"Darkness was then said to be light"

TO BE CHILDREN OF LIGHT NOW - An accurate history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries must indicate that the highest ethical teaching the world has ever known was rejected in favor of teachings that opened the way to forms of human behavior more degraded than any the world had seen to that point—from the Soviet form of communism to Hitler’s fascist state, from Maoism to Pol Pot. 

Each pled moral righteousness as the justification for brutalities that no one would have thought possible. This is partly due to the failure of those who have professed Christ to stand throughout the earth as the manifest children of light. Recent intellectual leaders have lived in an attitude of superiority and condemnation toward Christian morality. At the present time, popular culture has taken over the attack. 

Lyrics of the past did not critique traditional (Christian) teachings, but that changed with the Beatles and Bob Dylan. The bitterness of the previous generation’s literary writings broke through. They professed to have seen through “the establishment,” and they found much there to criticize justly. They promoted a “higher” morality to replace what they took to be “the establishment.” 

Darkness was then said to be light. Practicing what traditionally would have been regarded as blatant evil is now the single most dominant feature of our world. Sex and violence in the media is one symptom but is far from being the central issue. The central issue is the replacement of Jesus Christ as the Light of the World by people like Nietzsche and John Lennon, Lenin and Mao. Children of light are beyond the point where mere talk—no matter how sound it is—can make an impression. 

Demonstration is required. They must live what they talk, even in places where they cannot talk what they live. The children of light must be who and what they were called to be by Christ their Head. Mere reason and fact cannot effectively persuade because they are now under the same sway of public spirit and institutions as are the arts and public life generally—and, indeed, so is much of the “church visible.” The call of Christ today is to be his apprentices, alive in the power of God, learning to do all he said to do, leading others into apprenticeship to him, and teaching them how to do everything he said.