More than seventy killings took place in London in the first quarter of 2018.¹ A surgeon in a London hospital reports that the number of children and young people being brought in with knife injuries is at an all-time high.² This great city, blessed in the past by some of the greatest gospel preachers in church history, is waking up almost daily to headlines telling of another life snatched away.

Politicians debate increasing police funding. Newspapers argue about law enforcement. There is a place for that. But the root of the problem was described in a book aptly titledDeath in the City, written nearly fifty years ago by the apologist Francis Schaeffer. In a culture that has deliberately turned away from God, what basis is there for morality?

Schaeffer warned that Western societies in the 1960s were living off the borrowed capital of a Christian worldview. That capital was fast running out. There was now no certain foundation for morality, no firm basis for ethics. Social breakdown would surely follow. Death in the City drew a series of comparisons between the plight of Western civilization and the collapse of social order in Jerusalem as depicted in the book of Jeremiah.

Back in the seventh century BC, despite repeated offers of grace, the people of Jerusalem deliberately turned away from the “fountain of living waters.” They preferred “broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer. 2:13). They believed lies. “Truth has perished; it is cut off from their lips” (7:28).

Jeremiah faced ridicule as he warned that seeking “freedom” from God’s moral laws leads down the blind alley of slavery to sin. He showed how “evil and bitter” it is to forsake the Lord Almighty (2:19). His most bitter opponents were found in the religious establishment. The “horrible and shocking” reality was that prophets and priests had led the race downward into rebellion (5:30–31). They denied that God would ever bring judgment:

For from the least to the greatest of them,
everyone is greedy for unjust gain;
and from prophet to priest,
everyone deals falsely.
They have healed the wound of my people lightly,
saying “Peace, peace,”
when there is no peace.
Were they ashamed when they committed abomination?
No, they were not at all ashamed;
they did not know how to blush. (6:13–15)

This shameless behavior was designed to provoke God. It was actually self-destructive (7:18–19). God would turn His face away. Jerusalem would be left defenseless in the hands of ruthless enemies: “Death has come up into our windows . . . cutting off the children from the streets” (9:21).

Fast forward two and a half thousand years. Francis Schaeffer was horrified at the spectacle of liberal clergy denying the truth of God’s Word and ripping up the Ten Commandments. He compared them directly to King Jehoiakim, who cut up and burned Jeremiah’s prophecies as they were read out to him (chap. 36). Honest to God by Bishop John Robinson was published in 1963 to media acclaim. Having dumped the idea of a transcendent “God out there” and reduced Him to the “God within,” Robinson logically followed up with a call for “situational ethics.” “Moral absolutes” are a shackle, he argued. Liberation was urgent.

Schaeffer’s Death in the City (1969) and a string of other books such as Escape from Reason(1968) castigated the religious establishment for conniving with the irrationality of relativism rather than challenging it. False prophets in Jeremiah’s day painted evil as good and denied that there would be a judgement (14:14–15). It was even more repulsive when so-called Christian ministers with access to the revelation of God’s salvation in Christ painted evil as good and good as evil and laughed at the idea of wrath to come.

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