A lawless culture is at war with more than just the “rules.” Antinomianism likes to posture and say that it is simply against tiresome restrictions. But the cultural effects of lawlessness touch far more than just the idea of law. When lawlessness has run its course, it has demolished the very idea of forgiveness. Of course sinners have always struggled with forgiving others, but it takes a special kind of rebellion to remove even the concept of forgiveness. Our culture is in the midst of such a rebellion.
Despite the rebellion, reality refuses to go away. The concept of forgiveness has been removed as a functioning category in our minds, and yet we all continue living in the world God made — not the world we believe ourselves to be in. We have removed the antiquated notion of guilt, and so we are left to explain the guilt feelings. They are explained away as just that, feelings, and the one afflicted with them is hustled off into counseling. That counseling is conducted on a medical model, as though the problem were in the same category as a broken leg. The feelings of course continue, and so the counseling industry prospers, and all the people driven by amorality into unresolved guilt find themselves, ironically, enlisted in a series of various “moral” crusades. But more on this in a moment.
Good news falls into two categories. The first kind of good news does not depend on anything else in order to remain good news. If a man hears that he has inherited millions of dollars, this is good news even if detached from a particular context. But the second category of good news makes no sense apart from a previous understanding of some kind of bad news. The cancer patient who is going to die receives news of a breakthrough in cancer treatments with great joy precisely because he had previously grasped the bad news that he had cancer. A man on death row who receives a pardon is greatly relieved to the extent that he had understood his condition. Without an understanding of the bad news, good news of this type becomes nonsensical.
Now the gospel is certainly God’s good news, and it the kind of good news which falls into the latter category. Without an understanding of sin and wrath, the Christian message of forgiveness makes no sense at all. Because we have sought to make the gospel into the first kind of good news, we have simply made it unintelligible. Driving for a universal forgiveness (with no unpleasant or off-putting concepts like divine wrath) we have only succeeded in destroying the very concept of forgiveness.
But when there is no forgiveness, a curious thing happens. Profound guilt gradually accumulates in a culture — and nothing can be done about it. There is no law, and so there is therefore no guilt. In the midst of this, an impotent Christian evangelism feebly preaches forgiveness, but steadfastly refuses to preach law. Consequently, the forgiveness they talk about translates readily into the humanistic counseling categories of “self-acceptance” and so forth. After a time, Christian evangelists and pastors give up and become humanistic counselors, with a little God talk sprinkled here and there.
I mentioned above that after a time, the platitudes of the reassuring and accepting therapist are no longer adequate. The reservoir of guilt in a society is too great, and the words are too small. Nothing will do but a great crusade to rid the world of the “real” evil, which will be, each in their turn, polluters trashing the planet, tobacco companies selling to youngsters, women being denied their rights, and so forth. These crusades are nothing other than great causes invented to give moral order and purpose to people who have previously affirmed that there is no such thing as morality.
Because they believe this, they live in such a way that they become guilty before God. This is a troublesome thing when one is alone in a room. So they fill the room with others, all talking loudly about their pilgrimage into selfhood, and how it is with them. But the talk is always inadequate, and so finally the group says, “There must be something we can do.” And what they do is launch a moral crusade of some kind or other to enable them to feel good about how they left morality behind. Wisdom, as our Lord taught us, is always vindicated by her children, and this kind of thing of course makes no sense.
But the response of Christians to all this makes even less sense. We say that the good news is the message of forgiveness of . . . and then we choke on the word sins. That word, and the associated words about the wrath to come, might not be received as seeker-friendly. We don’t want to scare anyone away, and so we mumble our way through the tough parts of the gospel. No one understands what we are talking about, and so they wander away. But at least they were not scared.
Our responsibility is to be faithful, not successful. The irony is that those who repudiate the pragmatic success idol find the blessing of God on the message they preach — it is His message after all. In all their wandering around, modern Americans desperately need to hear that God is angry with them.