The West once was pagan and then became Christian; historically, it is the pagan-Christian West. Today, in contrast, it has become the Christian-pagan West. No century was ever more misjudged than the twentieth by those who hailed it as the “Christian” century. For the once banished demonic spirits have returned again to inhabit the abode of Western culture, and some, indeed, seem to be securing permanent tenure.

Thinking men may scorn the phrase “the Christian-pagan West” as ill-tempered. The West is, after all, the Christian West; what specially distinguishes Occident from Orient is this Christian motif. Moreover, even the compound “Christian-pagan” may seem as artificial as “pagan West,” for after all, whatever is pagan is non-Christian, even as what is Christian is assumed to be Western.

Decline Of Christian Spirit

Such an evaluation of events, however, is outdated; indeed, it is actually irrelevant. It reflects the romantic overconfidence of earlier generations and of the past century. It assumes, and erroneously so, that traditional patterns of the home and work, of civilization and culture still prevail. It perpetuates the illusion of a people who took for granted that the inherited spirit of the West could not die.

Never Fully Christian

Admittedly the West has never been the totally “Christian West.” At best, it has been the “Christian West plus or minus,” the Christian West qualified by some limiting word, e.g., the “imperfectly Christian West.” Scholars now admit, indeed, that the Dark Ages were less dark than historians once pictured them; yet the Middle Ages stood nonetheless in drastic need of the Reformation. The tradition of papacy, monasticism and scholasticism developed an hierarchical, ritualistic and legalistic religion. Superstition and legend abounded; faith was often blind and unreasoning; piety and sacrifice were common substitutes for virtue; ascetic self-denial and gross sensuality flourished side by side; and the church was drawn frequently into the current of political intrigue and immorality. As Philip Schaff remarks, “the medieval light was indeed the borrowed star and moonlight of ecclesiastical tradition, rather than the clear sun-light from the inspired pages of the New Testament; but it was such light as the eyes of the nations in their ignorance could bear, and it never ceased to shine until it disappeared in the day-light of the great Reformation” (History of the Christian Church, Vol. IX, p. 12).

Yet Luther and Calvin, no less than Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, stood in hourly need of justification on the ground of Christ’s death for sinners. The same applies to the early apostles Peter, Paul and John, and in our century to evangelical giants like Dwight L. Moody and Billy Graham. The smudge of sin discolors even the best Christian history.

Heritage Of Greatness

Nevertheless it must be said that no other world culture has lived on the Christian side of life and history; it has had a Christian past, with a lease on Christian experience. The classic pagan mind, shaped by Graeco-Roman idealism, even at best was not good enough for the West. The old culture at its vulgar or common level was beneath the dignity of Christians. And the vices of infanticide, religious prostitution, slavery were abhorrent and repugnant to believers. Because they revered Christ as the guardian of purity and as the champion of sexual virtue, the Christians renounced adultery, covetousness, craftiness, dishonesty, drunkenness, theft. Doubtless the New Testament exhortations, and the picture in the Revelation of the decline of the seven churches in Asia Minor, caution us against painting the first century only in the brightest colors. Yet even in wicked Corinth the apostle Paul could write the world-stained believers: “Such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.”

Virtue In Abundance

Actually, Christians were known from the very beginning more for their positive ethical and spiritual performance than for mere abstinence. Pagan observers marveled “how they love one other.” An inexplicable joy irradiated the lives of these ordinary mortals; the peace that became theirs was unknown even to an age free of international hostilities; a boundless flood of kindness and benevolence was turned toward neighbors and strangers; godliness came to live in human flesh. These were a holy people, graced by the Holy Spirit. Acquaintance with the Risen Christ endowed them with a spiritual treasure so surpassingly superb that they laid down their lives rather than renounce Him. Even where totalitarian rulers brandished steel against them, they preferred martyrdom to the sin of silence. They were “called Christians first at Antioch” (Acts 11:26), and they were worthy of His Name. They had a divine commission to go to a perishing world; they were “under orders” to witness of the Redeemer to lost men. Their “conversation”—their walk as well as their words—was halo-bright. The incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ was the meeting place of their hopes and fears. Their marching orders were to confront the world in an armor the pagan empires had never worn. They eclipsed all the previous generations in their embodiment of love, of joy, of peace, of long-suffering, of gentleness, of goodness, of faith, of meekness, of temperance.

Inspiration Of Christianity

All that became noblest in the West was but the lengthened shadow of such faith and life. In a world abounding with religions, biblical Christianity supplied a distinctive view of God and the universe, of man and his destiny. The life of the West came to revolve around the drama of divine incarnation and atonement. The span of human existence was related in every sphere to the God-man who died in the stead of sinners and who rose for them in triumph over death. Between the divine creation of man and the final judgment of the race, the advent of the Redeemer stood as the dominating peak of history. Time “before Christ” lacked any climax; it was a movement of events in which the redemptive promise of God waited fulfillment. “The year of our Lord” became synonymous with the age of grace, in which redeemed men and women were adopted into the family of faith, with the risen Redeemer as their living Head. Since the sixth century the West has based its calendar upon the reality of the incarnation.

While Christian monotheism furnished the lofty inspiration of religion and morality, its influence did not stop there. It shaped literature and the arts. It even furthered the confidence of the West (although contemporary thought arbitrarily obscures this debt) in the unity and rationality of space-time existence, and hence stimulated the growth of science. Christianity upheld the ultimate significance of reason and conscience under God, and it proclaimed as well a providential universe on the basis of divine creation and preservation. Neither ancient polytheistic religion nor philosophical dualism had produced this lively sense of God and the supernatural world, and of man’s awesome destiny.

A Squandered Inheritance

Today this inheritance is all but squandered. No doubt those who disparage life in the Middle Ages as measured by the purity of New Testament religion can make their case, but nonetheless the world today, in contrast with earlier centuries clothed by Christian influences, stands starkly naked in moral shame.

Call it a return to paganism or barbarism or what one will, the fact remains that in the West for three centuries Christian influences upon society, the state and culture have decreased while secular influences have increased to dominating proportions. In the eighteenth century the upper classes of society broke with Christian beliefs, and the unity of Western Christendom vanished. While phantom unity rémained in the balance of power preserved by the absolute monarchies, when these fell, only the myth of the West’s ongoing progress concealed its fragmenting ideals. When progress, in turn, seemed doubtful, only the rise of dictators preserved the outward illusion of unity.

Terrifying Ambiguities

Today’s situation is awesome in its ambiguities. The largest strength of the Communist party, next to Russia and China, is in Italy, home of Vatican City and the organizational head of the largest body of professing Christians. Many who vote Communist still attend Roman Catholic mass in Italy (in contrast with the French).

The Italian Senate’s only woman member, Senator Lina Merlin, has charged that between two and three million women live by prostitution; that in Rome houses of prostitution operate under government license “all over town, and near schools and churches.” Such confusions and contradictions strike ever deeper and deeper in nominally Christian centers today; principle and piety seem ever less and less a central concern of human existence.

The Reformation warned that the Christian West had deteriorated to quasi-Christian foundations, and called for a full and swift return to biblical supports. Scholasticism had one-sidedly emphasized the intellectual element in Christianity. The community it produced repeated the Apostles’ Creed, but without putting heart and soul in the opening word. For Credo (I believe) it tended to substitute Credendum est (it is believed). A generation merely mouthing the creed led to another generation that could not in good conscience even repeat it. The highest language of faith, used first by saintly men, next by carnal men, and then by unregenerate men, at last vanished entirely from the vocabulary of the modern pagan.

Medieval Compromises

The medieval compromise, in fact, reached far beyond matters of doctrine and personal virtue. It involved also a misconception of the social order and of the church’s relation to culture.

In the provocative volume Man in This World, Hans Zehrer reaches back a thousand years to A.D. 1075 and the autocratic Pope Gregory VII’s Twenty-Seven Theses, which led in 1308 to the bull Unam Sanctum as the pivot of the Western revolt against authority. By their own claims the papal despots began to lessen the distance between God and man, and man and God. Drawing the spiritual sword, popes presumed to rule over emperors and their subjects in place of God. “In setting himself in the place of God, the Pope gave the signal for every class to do likewise. ‘Why should you be God and not I?’ is a question before which title-deeds lose their force” (Zehrer, op. cit., p. 67). Thereafter, the man who would be God becomes in swift turn the man freed from all superior authority, who loses at last not merely the image of God, but in doing so loses also the image of man, and descends to bestiality. He becomes the herd man of our era, easily led by totalitarian superiors. In the Christian-pagan West he emerges as the beast-man of evolutionary naturalism, although in actuality he is the man-beast.

Men With Half A Soul

Whatever may be said about Zehrer’s thesis, the fact is that for five centuries, since the mid-fifteenth century yielded to the post-medieval era, the man of Europe and the Americas has stood increasingly confounded and mute in the presence of the Great Questions. His distant forefathers had been heirs of the classic Graeco-Roman world view and prized the Christian inheritance even above that. The death of ancient culture they counted gain because of the birth of a higher. But the modern man, by contrast, gave half his soul to the Renaissance, and was half-hearted toward the Reformation. He now gave snap answers to Ultimate Problems, answers which blurred the Christian motif, and from which all remaining biblical hues, already pallid, would soon fade.

Those who today call merely for “a new Reformation” thereby betray the fact that they judge current history unrealistically. Latin America, perhaps, is a prospect for such a duplication within history. There, as nowhere else, the smoldering revolt against a medieval temper could erupt into a war of ideas, involving Renaissance as well as Reformation claims. But elsewhere the West has already stripped human life of much of its traditional meaning. The inherited patterns of civilization are paling swiftly. Priority Answers of the past are now repudiated, and the Priority Problems along with them. The current failure to grasp the world of ultimates commits man to categories that imply the end of a rational-moral cosmos and the consequent insignificance of reason and the good. For two generations influential philosophers in the once-Christian West have ceased to ask, “Who is God?” “What is the purpose of history, and of the universe?” “How shall we define man’s dignity?” “What are the permanent aspects of truth and morality?” but instead have been asking “Is there a God?” “Does purpose exist in history and the universe?” “Is man essentially unique?” and “Have reason and goodness any objective significance?”

The Drift Downstream

The chorus of intellectual giants answering these questions negatively has swelled. Paraded as the verdict of modern intellectual genius are the dogmas that the binding force of reality is not supernatural and that life and society are held together best if God be dissolved. Confused Western man has been floating downstream on the river of negation, for driftwood requires nothing in the way of spiritual decision. Today, tossed by doubt and uncertainty, modern man is wearying of this world and of himself. His day-to-day existence balances on the sharp edge of chilling questions.

The geographical frontiers of Christendom have shrunk perceptibly. The Russian Orthodox Church and the vast evangelical Stundist movement in the U.S.S.R. eke out their existence by the tolerance of a totalitarian government. The Ukraine, where Roman Catholic congregations date back a millennium, is enslaved behind the Iron Curtain. France, a half-century ago included in every list of nominally Christian great powers, has a bankrupt faith; of its 42 million inhabitants, 35 million no longer attend mass (a mortal sin for Catholics). Only European lands on which the Reformation made a strong theological impact are today virile in their resistance to Communism.

But the shriveling of the Christian claim upon modern thought and life is even more shocking than the shrinking of Christian territorial frontiers. Almost everywhere the West shows a return to pagan ways of thinking and living. Before Christ and before conscience it puts a score of substitute allegiances.

Eroding The Patience Of God

First, the boundless wickedness of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, the cradle of civilization, eroded the patience of God’s Spirit, and the early human enterprise was finally deluged in doom. The new beginning was grounded in revealed religion; the sacred Hebrew narratives carry forward the best of the old history from Abraham to Moses and Sinai, to David and the Hebrew temple, and through the prophets of the Old Testament. Furthermore, they light up this whole venture of faith with Messianic expectation.

Then, the decline of the proud and classic Graeco-Roman civilization ended in the tribal sack and fall of Rome. This extremity of the pagan world became the Christian believer’s opportunity; the weakness of the pagan gods revealed the strength of the Lord of glory.

The third long night of human barbarism seems to have begun. To many observers, the horizon of this third night exhibits little, if any, prospect of a sunrise. Earlier and once benign cultures perished in judgment. The first civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates valley came to naught with the destruction of a generation hardened in its revolt; the glory of the Hellenic world could not withstand its later disintegration and doom. Descending from its pinnacle of lofty achievement, the Christian West in becoming pagan is ¡leaded for inevitable doom. The light men shun today is blinding, for the post-Christian era revolts against the most sacred inheritance of the race. To assume that an anti-Christ culture will escape perdition is sheer madness.

“Then I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf” (Ex. 32:24).

Not often does the preacher find it proper or helpful to quote a poet like Ogden Nash. Nevertheless, I find myself listening in memory to a couplet of his which, like so much that he writes, is accompanied by a mischievous twinkle of the eye:

Why did the Lord give us agilityIf not to escape responsibility

That is one man’s biting satire on a gravely widespread tendency of our time—the tendency to run away from life’s demands instead of meeting them with willing shoulders.

The same thing has been said in chaste but challenging prose by Elton Trueblood in The Life We Prize. After reminding us that the heavy strain under which modern life must be lived is essentially the same for all of us but that the reactions to this strain differ sharply in different persons, he says: “It appears that the most common reaction is that of some form of escape, and especially the effort to escape responsibility.”

Although there is no comfort in it, there is perhaps instruction in the fact that this shabby way of treating life and the Lord of life is not altogether new. To this our text can testify—it goes back three thousand years.

Description Of Failure

Consider, then, the description of Aaron’s failure as we have it in biblical history.

Only three months earlier the people of Israel had left Egypt. God had drawn a curtain over the four dismal centuries they had spent there. Now they were encamped over against Mount Sinai on their way to the Promised Land. Already Moses had made one ascent into the solemn heights of the mountain, returning with the Ten Commandments.

Again he is lost in the unapproachable splendor of Sinai, this time to receive a revelation from God as to the order of worship that the people are to follow. Before his six weeks’ absence had run its course, the people grew restless. Where was he? Why so long withdrawn from them? Was he dead or alive?

In this restlessness they conceived the idea of holding a festival. Since Aaron was second in command, would he make them an image around which they might have a religious dance? We may be sure that he was not for it. The pity is that he wasn’t firmly against it.

Under his supervision golden earrings were collected and melted down. From this molten gold a calf was fashioned. Aaron then built an altar in front of the calf and offered sacrifices.

Whether this was primarily a violation of the first commandment or of the second is a matter I make no attempt to settle. Each view has its advocates. If the sacrifice to the calf meant that the people were giving up Jehovah, then certainly it was flying in the face of the law they had just accepted: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

If, as some believe, it was an effort to hold on to Jehovah and to mingle with spiritual worship the visible image of deity, then it was a transgression against the law that says, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” We may not be able to read all of their thought. What we know is where their conduct led them. Their dancing became reveling. Their reveling became their shame. Their shame exposed them to the leering gaze of their pagan enemies.

In the midst of this disgusting spectacle Moses appeared. He “saw that the people had broken loose [for Aaron had let them break loose, to their shame among their enemies” (Ex. 32:25)]. The stern challenge that Moses flung at Aaron is set down in verse 21: “What did this people unto thee, that thou brought so great a sin upon them?”

To which the red-faced Aaron offered the feeble, flustered reply: “Let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief” (Ex. 32:22).

Then comes a further build-up of self-defense, after which Aaron says, in the words of our text: “I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.”

Aaron was a good man, whose name was to become famous as the founder of the priestly line in Israel, but in that hour Aaron was a weakling. It was cowardly of him to refuse responsibility for his part in Israel’s sin.

Cowardly or not, he did it; and, cowardly or not, you and I in one way or another are sorely tempted to soften down or sneak around this tall, titanic fact of responsible living. Under God we are accountable not only for the evil we may do or condone but for the good we might achieve or encourage. Let cabbages be vegetables, let animals be bundles of instincts, but let men know, creatures of God as they are, that the Lord of life will one day reckon with them for the way they have handled themselves and others. Let them know, too, that over the Day of Judgment is written: “No Excuses Accepted.”

Directions Of Responsibility

In view of this, it would be helpful to look around at the directions in which the lines of responsibility run.

To start with, there is our responsibility for ourselves. However we got here, whatever we find here, one thing is certain: we have ourselves on our hands. That’s something that won’t be changed by motoring to Miami or flying to Rio or taking a drawing room to Southern California. “For every man shall bear his own burden” (Gal. 6:15). Just that bluntly did St. Paul express it long ago, meaning centrally, I take it, the burden of responsibility. Professor Hocking expresses the same idea when he says: “Other creatures nature could largely finish: the human creature must finish himself.” “Therefore,” to quote St. Paul again, “thou are inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest” (Rom. 2:1).

Or, take the family, the first and closest social organism in which our relationships spell responsibility. Between husband and wife, mutually, there’s a love to be given, a care to be exercised, a loyalty to be guarded. Between parents and children there’s a table to be spread, a wardrobe to be furnished, a set of physical, emotional and spiritual habits to be fashioned, a system of responsible sharing to be worked out. It was a thoughtful father who said that he purposely delayed, by a year or two, the installation of an automatic heating plant because he wanted his teen-age son to gain experience by getting up at an early hour and firing the coal-burning furnace. Today’s irresponsible homes are the spawning grounds for tomorrow’s juvenile deliquents and day-after-tomorrow’s shiftless citizens or chronic criminals.

Still another line of responsibility runs into the schoolroom. It is easy enough for us to say that the school is responsible for the child. What we need to see more clearly is that part of that responsibility consists of making the child feel responsible for the school—responsible, in a measure, for its cleanliness, its physical care and upkeep and, in larger part, for the classroom atmosphere, for the grades he will receive and for the progress he will make.

Again, there is responsibility as it relates to one’s work. Usually, to start with, it takes the form of what one owes to his employer. Later the tables may be turned and the duty is that of an employer toward his employees. In either case, of course, there must be recognition that these responsibilities are mutual. When employers frequently fall back on injunctions and employees frequently fall back on strikes, it takes no expert economist to tell that somewhere the sense of responsibility has broken down. Nor will the trouble be cured merely by laws and penalties. There must be a new spirit, a different disposition.

Or, once more, there is community responsibility. Whose concern is it that we shall have decent housing, proper sanitation, good schools, respectable government, a healthy moral climate? There is only one intelligent answer: it is everyone’s concern. It is when this simple, basic fact is forgotten, when, in short, responsibility is shirked, that government rots, gangsters have a field day, vice flourishes and community standards deteriorate.

Let me name only one more direction in this survey of our responsibilities. It is the church. I’m not quite satisfied with this way of expressing my thought. Actually, what we owe the church is not just one of many responsibilities. What we owe the church and her Divine Head, Jesus Christ, should be the center of all our concern.

This gripped me powerfully the other morning as I was reading the fourth chapter of Ephesians. Christ’s gifts and appointments to the church, says Paul, were for “the equipment of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain unto the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (vv. 12–15, RSV).

Not one of us has reached this goal. Until we have, we had better put the church first on our list of loyalties and responsibilities.

Go back to that phrase “responsible living.” It is inescapable. Ourselves, our families, our schools, our jobs, our communities, the church of Jesus Christ our Lord—these circle us with claims we dare not deny. They lay upon us obligations we shun only at our peril.

Yet, shun them we do. Aaron did, long, long ago. Some of you have done it within the week. How?

Devices For Evasion

Let’s think next of the devices that we commonly use as we follow feeble Aaron down the road of refusing responsibility.

For one thing, it is frequently a trick of ours, as it was Aaron’s, to blame natural forces for our failures. Mark Aaron’s words: “I cast it (the gold) into the fire and there came out this calf.” Don’t blame me, the accused man seems to say; blame the fire. When the heat had done its work, this idol happened to be the result.

Moses’ comrade never looked so little as in the moment when that piece of sophistry escaped his lips. What of the pattern he had cut out for the idol? What about the graving tool he had used? No mention of these! Instead, the complaint is that by the play of natural forces, by the prankish effect of the fire, this image was produced over which Israel had corrupted itself.

You know the modern equivalent of such weakling talk, don’t you? You get it in crude form in the popular song of some months ago—“Doing What Comes Naturally.” You get it in somewhat more refined form in many current novels. You get it in a still more sophisticated version in some—by no means all—half-baked courses in psychology. In gist it says: Nature made me this way; I have these urges and drives; it’s really not my fault if I run counter to old-fashioned morals, which after all were foisted on the people by frustrated priests and old maids.

So a man who has been untrue to his wife, while admitting mildly that he has caused a tangle, says to a minister, self-defendingly, “I did exactly what other men in my position would have done.” The urge was there; I simply satisfied it.

Actually such nonsense is not modern. It is as old as Esau selling his birthright for a mess of pottage. It makes man an animal reacting to stimuli instead of a person responding to challenge. It takes no notice of what Jesus Christ said: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24).

What is more, it takes no notice of the sanest and soundest findings of psychiatry. Listen to Dr. Starke Hathaway in his Physiological Psychology: “After going through the experimental and clinical literature, the thoughtful reader will conclude that the effects of personality upon glands are more impressive and easier to illustrate than the effects of the glands upon personality.”

No, when we are confronted with personal responsibility, we can’t slither down the rabbit hole of nature and so escape blame.

But there’s another device, also tried by Aaron, which commonly serves as a means of shirking responsibility. It is putting the blame or the load on

other people. Look at verse 22: “Thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief.” In verse 23: “They said unto me.” In verse 24: “They gave it me.”

Some scholars say that in verse 1, where the Authorized Version reads “The people gathered themselves together unto Aaron,” it would not be incorrect to render it, “The people gathered themselves together against Aaron.” To use contemporary slang, “they ganged up on him,” jostled him, challenged him, threatened him.

Everybody likes to be talked up; most people like to be talked about; but nobody likes to be talked against. So we buckle at the knees and bow down to the great god called the crowd. “They … they … they!” They decide what clothes I shall wear, what books I shall read, what music I shall play or hear, what TV programs I shall view. They determine whether I shall drink or go sober, whether I shall smoke or go free, whether I shall support Hollywood or the Kingdom of God, whether I shall rate success in terms of money made or in terms of manhood dedicated, whether I shall behold the fair face of Jesus Christ and cry “Away with him” or whisper worshipfully, “My Lord, and my God!”

A member of this church, invited to a gathering in honor of a distinguished university professor, found herself surrounded by members of the intelligentsia who engaged in round after round of cocktail drinking and became the giddier for doing so. When her courteous insistence brought her ginger ale in place of alcohol, she was gently chided as one who was still held in the grip of a “cultural taboo.” With that light phrase they would dismiss a deliberate conviction held fast in conscience. It is that kind of smiling paganism that you and I must meet as Christians.

We must meet it, let me add, not with sour visage, not with a martyr’s halo self-fixed, not with a whipped and whining resignation to duty but with a passionate and unashamed devotion to Jesus Christ and all the high things for which He stands.

It is year’s end. Some of us have stood up to our responsibilities creditably well, all thanks to the grace of God on which we have leaned. Others have sagged miserably, like Aaron. We haven’t been as true to ourselves as we might have been, nor to our families, nor to our work nor to our church.

Let’s confess it. Let’s come out of hiding. Let’s stop making excuses. Let’s throw back our shoulders to bear the full weight of whatever responsibilities God presses down upon them. And then, taking gratefully His forgiveness for every one of yesterday’s failures, let’s head straight into the new year, trusting, dauntless, unafraid.

Paul S. Rees is an alumnus of University of Southern California, which conferred the honorary doctor of divinity degree upon him in recognition of his gifts. Since 1938 he has been Pastor of First Covenant Church of Minneapolis, which has about 1500 members. He has 18 years of continuous broadcasting experience and is author of seven books.