America's Decline Demands the Utterance of God

It is a fact that America’s earliest colleges and universities were established with “the goal of educating students by using Scripture as the foundation for their intellectual and spiritual development” (Thomas, America’s Expiration Date 146).

William F. Buckley’s 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, is a classic critique of the anti-Bible agenda Buckley saw unfolding at Yale during his undergraduate years (1946-1950). The agenda included the subversion of the Bible and the Christian religion, as well as the subversion of economic individualism, all done in exchange for atheism, agnosticism, socialism, and communism.

Buckley described how the cause of Christianity suffered at Yale from a treatment of the Bible which focuses on the Bible as a “monument over the grave of Christianity” (6). The truth is New Testament Christianity is not in a grave, and the Bible is not a monument over any such non-existent grave. The Bible declares, “All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades . . . but the word of our God will stand forever” (Isaiah 40:6-8; cf. 1 Peter 1:23-25). Jeremiah wrote concerning the Scripture: “ ‘Is not My word like fire?’ declares the Lord, ‘and like a hammer which shatters a rock?’” (23:29). The writer of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews concurs: “. . . [T]he word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (4:12).

A 21st century sequel to Buckley’s book is 2009 Yale graduate Nathan Harden’s book, Sex and God at Yale, published in 2012. Harden describes his Yale undergraduate days as a time of “witnessing much more than the decline of a great university. I was witnessing nothing less than . . . America’s descent into an abyss of moral aimlessness, at the hands of those now charged with educating its future leaders” (231).

What has caused the occurrence of the moral decline we are witnessing in America? Nathan Harden relates the following incident which implies a foundational cause, which too few understand. Harden writes, “I once took a class in the [Yale] Religious Studies Department, which is part of the main school of arts and sciences, not the divinity school. One day I was talking to the professor after class, and I remember him telling me with great passion how he wished that he could just get his religious students to stop believing that the Bible is divinely inspired—his hands waving in the air dramatically to emphasize his point” (224, emp. added).

I will (1) rest the case for the inspiration, inerrancy, and authority of the Bible in the sound argument set forth in The Utterance of God: An Extended Treatment of Thomas B. Warren’s Argument with the Proof that Assures Man the Bible is the Word of God, and (2) affirm that the implications in this brief article establish conclusively one of a multiplicity of sufficient reasons why the book, The Utterance of God, needs massive circulation for such a time as this.

Charles C. Pugh III
Executive Director