In addition to poise, sophistication, learning, wisdom, and a clarity of style nearly aphoristic, Idols for Destruction (Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tenn.; $8.95), by Herbert Schlossberg, has a prophetic boldness carrying it beyond apologetics, beyond the multiplicity of timid attempts at offering “a Christian perspective” on what it calls “this thoroughly immoral age,” and far beyond the smug vulgarities of the Moral Majority types who are all too plainly creatures of a “civilization” they claim to abhor.
Schlossberg has taken for his model “the prophetic works of the Old Testament,” and for his text Hosea 8:4: “With their silver and gold they made idols for their own destruction.” Accepting the proposition that “any hierarchy of values constitutes a religious system,” whether its adherents recognize ittobesoor not, Schlossberg argues that the modern, post-Christian West has succumbed to idols of History (historicism), Humanity (“ye shall be as gods”), Mammon (signified by the monetary inflation that has proved to be the definitive characteristic of social democracy), Nature (materialism), Power (summarized most succinctly as the refusal to render unto God what is God’s), and Religion (or what modernist churchmen call “dialogue”).
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