the reality of God’s holiness as I briefly tried to describe it.

Then, secondly, I want to try to explore a thought which may not have occurred to you, which is that the recovery of holiness in the church today, I believe, has extraordinary cultural implications. So this is not simply a matter of the private recovery of integrity and good character. It is also a matter of the church’s recovery of its character for the good of this nation. So those are the two themes that I want to take up.

The Purifying Light of God’s Purity

So first, consider how our experience in the modern world empties us out of this purifying light of God’s purity. The problem is not that anybody denies the holiness of God, at least not in the church, the evangelical church. I haven’t heard anybody who denies it. The problem is that it doesn’t have much weight. As I have said, it rests inconsequentially upon us, that the so what question never gets answered, that it doesn’t shape what we want, that it doesn’t discipline what we do, and, more positively, it is not strong enough or powerful enough to liberate us from all of the fake pieties and the fake therapies that, in its absence, come to mean so much to us as we seek to recover our souls. There is nothing more liberating in all the world than knowing the holiness of God, because it relativizes and trivializes so much of what passes as Earth’s shaking in this life.

Now, last night, I very quickly tried to recount as I understand it some of these massive changes in thinking that have taken place in the century. Let me quickly recount that. We’ve moved from thinking about virtues to values — values being very often simply personal preferences which have no norm at the center that is binding on anybody else. We’ve moved from talking about character to personality. Churches very often look for personality in the pastor. For a pastor to be entertaining and warm and engaging rates far higher than having real integrity. It is amazing how many personal moral lapses the church will overlook if they consider the person truly warm and embracing.

We’ve moved from talking about human nature to talking about the self. In the old days, everybody had human nature. I am the only one who has myself, and this self is full of intuitions and understandings and experiences which are mine. They’re not yours. You don’t share them. And so, we’ve moved from guilt, which was the violation of an external norm, now to talking about shame, which is simply internal private embarrassment, which in fact is a psychological malfunction and, therefore, should be treated with counseling.

Wholeness Over Holiness

Now the bottom line to this in the church is one that you’re very familiar with. It is that we are now more interested in wholeness than we are in holiness. This is the place at which we have arrived. We’re more interested in feeling good than in actually being good. What I’ve tried to argue is that this is not just a very simple little way of translating into the language of today the stuff of the Bible. This is not a translation at all. These are two entirely different languages. They come from two entirely different conceptual words. Ours is a therapeutic world. It wants to translate all of life’s wrongs that we do mostly into diseases. It wants to locate all of these diseases in the self. It wants to believe that the self contains within itself all of its own healing processes.

Where this is put in a religious key, as it is in so many of our churches, in the value of God to the church is that he is the one who provides these inner processes of healing. If you doubt that, just wait a minute and I will explore it further with you. This recasting of our understanding of God, inadvertent as it may be, not only obscures the biblical teaching, but it trivializes life and it is setting many people up for terrible disappointments. The fact of the matter is that our world is filled with ghastly evil. It has profoundly corrupted people in it. It has people who are very, very unhappy.

Despite all of the technological trinkets that we have and our access to the entire universe through the net, people still have profoundly deep unresolved pains and difficulties, which not all the therapeutic talk in the world is going to be able to touch, and we who by this sort of talk are reducing the stature of Christian faith to a midget size, which we are now attempting to match against the great Goliaths of these wrongdoers in our culture. It is becoming a complete mismatch.

The Promise of Deprivations

Furthermore, if there are any of us here who think that the New Testament promises to us as a benefit of redemption, psychological wholeness and relief from the assaults of a fallen world, we are going to be so terribly disappointed, if we haven’t been already. You will suffer deprivations. You will have wrongs done to you, if you haven’t already, which will never be righted in this world. You will have personal weaknesses that you will never master, try and struggle as you might. Some of you will even have personalities that perhaps over the years go awry.

Wholeness, in the sense of having a beautifully tuned internal self-life that never stutters and gasps and the machine never stops, isn’t going to happen. The only place that that might happen is Disneyland, the happiest place on earth. But in real life, it doesn’t happen. The point of the New Testament is that however much we’ve suffered, whatever losses we have endured, whatever indignities have come our way, we nevertheless can still walk with God who is holy and loving. We can still do right by others and not merely feel good about ourselves.

The Church Processing Problems and Pains

Now in this therapeutic world, the way in which typically people are thinking about processing life’s dilemmas and pains, what I said is that when this comes into the church in the way that God is understood and the chief benefit which he has to people is that he is seen as the one who provides the internal relief. When we lived in a moral universe, we thought about being saved. When we live in a psychological universe, we think about being pleased and relieved, and God is the one who provides that relief. Now this is not a mere surmise.

This is the conclusion to which Marsha Whitten arrives in her book, which is a study of contemporary protestant preaching. It is called All is Forgiven. The subtitle is very telling: The Secular Message in American Protestantism. It is an interesting book in which she takes quite recent sermons on the prodigal son. Unfortunately, she only takes them from a group of Southern Baptist preachers and PCUSA Presbyterians. I say unfortunately because you probably cannot extrapolate from those two groups to all Protestant preachers today. Yet, having said that, I suspect that what she has found is probably widely represented in our pulpits.

Now there were differences between these two groups. For example, the Southern Baptists typically focused upon the prodigal and tended to ignore the older son. For the Presbyterians, they typically focused on the elder son and ignored the prodigal. There may be a theological reason for this disposition. But, nevertheless, what is interesting beyond that is the similarity as these two groups converge in the way in which they treat sin and redemption and the nature of God relative to those two things. What Marsha Whitten traces out is the way that these preachers found themselves trapped and caught between two competing views of the self.

On the one side is the understanding that the self can be crafted, developed, actualized. On the other side is the notion that the self is corrupted, fragmented, and incapable of healing itself. The question now was how were these preachers going to negotiate through these tricky shoals of understanding? What so many of them did was to borrow cultural understanding. The problem is that the self has capacities for deep relationships which are not being realized. That’s the problem with the world today. The problem is that we need to get in touch with our feelings and we need to make self-disclosures to people. That will set everything right.

I have discovered when I make self-disclosures to people, it causes all kinds of problems. The thought is, “Don’t you understand that feelings are the inner voice which tell us who they are?” Some of these preachers even ventured the thought that feelings provide us with a blueprint of what Adam was like before he fell. Carl Rogers is riding high with these preachers. Isn’t the whole problem with life — this is the bottom line conclusion to these sermons — that we’re not in touch with ourselves? And this is the most profound way in which we can talk about sin in our world today.

Then, 80 percent of these sermons spoke about the value of God to people today in terms of the inward benefits which he brings. He releases our anxiety. He takes the uncertainty out of our decisions. He calms our jangled nerves. Marsha Whitten, who is a Jew, observes that the God of Calvin and Luther, and I would think substantially of the Bible, has now disappeared and in his place is a God far less transcendent, far more mellow, whose chief benefit to us is that he relieves these inner tensions and places us in a stable family, the church. In a moral universe, people’s preoccupations are with what is right and with what is true. In a therapeutic universe, people’s preoccupations are with how they’re feeling.

The Preeminent Fixation of the Scriptures

Now far be it for me to discount the internal wreckage to the human spirit which the modern world has done. I don’t discount it. In fact, I think I have probably written as extensively as most people on it. I understand why it is, at least I think I do, that people who sit in the pews Sunday-by-Sunday are preoccupied with their troubled families and with loves that have turned sour and with personalities that they don’t like. I know that if they’re average, they’re living with levels of stress and anxiety that are simply unprecedented. If the church is average, I know that there’ll be more people who are depressed in it than would’ve been 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, or 30 years ago. I know those things.

Our inward pains are very real to us. What is less real and sometimes what is completely unreal is the fact that we also live in a moral world, that we stand before God who is holy, a God who is other than outside of the self, to whom the self is accountable. That is far less real to us than our anxieties and insecurities as we sit there on the pew. This standing before God in his holiness, in the absolute purity of his character, is what the Bible is talking about preeminently and centrally. Our own personal internal wholeness is peripheral to its vision.

We need to pray for the purging of our understanding by the Word of God. More than that, we need to pray that God the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who is holy, might again illuminate our lives and our churches, that what is holy may rest upon us, and rest upon us in such a way that it is able to wrench around our lives where they need to be wrenched around, and powerful enough to liberate us from all of the fake pieties and therapies that so often hold us captive in the church today.

How the Church Impacts Culture

Now let me come to my second theme. Here I want to pursue this thought of the implications of God’s holiness in the life of the church as far as this has its impact upon the culture. I’ve been talking about the way in which the culture has been impacting the church. Now I want to look the other way, about the church impacting the culture.

There is, as you may know, a burgeoning literature which has been describing how our culture from a moral point of view has been coming apart at the seams. Between 1960 and 1993, for example, the divorce rate increased 200 percent. Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, it’s estimated that we’ve killed off 35 million of our children. In 1960, when we were on the cusp of the sexual revolution, illegitimacy stood at 5 percent, and that figure has increased 400 percent. Between 1960 and 1993, the population rose 41 percent, but in the same time, violent crime rose 560% percent. Even though the last two years that rate has gone down, it only means we’re not as bad as we used to be. Since 1960, the rate of teen suicide has risen 200% percent. It is now the third leading cause of death amongst teenagers. Robert Bork observes, and I’m quoting him, “ The traditional virtues of this culture are being lost, its vices multiplied, its values degraded. In short, the culture itself is unraveling”.

The Degradation of Rome

Now it was that statement that prompted me to reflect a little bit upon two other times, and they will, I think, be familiar to you. Put side-by-side, they really do give us a very interesting comparison. The first time I’m thinking about is the collapse of Rome in the fifth century. You remember that in the year 410, Alaric had moved south down out of Europe, leaving behind him nothing but a smoking funeral pyre. He and these hordes of barbarians came in the year 410 and they presented themselves at the gates of Rome. It was a completely unthinkable circumstance. Romans had been under the pious but mistaken belief that the Roman gods would never allow something like this to happen. But the unthinkable happened. Alaric and his soldiers moved into the city and, in four days, they wrecked it. They simply destroyed it. The lights after that began to go out all over the civilized world and the dark ages began.

So why did this happen? There have been dozens of theories, because on the face of it, this simply shouldn’t have taken place. Rome shouldn’t have collapsed just like a pack of cards. On paper, it had the forces and it had the armies. On paper, it had everything it needed to defend itself. So what happened? Some people have proposed that, finally, Roman citizens were overtaken by lead poisoning and the pipes got to them. Other people have proposed that there were climactic changes. The Roman citizens themselves proposed that the problem was that they’d been tolerating the existence of Christians, and the Roman gods had finally taken revenge. Of course, that was the accusation that Augustine replied to in The City of God.

The most plausible explanation, though it is not provable, is probably that Rome, over a period of time, became so degraded and so morally corrupt that it simply fell over. As it were, it died of its own hand and it was not killed. That, I think, is probably the most plausible explanation.

The Preservation of England

Now keep that in mind. I want to take you forward some 14 centuries, to England in the 18th century. It’s a time when England was in about as dire a state as Rome had been. In fact, the historian Lecky observed that without the evangelical revival that took place, England would have suffered a revolution that would have been as bloody and destructive as that which took place in France. It was only an estimate, but my guess is that he is probably true. Certainly it is the case that England, at the end of the century, is a very, very different country from England at the beginning of the century. So what made the difference?

Well, the conventional answer, of course, is the evangelical social crusaders made the difference. Wilberforce and his friends, for example, who, after a long and protracted struggle, abolished slavery. There was also the work of John Howard in humanizing the prison system, Lord Shaftesbury and others in introducing laws which prevented the exploitation of women and children in industry and so on. And yet when you add all of these great crusades together — and they were great — you don’t really have an answer as to why England changed the way it did. The only plausible answer I can find is in the preaching of the truth of the Word. It was as God’s Word was preached, as it was taught, as it was read, as the kids were pulled off the streets by Robert Raikes and the Sunday school movement began, as God’s truth began to penetrate the lives and the characters of people, sin began to be taken more seriously and virtue began to be honored.

As these two things happened, what had been completely lost in the society began to be recovered, which was the inherent worth of the human being. When people began to be seen as worth something, that changed the way that people were treated. Now I cannot prove that this is the case, but that’s my best judgment on both of these. And so, what you have here is two cases. If I’m correct, it was the slow step-by-step dissolution of moral character that finally brought complete ruin. On the other, it was a slow step-by-step recovery of the moral texture of life that slowly pulled England back from the brink.

The Place Where Virtues Are Nourished

Now how does this, in practice, work out and how would this apply to America today? I have found the little piece of analysis that I came across by an English jurist earlier this century, Lord Milton. I have found it quite helpful. It’s given me a way of looking at things in America. He says that in a society like this, we have to preserve three things. We have to preserve freedom on the one side, for without the preservation of that freedom, Christian belief, among other things, is jeopardized, but so too a lot of other things like creativity and productivity. So you have to preserve freedom. On the other end, you have to preserve law, because in any society there are those who rob and rape and steal. So we must have a judicial system and the full weight of that system both to issue punishment and to protect the society.

But lying between these two domains is a third domain, which is vital for the proper functioning, both the freedom on the one side and law on the other. This is the domain that Lord Milton calls “the place of obedience to the unenforceable.” It is the place where the virtues are nourished, where character is developed. It’s the place of formulating good policies. It’s the place where all that ennobles and elevates and protects life is talked about and acted on. But it’s the place where restraint is self-imposed and not imposed by law.

The problem is that in America today, it is this middle territory that has progressively shrunk. As it shrinks, what happens is that we have a warfare that breaks out between freedom on the one side and law on the other, with respect to this middle territory, the place of obedience to the unenforceable. I quote James Patterson and Peter Kim, who say that today Americans stand alone in a way unknown to any previous generation. The religious figures and Scriptures that gave us rules for so many centuries, the political system which gave us laws, all have lost their meaning in our moral imagination.

What happens in that circumstance? What happens is that freedom, now understood in terms of our rampant individualism, says, “I can do anything I want. I can say anything I want up to the boundaries of what is illegal. Provided it is not illegal, I can do it.” When you have people in a society who are acting that way, and where this middle territory has disappeared, all of the things that once controlled that kind of license are no longer there, character once controlled that sort of license somewhat. The general acceptance of moral norms to life controlled that somewhat. There were all kinds of intermediate agencies, like the families, which once controlled license somewhat, at least in their children. But all those things now are in trouble.

The Last Resort of Law

So what happens? What happens when we have these fires of license blazing in our society? We have only one place to go, and that is the law. Litigation today is our only means of self-preservation. In fact, the fear of a lawsuit often has far more power to bring a correction to behavior than any appeal to conscience. The problem is, however, that in putting all of our eggs in the basket of litigation, we’re asking it to do what in fact it just cannot do in broad swaths of life. We can pass laws against murder, but not against hatred. We can pass a law against fraud, but not against lying. We can pass laws against violence, but not against the emotional neglect of children. We can condemn abuse, but we cannot command kindness. We can condemn bigotry, but we cannot require civility.

In losing this middle ground, what we’re also losing is the way in which freedom and law should function. When they begin to malfunction, as they do today, then we are in real trouble. You might be able to apply some of the things which I’ve been saying to the troubles in Washington.

Recovering the Middle Ground

But how are we going to recover this territory, this middle ground, this place of obedience to the unenforceable, where you do things simply because they are right and not only because they are not illegal? How are we going to recover this? Well, in the church, the only way we’re going to recover it is by recovering our vision of the holiness of God. Only this is large enough, only this is big enough to be able to put in place for us the things that right now are just flying off in all directions. It is the understanding of God as holy and we as His people standing before him in full accountability.

If we can’t recover this understanding, then our virtue will lose its seriousness and its depth, and our belief will lose its gravity, and our practice will lose its moral pungency. If we can recover it, then what we are going to begin to recover is that salt and that light which alone is going to be able to preserve this particular society. Will America be like Rome of old or will it be like England of the 18th century? I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that men and women of integrity in the workplace, in business, in all of their commerce with other human beings, are the key to the preservation of this society. We who preach in the church need to remember that.

Holiness is not simply a private attitude. Holiness is what touches life. Without this holiness — if I can close with P. T. Forsyth:

The temperature of religion falls, the horizon of the soul contracts, piety becomes prosaic, goodness becomes domestic, and mercy becomes kind. We have churches of the nicest, kindest people, but they have nothing apostolic or missionary. They know nothing of the soul’s despair or its breathless gratitude. God today is not dramatic in the great sense of the word. He’s not adequate to history for so many of these people. He’s not on the same scale as the rest. He is the center of the religious scene, instead of being the protagonist in the moral drama of man and time.

We tend then to a Christianity without force, passion, or effect — a suburban piety, homely and kindly, but unfit to cope with the actual moral case of the world, its giant souls and hearty sinners. We cannot deal to any purpose with the great sins or the great fearless transgresses, the exceeding sinfulness and the deep damnation of the race.

P. T. Forsyth was right.

Questions and Answers

**

Why is America different from Europe, if we have in common that we’ve lost the moral texture to life? They are perhaps even more secularized than we are in America, but we on the other hand have a higher level of violence and we have 70 percent of the world’s lawyers that we nourish.

Well, the first part of your observation is actually correct. There is a very, very extensive study which has just been completed of Europe. It’s called “The European Values Study,” which shows a remarkable parallel to what we have here in America — the replacement of the moral culture by the therapeutic. There are some interesting findings in the European situation. What I’ve just described is least true in Norway. It is most true in Italy. Why? I don’t know.

But the second part of your question, why is it that we have so much violence and why do we have so many wretched lawyers? I don’t know the answer to your question. There have been so many studies done on why America is so violent, and I just don’t know the answer, because it’s not that America is without the other virtues, or at least hasn’t been without the other virtues in the past. Even to this day, America is, in comparison with other nations in the world, still remarkably generous. We are probably more self-indulgent than many other nations. For a world power, we are remarkably benign. We are far less cruel than many other nations. And yet the point that you’ve made is true. We are extraordinarily violent. I wish I knew the answer to that.

With respect to the lawyers, the social importance of lawyers comes out of these three domains and their interplay. This is exactly where they’re getting all of their food.

Francis Schaeffer spoke about personal peace and prosperity as the objectives that people have for their lives, and they’re willing to let everything else go by in order to get that, and have given to the state the responsibility for everything else. That’s what accounts for the violence

That may be right. I heard him express it a number of times. The fact is, however, that in terms of pursuing personal peace and prosperity, there’s very little difference today between Americans and Europeans. Now the argument that we have given over everything to the state, Irving Kristol has made this from a very conservative political point of view. He made a very compelling case that this in fact puts us right in line with what happened in Rome. However, having said that, what we have handed over to the welfare state in America is considerably less than what most European countries have done. So I’m not sure I know the answer to these things. I’m just a theologian. I don’t know the answers.

How does what you said relate to Christian counseling

I personally would make a distinction between people who have genuine psychological malfunctioning and others. I think for those people, you may well want to seek the help of professional people. I, as a matter of fact, consulted with my colleague Greg Pendleton just the other day, when something came up in our church and it was a very serious psychological malfunction. I wanted to know what to think about it. But I make a distinction between that and this broadly practiced psychological world into which people have placed themselves, in which what is moral weighs very lightly, and in which the pursuit of internal wholeness is the preeminent good. Now for those people, I think, they need to be yanked by the scruff of their necks and put back into the biblical world, which is talking a very different language and is looking for very different things in people’s lives.

What book in the Bible would you go to to try to get at these issues about how psychotherapy and the therapeutic mindset have replaced what we should have in relation to the holiness of God?

I’m not sure that there actually is a book that speaks specifically to that issue or speaks to that issue alone. So what I would be inclined to do rather is to begin working my way through a book and to make sure that wherever any of these issues from a biblical point of view come into view, I would make sure that the connections were made with how we tend to view things today, because, as Alistair said, what we have to try to do in the pulpit is to keep asking ourselves, “What does it mean to have this word in this world at this time?”

This is the work of theology as I understand it. It is to take the truth of Scripture and reflect upon it. It is to draw into that reflection where necessary all the ballast from history, what people have thought, and then just to bring all of that into a process of interaction with life as we find it. Now it seems to me that the preacher is doing exactly the same thing. So as you go about your work systematically, I don’t think there’s a simple answer, as though next week you can put this thing to death. You just systematically work at it from a number of different angles as these arise from within Scripture.