God’s Spies

It’s been two thousand years (or very near it) since the final words of the New Testament were penned. Two millennia since the canon was closed, since the final inspired words of God were given to men. But what has happened in the meantime? Has God stopped speaking to and through the words of men? Have the last of God’s prophets walked the earth? Are the last messengers of the wisdom of God gone and buried in forgotten tombs?

Quite frankly, I don’t think so.

Malcolm Muggeridge spoke to this point beautifully in the collection of essays (which were really transcriptions of television specials he had written) he called A Third Testament. Muggeridge did not believe that the work of God had ended with the closing of scriptures, but that He had proceeded to send spies into the world; spies whose words, if not the living breathing Word of God Himself, offered man a taste of the divine. “In the case of the Old Testament Jews,” Muggeridge wrote, “it was the prophets who thus called them back to God - and when were there more powerful and poetic voices than theirs? Then came the New Testament, which is concerned with how God, through the Incarnation, became His own prophet. Nor was even that the end of the prophets and testaments. Between the fantasies of the ego and the truth of love, between the darkness of the will and the light of the imagination, there will always be the need for a bridge and a prophetic voice calling on us to cross it.”

Muggeridge focused on seven figures who had shaped his own understanding of God; men who, though not producing scripture per se, “had a special role in common, which was none other than to relate their time to eternity. This has to be done every so often; otherwise, when the lure of self-sufficiency proves too strong, or despair too overwhelming, we forget that men need to be called back to God to rediscover humility and with it, hope.”

Muggeridge’s list of “Third Testament” prophets (by no means complete) consisted of Augustine of Hippo, Blaise Pascal, William Blake, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Soren Kierkegaard, and Dietrich Bonheoffer. Muggeridge called them ‘God’s spies’, for there was something secretive and subversive, something cloak-and-dagger, about their methods. Whether it was Pascal, who gained great fame as an eminent scientist before pursuing his far greater love of Christian apology; Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who secreted spiritual truths into their beloved writings, which kept spirituality alive in Russia, even as Bibles were being banned; Kierkegaard, who sought to reform the church under the guise of pure philosophy; or Bonheoffer, who quite literally carried the word of God into the heart of the enemy camp, accepting death at the hand of the Nazis as consequence for his subterfuge.

If I was to make my own list, what would it look like? Which voices has God used most readily to draw me closer to eternity; to give me hope and understanding, to supplement and enhancing His living word?

It is a fair question—and an important question—though it seemed overwhelming at first. There is really no shortage of clear and compelling Christian writers in the world, many of whom have influenced my thinking very directly. But, as I have considered the question, a few obvious suspects have stood out. One need only look at the things I have written and notice that there are some voices that are quoted far more often than others, evidence that their ideas and their ways of putting things have somehow resonated within me.

As I have read Muggeridge’s portraits of those whose words have inspired him, I was (as was certainly his purpose) moved to discover them for myself. My reasons here are really the same—I hope to encourage others to seek these men out and to find inspiration from them first-hand, rather than as a byproduct of the influence they have had on me. These men are far more than the quotes I have stolen from them, their ideas are far deeper than their witticisms (with the possible exception of G.K. Chesterton, whose ideas may be exactly as deep as his witticisms, but only because his witticisms are unusually deep); but it is the quality of their writing as much as the quality of their thoughts that has allowed them to stand above others in my mind.

It should be no surprise that I should begin my list with Muggeridge himself, who would never have been so vain as to include himself on his own list of modern day prophets. Indeed, I would consider him perhaps the most influential on my notions of apologetics, though he would have scoffed at the notion of being called an apologist, just as he would have laughed at the idea that he was a theologian. The glorious truth of Malcolm Muggeridge was that he was honest about the endless troubles of his own life. When, very late in life, he finally found his way to Christianity, he realized that, in his unflinching honesty, he had really been writing about God all along, without knowing. One may look at Muggeridge’s words long before he accepted the truth of Christianity and discover that, miraculously, the evidence for God is everywhere.

G.K. Chesterton, on the other hand, was significantly more self-aware of his own purposes and methods. Where Muggeridge wrote at length of his own intimate experiences in search of God, Chesterton’s method forged an endless broadening of ideas that had once been seen as narrow. He delved at length into fiction and fantasy—in fact, even his most serious works are not immune to grand flights of fancy. Where Muggeridge saw the entirety of his life as worthless, wasted effort, for he had, for too long, been searching for fulfillment outside of God, Chesterton had the uncanny ability to discover God even in the most trivial things. Muggeridge’s apologetic is practical, Chesterton’s was almost endlessly ethereal. But though they may be (in some respects) opposites, they are certainly not opposed; they are, in fact, almost perfectly complementary.

C.S. Lewis, certainly the most popular name on my list, forged path somewhere in between those of Muggeridge and Chesterton. Like Muggeridge, much of his greatest explanations of faith come from telling his own story.  Both men came to faith only after a lifetime fleeing, as Francis Thompson described, from the Hound of Heaven. Neither men were seeking God—both did everything in their power to escape Him. And yet both were found. However, like Chesterton, Lewis also had a flare for the fantastic, which he thought complemented the down-to-earth. Lewis’ writing, like Chesterton’s, also conveys a striking gift for turning a phrase; producing streams of endlessly quotable (and supremely logical) observations on man and his need for God.

Soren Kierkegaard is the one name in which my brief list overlaps with Muggeridge’s, but I simply couldn’t help it. Kierkegaard is, I think, a true outlier on this list for many reasons. Kierkegaard was a strange, peculiar character, whose personal qualities may be seen as either amusing or frightening. Though he is popularly considered a Christian existentialist, for all practical purposes he was more of a Christian eccentric. Among the men I have mentioned, he is certainly the most purely philosophical, and while much of his writing is, as a result, intimidatingly dense, he benefited from strange and exciting moments of perfectly clarity. Kierkegaard stood alone among his fellow philosophers in that he was constantly pitting Christianity against philosophy, only to discover that it was Christianity that always survived the encounter. Like Muggeridge, Chesterton and Lewis, Kierkegaard fought, not just for Christian ideas, but for real Christian living, which set all of them apart from mere theologians of philosophers.

There are others, of course. “...we may be sure,” Muggeridge concluded, “that other spies have been briefed and posted. It would be foolish even to speculate on their identity and whereabouts. One thing is certain, though: whoever and wherever they may be, great services will be required of them and great dangers encompass them.” Still speaking and writing today, and still inspiring believers and stupefying skeptics, there is Ravi Zacharias, William Lane Craig, Hugh Ross, Lee Strobel, John Piper, and countless others who continue to bring the freedom to the gospel to the minds of the world, whether by means as traditional as a sermon on Sunday or through a scientific lecture or public debate. But in the posts to come I will focus, not on the voices of today, but on these four men of the past 150 years, whose lives are absolutely inseparable from their work; whose writings deserve to be added to the pantheon of modern day prophecy.

I will begin, in the post to follow, with Muggeridge, a metaphorical spy of God in a spiritual battle, and a very literal spy of the British Empire in the midst of war.