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Though the heavens fall - Part I

Greg A. King

24/06/2009

Two years ago during a trip to Israel I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum. If you have been either to Yad Vashem or the similar museum in Washington, D.C., you know what a memorable—haunting may be more precise—experience it is. I took a walk through the poignant and unforgettable Hall of Children, where a voice intones name after name of the youngsters whose lives were cut short during this madness. I saw the starkness of the engraved stones commemorating all the Jews who were gassed in Dachau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, and the other houses of horror that Hitler and his henchmen constructed.

If there was one positive note during my otherwise sad, reflective tour, it was my walk down the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles. This walkway is surrounded by trees planted in honor of non-Jews who worked to rescue Jews from the jaws of death, sometimes at the cost of their own lives. Person after person is memorialized by a tree and a plaque. One person is John Weidner, the Seventh-day Adventist pastor who almost lost his own life as the head of the Dutch-Paris underground and whose sister did die in Nazi hands.1

Would I take the risk?

As I reflect on Yad Vashem, I wonder: Do I have the moral courage of a John Weidner? Other situations besides the Holocaust also prompt this type of question. Would I wade into an angry mob and rescue someone of another ethnic group as was done in the Los Angeles riots a few years ago? Would I forget about my own safety to rescue person after person, even while I slipped to my death beneath the icy waters of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. as a brave individual did after that doomed Air Florida flight a few years back? Would I refuse to run in my best event in the Olympics if it were scheduled on my day of worship, apparently forfeiting my best opportunity for a gold medal, as did Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire? In sum, are my actions based on principle rather than expediency? Am I willing to, in the words of Ellen White, “stand for the right though the heavens fall”2?

Notwithstanding our profound desire to display moral courage, to make decisions based on principle, it is not always easy to live this way in modern society. In fact, it is about as difficult as the arduous task of climbing Mt. Everest. It is usually easier to sit down when the going gets rough than to stand for the right though the heavens fall. Why? There are various reasons, but one is surely the temptation posed by the mindset and the values of post-modernism. That mindset involves the way of thinking and valuing regularly promoted by the media and thought and entertainment leaders, a mindset that is inimical to spiritual commitment and moral development. A number of trends in contemporary society seek to entice Christians away from how we should think and live. These trends present us with some of our greatest challenges in scaling our Everest and standing for the right.

The trend of secularism

Just what are these trends? We must identify them accurately, just as doctors must diagnose their patients correctly to provide the proper treatment. The first trend is secularism. In some respects, secularism is the popular religion of our age. The Russian Nobel laureate Solzhenitsyn put it this way, “If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the twentieth century, here too I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: ‘Men have forgotten God.’”

As Phillip Johnson and others have capably documented, philosophical naturalism, with its concomitant materialist ideology, dominates the leading institutions of modern society.3 This philosophy precludes the supernatural and therefore denies the reality of a transcendent creator God. Naturalism is a fundamentalist religion in its own right, for it is a closed system, and its adherents have a tendency to denigrate and demean anyone who questions the established orthodoxy.

The crown jewel plundered by those committed to this religion of secularism is the educational system. It happened so gradually that one has to look at the vestiges of the past to be reminded of what once was. For example, it is hard to fathom that at the center of the campus of Duke University, famous today for its basketball championships, there is a plaque that reads, “The Aims of Duke University are to assert a faith in the eternal union of knowledge and religion set forth in the teachings and character of Jesus Christ, the son of God.” That was what Duke stood for at one time. Now, any assertion that Duke is a Christian university would be met with either a firestorm of protest—or howls of laughter. Duke thus joins Harvard, Yale, and many other prestigious educational institutions that have traveled down this one-way street—one way because no universities are going in the other direction from unbelief to faith. Schools have taken the primrose path downhill, journeying, as the title of church historian George Marsden’s recent book puts it: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief.4

Let us not delude ourselves that Christians, Adventists included, are unaffected by the religion of secularism. Because the secularistic viewpoint permeates contemporary society, and especially academia, we sometimes find ourselves struggling over whether to believe in a personal God, the validity of prayer, or the reality of the Bible as God’s revelation to humanity