“For many contemporaries God has dwindled into a noble abstraction, a tendency of history, a goal of evolution; has thinned out into a concept useful for organizing world peace — a good thing as an idea. But not the Word made flesh, who died for us and rose again from the dead. Not a Personality that a man can feel any love for. And not, certainly, the eternal Lover who took the initiative and fell in love with us.
“Do you think that Christianity is primarily valuable as a means of solving our “real” problem — i.e., how to build a permanently healthy, wealthy, and wise society in this world? If you do, you’re at least half a materialist, and someday the Marxists may be calling you comrade.
“So strong is the materialist climate of opinion that even convinced Christians sometimes feel compelled to defend Christianity against the charge of “otherworldiness” — to slight its value as the passport to heaven in favor of its usefulness as a blueprint for remodeling earth. Yet we must not blame our earthiness entirely upon Western scientific progress, as if materialism had waited for Edison to invent it. By no means. The Rome of Lucretius, the Athens of Epicurus–even the Israel of Ecclesiastes–were hardly without their materialist philosophers. Devotion to the prince of this world is one of the ancient tempations, and perhaps our remote ancestors had no sooner invented the slingshot than they reared back on their hind legs and proclaimed that their technical progress had now enabled them to do without religion. The choice before us today is just what it always was–whether to be worldly or otherworldly; whether to live for the unloving self or to live for the love of God.”
- Joy Davidman
