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.

An Empire of Absolutes

The Virtues of Imperialism, pt. 2

I wrote a short story once (though I am unable now to find any evidence of its existence among my files--I fear that it has been lost forever) about privileged man from the first-world who decided that he would use his riches to travel the world. His purpose was not, as one might expect, to sight-see--he would have absolutely despised such practices. Instead, he would go from place to place and apologize for the imperialists who would dare tell others how to live their lives; he would extol the virtues of the world's many, diverse cultures. He thus travels to China to celebrate Communism, to India to celebrate the caste system, to Iran to celebrate radical Islam. Everywhere he goes he encourages all who will listen to continue pursuing what they perceive to be true, never letting any evil imperialist try to tell them otherwise. Finally, he travels to a forgotten tribe in some remote jungle to apologize for the missionaries who dared try and tell them that there was something wrong with the way they had chosen to live. The story ends, naturally, with this anti-imperialist being eaten by cannibals.

The story, needless to say, is a parable. The protagonist is a caricature of every moral-relativist and anti-imperialist to ever walk the earth. It may be founded on hyperbole, but there is no doubt in my mind that it is far too close to the truth for comfort. We need merely open our eyes to see this sort of thing. There is no single idea our present philosophers delight in more than moral relativism--no culture is better than another; no thought is superior to another; no... it is pointless to point out to such individuals that the very concept of moral relativism fails the fundamental test of self-sufficiency.  Any thinking individual ought to see clearly that the idea has no grounding in reality... the greatest failure of my character was that he thought nothing worth caring for; or, worse, he thought everything worth caring for equally.

It is thought by some that empires arise because one desires to destroy others, but empires are really never about others. Even history’s great empires—the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Mongols, the British—were not empires because of the world, for empires exist for themselves. An imperialist does necessarily need to see others destroyed; it needs to see itself rise. As G.K. Chesterton observed, “A true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

This love, this belief, is the hidden sanity of the imperialist; and the lack thereof the hidden madness of the postmodernist. It is a beautiful thing to fight for what one believes! Unfortunately, this can only mean that our world today is filled with a growing and dangerous sort of irrational madness. Far too many steps have been taken (often by those who know no better) to stifle this bit of humanity in what amounts to a particularly gruesome form of self-abuse. The greatest virtue has become to 'live and let live,' even if this living amounts to a sort of living hell; the greatest vice becomes to persuade another to abandon the fortresses of their own kingdoms. To speak of anything as an absolute is anathema to this sort of insanity. 

Even many Christians neglect this fundamental truth: to forego the commandment of Christ to conquer—to refuse to go into the world and to make disciples—is an act of hate. Too many Christians have too much in common with those deranged churches that preach unity over doctrine; peace over truth. There may be unity in Unitarianism; but there is also a willingness to believe a lie (or many lies, as the case may be) for the sake of this unity.

There are few things sadder than those who oppose the very notion of imperialism upon the premise that it is wrong for one man to subject another to his philosophy or his politics. Make no mistake: I find it perfectly commendable when one chooses to stand fast in opposition to the expansion of an empire—no matter what form that Empire may take—but only when he who opposes is part of yet another Empire; one he believes to be superior. When one Empire is thrust against another, when swords and ideas clash, one feels the shivers of great and powerful things afoot. There is found the beautiful conflict of religious ideas and political philosophies that can only strengthen the very power of man to think and to feel.

Some of our world's Empires may have been right and even more were almost certainly wrong, but both good and evil are preferable to one who fails to recognize the difference between the two. There is perhaps no more fitting (and no more pitiful) representative of our present age than such a man. This is the man who protests against the rich man simply because he has had the audacity to become rich. And perhaps he is right—perhaps the rich man is rich only because of his greed; perhaps he has lied and cheated his way to riches. But can't we see that such an evil can only be opposed by an equal or greater good? Evil will not be moved by idle sign-holders or pitiful hunger strikes. Only the great and unstoppable force of the Sermon on the Mount (one of the great stump speeches given at the foundation of the world's greatest Empire) will speak to the heart of the evil. The rich man may hold no fear of the long-haired heathen on the sidewalk, but he will surely be stricken with deadly fear upon the conviction of the scorching words of Christ against the evils of greed and idolatry; he will be unable to provide an answer when how he expects to escape from the damnation of hellfire. 

Make no mistake about it, the call to bring to fruition a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth—not by men but for men—is the call to raise up an empire of good that is powerful enough to topple all evil. We do not point in admiration to the early martyrs because of their passivity in the moment of death, but because of their outspoken ferocity against the empires that opposed their God. There is nothing passive about the Kingdom of God; it exists only so that the world might be overtaken by it. Though the empires of this little planet may topple, and though the pangs of childbirth from which the world continually suffers may inflict themselves upon every institution and edifice (including Christendom itself), there is the hope in knowing that the Christian empire, properly wielded, is destined to overcome. But it must be held to as one holding onto the final rung of a ladder leading to freedom; as one holds a holy book to their chest in the moment of death as if it were a beloved child. Above all, it must be believed in and it must be allowed the freedom to spread and to conquer the nations and to topple the pitiful attempts of man.

“Let us then as Christians rejoice,” Malcolm Muggeridge reminds us, “that we see around us on every hand the decay of the institutions and instruments of power, see intimations of empires falling to pieces, money in total disarray, dictators and parliamentarians alike nonplussed by the confusion and conflicts which encompass them. For it is precisely when every earthly hope has been explored and found wanting, when every possibility of help from earthly sources has been sought and is not forthcoming, when every recourse this world offers, moral as well as material, has been explored to no effect, when in the shivering cold the last faggot has been thrown on the fire and in the gathering darkness every glimmer of light has finally flickered out, it’s then that Christ’s hand reaches out sure and firm. Then Christ’s words bring their inexpressible comfort, then his light shines brightest, abolishing the darkness forever. So, finding in everything only deception and nothingness, the soul is constrained to have recourse to God himself and to rest content with him.”

The Kingdom of God

(The following is intended as a companion to my first post. Together they form a sort of introduction. If you have not read The Modern Mind, I recommend doing so first)

Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:

Rise, clasp My hand, and come!

Halts by me that footfall:

Is my gloom, after all,

Shade of His hand, oustretched caressingly?

‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He Whom thou seekest!

Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest me.’

                                                -Francis Thompson

Though I wrote condescendingly, and perhaps somewhat bitterly, of the Modern Mind, and though it may come across that I have somewhat fallen into a spirit of pessimism toward my fellow man, I intend this as a sort of other hand. On the one hand, The Modern Mind has been a destructive, even paralyzing force in every age in which it has arisen. On the other hand, the Kingdom of God is the perfect antidote to this destruction, and it is a relevant topic in any and every age.

I do not intend to write only in the negative. Though it is easy to wax on about the reasons a person might find for despair, at some point even the most ardent cynic becomes disingenuous in his criticisms of society. One must try very hard to be an absolute pessimist; and it is all the more difficult when discussing a topic of such joy as The Kingdom of God—a topic that really ought to be returned to more often in Christian Literature, for here is the point where the apologist may be transformed into a poet. It is a point in which a man used to playing the defendant is transformed into a man who is no longer offering excuses and alibis, but is instead offering a perfect, beautiful vision of the freedom and joy available to every man.  

While discussing the Modern Mind in the future I may spend time defending what others view as the weaknesses of the faith, but this is not my ideal; the ideal is to turn every topic to this beautiful, perfect vision, for in discussing the Kingdom of God one is inevitably extolling the greatest strengths of Christianity. And anyone who has tasted that glorious sweetness will readily assert that, in light of its strengths, the apparent weaknesses of the Christian sect grow almost invisible.

The thing that is most often forgotten about The Kingdom of God is that it is not just something to look forward to. It is not merely a fanciful way of saying “Heaven.” It is not merely a vision of a thing that is to come; it is, in a sense that can be difficult to understand by those who are unaware, very much a present reality. It is a both something to be fervently sought and yet something already obtainable. It is already and it is not yet.

That, in some respects, this long-awaited Kingdom is already available to us becomes particularly important when observed in light of man’s persistent attempts to dispense with God and to build such a kingdom for himself. The story of humanity since the time of Christ is the story of a people with no knowledge of architecture attempting, again and again, to construct a tower reaching into the heavens. Their wasted effort is especially tragic, of course, because it is being constructed directly beside a tower already completed. Man’s tower is a crippled, reeling edifice of mud and straw, unable to support its own weight; a poor, pathetic imitation of the perfect tower. The building of man either grows too tall and collapses under its own weight, or it is destroyed by other men, who believe their own blueprints to be superior. Either way, the building is continually toppled and almost without hesitation, the work is begun again, as if an important lesson has been learned.

Throughout these centuries of futility, the tower of God’s Kingdom has stood, entirely unaffected by the tragicomedy in the adjacent lot. The tower of the Kingdom of God is unshakable, built of hardened steel, fortified with a foundation of concrete that will never be unearthed.

The history of man’s attempts apart from the Kingdom of God is, to put it bluntly, a history of failure.

No one writes more perfectly of this rarely-noticed phenomenon than a man who witnesses the phenomenon up close. One such man is Malcolm Muggeridge, who must be quoted at length:

“We look back on history and what do we see? Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counter revolutions, wealth accumulating and wealth disbursed, one nation dominant and then another. Shakespeare speaks of “the rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.” In one lifetime I have seen my fellow countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, the great majority of them convinced, in the words of what is still a favourite song, that “God who’s made the mighty would make them mightier yet.” I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian proclaim to the world the establishment of a German Reich that would last for a thousand years; an Italian clown announce that he would restart the calendar to begin with his own assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the Western world as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Asoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius. I’ve seen America wealthier and in terms of weaponry more powerful than all the rest of the world put together, so that Americans, had they so wished, could have outdone an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of their conquests. All in one little lifetime. All gone with the wind. England now part of an island off the coast of Europe and threatened with dismemberment and bankruptcy. Hitler and Mussolini dead and remembered only in infamy. Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped to found and dominated for some three decades. America haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluid that keeps the motorways roaring and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam and of the great victory of the Don Quixotes of the media when they charged the windmills of Watergate.”

One may readily refuse to believe in the existence of God—one may fight him tooth and nail, denying, decrying, defaming both the Creator and His Kingdom—but if there is to be one thing that is impossible to deny—one clear point of agreement between the theists and non-theists and anti-theists—it must certainly be this: man, despite his best efforts, has not yet obtained his goal of a perfect, just and peaceful society. Perhaps we can even agree that the one force that has ultimately stymied man every step of the way in his efforts is himself. Nations (when not self-destructing) are destroyed by other nations; Presidents and kings fall from grace because of their own impotence or indiscretions; Emperors are more often killed by their own when they are not gallivanting around without clothes. Man, it should be undeniable, has only himself to blame.

But our efforts have been great: Perhaps we came close to something important in the days of the Russian Revolution, when the overthrow of the bourgeoisie gave way to the rulership of the proletariat and the rise of a true communist utopia. Little could we have predicted that the proletariat, being human, would prove just as prone to dictatorship as the bourgeoisie. Perhaps we were even closer with the laissez faire doctrines of the roaring 1920’s, when the economy of the United States saw unparalleled growth, absent the intrusion of Government. Little could we have known that the hand of man, whether greedy or power-thirsty or simply idiotic, would turn the greatest upturn into the greatest depression within a single decade.

It is the utter lunacy of the Modern Mind that even in accepting this much—in acknowledging the hand of man in his own perpetual downslide—there remains a real hope that man may overcome the thousands of years of history that readily demonstrate otherwise. It is a madness known only to man that he thinks himself singularly worthy of besting his fellow men, whether in his political theories or the cleverness of his maneuverings.

I believe that anyone looking honestly at the history of the world must recognize the truth of this, and in so doing, one must be led either to an admission of hopelessness regarding the fate of mankind, or to a desire to find some Kingdom outside of man in which to place our hopes.

If this still seems too cynical, just wait! Muggeridge beautifully resolves the tension of his own observations:

“In Christian terms, such hopes and fears are equally beside the point. As Christians we know that here we have no continuing city, that crowns roll in the dust and every earthly kingdom must sometime flounder, whereas we acknowledge a king men did not crown and cannot dethrone, as we are citizens of a city of God they did not build and cannot destroy. Thus the apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, living in a society as depraved and dissolute as ours. Their games, like our television, specialized in spectacles of violence and eroticism. Paul exhorted them to be stedfast, unmovable, always abounding in God’s work, to concern themselves with the things that are unseen, for the things which are seen are temporal but the things which are not seen are eternal. It was in the breakdown of Rome that Christendom was born. Now in the breakdown of Christendom there are the same requirements and the same possibilities to eschew the fantasy of a disintegrating world and seek the reality of what is not seen and eternal, the reality of Christ.”

I find it encouraging that the Kingdom of God was not created recently, that it was not fabricated in response to the continued hopelessness of man’s failed conquests. It does not respond to man’s inability, it predicts man’s inability. The message of The Kingdom arose at the very height of the Roman Empire, just as man was undertaking perhaps his greatest attempt at unifying the Earth under a single throne. The message of the Kingdom first arose just at the point when man had perhaps the least need for it. Christ demanded that both Heaven and Earth would pass away before his message, but he did so at a time when it seemed inconceivable that even the Roman Empire would ever pass away! And this same message has remained the one consistent hope of man, surviving the sackings of Rome, the watering-down and politicizing of Christianity under Constantine, the horrors of the Crusades and the Inquisitions, the Mongols and the Mohammetans. The message of the Kingdom of God, which really ought to form the foundation of all sects of Christianity—surpassing all false gospels of morals and methods—is a message that has survived precisely because man has so utterly failed. The cross remains an enduring symbol precisely because man continues to fail to live up to the standard of the man who died upon its beams.

The good news of the Kingdom of God is that man is no longer compelled to create a kingdom for himself. He is no longer compelled to instigate his own salvation by way of fame or wealth. He is no longer distressed when he looks at the world and sees that everyone is just as lost as him. This is the aspect of the Kingdom that is here already—the only true freedom offered to man, surpassing all Earthly slavery. The message is that we may live as free men, unburdened by the eternal weight of his own soul. This freedom—a freedom more perfect than any known to man—is the great gift of the already Kingdom.

The aspect of the Kingdom that is still to come is the thing that is worth giving up all simply to seek. The Kingdom to come is the pearl of great price and the treasure hidden in a field, for the sake of which a man might give up all he has and never be disappointed in his reward. The Kingdom of now is but a shadow of the Kingdom that is to come, but one must lead to the other. The “already” Kingdom culminates in the “not yet” kingdom. One makes life worth living in the present; the other offers something to hope for in the future.

“Let us rejoice,” Muggeridge concludes his own discussion of The Kingdom, “that we see around us on every hand the decay of the institutions and instruments of power, see intimations of empires falling to pieces, money in total disarray, dictators and parliamentarians alike nonplussed by the confusion and conflicts which encompass them. For it is precisely when every earthly hope has been explored and found wanting, when every possibility of help from earthly sources has been sought and is not forthcoming, when every recourse this world offers, moral as well as material, has been explored to no effect, when in the shivering cold the last stick has been thrown on the fire and in the gathering darkness every glimmer of light has finally flickered out, it’s then that Christ’s hand reaches out shire and firm. Then Christ’s words bring their inexpressible comfort, then his light shines brightest, abolishing the darkness forever. So, finding in everything only deception and nothingness, the soul is constrained to have recourse to God himself and to rest content with him.”