David Wells has an insightful book Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World. The book deals with hyperconsumerism and functional nihilism among other things and is well worth the read. In a chapter entitled Miracles of Modern Splendor, Wells sets forth an interesting proposition:

Years ago, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that we are “somewhat embarrassed by the fact that we are the first culture which is in danger of being subordinated to its economy. We have to live as luxuriously as possible in order to keep our productive enterprise from stalling.” Today, we are not embarrassed at all. It is exactly what we want and what, we have come to think, we need. This kind of avid consumerism, Christopher Lasch observes, “promotes an ethic of hedonism… and thus undermines the ‘traditional values’ of thrift and self-denial.” This never-ending transformation of luxuries into necessities, the experience of comfort only fueling the desire for even more comfort, “appeared to give the Anglo-American idea of progress a solid foundation that could not be shaken by subsequent events,” he remarks, “not even by the global wars that broke out in the twentieth century.”¹

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1. Wells, David F., Above All Earthly Pow’rs (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 41.↩

In his book God is the Gospel John Piper makes the point that Christians can tend to miss the main point of the gospel by focusing on its peripheral aspects instead of its supreme end - the glory of Christ. Imagine a jeweler who is an expert in diamonds. It is certainly possible for a jeweler to become so enamored with the peripheral aspects of a diamond and yet miss the diamond’s overall glory. The jeweler can appreciate the diamond’s cut, its magnificent clarity, and its color all the while forgetting to see that those aspects contribute to the overall glory of the object. If the jeweler appreciates each characteristic in isolation without being able to appreciate the fact that the diamond in its fullness is a wonderful thing as it shines in the light, he has missed the point. However, when understood rightly, each individual characteristic of the diamond contributes to its overall glory. As the jeweler comes to understand each aspect of the diamond more fully, his appreciation of the diamond’s glory in its fullness is that much more magnified.
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