In this address titled The French Revolution and After, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones traces the philosophical and spiritual roots of modern revolution from the Enlightenment thinkers — Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot — through Hegel and Marx, and into the theological chaos of liberation theology in the twentieth century. His thesis is precise and unsparing: the French Revolution was not merely a political convulsion but the emergence of a new religion — the systematic exaltation of human reason over divine revelation, the sovereign self over the sovereign God. Where earlier English and American upheavals retained, however imperfectly, some residual acknowledgment of God, 1789 marked a decisive rupture: man enthroned, revelation discarded, and the state remade on purely humanistic foundations.<br><br>Yet Dr. Lloyd-Jones does not leave his hearers in the rubble of historical analysis. He turns, with the gravity of a physician diagnosing a mortal condition, to the question that matters most: what is the Christian to do? He insists that the church must neither collude with the establishment as a perennial defender of the status quo, nor be swept away by the enthusiasm of revolutionary reform. The Christian's citizenship is in heaven. The world cannot be reformed by legislation or revolution; men must be born again. The preacher's supreme task in a revolutionary age is not political commentary but earnest proclamation of the gospel — warning, pleading, urging men and women to be ready for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. History is not spiraling toward a human utopia; it is moving, under God's sovereign hand, toward one far-off divine event.
