This morning, I have been meditating on Psalm 57. It has been some rough sledding. Sometimes, a psalm screams at your soul and begs you to listen. Other times, wisdom has to be mined like diamonds from deep underground. So, after writing, thinking, and meditating for hours, I turned finally, to my shelves with more prayers that God would give me insight. One book, Christ in the Psalms (Patrick Henry Reardon, Conciliar Press, 2000), diverted me from my study in a helpful way. Reardon was the pastor of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, IL.
I turned to Psalm 57, and somehow got diverted to Reardon’s meditation on Psalm 58. I’m glad I did. Reardon used the psalm as a springboard to reflect on modern culture. His thoughts were infused with the thoughts of a book written 70 years before Reardon’s words were published in the book mentioned above. (I will be going to the library on Monday, to see if I can check out a copy of the now 95-year-old book)
Ransom was an English professor at Vanderbilt University as well as a poet and literary critic. His book decried the trends he was already seeing then (in 1930) of gross materialism of American culture. But more than that, as Reardon explains, our materialism is warping our perspective on who God is. I am going to quote in their entirety the first four paragraphs of Reardon’s commentary.
. . . Ransom was associated with a group of philosophers, historians, and other local scholars profoundly disturbed by the rampant materialistic consumerism that had become, even then, a predominant characteristic of American culture. Writers all, they attempted in various ways, depending on their separate disciplines (for example, two of them, Caroline Gordon and Robert Penn Warren, wrote novels), to examine the historical roots of what they agreed was a most grievous problem corrupting our nation’s ethical core and, if left unchallenged, threatening its final moral decline. God Without Thunder was Ransom’s major contribution to that discussion
His thesis was fairly plain. Ransom argued that we had forsaken the God of our fathers, the biblical God who smote the hosts of Pharaoh and delivered his poor from the hand of the oppressor, the stern God of an unbending but therefore dependable moral purpose, and we had replaced Him with a more congenial divinity better seasoned to our modern and gentler tastes. We had graven with our thoughts, that is to say, and had fashioned forth unto ourselves a God without thunder
This new divinity was broadminded, reasonable and, above all, nonjudgmental. Ransom wrote: “The God of the new religion is anthropomorphic. So doubtless are the gods of most other religions. But the present anthropomorphism is peculiarly tame and ingenuous. . . . The net result of holding by this religion is just to be encouraged in attending to one’s own human concerns, secured of God’s favour and finding no propriety in burnt offering and sacrifice.”
A major problem spawned by this new religion, according to Ransom, was the loss of any sense that human existence is answerable to a higher moral throne that takes seriously such old-fashioned matters as doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly. Without that abiding sense that it must eventually render an account of its earthly stewardship to a God very serious on points of justice, mercy, and humility, our society was losing its way upon the earth. A chief deficiency of this new, completely benign godhead was that no one could any longer say of Him, for sure, that “He will come again in glory to judge.” Transcendent moral judgment was a vanishing memory of yesteryear. American society, thus cut loose from its moral mooring, now felt itself free to seek, not the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness, but selfish materialism and other delights of the American dream.
There is a lot to think about in those four paragraphs. But my particular first thought is for pastors.
Pastors of America, does your preaching put before your people a holy Christ who is coming again to “judge the living and the dead” (2 Timothy 4:2)? Is Christ portrayed with as much glory and majesty and fearsomeness as you can muster alongside the love, mercy and compassion that modern westerners are more prone to emphasize?
Let’s pray for one another, and let’s run in hot pursuit of a holy God and let’s make sure we present Him with our greatest clarity and passion. And pray for me as I try to hunt down a copy of John Crowe Ransom’s book, God Without Thunder.
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