Heavenly Father, we want to thank you for this warmer weather and the promise of spring, bud swelling and daffodils and other bulbs coming up out of the ground. It's such a good time of the year to look forward to Father and we thank you. Now we pray that you will enable us to think in new ways, far the way you need to challenge and to constrain our minds, to think your thoughts after you in ways that are pleasing to you. We pray, Father, that you will do that with us. Father, where we face ideas that are very challenging, help us to take your word very seriously when it tells us that unless we acknowledge we are blind, we will not be able to see. So teachers, we pray, Father, for Jesus' sake, Amen. One of your classmates came to share with me on Tuesday morning that I was scrambling his brain all over the place and I was delighted to hear that and my prayer is that I will scramble all of your brains in all sorts of ways to try to help you to think more carefully and clearly both about the time in which we live and the way we ourselves are shaped by it, I hope one of the things you're all seeing as we go along through this is how you are all touched by this. Post-modernism isn't simply the problem of somebody out there, somebody who's not a Christian. It shapes the way all of us think and relate to one another and we need to be aware of that as we go through that. It helps us to be more understanding of the people around us and not only in terms of how to communicate the gospel, but also in terms of ourselves to see where we are touched by these things. Now at the end of class last time, we had been talking about pluralism, the challenge of living in a pluralistic society and also point B there, everyone has the right to their own views. This, after all, is American democracy that everyone is free to think precisely what they want. The most widely held view, the most widely held belief on anything in the United States, is that I have the right to control my own destiny, to think what I want to think. That's a conviction held by 98% of us. Now it doesn't really take into account anything about the authority and sovereignty of God. We are creatures, we're not the ones who decide the way things are. Nor do we have control over our own lives. Jesus said we cannot add just a tiny little bit to our stature or a moment to our lives. I never mind being in control of ourselves. It's an absurdity to think about it. The combination of our finiteness, our creatureliness, and also our sinfulness. That's so much of what we think is so clearly wrong and so thoroughly prejudiced in all sorts of areas. Makes it an absurdity to think that I am really in control of my own life and destiny. That's the most widely held conviction by 98% of Americans today. And that probably includes many of us in this room. Now that leads us to point C here, pragmatism. In American society there has been for more than the past century a very deep strain of pragmatism. That is that truth is what will work for me. Instead of thinking of truth as something objective, truth is rather what works out for me. This is one of the things you can see as you look at the New Age movement. People will change their convictions and their ideas about spirituality at the drop of a hat because they see something that will work better for them. That makes them feel more spiritual. It's one of the reasons why even within the church people are constantly hopping from one church to another. Now all that matters is what works for me. We have very little regard in the church today for doctrine. That is the truth. We're much more concerned with all sorts of practical questions. What will make me happy and what will make my children happy? Who's got the best programs then? What's somebody's teaching? Truth is very low on the level of people's priorities. Both outside the church and within it. For many people in our culture, truth is equivalent to authenticity. That is my honest personal opinion or what feels authentic to me is considered to be truth. Again, this reinforces the notion that truth is simply the honest opinion of the individual. It won't help us when we stand before God to say, well, I sincerely held this position. CS Lewis has a very powerful passage challenging this in his book, The Great Divorce, where he imagines people in hell complaining about their sincerely held convictions and how come that they're facing judgment for them. This is a third area here, pragmatism, which reinforces this loss of truth. Point D, what this leaves us with is a generation of skeptics for most young people in this culture. There is no sense that there is ultimate truth and therefore that there is ultimate meaning to the human condition. Everything becomes doubtful to us. This has been true in Western Europe for almost two generations. When I went to university in the 60s and the early 60s in England, everybody was completely skeptical and it wasn't just the younger generation, almost all my professors at university were too. There's a very deep skepticism in the culture. As I said the other day, as I think of my three sons' friends in high school and college here, I don't think it entered the minds of almost all of them to ever imagine that there might be truth. They take it for granted that skepticism is the right position. Just think about something like BBC and Butthead. That's fundamentally expressing skepticism at the deepest possible level. And it's very popular. Everything is held up to date. Nothing and no one is trustworthy. There's a kind of humor and all of you are familiar with this. If you enjoy and many of you do watching British comedies on television, almost all of them are deeply cynical and skeptical. You just think of Monty Python. Many of you may love Monty Python so well that you could sit down in a group and repeat all the lines. My sons could do that with some of those movies. Just sit there in a group of the three of them and just go through the movie for half an hour at a time. But I'm not saying you shouldn't like things like that, but you need to understand how easily they can shape the way you view everything. And we can become deeply cynical. I would suggest that one of the problems that many of you face with deal with at a personal level is a deeply cynical attitude about all sorts of things. We make the mistake and our culture makes the mistake of thinking that if I see clearly the folly of something, or the sin of something or the problems of something, that then cynicism is the right response. God sees our follies and weaknesses and sins with absolute clarity and he never becomes cynical about us. For those of you who love to laugh at cynical jokes and cynical comedies, I'm not going to tell you not to watch them, but or to listen to such jokes, but you really need to think very carefully about what's happening to your own mind. Because in our culture, cynicism is very, very deep, so we dad everything. There is a wonderful passage in CS Lewis's children's story, The Last Battle, which some of you will be familiar with. How many of you have read the Nanania stories? Well, hopefully the rest of you will when you have little children. You can then have the excuse of reading them for yourself so you can read them to them. But you all ought to be familiar with them because they are a classic expression of the Christian faith, as well as being absolutely wonderful children's stories, which communicate across any kind of cultural divide.
But in The Last Battle, there is a scene where there is a group of dwarves. And these dwarves are characterized by skepticism and cynicism. And some of you will remember the scene. Even when the world is renewed and they are surrounded by the glory of the new earth, they are still sitting, at least they think they are, still sitting at a stable in the darkness smelling the newer. And they just simply can't lift up their eyes and see the glory of what's around them. It's a very powerful portrayal of skepticism. And what CS Lewis comments about them was that they were so afraid of being taken in, so skeptical of anybody's claim to truth or anything else that they could not any longer be taken out. That's the danger of cynicism. So a generation of skeptics, and fifthly here, pessimism. And this follows on necessarily when we talk about skepticism and cynicism, that necessarily one is going to be deeply pessimistic about the human condition. One of the primary characteristics of postmodernism is its rejection, its passionate rejection of the optimism of modernism. Now they're right to reject the optimum optimism of modernism. Because modernism, with its confidence in the human person, its assumption that people are basically good and its confidence in human reason, has no foundation whatsoever for optimism about the future. But postmodernism is deeply pessimistic about the human condition. So pessimistic that it's very hard to communicate to young people any notion of genuine hopefulness, hope in the biblical sense of the word, the conviction of faith is the conviction of what is hoped for, of what we're certain about because of what God is going to do. But there is a very deep pessimism in our culture. It is assumed by most young people that there are no answers at all to the basic longings of the human heart and to the human condition. One of Dr. Winter's daughters, Johanna, their eldest daughter said one day, I think this is when she was a university here at Washington University. She said, I think that our generation is the most hopeless generation that there has ever been. And I think that's accurate. We are living in a culture of deep hopelessness. So again, you listen to the music of young people across all sorts of kinds of music, whether you're thinking about something like punk rock or rap or alternative music, like the beautiful South that I mentioned the other day, but all kinds of contemporary music are deeply pessimistic about the human condition or you can look at the films of someone like Tarantino or Woody Allen or whoever. Their movies are deeply pessimistic about the human condition. And that is where our culture is in a very deep way. Someone is called postmodernism, nihilism with a smile. But it's not always got a smile. It's often very deeply tragic. And sometimes there's an extraordinary forced gayity over the pessimism. Someone has said a friend of mine in the Brie, one of my colleagues in the Brie, there's a wonderful essay by him on Madonna as an icon of postmodernity. And he talks about her dancing over the edge of the abyss. That's where so much about culture is. It's dancing on the edge of the abyss, trying to smile, pretending that things are okay, but the smile is rather forced. One of the most interesting things to me is that if, and some of you remember me saying this, I think in biblical and cultural hermeneutics, that if you look at movies being made today, or at many of the music videos, they're extraordinarily similar to what was being produced in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s at the beginning of the rise of the Third Reich. Because when Hitler came to power, it was in the context of a very deep skepticism and pessimism in German culture because these things we're thinking about here were already extraordinarily powerfully operative in Germany by the middle 1920s. And you watch movies from that period. And you see some extraordinary similarities to what is taking place in our culture right now, which should be very shocking to you when you think about what happened in Germany. So a deep pessimism about the human condition, which is very difficult to bring people out of, hope is very tough to communicate to people who feel that life is ultimately observed. That brings us to main point two, the rejection of authority, the rejection of authority, which follows necessarily along from our first point that there is no truth, but we're talking about the consequences here. If there is no truth, then there is nothing and no one that can be who or that can come on respect or deserve submission. Again, this is one of the characteristics of the culture in which we live. And deep suspicion of authority, wherever you can look at any kind of social indicator, whether it's respect for political officials, from the president down to local ones, whether it's respect for the church and for ministers, or there is a deep erosion of respect for authority. Again, all of you will have seen British movies in which ministers of the gospel are presented as just complete noodles. I mean, it's just absolute fools. And some of them, of course, are very funny. I dare say some of you have seen The Princess Bride. It's one of my son's favorite movies. I like it a great deal too, but there's an extremely amusing minister in that who takes the wedding and looking at listening to some of the giggles around the room and looking at some of your faces, I know that many of you familiar with that movie when he's talking about marriage. But there are lots of movies like that. Or you could think of four weddings in a funeral. It's another where Rowan Atkinson is, I think, was Rowan Atkinson playing the Vicar in that service. Now, this has been happening in Western Europe for a very long time. I was a pastor in England for 17 or 18 years. And one could never assume that as a pastor you would get any respect, in fact, precise of the opposite. The fact that one was a pastor made me assume that I would not get respect. So I would never tell people that I was, not because I was ashamed of being a pastor, but because I wanted people to meet me and to respect me as a person before I revealed to them that I was a pastor. Otherwise, I lost it. It was almost impossible to regain the grand because there is an assumption that in much of Western Europe, and it's a growing assumption here, that being a pastor is a position which no longer deserve respect at all. Now, there are sections of the community where this is not so strongly so. But it's growing everywhere. Let me tell you. Don't assume that because your particular part of the American community has respected pastors in the past, but that's where most people are now. Many people outside the church and inside the church have very little respect, simply because the culture teaches us at a very deep level to question what to be suspicious of authority. And every time there's another article in the press about a priest abusing children sexually or about a pastor committing adultery or a pastor burning his church down and fiddling the church's finances, what seems to have probably taken place near here, just very recently. Every time we see something like that, then the skepticism about and questions about the trustworthiness of somebody in authority in the church grows. When in England, when I was in hospital, I was having some very serious kind of arthritic problems. This was about 16 years ago, 17 years ago, and I could hardly walk for months at all. And I was taken into hospital at one point for three weeks into a rheumatology ward, and I was in there with a group of another five or six guys. And I didn't tell them that I was a pastor, and we got on really well. We had lots of wonderful discussions about the gospel and many, many other things. And then one day my session came into the hospital, and we had a session meeting around my bed, and of course prayed together and were discussing all sorts of things, which these guys could over here. And after they had gone, after the session had gone, the guys came to me and one by one and said, what do you do? What do you do? And then I told them I was a pastor, I wasn't ashamed of being a pastor, but by that time I had one sufficient respect and confidence that it didn't matter that they knew. Don't ever assume in this culture any longer, but simply because you hold this position, it's going to mean you have respect. When I moved here 12 years ago, I remember all sorts of comments as I, you know, it's very difficult when you come from another culture to try to establish credit, when you have no credit history. Even if you've got cash, people are kind of dubious about you. And moving here from another country was extremely difficult. And I remember going to a couple of stores out here on Manchester Road in Manchester in Baldwin, and men in the store are saying things like this when they discovered that I was a minister who was going to be teaching me the seminary. You know, some of them were rude and others were envious, but in this sense, well, that's a great business to be in because that's a place where you can make lots of money. And they meant by being dishonest. You know, that's a good job. And others then would tell me stories about how pastors in their neighborhood had been discovered to commit adultery or to be addicted to pornography or whatever. You know, this isn't a problem just in some other part of the world. It's a problem right here. There's a deep lack of respect for authority. This is true for the church as an institution. It is true for pastors as persons and anybody else in authority, just as it is for political figures. And it's true for any book like the Bible which claims to have authority. The notion of authority is one that's deeply questioned in a postmodern culture. We've seen the change even here among our seminary students. You're much more postmodern in this area than you might think. Over the last, we had a discussion in faculty meeting. This was a couple of years ago over the engrowing lackable respect for authority, the authority of the professors in our classes, the increasing questioning of grades of the right of a professor to assign a grade to a student. We had a long discussion about faculty meeting and what was so interesting the next week, Dr. Chappell came back to the faculty meeting and said I was just talking to the president of another seminary and he said last week in our faculty meeting we had a discussion about how increasingly postmodern our students are in terms of their questioning of authority. And that was the same discussion was taking place in another seminary at exactly the same time we were having it all the same week. This is a problem. It means you, personally, need to be very careful how you speak about political figures for example. You just contributing to the cynicism about authority in the culture. Many Christians do. Many Christians who pride themselves of being extraordinarily conservative and very anti-postmodern ridiculing postmodernism are contributing every day of their lives to the deep skepticism and suspicionable authority in this culture by the way they talk about people in authority in the society. Now scripture is very challenging to us. In the New Testament the scripture teaches us to fear God Peter says and first Peter to an honor the emperor and to give respect to everyone in authority.
Now Peter wasn't writing about some pillar of virtue. He was writing about the emperor Nero who was going to put him to death in the most brutal manner in a year or two. Paul writes something very similar in Romans chapter 13 about having respect for authorities. That doesn't mean we can't question or challenge authority to do what is right. That's another issue. It may be appropriate to, it is indeed appropriate not just it may be it is appropriate to remove a president from office for being dishonest or to try to impeach a president for abusing his power. It's appropriate because historically this society has holding a biblical understanding at this level that it recognizes that power corrupts people because people are sinful by nature and therefore they need to be restraints on those who are in office in authority at every level. And the scripture teaches that everywhere and it teaches us that those in power are not the law but there is a law which stands above them as a great jurist but it be he never so high the laws above him. But there's an enormous difference between holding a president or a governor or a senator or a congress person or whoever or a judge holding them to a set of standards. And then calling them to account by those standards and maybe removing them from office if they seriously offend against those standards there's a huge difference between that and just communicating deep suspicion of the value of any authority and Christians are doing this all the time. And what we're doing is just simply helping our culture become more postmodern and making it even more difficult to communicate Christian truth to people that's what we're actually doing if you're telling jokes about the president or being completely dismissive of his authority whoever he is whether you're a Democrat or whether you're a Republican and you're doing it for the other side it's beside the point. The scripture is very clear about this it tells us that in the Old Testament that to dishonor to curse to dishonor the king the ruler is like blasphemy it's an offense in the Old Testament little punishable by death and the scripture tells us not even to curse the ruler in our hearts. It's not a question of doing it because of fear of punishment that's not the biblical principle it's a question of respect for authority because when we lose respect for authority then it becomes very difficult to communicate anything but this loss of respect for authority is true at every level it's true at the institution of marriage. Christians make vows which they break all the time they promised before God and his people to love this person until death separates us for richer or poorer in sickness and in health for better or worse and the levels of divorce in evangelical church are almost the same as in the society as a whole. That's a lack of respect for authority at a very deep level for the authority of the institution of marriage given by God now of course God forgives us I'm sure some of you in this room are divorced. God is very merciful gracious but there's a huge difference between recognizing that and taking God's gift God's forgiveness to heart because of what it cost him in giving his son to bear the judgment for our sins is a huge difference between delighting in that forgiveness and disregarding the issue of authority whether it's the authority of the institution of marriage the authority of the family of one's parents of the institutions of the state or the church or of any other. I'm not teaching some view like Bill Gothard there's a kind of chain of command and the Christian virtue is just simply obeying the person above you that is not what Scripture teaches. Scripture does not teach us that human authority is ever absolute it's always it's always subordinate to God's authority only God's authority is absolute whenever there's a conflict between authorities were called to obey God rather than human beings. Scripture is absolutely plain about that but the issue of just disregard for authority disregard for the institutions disregard for the word of God which is the deepest problem in the church it comes back to this issue of feeling I have the right to govern my own life. Well I don't God does I am not the captain of my soul God is he's the one who teaches me what to do so the problem of suspicion of authority in the culture now there are several sub points someone to make here point a this is going to mean trust in my soul. And in myself trust in myself I am my own the authority it's the point I've already been making just think of all the books out there you go to any books or go to board is up the road and look at the great shelves of books on self esteem on self reliance how that I'm the only person in the end who is worth trusting. I'm the only one who can be my own authority so trusting myself secondly point be here the privatization of religious experience what do I mean that is what in the area of religious truth I become my own authority my private experience is all that matters now we can see this in the new age movement people just drift around from one new age group to another mixing and swapping ideas and beliefs and practices as they like them and it's what makes me feel good what makes me feel spiritual is all that matters. But you can look at it on all of you have seen articles in magazines and newspapers and programs on television where they'll ask the question who is God and then they'll give you the views of 50 celebrities and they all have their different views of God well who cares what they think and what difference does it make their private opinions about who God is don't tell us anything about who God is who God decides who he is that's how he reveals himself to Moses I am who I am the sent me to you this is who you tell to say that I am I am the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob the God who is faithful to his promises the God who is holy and righteous and just and we can't decide who God is it would have been observed through most of the history of this nation to have an opinion poll or to ask celebrities who they thought God was not because the nation was Christian that's not my point but the whole notion but it's a sensible thing to do to ask a series of actors and actresses and musicians and novelists and politicians to tell us who God is who they think God is who's your God and that's how the questions but as if we have God in our pocket and can decide who he is but that's the culture in which we live and that's very easily the way it can become in the church as well but my religious experience has more authority than anything else so the privatization of religious experience point C the deconstruction of everything sacred the deconstruction of everything sacred I talked about this a little bit earlier when we were discussing the issue of style but this is true on the level of the arts we talked about that things that were helped be precious significant beautiful wonderful examples of human achievement just treated as if they were jokes or games or something to advertise beer or cigarettes or deodorants or cars or anything under the sun but it's true with things which are regarded as sacred in the sense of religious things I think of Madonna just the name she chose why do you think she chose that name I think of many of the things that she has done calling into question the authority and value of any kind of religious symbolism or religious content I don't want to attack Madonna here and we're saying you shouldn't listen to Madonna's music that's not the point you just need to understand what's happening that when you look at the apostle Paul see Christians can do this too with regard to other people's convictions I get a letter from time to time from a man who claims to be an apologist and evangelist to Muslims and his idea of being an apologist being an evangelist to Muslims I didn't ask to get this or I just get it it's one of the things that happens to you when you're a professor of apologetics at a seminary people send you all sorts of stuff you didn't ask for and some of it's interesting but this particular one is just tragic you know he thinks that what being an apologist and evangelist to Muslims means is to go to a university campus and and denounce salar and say all kinds of nasty things about him and blaspheme him from the perspective of the Muslim and then there's usually a riot on the university campus and he has to be escorted off the campus by the university police to keep his life safe and he regards this as a great triumph for the gospel but when you look in Acts 19 and you see the riot that took place in the city of Ephesus over the falling off of the sales of the images of the temple of Diana and these people in Ephesus are shouting for two hours great is Artemis of the Ephesians the city clerk is able to quiet the crowd by saying this when you can look it up in Acts 19 he says these men have not robbed our temples nor did they blaspheme our goddess again if we ridicule what other people believe were actually simply undermining ourselves and the glory of the gospel we are becoming postmodern too we're just taking part in another little culture war where we sort of attack and ridicule other people we don't like to be treated that way ourselves and part one of the most basic commandments in scripture is to do to others what we would like to be done to us to speak of others as we would like them to speak about us when you hear somebody blaspheming Christ or blaspheming Christianity or ridiculing it on the television you get really angry or treat other people for the same respect when you have to say what they think is true that's not the point but you are called by scripture to treat people with respect and their opinions and convictions and we'll look at this very carefully later so the deconstruction of everything sacred as part one of the characteristics of the culture in which we live and point number four and we won't go into this in detail but no style or art is better than any other we already talked about this so I won't say any more about that right here but except simply to say this some of you may have wondered when we were discussing art and architecture earlier where that comes from that notion that there are no standards to judge art by but where it's coming from of course is this a complete rejection of the noticeable authority we have no standards by which we can say this is a great work of art this is a wonderful piece of music and this is a poor one there are no standards at all because there is only personal opinion and point E of course there is as I've already said a very playful element to this and we recognize that and sometimes that's kind of fun but there's also something serious underneath it this brings us to main point three the issue of moral relativism once you've lost the notion that there is truth once you have lost the notion of authority then there are no longer any transcendent commandments any transcendent moral standards that is there is no law above us at all there is nobody in heaven saying you shall do this and you shall not do that there is nobody in heaven defining for us what it means to be human scripture defines that for us we're created to be the image of God our calling is the love God with our heart and soul and mind and strength and to love our neighbors ourselves that's a nice definition of what it means to be human that's what we're created for but if God no longer exists or if God is silent and there's nothing else or no one else inhabiting the heavens there's no absolute set of moral standards to govern us then we are in a position where we have no way of knowing what is ultimately right or wrong now what that means at a very practical level is this one of these four options that I've set down here the first is that the only way we can think about moral issues is the matter of individual choice right and wrong is what I think it is right and wrong is what I think it is it's no it ought to be no surprise to us that if we think about the issue of abortion that those who are in favorite abortion abortion call themselves the pro choice movement or talk about a woman's right to choose and that's regarded as the sacred thing in our culture that each of us has the right to choose for ourself what we are going to do whether to allow this child to live or to have this child die because it's going to be handicapped because I don't like the sex because I can't afford to have a child right now because it's no convenient for my career etc etc now that's one of the deepest currents shaping the culture in which we live I have the right to choose for myself what I think will be right and what will be wrong and it's very easy for us to fall into this trap I talked earlier about the decay of moral standards in the church when we think about marriage to with every other social indicator the church is becoming morally weaker and weaker in the culture because this is such a pervasive idea this is the greatest idol of the culture in which we live that I am free to choose what I want to do with my life with my sexuality with everything else about myself I had a debate a couple of years back a public debate with a gay professor from the University of Chicago Divinity School that was just up the road here in St. Louis was a debate on the issue of whether the state should recognize same sex marriages and this was of course a fundamental argument that such issues are entirely a matter for the individual to decide for themselves these are matters of private personal morality and he argued very passionately that no state should ever interfere with matters of private personal morality it's absolutely up to the individual now there are all sorts of practical answers that you can make to this all states of course have to have laws about matters of personal and private morality there is no state in the world which doesn't have laws about pedophilia having sex with children though in every western country laws about the age of consent to going down all the time to a younger and younger age but I didn't raise that issue because in that context it would have been particularly offensive but the issue I did raise was this so I just asked everybody present do you would you like to have laws upholding polygamy or polyandry having several wives or having several husbands as Utah did at one point as this was part of moment teaching and everybody present was horrified by the idea because they saw all the practical problems that it creates and they saw it as being subversive of order in the society of course societies have to make laws about moral questions but it's assumed in our culture that it's not appropriate to have such laws and even as Christians again we can be shaped by this not just in this in the level that our own moral standards start declining but there are enormous numbers of Christians who will say personally I think remember I used this example the other week person that I think abortion is wrong I think it's killing an unborn child but who am I to say that this is what other people should think we don't need laws about it it's purely a matter of personal choice with if it is true that a fetus in the womb is indeed a human person a developing human person well of course it's wrong for anybody to do this the truth is of course that in our culture people acknowledge that the fetus in the womb is a developing human person obviously it is we know more about that than any previous generation has ever known but we don't allow that to have any moral weight we simply say this is just a matter for the individual and let me open it up for questions because I didn't give you really time to ask many questions the other day so we'll take the next few minutes if you've got some questions to look at some things yes now that's fine that's a good question let me just try to summarize it and if I miss represent you just tell me for the sake of the tape here the question is about the loss of standards in music and the question of what's your name? Tim was saying that in his college and his Christian college there was somewhat of a relativism in the music department in terms of whether there are any standards and that was partly a reaction against a kind of view from the past that only classical music was good in every other form of music jazz et cetera we really had very little value in comparison now it's a very interesting question because it seems to me we've got two problems here one is the problem of modernism modernism that which postmodernism is reacting against modernism with its confidence in human reason and confidence in the human person had a very strong view that there is a canon of music and a canon of literature so the whole notion of the 100 best books for example that's really a modernist notion and it's fascinating if you think of Alan Bloom's book, famous book yeah there's another one as well but in all of his books western canon just slipped out of my head at the moment the name of his book but yes closing in the American mind thank you now Alan Bloom is a modernist, passionately antiposed modern and he talks about the value of the great books and he lists some of them includes the Bible in it though he certainly doesn't believe it but it's great literature now that there was a problem with the modernist approach to the canon because it was very restricted it was very dominated by one particular culture white male European culture it's true and Christians need to be prepared to recognize this we talked about this a couple of weeks ago that the Christian above all others ought to be the first person to say that every culture has its own glory let's have the book of Revelation ends with all the cultures bringing their glory into the kingdom of Christ we ought to delight in great cultural artifacts, whatever culture they come from, whatever part of the world, whatever part of history rather than just simply saying that our culture is the pinnacle white European male culture is the pinnacle of all human civilization and we don't need to say that we need to recognize what is good and beautiful wherever it comes from rather than making our own particular music or own particular art or own taste in these things an absolute standard for everybody else so that's and there's been a proper reaction against that at the same time it is not helpful to go in the direction of saying there are no standards at all by which we can judge anything because some art, some music, some painting, some literature, some poetry is better than other but in each particular field there are standards by which you can judge and to say there are no standards there are no standards by which we can judge there are no criteria is will lead us to saying well you know the men's urinal of Marcel Duchamp or his bicycle wheel but he's signed it's just as great art as Michelangelo's David or that some kid scribbling dirty jokes on the on the lavatory wall is just as great literature as Shakespeare's hamlet well that's just nonsense and one cannot adopt this notion that there are no standards by which one can judge art it's not so easy and we have to be aware that there are cultural prejudices but there are indeed standards of beauty by which we can judge and in the end for the Christian mood have to say they relate back to the question of God as the great creator and are calling to imitate him that there are all sorts of criteria by which we can judge the arts and I don't have time to go through them in detail here but let me mention several one is the fundamental one is is there truth in them or at the deepest level all great literature for example from whatever culture anywhere in the world is going to deal with the three great themes of the glory of creation the tragedy of our experience of the brokenness of this world and the longing for redemption for a better world that's true in all great literature from all over the world no matter what culture, what period of history those themes are present in great literature because or we could think about the human person in all great literature you're going to have this tension between the glory of who we are as human persons the marvelous things that we can create and produce and the shame of our brokenness and sinfulness and people don't have to be Christians to know that because this is fundamentally the truth about the human condition which all human beings are in touch with so at the level of truth and that's why for example you can read a novel and it can be far truer novel by a non-Christian than one by a Christian if the Christian just writes something sentimental and shallow it's not true the human condition is not a kind of polyanin one where everything works out lovely it simply isn't and it's dishonest to present it that way and there are many Christian books out there if you go to Christian bookstores which are like that I don't like to use the word Christian books there are Christians who write books and some of them are good and some of them are bad because there are some standards by which you can judge them and one of them is truth a second deals with issues of morality we have to ask questions about the moral intent and the moral consequence of things that claim to be art there is literature which has the purpose of depraving there's no question about it that's the question with the lyrics of two live crew is it appropriate to encourage men to brutally sexually assault women art has to be judged at the moral level that's not a shallow judgment you can't simply say this has got nudity, sex and violence so it shouldn't be they'd have to get rid of the Bible I'm serious it's very foolish the way Christians approach this question now this film's got 50 blasphemous words in it a scene of nudity, some sex and some violence so we shouldn't watch it I'll just take for example the rape to death of the Levite's concubine in the book of judges that's a horrible scene or take the song of songs which has graphic very explicit nudity and sexuality very graphic it's not a book about the love between Christ and the soul or Christ and the Church it's a book about sex that's simply what it's about and it's part of the word of God or take the book of Job, it's filled with blasphemous statements by Job's confidants who say false things about God now we as Christians blaspheme all the time, far worse than unbelievers when we say to somebody, oh I'll pray for you and God bless you and we really don't mean it at all, we have no interest in the person whatsoever that's really blasphemous in a way that somebody who doesn't believe in God taking his name in vain is not blasphemous to the same power at all I'm not saying we excuse that, we don't understand blasphemy deeply enough so secondly there's a moral criteria by which we judge things thirdly there are criteria, there are objective standards of the artistic merit of something in terms of how carefully and beautifully it's designed this is true of writing a book, writing a poem, writing music painting a picture, there are objective standards of quality by which all art has to be judged there are questions of the unity, of the message of the work and the form in which it's put which is another criteria by which we consider things there are questions of integrity is this work of art, does it have integrity with the artist or is it something which is at one level deeply hypocritical so there are all sorts of questions, there are criteria by which we can indeed judge any work of art and they are objective but we can't form into the modernist trap and the trap that's the questions of sometimes made of saying well the only good music is this there is great music in all sorts of different forms whether it's in jazz or in classical or whatever and we have to ask for those objective standards about that yes, we could talk about that afterwards I'd certainly be happy to give you right away my own notes from on Christianity and the Arts which go through some of these issues but there are lots of really excellent books out there and there's some good books by Hans Rook marker who taught art history at the Free University in Amsterdam and I can recommend a couple of titles there I'd encourage you to get in touch with John Hodges he was speaking at the Library Conference last weekend and I've just ordered some of his tapes he was talking both about some great classical sacred music like Bach but also about contemporary sacred music and you'd find his lectures very interesting we'll have them in the library in a couple of weeks and there's quite a few others in there dealing with these issues and there's some tapes by Schaefer addressing some of these questions that we have in the Seminary Library there's a fine book by Calvin Seerveld called Rainbows for a Fallen World but there are many many books out there which will address some of these questions yes sir that's an interesting question would we all cultures produce great works of art but shouldn't we expect or at least hope that a culture influenced by the gospel or to produce really great works of art can sit more consistently that's an excellent question and I think that one would hope that that would be true and it ought to be true and I think that we can certainly take for example I think if you look at the drama for example I don't think there is any question but the by objective standards Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist who's written in any language or at any point in history and this is almost universally acknowledged except by a few radical postmodernists and I think there's no question but the Shakespeare personally was a question because the Christian ought to have a clearer understanding of what is true and what is good and what is beautiful they won't necessarily have that and one of the art tragedies right now is there a very shallow view of the arts and negative view of the arts in most of our churches for most of the past 80 to 100 years which has been devastating in its consequences but the Reformation had a very high view of the arts a very high view of what it means to be made in the image of God and of the Lordship of Christ over the whole of life and one of the consequences of that was the production of very great art and all sorts of areas on the issue of drama the other three greatest dramatists are Greek who were not Christian God has made human beings wonderfully and people who don't know him are able to produce wonderful things in theory we ought to be able to say that the Christian should be the greatest cook but that doesn't necessarily happen of course that doesn't necessarily happen you can look at all sorts of areas everybody is sinful the Christian too people fail to use or miss and miss use and abuse their gifts that's true for both believers and unbelievers it's probably true that the greatest philosopher who's ever lived that's not the area of the arts but the greatest philosopher who has ever lived in any culture is Plato most people including most Christians would acknowledge that was not a believer now some Christians tried to deal with that one by saying there's a Christian before Christ because he said so many wonderful things but that doesn't help us that we ought to be prepared to acknowledge that the unbeliever is capable of producing wonderful things I think I used this illustration before my parents as unbelievers had the best marriage I've ever seen so while we might say we hope this might be true and in some areas we can point to examples where it is Bach is certainly one of the greatest musicians ever the greatest of music Rembrandt is one of the greatest painters Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist you know those three people are all believers but there are many many very great artists who are certainly not personally Christians and who don't come from cultures which are shaped by Christianity and you can look at the great statuary for example of the Greeks where you can look at the glories of Japanese or Chinese painting or at the marvel of architecture in Egypt in ancient Egypt or in India et cetera et cetera we could go all over the world and we could look at marvelous examples of human creativity from every nation and every culture on the face of the earth and say we have to have a really biblical view of the glory of what it means to be human David asks the questions Psalm 8 after he's talking about the glory of God Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth you've said your glory above the heavens that is higher greater, more exalted than the heavens and then he asks the question what is man, what's human being and his answer is you've crowned him with glory human beings have a greater glory than the heavens that's what that Psalm teaches us and Proverbs chapter 8 teaches us that God's wisdom is made known to the whole human race so Calvin who certainly had a very deep sense of human depravity also had a very high view of what it means to be the image of God and of the goodness of God to all people and to all cultures and while we should say yes Christians whether we're thinking about the more life my marriage as a believer or to be better than my neighbors who's not but is it necessarily? in fact it should be real challenge to us when we see the wonderful marriages that unbelievers can have to repent very deeply of our own sin if they are capable of producing this level of love and commitment and self-sacrifice without the Holy Spirit and their hearts without the knowledge of the forgiveness of Jesus Christ should I be capable of? and this is true in every area of human life whether we're talking about moral victories and glory or whether we're talking about artistic victories and glory and you know that's where we have to be very careful that we don't fall into the modernist trap of assuming that the products of Western culture are superior at every point the products of every other culture that's ever lived and we must be very careful not to do that because it's not right to do it because it denies the common grace of God at a very deep level and we are the first as Christians we are commanded by the Apostle Paul to wherever we see things that are lovely and noble and true and worthy of good report that we should recognize them and delight in them and so why your question is a great question I would say that's one we need to think about very carefully rather than assuming that this is what's going to happen