SHOCKED
INTO BELIEF

Topics: Conversion; Evil; God’s Holiness; Hatred; Humanism; Racism; Sin

References: Proverbs 14:12; Romans 3:9–26

Many Germans who had immigrated to the United States were sitting in a theater when the movie Psyche was shown. The propaganda movie, produced by Hitler’s Third Reich in 1940, followed the invasion and Blitzkrieg through Poland. Whenever a Polish person appeared on the screen, people in the audience would scream, “Kill him! Kill him!” in a frenzied commitment to the destruction of Germany’s enemies.

W. H. Auden, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet, playwright, and literary critic, was so shocked that he walked out of the theater. He later said one question ran through his mind: “What response can my enlightened, humanistic tradition give to this evil, to those who cry out for the blood of innocent victims?” He began to sense that the only answer to evil was not in humanism, but in God and the revelation of God in the Bible.

He was convicted of God’s holiness and his own sinfulness. In 1940 he became a Christian.

—John Yenchko, “Hell,” Journal of Biblical Counseling (Fall 2000)