This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of the “Misc. OT Sermons” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, February 23, 1992.
And as we begin our scripture reading with Psalm 46, actually we will begin and end our scripture reading with Psalm 46. God is our refuge and strength for very present health and trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change and though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains quake at its swelling prime. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy dwelling places of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved. He will help her when morning dawns. The nations made an uproar, the kingdoms tottered. He raised his voice, the earth melted. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our stronghold. Come, behold the works of the Lord, who has brought desolations in the earth. He made wars to cease to the end of the earth. He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two. He burns the chariots with fire. Cease striving and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our stronghold. Well, this is turning out to be the day of detours.
Again, what I have to say tonight is not unrelated to the message of creation, and most specifically, the issue of the creation of man, man’s creation in the image of God. But I do want to address the state of the Church. in the midst of the world in which we live. Occasionally I have given through the years a sort of state of the church address in order to set the tone for our ministry and also for the purpose of helping us understand better where we are. who are witnessing the collapse of a culture and civilization. It may not appear to be so, surrounded still with great affluence as we are, but we are living in a period of radical change as far as culture and civilization are concerned. The culture and civilization that I have in mind is that of the West. I’m certainly not the first to say this, and I’m not going to be the last.
But as there is this disintegration, this collapse, even the most devout Christians are thrown into a tailspin. Many are bewildered, very confused. They hardly know what to do, they hardly know what to think. They simply can’t make sense out of it all anymore.
We who love Jesus Christ and his gospel, we who love our Savior and his gospel dearly, find ourselves bewildered by this erosion. an erosion that is evidence in the fact that those testimonies to common grace, God’s common grace, distinguished from his saving grace now, these evidences and testimonies to God’s common grace are slipping away.
Those things which in former times within our society restrained its wanton violence, its overt sensuality, its greed, that common grace that restrained these things is now seemingly being removed. There were times that common grace cultivated within our culture, within our civilization, such things as character, industriousness, thrift, even amongst those who didn’t believe, who were distant from the church and alien. to God. In the last century, there were all the premonitions of this collapse in what occurred in Europe. For Europe during the 19th century was engulfed in what we might call a cynical sophistication And that cynical sophistication plummeted that continent into a severe crisis of spirit and soul. Prior assumptions were gone. Former checks, balances were removed.
Now to be sure, There were all those silly pretensions, all those insincerities which that culture and society had propounded. We know that those pretensions and those insincerities within European society were exposed by those who were quite perceptive as to the true state of affair. If you want to look deeply behind the pretensions of European civilization in the 19th century, all you need to do is take up the novels of a Russian by the name of Dostoevsky. And if you find him a bit foreboding and a little bit lengthy and wordy, maybe just acquainting yourself with Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Heart of Darkness. But at the same time that we had the exposure of European culture’s pretensions and insincerity, there was simultaneously that attack upon objectivity.
People were robbed of any objective standard and were thrown back upon and in toward themselves. The nineteenth century in Europe became a century of inwardness. Now for many, that experience wherein they lost objectivity and were turned in upon themselves was torturous. It was such a torturous experience that it left any number of casualties to various neuroses and even madness.
If you are bewildered by modern art, if you have a few art history books and you have thumbed through the pages and you have come upon the art of some of Europe’s leading painters of the last century and moving into this, you might be more than startled. You might be disgusted at what you see. Disgusted because here is something you can’t quite grasp. Let me say, lurking beneath the surface, within these artists is an attempt on their part to come to grips with the dissolution of their culture and civilization.
And many of these artists were the victims of neuroses themselves, if not madness. Now what happens in Europe usually catches up with America. by and by. America is the child of Europe in many respects, and now follows in the wake of European demise. The pressures produced by the unraveling of our society have, as they did in Europe, pushed us further and deeper into ourselves. It is not without reason that Christopher Lasch, over a dozen years ago, wrote his very profound analysis of American society entitled, The Culture of Narcissism. What is narcissism? Self-love. Self-absorption. Self-preoccupation.
Our culture says Lash is in the death throes of a competitive individualism. And by absolutizing the individual, there is no external authority left. There is no objective standard outside the self. Rasch goes on, he says, we are no longer capable of understanding, let alone dealing with, even as fundamental a matter as guilt.
Because guilt, you see, suggests that there’s something outside of ourselves by which we are being measured. It is suggesting that there is reality out there, even embodied in other people, to whom we are accountable. From the place of guilt, says Lasch, we now are preoccupied with anxiety. personal hang-ups. We don’t have guilt, we just have adjustment problems.
Rush continues, he says, that we have lost the ability to grab a hold of historical objectivity. He says Americans have been traditionally handicapped in this regard anyway, because Americans have been preoccupied with the present moment, the immediate situation. But he has said that our inability to grasp hold of historical objectivity has become an epidemic. And historical objectivity no longer interests us, because we cannot see the immediate value of studying distant facts, figures, circumstances, and ideas.
Instead of history, we demand nostalgia. and we are preoccupied with sentimentality. Have you been struck by what’s going on television-wise and motion picture-wise these days? Have you noticed the inability of the media, of the popular media to present to us anything that demands of us some sort of historical distancing? Very few films are being produced now that are taking us back into another century, into another time, into another era. It doesn’t sell. It simply doesn’t interest anyone. It has to be of a contemporary setting. Well, things were bad. Psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, very bad.
So said Lasch when he wrote his book in 1979. that there is much evidence that things are far worse now in 1992. One such piece of evidence of the desperate straits we are in is this interesting footnote to our present economic nightmare. A number of economists are telling us, and I believe rightly, that the recession of the early eighties was far worse than the one we are experiencing presently. But in ten short years, the American people find themselves emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually far less capable of handling what’s going on. Don’t you sense a spirit of desperation that is overtaking us in this country? It’s as if we’re becoming frantic and almost unconsolable in our worries. The recession of the early eighties was less extreme, but we’re far more depressed about our present recession, which isn’t as extreme.
Why is that? What’s going on? We can approach it from the side of God’s common grace. That’s one way to go at the problem. It’s not a wholly satisfactory resolution, but it does provide us some insights. For yes, within our society we are witnessing the removal of the vestiges, maybe the last vestiges, of objectivity. An objectivity that kept us in check. There was a reality outside of us. There was an authority apart from us. There was some standard, you see, to which we were accountable.
That is one of the great gifts of God’s common grace to mankind. That sense that we have our meaning with respect to, in relationship to, some external place or reality apart from ourselves. Isn’t that in part what the image of God is preaching to us? That beyond ourselves there is this reality that we are bound to? with respect to which we find our meaning.
In the past, man found a place of external verification. Even within the arena of common grace, men were finding such a place in which to stand. whether it was creation generally, outside of themselves, the reality of which they did not deny, or maybe law, a category of law, be it even natural law, or in philosophy, where principles were insisted upon, or in religion, as profane as it may have been. So man, even through common grace, was finding true that inherent reality of the creation and its order, a reality that forced him to understand that he must find a place external to himself in order to see himself and his world objectively.
As was the case in Europe in the nineteenth century, now presently in the twentieth, such objectivity is lost. Even the testimony of God’s common grace in this arena of objectivity is lost. It is even being deliberately rejected. And we are turned back upon ourselves and in toward ourselves. We become our own authority. We become our own standard. There is no objective reality apart from ourselves and our experience. We are thoroughly committed to this philosophy because we feel that it is the inherent expression of our freedom. Our freedom entails that we be free from all objective standards and any demands that would be made upon us from outside of ourselves.
Do you marvel at the rebellion of youth? Do you think it’s sophistication that’s overtaken Europe in the 19th century and sophistication that has overtaken America in the 20th century? It’s not sophistication, it’s adolescence! Back to the media. Are you concerned about television programs? Are you concerned about the motion pictures that are being turned out? There’s nothing at all about them. They’re puerile. They’re infantile.
So in the name of freedom, which we are determined to hold on to at any cost, We will reject objectivity, any rule, any authority, any standard, any reality outside of ourselves. It doesn’t even matter how extreme the cost of such a decision. It doesn’t matter that we aren’t happy. It doesn’t matter that we’re miserable. Doesn’t matter that we’re mad at everyone. Doesn’t matter we can’t get along.
It doesn’t matter that the answer to a voter vehicle altercation is to pull out a gun and shoot the guy. Why shouldn’t he? He violated my space. turned in upon ourselves hasn’t been pleasant. Without any objectivity, we are left in utter instability. We are left frighteningly insecure and tremendously suspicious and unsure of ourselves, if not of everyone else.
Nonetheless, we fight to regain our footing. Do you notice how Europe fought? Do you notice the cost of their effort to regain their footing? Put in picture? Do you ever see pictures? Do you ever see pictures of the fields of France? from World War I? The horrors of World War II?
Nevertheless, we fight to regain our footing, our hold on things. We fight to control At a mundane level, we fight to do this through self-help programs, programs that merely exalt our image of ourselves all the more. We do so through programs of self-esteem. We do so through psychoanalysis, through therapy, through efforts at improved self-awareness, through conscious raising religion, through New Age techniques. But for all of this, look at where we are.
Our marriages continue to fail at record rates. Our society is succumbing to various kinds of addictions. Suicide is at a record rate, and the moral fabric of our society dissolves. They wantonly destroy our unborn because they are inconvenient and a restriction to us in our freedom. We cheat. We cheat on our taxes, we cheat on our bosses, we cheat on our spouses. We lie. And we lie some more to cover up our lies.
We claim that the whole world has a moral obligation to my self-image and my personal freedoms. We claim that the whole world has a moral obligation to guarantee my right and my freedom to pursue my own personal lifestyle. And then we have the audacity to say that that same world has the moral obligation to pay for all the decisions that I have made and the consequences of them. But at the same time, that same world does not have any right whatsoever to interfere with me in the exercise of my free rights in pursuit of my personal lifestyle. And, of course, we believe, do we not now in our society, in the inalienable right of self-indulgence.
Whether it’s guzzling beer at Thunderbender tailgate parties in the parking lot of Three Rivers Stadium, or overdosing on TV sports day after day after day. or whether it’s snorting cocaine in the privacy of our own homes, or maxing out on three credit cards simultaneously, because we can’t live without the entertainment center, the new wardrobe, and the family vacation to Disney World.
Our culture, our civilization is in deep trouble, even if considered from the standpoint of this matter of God’s common grace. And it is in deep trouble not because we are the victims of selfishly wicked politicians and a nefarious CIA plot, regardless of what Oliver Stone says. We are in trouble because we are the ones who are selfishly wicked. and all too wickedly participants in a plot that rises out of the pit of hell and our own depraved thoughts. I’m waiting for the politician of that message. I’ll tell you, I’m going to vote for him.
Indeed, this collapse of culture and civilization which we are witnessing throws us, we who are the most devout in our faith, into a tailspin. There are temptations for us in the midst of this chaos. We too, like our society, are tempted to go off into the cult of the self with all of the attendant horrors. But we are also tempted in our distress and in our desire for objectivity and even security, to settle for the mere matters, for the mere matters of common grace, as if that were enough, as if merely giving back to some form of objectivity, regardless of what it might be, would be enough to satisfy the longings of our hearts.
And many of us have been tempted by those who insist that the blueprint for our life and the world should be a republication of the Old Testament theocratic state. need very desperately to remember, even as we witness the signs of collapse, that the Church of Jesus Christ has survived many collapses before.
Two outstanding collapses come to mind. one of the Roman Empire and the other of the medieval world. In each case, God has been gracious to his people who call upon him in faith in raising up a voice that brought before the Church the message of the scriptures and of the gospel. In the midst of the collapse of the Roman Empire came the voice of an African priest, the voice of St. Augustine and his reminder to a distraught Christian citizenry as they watched the city of Rome sacked by barbarians. His reminder that the city of God, not the city of man, stands eternal. Similarly, with the demise of the medieval world. And although the message of the Reformation has been variously interpreted, its message was virtually the same as that of St. Augustine.
Beyond this world and bodies they may kill, beyond goods and kindred, beyond any fortress of this creation is our God, a mighty fortress in Himself, one in whom we by faith have been brought so as to be made secure through His mercies, those mercies made real to us in the person and in the work of Jesus Christ. his son. Indeed, his kingdom is forever. And is there any doubt about Psalm 46’s application to all that I have said? Amen. Oh God, turn our eyes to you.
The sermon text provided above is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.