What do you think?
Rate this book
Epoch: The Rise and Fall of the West
The rise of the Christian West was spectacular. The fall of the West was similarly spectacular, especially for those who witnessed it firsthand. But the rise was more spectacular than its fall. That's the conclusion drawn in this epochal story of the Western world. The fall of Western civilization constitutes the most significant seismic shift in world history since the fall of Rome. And, such eschatological developments call for an immediate response — an extended explanation based in a definitive Christian interpretive framework. What conclusions should Christians draw from this cataclysmic event?
The timing was never better for a 2,000 year survey of the rise and fall of the Christian West. We are living in a moment when we must understand the times in order to know what to do, and how to respond. The West has already fallen, although the news has yet to sink in with most Europeans and Americans in 2021. The East is on the rise. The Christian faith is fast moving east and south, and the glory has departed from the West.
Epoch carefully chronicles the phenomenal impact of Jesus Christ and His people upon the culture, economy, religious character, charitable institutions, educational systems, science and technology, and worldview of the Western world—and the West's subsequent impact upon the whole earth. The book then traces the devastating decline and fall of a civilization, identifying the principal defectors and key provocateurs along the way.
The story plays out at a good clip for maximized efficiency, impact, and clarity. Author Kevin Swanson zeroes in on the most defining events and persons that would eventually make or break a civilization and the faith that ungirded it. The battle for the soul of Western civilization continued for a thousand years. As the smoke clears on the field, the survivors should be aware of the chief breaking points that brought about the demise of the West, such as the fateful forgery devised in Rheims, the Fourth Lateran Council, the Dum Diversas bull of 1452, the publication of Darwin's Descent of Man and Keynes' Economic Consequences of Peace, and more.
Yet, the war is not over yet. The world goes on. So Epoch concludes with an international vision for the Christian church, and a clarion call for Christians to press forward in the work of discipling the nations in the generations to come.
Includes pages of illustrations, graphs, tables, firsthand accounts, biographical information, and applied Scriptural principles.
The timing was never better for a 2,000 year survey of the rise and fall of the Christian West. We are living in a moment when we must understand the times in order to know what to do, and how to respond. The West has already fallen, although the news has yet to sink in with most Europeans and Americans in 2021. The East is on the rise. The Christian faith is fast moving east and south, and the glory has departed from the West.
Epoch carefully chronicles the phenomenal impact of Jesus Christ and His people upon the culture, economy, religious character, charitable institutions, educational systems, science and technology, and worldview of the Western world—and the West's subsequent impact upon the whole earth. The book then traces the devastating decline and fall of a civilization, identifying the principal defectors and key provocateurs along the way.
The story plays out at a good clip for maximized efficiency, impact, and clarity. Author Kevin Swanson zeroes in on the most defining events and persons that would eventually make or break a civilization and the faith that ungirded it. The battle for the soul of Western civilization continued for a thousand years. As the smoke clears on the field, the survivors should be aware of the chief breaking points that brought about the demise of the West, such as the fateful forgery devised in Rheims, the Fourth Lateran Council, the Dum Diversas bull of 1452, the publication of Darwin's Descent of Man and Keynes' Economic Consequences of Peace, and more.
Yet, the war is not over yet. The world goes on. So Epoch concludes with an international vision for the Christian church, and a clarion call for Christians to press forward in the work of discipling the nations in the generations to come.
Includes pages of illustrations, graphs, tables, firsthand accounts, biographical information, and applied Scriptural principles.
- GenresNonfictionChristian
734 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2021
13 people are currently reading
113 people want to read
About the author
Kevin Swanson
92 books55 followersKevin Swanson is a husband, father, pastor, radio-host, and national speaker. Kevin is the pastor of Reformation Church in Elizabeth, Colorado (ReformationChurch.com).
He also serves as the Director of Generations; a ministry he founded to strengthen Christian families around the country. As a father who wants to leave a godly heritage for his five children, Kevin's passion is to strengthen and encourage families all over the world, and to cast a vision for generations to come.
For the last 13 years Kevin has hosted a daily radio program--Generations Radio-- that reaches families across the U.S. and in over 100 countries.
He also serves as the Director of Generations; a ministry he founded to strengthen Christian families around the country. As a father who wants to leave a godly heritage for his five children, Kevin's passion is to strengthen and encourage families all over the world, and to cast a vision for generations to come.
For the last 13 years Kevin has hosted a daily radio program--Generations Radio-- that reaches families across the U.S. and in over 100 countries.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 12, 2022
There is so much good in this book that I hated to rate it less than four stars. The history of the church and society are presented in a concise and accurate manner and his thesis that the West has fallen in many aspects of influence was made very clear. However, his belief that the reason for the fall is the apostasy of the church falls flat. For example, he discusses the rise of China in influence - using his logic is it because of their righteousness? No, the Lord puts down one and raises up another for His purposes (Psalm 75:6). Rather than blame the Church it makes more Biblical sense to blame this fallen world. The Lord Jesus said that the road and gate to salvation is narrow and "few there be that find it" (Matthew 7:14). So we would expect that the vast majority of people and civilizations would be lost and fallen. It appears the author holds to the belief that the Church will bring in the Kingdom of God (Dominionism) - he even alludes to something similar to the Seven Mountains Mandate in the last chapter by including his own similar list of seven spheres of influence wherein "This reformation must take place in education, science and technology, media, culture, family life, business, and church." He also seems to have an axe to grind against Trump and conservatives - he makes many snarky comments against him and them. He seems to blame the 2020 recession on Trump rather than Covid and ignores the Godly reformations of Trump. While Trump is most likely not a Christian, he certainly made many changes that should please Christians - more than any other so-called Christian President. No, the Fall of the West actually helped Christians rather than hurt them. The rise of Biden and the loss of Trump, the recession, inflation, loss of world influence and strength of America has helped believers to focus on God and His Kingdom rather than hope for a Heaven on earth due to man's efforts. 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3 says, "Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you, not to be soon shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if from us, as though the day of Christ had come. Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition." The Apostle John in 1 John 2:18-19 says, "Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest, that none of them were of us." The Fall of the West is NOT the fall of the church but the Fall of the apostate believers who were infecting the church. They are not fallen believers - that is IMPOSSIBLE - but unbelievers, wolves in sheep's clothing, tares among the wheat who were hindering the church. As Christ prunes His Church, he is readying the world for the coming of the antichrist and the rapture of His Church. Even so come Lord Jesus!
January 3, 2025
This book is going to take a bit of a gentle hand to review.
First, I know Kevin Swanson at least as an acquaintance. I’ve heard him speak, I’ve met him, I’ve talked to him. His devotion to the Lord is remarkable. A man after God’s own heart who every Christian could learn from and imitate as he imitates Christ.
Next, I don’t necessarily disagree with most of his points. Only one point is truly problematic for me, and it happens to be one of his key thesis statements, that is going to be a problem for any book review.
With that being said, here goes my simple attempt to review this book:
For starters, as a brief summary and overview. Mr. Swanson is seeking to draw a continuous line from the first century church to the modern day with a focus on Western Civilization as the Christian faith took hold in the west, and then slowly eroded as time went on. His line is incredibly well researched, well thought out, and well established. He looks at morals, economy, art, music, education, politics, and altruism within the western world.
His overarching idea is that apostasy was a slow but never-ending march starting around the end of the first millennium with the works of Thomas Aquinas and leading us to today. The fall culminates on a micro level within individual countries and expanded to the macro level of the entire western world. The warning signs are almost always the same as the leaders (and/or people) reject the sovereignty of God and replace the Scriptures with human reasoning. The outward expression of this is always the acceptance of homosexuality and abortion. The way to combat this is to remove pagan literature and focus solely on the Word of God.
Kevin Swanson does much of this incredibly well. Again, I have a hard time saying I would disagree with many of his overarching ideas. You can see the march of humanism, and you can see where it has failed and left death and destruction in its wake. You can see how the US is caught in this now and has been collapsing for some time.
His accounts are incredibly well researched, his points are logical, and his conclusion is valid. That being said, this book is not without some pretty glaring issues.
Okay, where do we start with this . . . this is going to be like a plate of spaghetti, everything kind of jumbled and messed up.
Swanson’s conclusion is valid, but how he gets there is questionable. I have never seen someone so anti-Thomas Aquinas. I’m not going to defend the man, but I’ve also never seen anyone explain Aquinas’s conclusion like Swanson does. Swanson claims Aquinas’s conclusion was two forms of knowledge, secular and spiritual. I’ve always heard it described that Aquinas said there was more knowledge to be learned than was just in the Bible. I’ve always heard it as a pro-intellectual, pro-scientific, Christianity. “All truth is God’s truth,” (which I thought was attributed to Aquinas) was the go-ahead for Christians to study their world and not rely on a “blind faith” that rejects anything not explicitly in the Bible. This paved the way for scientific advancement because Christians didn’t need to be afraid of discovering something that would “disprove” their Bibles. If a Muslim or a Buddhist discovered something, that doesn’t make their worldview right, it means they happened to stumble upon something that was accurate, be it in the world of the secular (i.e. gravity, changing a tire, inventing eyeglasses), or the world of the spiritual (i.e. the golden rule, or advocating monogamy to protest abortion). The truth that God is truth, is what separates us from the Muslims and Buddhists because they must by very careful about what they discover. C.S. Lewis said, “an atheist can never be too careful about their reading.”
If we accept Swanson’s attack on Aquinas, again I’m not here to defend the man, then the Christian west has been fallen(ing) longer than it existed, and what proof does he have that the true Bible or faith exists? There is hardly a beginning here to mourn, it was over before it even got started, before the Catholic Church even went weird (circa 1200).
Swanson is an historian. His history is second to none. It is remarkable. He is not an art critic, a music critic, a politician, or an economist. Most of those chapters are pretty hard to get through. He tends to speak out of both sides of his mouth (one minute radios are a gift from God, discovered and invented by God fearing Christians, the next they are not playing enough classical music.) His economics chapter is repeated talking points that either he can't or doesn't explain well. His literature, art, and music reviews are so bad as to be borderline comical. (Van Gogh's picture of cats at night is filled with ungodly-emotion, Michelangelo's David is the deification of man in nude, Da Vinci's Christ is feminine, Beethoven cursed God, Disney's Mulan champions transvestitism) on and on and on.
This book should have been 200 pages shorter with all this taken out. He claims Shakespeare is a raging homosexual. Now, I studied a little Shakespeare in a liberal college before I was a Christian. If he had been gay, they would have celebrated it from the rafters, I had never heard this claim. In fact, I've heard many arguments that Shakespeare never even existed. But after a google search, one of his sonnets appears to be affectionate towards a young man. One, in his first batch of 156, appears to be. And Swanson repeats this claim. A lot of his arguments become Straw Man arguments like this. Where he picks one thing an artist did, and then judges their entire life, career, work, worldview, and spiritual heart based on that one thing.
Swanson doesn't really do grace or forgiveness. His is more of a harsh legalism that when it can't find a sin makes one up and inserts it so he can yell at you more. He does the same thing in his speeches. He is consistent on this message that you can never be free from your sin. I once saw him convince a young man that his life was filled with pornography. The young guy had two accountability partners, went to two or three Bible studies, and was looking for another accountability partner.
Nothing is good, nothing is right, nothing brings joy, nothing works. The man is against anything that has been made or thought within the last . . . 200 years. One moment he is talking about the amazing things Christians have invented and created, the next he is cursing how these things are used. Swanson would only be content with us living in the feudal system, on the family farm, sustenance farming, while reading only our Bibles for 7 hours a day, and then flagellating ourselves in unrepentant tears of disgust over our sin. Swanson is clearly confused about the Sovereignty of God. He claims God is sovereign, but then seems to think that man is in control of all this other stuff. Either God is sovereign, or man has control. Man is responsible for their faith and their actions, but God is sovereign over all. The world is exactly where God wants it, you are exactly where God wants you.
He badmouths the US Constitution, doesn't think much of any form of entertainment (phew, don't even go there! He has said in a speech that "entertainment is the Devil's replacement for joy.") At one point he seems to advocate book banning and book burning, and here is my real problem with most of this book.
Swanson is afraid.
Swanson is under the impression that if you read the "pagan authors" you will renounce your faith and become a pagan. He is under the impression that when held up together, the Bible on one side and the pagans on the other, the Bible will not be able to hold its own.
It is a sad way to look at faith. Not based on thinking and rational evidence, not based on what limited reasoning my depraved mind has, not based on evidence, or proper argumentation. Swanson seems to want you to take the Bible completely and totally on blind faith. The entire world of apologetics is based on man's reason, the entire historical record is meaningless, all of Biblical authority boils to singularly accepting the Bible, in it's entirety, on blind faith. While masquerading as intellectual, Swanson's argument is anti-intellectual.
He becomes the stereotypical "evil" pastor from Footloose. Where we have to ban dancing because it is an affront to God. Swanson would have us ban everything that doesn't immediately confirm to what his idea of worshipping God looks like.
For example, he hates The Beatles (to be fair, he hates any music that isn't Bach, but let's focus on The Beatles for now). His argument is that all they produce is screaming noise, a disconnected jangle of sounds and primal shouting, no pagan could ever find unity in a multitude. Now, I repeat, I'm not here to hold up The Beatles as a paradigm of Christian living (don't be absurd), but the problem with The Beatles has very little to do with their noise, and everything to do with their Worldview. One of them was a horrible Communist, one became a Hari Krishna, and one overly romanticized love. Of course they are not Christian. But Swanson is not using an intelligent argument, he is arguing emotionally and subjectively. He doesn't like their music, ergo they must by evil.
Swanson seems to expect non-Christian entities to act like Christians, and then is shocked that they don't. It's almost as if the world and Christ are . . . enemies. Like they shouldn't get along. Like the world was always going to reject Christ. Is Swanson . . . confused by this?
His expectations for the world are absurd. He claims that the Western Church has fallen, but in all fairness, the Western Church was never meant to be an entire continent of people. The real "secret" of the Bible's history is that most people who claim to follow God, in fact, do not. Before Christ is on the cross we see disciples abandon Him because the teaching is too hard. We see Judas betray Him for money. But because the West experience unparalleled sovereign blessings from God because of His good and perfect will and for no more reason than because it pleased Him to do so. Swanson is now under the impression that the west is somehow Christian.
History is the story of different people having the same reactions to Christ. Some will follow and love the Lord, some will be interested and want to learn more, most will not be interested and turn away from Him. To claim that now things are different because it is happening to the country he lives is incredibly shallow.
Swanson kind of becomes the worst part of a "reformed" pastor. He lacks any sense of grace or forgiveness, he removes joy from life, he is legalistic, he is pessimistic, he doesn't really care for evangelism, has no patience for people learning, and is filled with pride. He is out of touch with reality, is not a man of Issachar understanding the times because he has isolated himself from the world. He is not experiencing the real struggle of this western apostasy in his 200+ person, multi-million dollar church (which he claims is small).
Swanson is a chore to read and a chore to get through. It is hopeless lecture, after hopeless lecture. The west has been falling since 1000 AD, the church fell in 1200, the Reformation fell to the Renaissance, the New World fell before the US became a country, the US was never built on Christian values, the rise of Darwin destroyed Christian science, the World Wars revealed the nihilism, the 1960's removed Christ from the public sector. What could possibly make you think someone born after all of it has anything resembling the "real faith" that Swanson wants?
His indictment becomes of the world, which was never meant to be Christian, as opposed to the Church, which has lost its salt, and needs a major call to repentance.
There is nothing said of Mormons, Jehovah's Witness, or other cults. There is nothing said of Pentecostal or Charismatic Churches. The Downgrade Controversy is only briefly mentioned, but honestly the church is fallen by the time Spurgeon comes. D.L. Moody, Billy Graham, even Johnathan Edwards, offer nothing to the church. The only theologian "worth" anything is Augustine.
This isn't a call for Christians to repent and return to Christ, it's a 700 page complaint that the world isn't as good as it was 100 years ago.
None of this should have been news to Swanson. Daniel's vision shows that the world powers get weaker and weaker as history progresses. We go from gold to iron mixed with clay. We are well past that and the nations of the world are weak and ineffective. God is on his throne, and we should have joy that Jesus sits at the right hand of God and advocates for us.
Swanson is right, I am not good enough to enter into the Kingdom of God. Thankfully, I am blessed with a Savior who enters for me and then lifts me up to be with Him. Swanson needs to get past the negativity and find the joy and beauty in the world that God has given us. So what if the romantics were lost and confused, the world is filled with God's beauty and joy, enjoy it.
First, I know Kevin Swanson at least as an acquaintance. I’ve heard him speak, I’ve met him, I’ve talked to him. His devotion to the Lord is remarkable. A man after God’s own heart who every Christian could learn from and imitate as he imitates Christ.
Next, I don’t necessarily disagree with most of his points. Only one point is truly problematic for me, and it happens to be one of his key thesis statements, that is going to be a problem for any book review.
With that being said, here goes my simple attempt to review this book:
For starters, as a brief summary and overview. Mr. Swanson is seeking to draw a continuous line from the first century church to the modern day with a focus on Western Civilization as the Christian faith took hold in the west, and then slowly eroded as time went on. His line is incredibly well researched, well thought out, and well established. He looks at morals, economy, art, music, education, politics, and altruism within the western world.
His overarching idea is that apostasy was a slow but never-ending march starting around the end of the first millennium with the works of Thomas Aquinas and leading us to today. The fall culminates on a micro level within individual countries and expanded to the macro level of the entire western world. The warning signs are almost always the same as the leaders (and/or people) reject the sovereignty of God and replace the Scriptures with human reasoning. The outward expression of this is always the acceptance of homosexuality and abortion. The way to combat this is to remove pagan literature and focus solely on the Word of God.
Kevin Swanson does much of this incredibly well. Again, I have a hard time saying I would disagree with many of his overarching ideas. You can see the march of humanism, and you can see where it has failed and left death and destruction in its wake. You can see how the US is caught in this now and has been collapsing for some time.
His accounts are incredibly well researched, his points are logical, and his conclusion is valid. That being said, this book is not without some pretty glaring issues.
Okay, where do we start with this . . . this is going to be like a plate of spaghetti, everything kind of jumbled and messed up.
Swanson’s conclusion is valid, but how he gets there is questionable. I have never seen someone so anti-Thomas Aquinas. I’m not going to defend the man, but I’ve also never seen anyone explain Aquinas’s conclusion like Swanson does. Swanson claims Aquinas’s conclusion was two forms of knowledge, secular and spiritual. I’ve always heard it described that Aquinas said there was more knowledge to be learned than was just in the Bible. I’ve always heard it as a pro-intellectual, pro-scientific, Christianity. “All truth is God’s truth,” (which I thought was attributed to Aquinas) was the go-ahead for Christians to study their world and not rely on a “blind faith” that rejects anything not explicitly in the Bible. This paved the way for scientific advancement because Christians didn’t need to be afraid of discovering something that would “disprove” their Bibles. If a Muslim or a Buddhist discovered something, that doesn’t make their worldview right, it means they happened to stumble upon something that was accurate, be it in the world of the secular (i.e. gravity, changing a tire, inventing eyeglasses), or the world of the spiritual (i.e. the golden rule, or advocating monogamy to protest abortion). The truth that God is truth, is what separates us from the Muslims and Buddhists because they must by very careful about what they discover. C.S. Lewis said, “an atheist can never be too careful about their reading.”
If we accept Swanson’s attack on Aquinas, again I’m not here to defend the man, then the Christian west has been fallen(ing) longer than it existed, and what proof does he have that the true Bible or faith exists? There is hardly a beginning here to mourn, it was over before it even got started, before the Catholic Church even went weird (circa 1200).
Swanson is an historian. His history is second to none. It is remarkable. He is not an art critic, a music critic, a politician, or an economist. Most of those chapters are pretty hard to get through. He tends to speak out of both sides of his mouth (one minute radios are a gift from God, discovered and invented by God fearing Christians, the next they are not playing enough classical music.) His economics chapter is repeated talking points that either he can't or doesn't explain well. His literature, art, and music reviews are so bad as to be borderline comical. (Van Gogh's picture of cats at night is filled with ungodly-emotion, Michelangelo's David is the deification of man in nude, Da Vinci's Christ is feminine, Beethoven cursed God, Disney's Mulan champions transvestitism) on and on and on.
This book should have been 200 pages shorter with all this taken out. He claims Shakespeare is a raging homosexual. Now, I studied a little Shakespeare in a liberal college before I was a Christian. If he had been gay, they would have celebrated it from the rafters, I had never heard this claim. In fact, I've heard many arguments that Shakespeare never even existed. But after a google search, one of his sonnets appears to be affectionate towards a young man. One, in his first batch of 156, appears to be. And Swanson repeats this claim. A lot of his arguments become Straw Man arguments like this. Where he picks one thing an artist did, and then judges their entire life, career, work, worldview, and spiritual heart based on that one thing.
Swanson doesn't really do grace or forgiveness. His is more of a harsh legalism that when it can't find a sin makes one up and inserts it so he can yell at you more. He does the same thing in his speeches. He is consistent on this message that you can never be free from your sin. I once saw him convince a young man that his life was filled with pornography. The young guy had two accountability partners, went to two or three Bible studies, and was looking for another accountability partner.
Nothing is good, nothing is right, nothing brings joy, nothing works. The man is against anything that has been made or thought within the last . . . 200 years. One moment he is talking about the amazing things Christians have invented and created, the next he is cursing how these things are used. Swanson would only be content with us living in the feudal system, on the family farm, sustenance farming, while reading only our Bibles for 7 hours a day, and then flagellating ourselves in unrepentant tears of disgust over our sin. Swanson is clearly confused about the Sovereignty of God. He claims God is sovereign, but then seems to think that man is in control of all this other stuff. Either God is sovereign, or man has control. Man is responsible for their faith and their actions, but God is sovereign over all. The world is exactly where God wants it, you are exactly where God wants you.
He badmouths the US Constitution, doesn't think much of any form of entertainment (phew, don't even go there! He has said in a speech that "entertainment is the Devil's replacement for joy.") At one point he seems to advocate book banning and book burning, and here is my real problem with most of this book.
Swanson is afraid.
Swanson is under the impression that if you read the "pagan authors" you will renounce your faith and become a pagan. He is under the impression that when held up together, the Bible on one side and the pagans on the other, the Bible will not be able to hold its own.
It is a sad way to look at faith. Not based on thinking and rational evidence, not based on what limited reasoning my depraved mind has, not based on evidence, or proper argumentation. Swanson seems to want you to take the Bible completely and totally on blind faith. The entire world of apologetics is based on man's reason, the entire historical record is meaningless, all of Biblical authority boils to singularly accepting the Bible, in it's entirety, on blind faith. While masquerading as intellectual, Swanson's argument is anti-intellectual.
He becomes the stereotypical "evil" pastor from Footloose. Where we have to ban dancing because it is an affront to God. Swanson would have us ban everything that doesn't immediately confirm to what his idea of worshipping God looks like.
For example, he hates The Beatles (to be fair, he hates any music that isn't Bach, but let's focus on The Beatles for now). His argument is that all they produce is screaming noise, a disconnected jangle of sounds and primal shouting, no pagan could ever find unity in a multitude. Now, I repeat, I'm not here to hold up The Beatles as a paradigm of Christian living (don't be absurd), but the problem with The Beatles has very little to do with their noise, and everything to do with their Worldview. One of them was a horrible Communist, one became a Hari Krishna, and one overly romanticized love. Of course they are not Christian. But Swanson is not using an intelligent argument, he is arguing emotionally and subjectively. He doesn't like their music, ergo they must by evil.
Swanson seems to expect non-Christian entities to act like Christians, and then is shocked that they don't. It's almost as if the world and Christ are . . . enemies. Like they shouldn't get along. Like the world was always going to reject Christ. Is Swanson . . . confused by this?
His expectations for the world are absurd. He claims that the Western Church has fallen, but in all fairness, the Western Church was never meant to be an entire continent of people. The real "secret" of the Bible's history is that most people who claim to follow God, in fact, do not. Before Christ is on the cross we see disciples abandon Him because the teaching is too hard. We see Judas betray Him for money. But because the West experience unparalleled sovereign blessings from God because of His good and perfect will and for no more reason than because it pleased Him to do so. Swanson is now under the impression that the west is somehow Christian.
History is the story of different people having the same reactions to Christ. Some will follow and love the Lord, some will be interested and want to learn more, most will not be interested and turn away from Him. To claim that now things are different because it is happening to the country he lives is incredibly shallow.
Swanson kind of becomes the worst part of a "reformed" pastor. He lacks any sense of grace or forgiveness, he removes joy from life, he is legalistic, he is pessimistic, he doesn't really care for evangelism, has no patience for people learning, and is filled with pride. He is out of touch with reality, is not a man of Issachar understanding the times because he has isolated himself from the world. He is not experiencing the real struggle of this western apostasy in his 200+ person, multi-million dollar church (which he claims is small).
Swanson is a chore to read and a chore to get through. It is hopeless lecture, after hopeless lecture. The west has been falling since 1000 AD, the church fell in 1200, the Reformation fell to the Renaissance, the New World fell before the US became a country, the US was never built on Christian values, the rise of Darwin destroyed Christian science, the World Wars revealed the nihilism, the 1960's removed Christ from the public sector. What could possibly make you think someone born after all of it has anything resembling the "real faith" that Swanson wants?
His indictment becomes of the world, which was never meant to be Christian, as opposed to the Church, which has lost its salt, and needs a major call to repentance.
There is nothing said of Mormons, Jehovah's Witness, or other cults. There is nothing said of Pentecostal or Charismatic Churches. The Downgrade Controversy is only briefly mentioned, but honestly the church is fallen by the time Spurgeon comes. D.L. Moody, Billy Graham, even Johnathan Edwards, offer nothing to the church. The only theologian "worth" anything is Augustine.
This isn't a call for Christians to repent and return to Christ, it's a 700 page complaint that the world isn't as good as it was 100 years ago.
None of this should have been news to Swanson. Daniel's vision shows that the world powers get weaker and weaker as history progresses. We go from gold to iron mixed with clay. We are well past that and the nations of the world are weak and ineffective. God is on his throne, and we should have joy that Jesus sits at the right hand of God and advocates for us.
Swanson is right, I am not good enough to enter into the Kingdom of God. Thankfully, I am blessed with a Savior who enters for me and then lifts me up to be with Him. Swanson needs to get past the negativity and find the joy and beauty in the world that God has given us. So what if the romantics were lost and confused, the world is filled with God's beauty and joy, enjoy it.
November 2, 2024
I found myself truly ambivalent about this book, vacillating between enjoyment and frustration.
On the one hand, Swanson's incisive critiques of the church and culture throughout the last 1500 years offer incredible moments of teaching that invite severe self-reflection, urging the reader into a more authentic faith, and re-introducing to us the fact that it is God's providence that upholds all, not the achievements of man. His critiques on the role of humanism in the decline of Western culture are constant, impactful, and bolstered by the fact that we hear such arguments so rarely, because humanism has won in our culture.
On the other hand, the book is something of a muddled mess. The reader often doesn't know exactly what the thrust of Swanson's argument in each section will be until the end of that section or chapter, and in some cases never finds out at all. While the chapters all address larger ideas, the functional writing leaves the reader without a road map, without thesis, and sometimes without context. It was only through sheer force of will that I pushed myself through these sections, and while I did generally find them rewarding, reading them was a chore.
These shortcomings are only made up for the fact that Swanson's exhortations really are touching in many parts of the book. The tragedy of the decline of the church is on full display, and it leads one to grief and a desire for corporate repentance.
Overall, this is probably a book best left to those who are either already hardcore Reformed in their theology, or who enjoy reading alien viewpoints. The average reader, and even the average Christian, is going to find themselves at odds with Swanson and his view on the reasons for the decline of the West. Nevertheless, as someone who is both of the aforementioned things, I found this to be an enjoyable book that caused me to take inventory of my life, my decisions, and the seriousness of my faith.
On the one hand, Swanson's incisive critiques of the church and culture throughout the last 1500 years offer incredible moments of teaching that invite severe self-reflection, urging the reader into a more authentic faith, and re-introducing to us the fact that it is God's providence that upholds all, not the achievements of man. His critiques on the role of humanism in the decline of Western culture are constant, impactful, and bolstered by the fact that we hear such arguments so rarely, because humanism has won in our culture.
On the other hand, the book is something of a muddled mess. The reader often doesn't know exactly what the thrust of Swanson's argument in each section will be until the end of that section or chapter, and in some cases never finds out at all. While the chapters all address larger ideas, the functional writing leaves the reader without a road map, without thesis, and sometimes without context. It was only through sheer force of will that I pushed myself through these sections, and while I did generally find them rewarding, reading them was a chore.
These shortcomings are only made up for the fact that Swanson's exhortations really are touching in many parts of the book. The tragedy of the decline of the church is on full display, and it leads one to grief and a desire for corporate repentance.
Overall, this is probably a book best left to those who are either already hardcore Reformed in their theology, or who enjoy reading alien viewpoints. The average reader, and even the average Christian, is going to find themselves at odds with Swanson and his view on the reasons for the decline of the West. Nevertheless, as someone who is both of the aforementioned things, I found this to be an enjoyable book that caused me to take inventory of my life, my decisions, and the seriousness of my faith.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews