Ozzy Osbourne died yesterday at the age of seventy-six.
He was especially famous (or infamous) for biting the head off a dead bat during a concert in Des Moines. This is unsurprising; the Associated Press calls him “the gloomy, demon-invoking lead singer” of his band (tellingly titled “Black Sabbath”) and the “drug-and-alcohol ravaged id” of heavy metal. His band’s eponymously-titled first album was released in 1970 and sold nearly five million albums; Black Sabbath sold more than seventy-five million albums total.
Osbourne was known as the “Prince of Darkness,” a term employed in John Milton’s Paradise Lost to refer to Satan as the embodiment of evil. To understand the cultural insight Osbourne’s career illustrates, ask yourself whether his music celebrating themes of horror, doom, paranoia, drug abuse, and the occult would have been popular (or even possible) twenty years earlier.
What happens when we kill God
Now let’s turn to our second news item: Monday was the one-hundredth anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial conclusion.
At issue was Tennessee’s law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. The high school teacher being prosecuted, John T. Scopes, was found guilty and fined $100, although the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned his conviction on a technicality while upholding the law against evolution as constitutional.
In many ways, the cultural conflict revealed by the trial has been exacerbated by the normalization of evolutionary theory that it produced for many.
From then until now, battles over abortion, sexual “liberation,” and LGBTQ ideology have been won resoundingly by their proponents. Even the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade did not lower the number of abortions in America.
This is tragically logical: If human life is the coincidental product of chaotic evolutionary forces, there are no external or objective authorities by which to value or protect it. Mothers are then free to abort their babies (“My body, my choice”); people are free to have sex with anyone who consents (“If it feels good, do it”); marriage is whatever we define it to be (“Love is love”).
Friedrich Nietzsche accused atheists of his day of having no idea of the significance of their atheism. As historian Carl Trueman notes, “Killing God, [Nietzsche] points out, requires that his assassins themselves rise to the challenge of being gods, of becoming those who create meaning and value.”
You don’t have to listen to the nihilism of a Black Sabbath song to know how this is working out for us.
“Did you have a good time?”
I fear that American religion has been partly to blame for the moral trajectory of American society, especially in recent years.
In Rome Before Rome: The Legends that Shaped the Romans, Oxford historian Philip Matyszak reports, “The Romans felt that their gods helped those who helped themselves.” Benjamin Franklin would popularize their sentiment; 82 percent of Americans would come to believe that “God helps those who help themselves” is in the Bible.
And why not? This assertion is the essence of American self-reliant religion.
Our Declaration of Independence asserts that we have the “inalienable” right to “the pursuit of happiness”; George Washington later identified “religion and morality” as “great pillars of human happiness.” Both statements are true, of course. But when “human happiness” becomes our purpose, religion becomes merely a means to this end.
Across American history, religious fervor has risen in times of need and fallen in times of prosperity. (This is known as the “existential insecurity theory.”) The Sunday after 9/11, the 2200-seat sanctuary of the church I pastored in Dallas was packed for both services. Two Sundays later, when it had become clear that the horrific attacks were not part of a sustained assault on our country, attendance returned to normal.
A longtime children’s Sunday school teacher told my wife that when she began teaching years ago, parents would pick up their children and ask, “What did you learn?” Now they ask, “Did you have a good time?”
Is God a divine egotist?
The Bible, by contrast, declares that God is not a means to our ends. To the contrary, he testifies that we are “created for [his] glory” (Isaiah 43:7) and warns, “My glory I will not give to another” (Isaiah 48:11). We are commanded, “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).
Does this make God a divine egotist? The opposite is true: he knows that seeking the glory of anything or anyone (especially ourselves) rather than his is idolatry. And he knows that no idol can do what his omnibenevolent omnipotence can do in our lives and world.
Listen to the prophet:
Every goldsmith is put to shame by his idols, for his images are false, and there is no breath in them. They are worthless, a work of delusion; at the time of their punishment they shall perish. Not like these is he who is the portion of Jacob, for he is the one who formed all things (Jeremiah 10:14–16).
Consequently, “Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lᴏʀᴅ” (Psalm 32:10). A culture that would embrace Ozzy Osbourne’s occultic idolatry desperately needs such “steadfast love” today.
So know that, Darwin to the contrary, you are here on purpose for a purpose: God created you “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29). Here’s our role: “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18).
The more we seek to glorify Jesus, the more we become like Jesus. And the more we become like Jesus, the more the light of Jesus “shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
“Let go of riches and gather virtues”
St. Bridget, patron saint of Europe, died on this day in 1373. From the age of seven, she had mystical visions of the crucified Christ. These visions drove her to compassion for others mirroring the compassion of her Savior.
She once heard her Lord say,
You ought to be like a person who lets go and like one who gathers. You should let go of riches and gather virtues, let go of what will pass and gather eternal things, let go of visible things and gather invisible. . . .
In return for the possession of goods, I will give you myself, the giver and Creator of all things.
What will you “let go” to glorify Jesus today?
Quote for the day:
“The world would have peace if only men of politics would follow the Gospels.” —St. Bridget of Sweden
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