Volume XIX, Issue XIII: Will the Church Just Sing Louder?
Will the Church Just Sing Louder?
In his book When A Nation Forgets God Dr. Erwin Lutzer recounts the following testimony of a German Christian: “I lived in Germany during the Nazi Holocaust. I considered myself a Christian. We heard stories of what was happening to Jews, but we tried to distance ourselves from it because what could we do to stop it. A railroad track ran behind our small church and each Sunday morning we could hear the whistle in the distance, and then the wheels coming over the tracks. We became disturbed when we heard the cries coming from the train as it passed by. We realized that it was carrying Jews like cattle in the cars. Week after week the whistle would blow. We dreaded to hear the sound of those wheels because we knew that we would hear the cries of the Jews in route to a death camp. Their screams tormented us. We knew the time the train was coming, and when we heard the whistle blow, we began singing hymns. By the time the train came past our church, we were singing at the top of our voices. If we heard the screams, we sang more loudly and soon we heard them no more.” And then the eyewitness shared with Pastor Lutzer, “ Although years have passed, I still hear the train whistle in my sleep. God forgive me, forgive all of us who called ourselves Christians and yet did nothing to intervene.”
Adolf Hitler sought to keep the church away from the affairs of state. “The Germans were deceived into believing that allegiance to God was best demonstrated by allegiance to the state. Hitler stood down and negated the influence of two strong Christian theologians – Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Although Niemöller and Bonhoeffer refused to buy in to the Nazi propaganda, the more than 2,000 pastors that had stood with them in the early stages of Nazi development withdrew their support.” – James Robinson
Of course, we know the tragedy of the Shoah where over six million Jews died while only a handful of Germans resisted. It was a tragedy of epic proportions. It happened while so many people ‘just sang louder.’ “But that was back then,” you say.
The world of the early and mid-twentieth Century was not so unlike our world today. Joseph Laconte, in his book A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War, tells of how the generation of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were affected by the great war. Both of them served in the trenches and saw youth move from idealism to despair. Many of the young people of that generation, Lewis included, became their time’s version of the ‘Nones;’ those with no faith. Laconte describes a culture much like our own. Disillusioned by the wars they entered as a ‘holy crusade,’ they now saw nothing worth fighting for. They lived mainly for the pleasure of the moment and with a certain fatalism.
Lewis and Tolkien saw the literature of the time promoting further the myth that there was nothing worth fighting for. Nothing was good and holy. Modern science sought to better the condition of man on earth but ignored the spiritual being that man is. Science offered solutions such as Eugenics and that would eventually lead to horrible things. Lewis and Tolkien took it upon themselves to write the stories their time needed – the ‘True Myth’ informed them. Redemption in Christ! In that light there were true goods to preserve, true evils to be fought. Epic struggles with little hope of success, but they were the great stories! The heroes of these stories were ordinary people, like a simple little hobbit – a member of a race not known for heroic exploits, preferring instead the comfort of hearth and home – and a good meal!
So too we live in a time of great peril. The good and true foundations of our world are under siege as life has been devalued by abortion, the family has been rendered obsolete by many modern thinkers, our freedom of religion is challenged by civil authorities and precious children are victims of sexual exploitation. We reduce human lives to commodities. We now are able to offer solace to the millions of truly persecuted in the world, but that may soon no longer be allowed us.
And we just sing louder!
Too many pulpits fail to call us to action in the epic war we are already in. We need to uphold the principle learned from Genesis 1: IMAGO DEI, that each person is created in the Image of God. The unborn, the child, the refugee from Rwanda, black, brown, white, and every shade between — each life matters. Such are the issues that need to be addressed in our public life. And yet, the participation of Christians in the election process is pathetically low. Why is that so? I truly believe people care about their communities. I feel like so many simply don’t know what is at stake – and we just play the music louder...
White Rock Falls
Photo by Bob Kirchman
Raindrops on Roses (and Other Blossoms)
Photos by Bob Kirchman
Elites Try to Demonize Votes for Trump
[click to read]
They’re blind — or worse — to the false moral equivalence between abortion and their classic character concerns. (read more)
More Harm than Good
[click to read]
By Jay Hobbes
I love John Piper and have been influenced by him in countless ways–all, I hope, to the good. However, I think this piece does far more harm than good. Among a large number of false dichotomies he lays out (as if Trump were uniquely guilty of pride compared with fellow politicians — to which I say, “Hardy har-har”), the most glaring is Piper’s conflation of sin and policy. It’s true that a leader’s bad character and a nation’s degradation go hand-in-hand, but isn’t policy the clearest way to see this phenomenon play out? It was in the Old Testament, where nations and Israel were judged for their wicked actions such as child-sacrifices and sexually untethered idolatry, (Leviticus 20:1-5, Jeremiah 7:30, 2 Kings 17:17) and it’s just as true today. Of course, the heart plays a crucial role, but the actions and policies are where we see the heart on display.
On the topic of character, we should remember that one key indicator of this quality is whether someone keeps his or her word. Many conservatives were understandably reluctant to vote for Trump in 2016, but his track record of conservative accomplishments—not just the Supreme Court justices, but also some 300 lower court judges, his efforts to cut back on crushing regulations, and his admirable restraint to resist expanding the size of the federal government even in times of crisis—speaks for itself. That’s what character is. The word for that is integrity. Yes, boorishness and pride are wicked vices. Full stop. The problem is, these vices are common throughout our body politic. They’re not relegated to one party or the other. Unyielding allegiance to a regime of abortion, sexual immorality, and theft, on the other hand, are hallmarks of the stated platform of the only one party. And these policies far outlast any president’s time in office. In his piece, Piper also commits the common error of assuming that issues like abortion, religious liberty, free speech, gender identity, and parental rights won’t seriously be affected regardless of who wins between Biden and Trump. It just ain’t so. (read more)
