The mercy of God knows no limits. Repeatedly, century after century, the Lord God did not keep silent nor leave Israel without a witness concerning himself. The Lord sent prophets to the people to warn them of impending judgment, to call them to repentance, and to admonish them to covenant faithfulness. Nonetheless, apart from a few times of reformation and short periods of loyalty, the Israelites hardened their hearts and turned away from the Lord by embracing the idols and deities of the cultures around them. They became syncretists, blending pagan beliefs with the true beliefs God revealed to them through their prophets. They corrupted the worldview they received from the Lord.
God’s mercy is boundless, yet he marks a date when he will no longer patiently endure wickedness. Hence, Israel’s and Judah’s covenant-breaking filled God’s cup of wrath. God turned them over to their enemies to be destroyed and carried off to be exiled from their land, the inheritance God had given them. Repeatedly, the Israelites preferred the pleasant-sounding prophecies of the false shepherds and banished or killed the prophets the Lord sent to them. The Lord sent the Assyrians to punish Israel (722-721 B.C.). Israel was no more. Then the Lord sent the Babylonians to punish Judah (587-586 B.C.). The vision the Lord gave Daniel, entailing 490 years, shows that after 70 years of captivity, Jews would return to their homeland and rebuild the walls and the temple, but that does not end the exile. The exile would not end until the Messiah came.
Following the last of Judah’s prophets came a period of 400 years of silence. The Lord broke his silence by sending another prophet, John the Baptist, who announced the impending advent of the Lord’s promised Messiah, the one of whom Daniel prophesied. Once again, the Israel sites responded to these two latter-day prophets as to the earlier prophets. They arrested them and killed them. Few Israelites had any notion that they were fulfilling numerous prophecies by killing their promised Messiah was integral to the climactic fulfillment and termination of the Mosaic Covenant with its temple and sacrifices they so zealously protected against the teachings of Jesus who came to fulfill it. This prophet was unlike all the others. He was the Messiah. He rose from the grave to inaugurate the New Covenant.
It is fitting, then, that the apostles and their first-century fellow ministers should contrast the Last Days prophet, Jesus Christ, with the prophets of old: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world” (Hebrews 1:1-2). For Jesus is the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, fulfilling all things that went before him (Hebrews 3:1).
Following the deaths of Jesus Christ’s apostles, the Lord has not left his people without a prophetic voice. However, when we acknowledge that someone fills a prophetic role today, we should not expect to observe that person performing miraculous signs, writing Scripture, or functioning as a divine agent conveying fresh revelation from God. Rather, the prophetic role in the church today may be filled by rather ordinary individuals like the men of “Issachar, men who had an understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do” (cf. 1 Chronicles 12:32; Luke 12:54-56; Romans 13:11-14). Such individuals are people who insightfully “understand the times” and courageously speak the truth where others, including many pastors, are silent, many because they lack courage and others because they fail to discern the times.
Concerning men who understood the times and filled the roles of prophetic voices during my lifetime, two men immediately come to mind. One is Francis Schaeffer, whom I was privileged to hear speak in a chapel session when I was a college student. Regrettably, I had no proper appreciation at the time of how blessed I was. Though I had already read Escape from Reason, I did not sufficiently grasp its significant message until later. For those needing a refresher on the prophetic nature of Schaeffer’s ministry, Christ Over All featured a series of reflections on his A Christian Manifesto (1981) in October 2022.
A second man who comes to mind when I think of recent prophetic voices is Herbert Schlossberg. His earliest book, Idols for Destruction, was the first I read after hearing him being interviewed on late-night radio (WCCO, CBS) in the Twin Cities. The radio host had read his recently published book. Schlossberg was a graduate of the University of Minnesota.
Consider a few segments from Idols for Destruction, illustrative of Schlossberg’s prophetic voice. Ahead of his time but entirely apropos to our time, he demonstrates how Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of ressentiment, advanced by Friedrich Nietzsche by using the French word rather than a German translation, was altering Western culture, particularly American culture. Ressentiment, married to Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, has radically “transformed America” as Barack Obama announced his presidency would do, has done, and does so even more with the Biden Administration, which exploits the power of government to enforce ressentiment.
Ressentiment begins with perceived injury that may have a basis in fact, but more often is occasioned by envy for the possessions or the qualities possessed by another person. If the perception is not either sublimated or assuaged by the doing of some injury to the object of the feeling, the result is a persistent mental condition, stemming from the repression of emotions that are not acceptable when openly expressed. The result is hatred and the impulse to spite and to say things that detract from the other’s worth. One of the most common secret elements to be repressed is Schadenfreude, the rejoicing at another person’s misfortune; vengeance is the principal manifestation of ressentiment (51).
Schlossberg rightly identified ressentiment in action within the American culture as the hateful desire for revenge, which plays a pivotal role in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, where he calls it the “slave morality.” Nietzsche uses the French word ressentiment to convey the concept rather than attempt to use a single German word. Like other English writers, Schlossberg also opts for the French word because the English resentment does adequately capture the concept. The concept and practice of ressentiment work on power dynamics along the same paths as Marxism.
Keep in mind that Schlossberg published his book in 1983. Though his discussion of ressentiment features disparities between the poor and the wealthy, the traditional class conflict exploited by Marxism, mindful individuals will recognize that ressentiment concerning alleged unjust economic disparities is readily adaptable to “cultural Marxism” concerning alleged unjust racial and sexual oppression.
If you have not yet recognized how applicable Schlossberg’s comments are concerning the role of ressentiment in fueling cultural Marxism’s Multiculturalism & Diversity, Critical Race Theory, Diversity-Equity-Inclusion, or whatever other designation social engineering may use, thoughtfully consider Schlossberg’s further explanation of ressentiment.
This phenomenon differs from mere envy or resentment because it is not content to suffer quietly but has a festering quality that seeks outlet in doing harm to its object. Ressentiment has its origin in the tendency to make comparisons between the attributes of another and one’s own attributes: wealth, possessions, appearance, intelligence, personality, friends, children. Any perceived difference is enough to set the pathology in motion. Ressentiment “whispers continually: ‘I can forgive everything, but not that you are—that I am not what you are—indeed that I am not you.'” The other’s very existence is a reproach. . . .
Ressentiment does much to explain the existence of crimes that otherwise are thought of as “senseless.” They are senseless from a materialist perspective because the criminal does not gain anything tangible from his action. But if he is striking at the object of ressentiment, his crime is as rational as if he had made off with the crown jewels. He has gained what he desired. Ressentiment values its own welfare less than it does the debasement or harm of its object (51-52).
Social engineers at America’s colleges and universities exploited ressentiment to advance their racialist agenda, popularly designated “multiculturalism and diversity,” to enroll more “people of color,” particularly Blacks. Throughout the 1980s they incited ressentiment by imposing “affirmative action” on all operational procedures—admissions, campus housing, and all things academic—to work toward the enforcement of equal outcomes.
Then, in the early 1990s, ressentiment received a welcome on Christian college and university campuses. Each member institution of the Coalition of Christian Colleges (now, Council for Christian Colleges and Universities) was obliged to establish a diversity office on campus and to implement “affirmative action” programs in admissions, housing, and academics. On Christian college campuses throughout America, ressentiment took up residence, launching its ugly work of stirring up strife, silencing opposing voices, and poisoning each subsequent generation of students who pass through the ivy-deck halls of learning.
It is difficult to discontinue citing these superb quotes from Schlossberg. Consider another.
Altruism has its source in this poisonous brew. The word was invented by Auguste Comte, who thought that self-love was immoral. In common with other forms of ressentiment, altruism glories in the praise of the weak and base, even at its own expense, if that will also debase the strong and good. . . . Altruism is thus best interpreted as a counterfeit of Christian love, informed by the ideology of humanism and powered by ressentiment. It permits demeaning the successful, or those who display any form of superiority, by pulling over that act the mask of concern for the poor and weak. . . . The fake love of altruism perverts the sense of values so that sickness and poverty approach the status of virtues. Christian love seeks to help the person but refuses to elevate the problem by giving it ontological status and worth. It also avoids helping the weak as a means of causing harm to the strong. In this it heeds the apostle’s admonition that love “does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right” (1 Cor. 13:6) (53).
Given the above citations, it is fitting and right that I offer one or two additional quotes. Under the heading, “The Curse of Ontological Victimhood,” Schlossberg offers this concerning humanitarianism’s twisted embrace of ressentiment.
Humanitarianism thus changes victimhood from accident to essence. It expands the category of victim until it swallows the entire person. It takes away the poor person’s humanity and gives him in its place the ontological status of victim. The sheltering arms of humanist sentimentality shower altruism on the poor person and refuse to allow any criticism to fall on his behavior. Blame instead falls on circumstance. The universe is said to have arrayed its forces implacably against the victim, who understandably feels resentment and self-pity because of the fate that circumstance has arranged for him. He was born out of circumstance, molded by circumstance, determined by circumstance. That hard taskmaster will never release its hold on him, will always keep him in the thrall of ontological victimhood.
But the agents of circumstance must be made to pay, first by an unbearable guilt for which no atonement will ever be sufficient and second with a never-ending stream of resources extorted out of them by ressentiment politics. The same humanitarian destiny that perpetuates victimhood on one imposes permanent guilt and material loss on the other. Ressentiment enjoys its double triumph in the public celebration of humanitarianism: It exalts categories of weakness, sickness, helplessness, and anguish into virtues while it debases the strong and prosperous. In the country of ontological victimhood, strength is an affront. Denying the possibility of strength for the weak keeps them weak. Being freed from dependence would bring the victim back into the human family, responsible for himself and others. How much better to remain a victim, shielded from trouble and responsibility by altruism. imposing a load of false guilt on the strong, ressentiment elicits a countering resentment that blinds them to the need of repentance for their real sins. Both poor and rich need to be made whole, but nobody can be made whole with a humanitarian understanding of his life. Poor and rich need to be reconciled, but altruism accentuates the self-righteous hypocrisies of both. Even the ontological division of humanity into rich and poor is a ressentiment stratagem that exploits differences so that it can use strife for its own purposes (69-70).
Do you recognize the prophetic nature of what Herbert Schlossberg portrays with the quotes I have cited? When I first read Idols for Destruction in 1983, I did not realize how prophetic his voice was. When I cited him a decade later in a presentation, I also failed to recognize this. Furthermore, I did not understand that my citation of Schlossberg’s book in my presentation bore something of a prophetic role to those who heard me. I should have realized it because I received a prophet’s welcome.
In my next blog article, I will develop this more and indicate what prompted this reflection on the prophetic voice of Herbert Schlossberg in Idols for Destruction as I continue the theme introduced. Watch for Understanding the Times 2.0.