by Bill Nugent
Article #266
In 1986 I had the pleasure of touring Ernest Hemingway’s Key West, Florida home. It was a gorgeous home just across the street from a lighthouse. I like old houses and this one was restored to perfection and was filled with Hemingway memorabilia.
Being a writer, I think of Hemingway often. He’s perhaps America’s most famous writer and his name itself has become part of our vocabulary. A hack writer is scolded: “You’re no Hemingway!” A young writer is encouraged to become a “future Hemingway.”
To say Hemingway was a renaissance man with a thirst for adventure is to put it mildly. In 1918, just out of high school and working as a reporter in Kansas City, he signed up to be an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War One. He was seriously wounded by mortar fire. Shortly after his return from the war, he married and took his new wife to Paris.
Mentored by Famous Authors
In Paris he hooked up with the “lost generation” of American and British expatriate writers and artists. He worked with or was mentored by authors such as Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos and the extremely influential Irish author, James Joyce.
Still in his twenties, he published the famous novel, The Sun Also Rises, which is about a group of American and British expatriates who travel to Spain to watch bullfights. It has never been out of print since it was published in 1926 and has been translated into more languages than probably any other American novel. Seems like a trivial story; people travelling to watch bullfights, yet it’s one of America’s most famous novels.
He relocated to the U.S. in Key West in the late 1920s but didn’t stay in one place very long. His adventures continued with his travels to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War.
He was an avid sport fisherman (Marlin) and went on several African safaris. He was involved in two plane crashes in the 1950s that left him in severe pain. In the late 1950s Playboy magazine published a glowing piece about Hemingway as a man who mastered life and was the epitome of a worldly life well lived.
Man of the Brave New World
Hemingway was a product of his time. His boyhood was in the optimistic Progressive Era of American politics in which the Republican party was the liberal party of the time. America was bringing about reforms like establishing the Food and Drug Administration and the US National Park system under Theodore Roosevelt, and revolutionizing education.
Darwinian evolution was brought into science curriculum in the high schools during this time despite vigorous opposition. Darwinism became the anti-religious backdrop of the new optimism of the secular intellectuals who rejected God and the afterlife. Science, medicine and engineering were progressing to the point where, in their view, man would conquer nature and bring about a brave new world of shared prosperity.
Hemingway, the sensitive, deep, articulate man was a searcher for meaning and purpose in a secular faith that offered no promise of life after death. He crammed every shred of adventure he could into his fleeting years.
The New Secular Faith
The secular materialistic religion, of which evolution is the origins myth, claims that there is no ultimate future for any person. Secularism has abolished the future. That may sound like a bold, rather cynical claim but it’s a fair representation of secular doctrine.
Secular materialism claims that we evolved from animals and the lights go out at death. All of the learning, personal growth, love, relationships and experience of each person ceases at death. It’s a total loss of hope. In the secular view, no person has a future existence in either heaven or hell.
Secularism expresses its contempt for the afterlife. The Humanist Manifesto II (1973), in its article two, lays out the secular humanist rejection of belief in life after death. Hemingway was an convert to secularism and it led him to despair.
The secularism that dogged Hemingway has since become the overwhelming philosophical colossus of our time. It’s called Postmodernism. Hemingway was quoted as saying “There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.” That’s a strange statement which claims all things are true. It sounds broad minded but it shuts down the search for truth and meaning in life. That clearly expresses postmodernism with its denial of absolute truth.
Absolute Truth
The Christian concept of absolute truth is that the truth about humanity’s purpose and morals is given by divine revelation and is recorded in the Bible. Absolute truth is laws or morals that apply to all people in all cultures at all times. The Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus are examples of absolute truth.
Secular modernists reject the Bible but would claim that certain teachings of classical and Enlightenment philosophers could be considered absolute truth.
Postmodernists, however, reject any objective, absolute truth or moral standard. If all things are true as Hemingway claimed, could we say that even murder is truly a permissible thing? Abortion, which is murder of the preborn, was illegal during Hemingway’s time but the early proponents of abortion were the postmodernists of Hemingway’s generation.
Turning the Clock Back
Those who stand for traditional Christian values are often accused of trying to turn the clock back to the 1950s or some other era of American “good old days.” The secular progressives, however, are the real clock spinners.
The radical secularists want to remove all restraint and take us back to pre-Christian Europe. Aborting your young in the womb is very similar to the ancient Roman custom of infanticide of unwanted babies. The political move to legalize gay marriage evokes comparisons to the rampant, open homosexuality of ancient Greece and Sodom.
Hemingway was a consummate searcher for philosophical meaning yet he embraced the superficial wild things of life. It’s been said that searching for meaning apart from God is like a blind man in a black closet, at midnight, searching for a black cat that isn’t even there!
His first novel, The Sun also Rises, is also his most famous. The title was taken from the Bible, from the book of Ecclesiastes 1:5. Ecclesiastes is a kind of notebook of king Solomon of ancient Israel. In this book Solomon meanders through worldly philosophies and fleshly pleasures.
Solomon came to the conclusion that when all has been heard, serving God should be one’s purpose. “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth” (Eccl. 12:1). I wish Ernest Hemingway had also come to that conclusion.
Hemingway was a lover of the American West. He and his family moved to Ketchum Idaho in 1959. By that time he was in severe mental depression. His end was in a shotgun suicide in 1961.
Lessons From Hemingway
What can be learned from the life of Ernest Hemingway? I pity Hemingway but he does teach us many things. He teaches us that worldly adventure is, in the end, unfulfilling. As a hero of the new American religion of secularism he shows the shallowness and inconsistency of the secular faith.
The notion that we are descendants of apes and our end is oblivion rings so tragically hollow. The Bible is confirmed to be God’s word by the Bible’s many fulfilled prophecies and by the miracles that occur in answer to prayer. Secularism has no miracles and offers only despair. That’s the tragic lesson of Ernest Hemingway.
Jesus Christ came in fulfillment of over 300 Old Testament prophecies. No other figure in all of world history can make this claim! The prophecies foretold that Jesus would die for our sins. This means that when He suffered and died, Christ took the penalty of our sins upon Himself.
“He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities . . . All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:5-6, written 700 years before the birth of Christ).
Christ rose from the dead to offer forgiveness to all who call upon Him in repentance. I invite you to turn to Christ today to receive forgiveness of sins.
Steps to salvation:
Jesus said “Ye must be born again” (John 3:7).
Prayer to receive salvation:
“Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:13).
To receive the salvation that Jesus purchased for us at the terrible cost of His suffering and death on our behalf I invite you to pray this simple prayer:
“Dear heavenly Father, I thank you for sending Jesus, the promised Messiah, to die for my sins. I admit that I am a sinner. I repent of my sins and I ask for your forgiveness on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I ask you to fill me with your Holy Spirit to empower me to serve you under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, Amen.”
If you prayed this prayer in the humble sincerity of your heart then you have received everlasting life, which includes power to live right in this life and entrance into heaven in the afterlife!
Postmodernism arose after World War II as a reaction to the perceived failings of modernism, whose radical artistic projects had come to be associated with totalitarianism
Hel?o there! This blog post couldn’t be written much better!
Looking through this post reminds me of my previous roommate!
He al?ays kept preaching about this. I will forward this article to him.
Fai?ly certain he’s going to have ? very goo? read.
I appreci?te y?u for sharing!