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 Church and the Pursuit of Happiness

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” – United States Declaration of Independence

These words, penned by Thomas Jefferson, are hardly a matter of controversy. Rarely, outside of those few who still subscribe to some form of tyranny or another, will anyone be heard arguing against the very basic notion that a nation ought to be founded on the principle of freedom; fewer still would, or should, argue that a nation ought to do anything at all to stifle its citizens pursuit of happiness.

As a political doctrine I take no offense to the Declaration of Independence. As an assertion of basic freedoms it is practically unmatched; it is used to affirm very basic principles of government—that a citizen and a government are separate; that a government does not exist to control the people, but to protect and to enable individual success. I even understand when this principle is abused in an effort to support certain viewpoints that I happen to oppose. Of course there are reasonable limitations that have to be placed upon any such unrestrictive doctrine; if it makes a person happy to kill his neighbor that is, of course, not a pursuit we are likely to oblige. If it makes a person happy to steal another’s property, it is only the rare, freewheeling judge and jury who might grant leniency when the defendant decides to quote Jefferson on the stand.

I certainly understand the value the world places on the pursuit of happiness, and I understand that it really is a good thing. What I object to—what I really cannot fathom—is when the church comes to the very strange belief that it might go well with them if they hold to the same thing.

This is one of many ways that the doctrines of a church ought to have no overlap with the doctrines of a nation. Just as I can assert that the communism practiced in the early church ought never be considered a valid principle for governing secular society, so also it should be stated emphatically that the church ought never be tempted to teach its members to pursue their own happiness.

To a Christian, after all, the pursuit of happiness should be seen as a great contradiction. It should, at the very least, be recognized as an enigma—for the Christian ought to know that happiness is not a thing that can possibly be pursued. If anything, we could say that happiness has already pursued and overtaken us, and that we are foolish to think that anything could work the other way around.

Christianity is really not the solemn, quiet religion that the secularists make it out to be; the content Christian is not really the opposite of the giddy drunkard or the self-fulfilled womanizer. The Christian simply knows a great secret: That he needn’t go searching about the world, wandering back and forth in it, in the pursuit of happiness, contentment or fulfillment. He needn’t any politician to tell him that he is free to pursue his happiness. For the Christian, happiness is intrinsic. “Man is more himself,” wrote Chesterton, “when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live... Joy, which is the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.”

The church that dares encourage its members to pursue happiness, each in their own way, is a church that has quite clearly never understood the nature of happiness, for it has somehow mistaken the temporal, in which happiness is futile and fading, for the eternal, in which happiness is inward and indistinguishable from joy. Such a church has really sought to undo the drama of the temptations of Christ! For what was the temptation to turn stones into bread but the temptation to place the temporal above the eternal, to feast now and ignore the later...? The Devil offered Christ nothing more than a moment of earthly happiness—a temptation just as direct as an offer to a philanderer of his choice of lovers.

Many churches in recent years have failed in this very particular and very important regard (just as, in many other regards, churches have been failing throughout history). We are all sinners, of course, but the fact that a man had to die for our sins mean that we ought never be proud of them, and we certainly never ought to convince the church to accept them! Needless to say, not only are certain sins being tolerated within the body of Christ, but they are being celebrated!—for certain sins offer the impression to the weak minded that they are nothing more than men and women pursuing their own happiness, non-traditional places though their happiness might lead them. Sinners are no longer driven to repentance; they are driven to the altar in holy matrimony.

How can one obtain the status of Pastor or Priest—titles that one expects to go hand-in-hand with theological training and, one hopes, devoutness—and yet utterly miss such a fundamentally scriptural doctrine? Faith is not a means of obtaining happiness—not in this world, at least.

When the author of Hebrews offers his beautiful account of the great men and women of faith in the Old Testament, how does he conclude his account? “These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth,” and, again, “And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us...”

What about the Bible could possibly lead us to believe that earthly happiness is our ultimate reward? Time and again men and women are reminded to have eternity in mind and to reject their impulses toward earthly security and happiness. But true happiness is not the fulfilling of our every desire, just as true pleasure is not the momentary giddiness of a strong drink or the brief impulses of eroticism.

G.K. Chesterton says that this “religion” of happiness and pleasure seeking, “is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose that Dante saw. Great joy has in it the sense of immortality; the very splendor of youth is the sense that it has all space to stretch its legs in.”

Likewise, Malcolm Muggeridge, writing near the end of his life, offered an intriguing observation on the source of true happiness: “I increasingly see us in our human condition as manacled and in a dark cell. The chains are our mortal hopes and desires; the dark cell is our ego, in whose obscurity and tiny dimensions we are confined. Christ tells us how to escape, striking off the chains of desire, and putting a window in the dark cell through which we may joyously survey the wide vistas of eternity and the bright radiance of God’s universal love.” 

Christ and Mythology

“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? ... Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’ ...the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. ‘I have come too early,’ he said then; ‘my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.’” -Nietzsche

Nietzsche was right. Christianity really ought to be dead by now. Indeed, as Chesterton noted, Christianity has died, many times over: “Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

If Christianity was just another form of mythology (a pejorative that the secular humanist clings to hopelessly when discussing the Bible), if it was just another superstition, then, yes, it really ought to have died out by now just like any other myth. It ought to be as disbelieved as any other superstition. The fact is that, unless they are being brought to life by authors or Hollywood screenwriters, almost every mythology that arose coextensively with the birth of Christianity have not just seen their followers dwindle—it has seen them literally drop to zero. There is no one, literally no one, who argues that Greek or Roman mythology might be more than myth. There is no one, literally no one, who would pray to Thor or Odin; who would worry about offending Ra or Osiris. The Celtic druids are not merely in hiding; they are extinct. Their temples and statues have been overrun by moss and are steadily crumbling into the earth.

Nietzsche was right in the 19^th century when he thought that Christianity was in some trouble. Like the first centuries after Christ or the period of reformation, theological crises were commonplace then, and it could even be said that, in a sense, Christianity was dying. One would have expected the trend to continue, as trends often do, and yet the 20^th century saw a number of revivals, and even today there are vast pockets of society wherein the Christian faith is growing, not just in terms of demographics, but in terms of devotion. Nietzsche could never have believed that a preacher like Karl Barth would come along and renew theology, or that preachers like James Stewart or Billy Graham would arise and that countless millions would still be willing to hear a message that has not changed in more than two thousands years. There is a strange truth of Christianity that says that a generation of apostasy does not have to lead to a generation of greater apostasy. In any mythology, and even in most religions, when one generation abandons their beliefs, the avalanche has begun and in the next generation this apostasy will be heightened. Why should a son ever come to believe in something that his father has abandoned? In Christianity this is precisely what has happened, time and again.

Christianity is different, not only because it is true, but because it is believed to be true. The Greek and Roman myths were not merely abandoned, they had really never been believed in the first place. Yes, perhaps they had been believed inasmuch as a deist or agnostic might hold some vague notion that a god may have some form of existence, but they had never been believed as one believes in the world. Faith is a conviction of the unseen; myth is the hope for a daydream. Faith is a discovery, myth is a creation.    

When a person becomes a Christian, he ceases to allow his mind to create a world as he wants it and begins to discover a world that God has created for him. It is not creating the savior that we desire, it is discovering the Christ whom we need. This is what has led to the otherwise unaccountable survival of Christianity through the many moments when it really ought to have died. This is what keeps sons coming back to the faith even after their fathers fall away; it is what leads to revivals when the world thinks we ought to hold a funeral for God; it is what leads to awakenings long after Christianity seems to have fallen asleep. If there was no more Christ in Christianity, the faith would certainly have been killed off long ago, swallowed up by the incorporeal nonsense of Gnosticism or the worldliness of the Manicheans and then killed entirely by the cultures of the world.

This ought to be seen as remarkable! That Christianity has managed to survive, that churches grow and that non-believers become believers and that the faith thrives most under the greatest persecution, is one of history’s greatest contradictions. Chesterton likened Christianity to a river—an independent flowing of fresh thought that is racing unstoppably toward the salty sea of culture and, yes, myth. “Some expect it to go down in a cataract of catastrophe, most of them expect it to widen into an estuary of equality and moderation. In other words, most moderate people thought that faith like freedom would be slowly broadened down; and some advanced people thought that it would be very rapidly broadened down, not to say flattened out.”  

To Christianity, the delta—the place where river and sea meet—should not be considered the life of the sea, but rather the death of the river. When a tiny stream of fresh water meets an infinite ocean, it is the fresh water that is made salty. The vast ocean swallows the river whole. Even the mightiest river—one that has carved canyons in solid stone and swept both away man and beast by its deadly currents—is rendered impotent the very moment it touches the vast ocean.

The river of Christianity has somehow (and by this I mean “by the power of God”) collided with the sea and yet remained a river. No, much more than that! It has made the sea less salty! Though moments have arisen that have seen the river disperse, losing ground to the mighty tide, let it be known that the faith is not subject to entropy. Though creation itself may be groaning for redemption, not so the river that cuts its way through the ocean—it is the church that carries the great promise of redemption to a groaning world. In the church is held the mystery that, though an entire generation may seem to slip away and the faith may appear to fail, the next generation may very well bring about an awakening. The river, though cutting through the ocean, might in fact grow stronger, sweeping the sea along in its path. It is not necessary that periods of darkness must prefigure periods of even greater darkness; they may, in fact give way to glorious light!

Christianity may be called untrue, but it cannot be called a myth, because it is a thing that has been believed and it is a thing that has swept its way into the world while remaining pure. While every myth is swept away easily by the changing tide, Christianity alone marks the place where the river at last begins to overcome the sea.

This is a thing to be believed! What if we truly lived as if it was the sea whose identity was threatened by exposure to the river? What if we understood that it is the world that must flee from the church in order that their addictions and idols might be spared, rather than the other way around?

This boldness is the great promise of the gospel, and it is a truth borne out by history. Christianity lives and thrives and has been regularly walking out of its own grave for two thousand years, following in the footsteps of its founder.

The Altar of Science

The Literature of the Heretics, pt. 8

“As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.” – Richard Dawkins

“Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They begin with the fact of sin—a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing.” – G.K. Chesterton

I find plenty to disagree with when reading the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens when it comes to their content. But there is also much that I disagree with in how their disagreeable content is expressed. It may seem trivial, but how an argument is presented is, in some respects, equal in importance with the validity of the argument—and in the case of these heretics (Dawkins in particular), his method does much to undermine the very points he is making.

Take, for example, Dawkins’ writings on science. What I mean by that, of course, is take almost everything he has written. Dawkins writes about science in the same way he writes about himself and all of mankind—with a purposeful, but insincere, subjectivity. Of course, he would say. Subjectivity is the one thing required of the scientist! He doesn’t realize that, while the scientific method may thrive on subjectivity, understanding human nature absolutely does not.

Dawkins seems to insist on keeping his explanations of every human decision, every human thought, every human quirk, firmly at arm’s length. He feels a desperate need to rationalize absolutely everything by way of natural selection—every action or thought a human could have can be rationalized as a self-evident quirk of genetics. When a poet describes happiness they might do so by employing the metaphor of a sunny day or the return of a long-lost love; when Richard Dawkins describes happiness he does so as a mixture of proteins that release dopamine into the brain so as to prolong the survival of the species by way of... and from the first word he demonstrates only that he has really never understood the meaning of happiness.

Science, to the heretics, too quickly ceases to be a method by which one looks at the world and instead becomes just as much a religion as the faith they deride. When Dawkins writes that, “...a widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts...is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect...” he is absolutely right (and this is something religions should seriously consider), but at the same time he does not seem to understand that he has not merely pulled religion down from its place above criticism, he has replaced it with his own altar of science! God forbid that any of us should second guess a scientific study!

I do try to avoid criticizing a healthy pursuit of science (because I have ventured down this road myself and found great joy here), but I cannot help but criticize the scientists for their utter failure to understand the very things they are so desperately trying to comprehend. An astronomer can become so lost in his telescope that he has forgotten to lie in a field at night and simply stare into the heavens; a biologist can become so lost in his microscope that he has forgotten that the cells he is studying actually make up a creature. Scientists have a tendency to sacrifice their own humanity for the sake of their discoveries. Men like Dawkins have become, for lack of a better (or more fitting) analogy—the extreme Calvinists of humanism. Just as Calvinism in its most extreme form rids humanity of both free will and, in effect, personal responsibility, so also is Dawkins quick ascribe an evolutionary explanation for every decision made by man, removing responsibility from all of us for our actions. Every action is biological; every decision is made with the intent of spreading our DNA, to ensure the survival of our genes.

My opposition to Dawkins in terms of science is not limited, however, to the cold, aloof tone it forces him to take when talking about things that are living and awesome—it has also become clear to me that I ought to no longer give him the benefit of the doubt when he is prattling on about how science frees us from religion, because whenever it proves convenient to do so, he seems willing to neglect the very scientific method he worships! So rigidly and worshipfully does Richard Dawkins view science—so low does he prostrate himself before that particular altar—that he has forgotten (or consciously abandons) one of the core principles of the scientific method. Specifically, he neglects to acknowledge that facts are notoriously difficult to come by, and that the very word—fact—is not a word to toy around with.

Dawkins claims that, “Creationists simply don’t realize that evolution is a fact!” No, they don’t, but neither does the honest evolutionist. Time and again Dawkins refers to the “fact” of evolution, deriding the weak-minded zealots who refuse to believe. Surely Richard Dawkins—a man steeped in science throughout his adult life—is intelligent enough to know that there is something very significant and very special about calling something a “fact.” Richard Feynman—an atheist himself, and one of the greatest, most beloved scientists of the 21^st century—loved to boast about how close his theories were to being facts, but consistently stressed the difficulty of facts: “You can see, of course, that...we can attempt to disprove any definite theory. If we have a definite theory, a real guess, from which we can conveniently compute consequences which can be compared with experiment, then in principle we can get rid of any thoery. There is always the possibility of proving any definite theory wrong; but notice that we can never prove it right. Suppose you invent a good guess, calculate the consequences, and discover every time that the consequences you have calculated agree with experiment. The theory is then right? No, it is simply not proved wrong.”

Human evolution is theory, not fact. We could literally watch a species evolve into another before our eyes and it still would not prove that this is how life came to be as it is. I realize that this sounds like nit-picking; like I am quarrelling over a simple matter of syntax or vocabulary, but it really is much more than that. It is indicative of an arrogant form of scientism that simply cannot be taken as gospel. It is evidence of a man so singularly focused on attacking something that he has forgotten the very laws he claims to live by. This is a common danger—our desire to destroy others getting in the way of positive affirmations of our beliefs—that we all must continually guard against. It is especially evident in political disagreements, where we are so quick to point out inconsistency and hypocrisy on the other side that we neglect to notice our own. Dawkins betrays the certainty of his own beliefs by being disingenuous about them.

One need only read the words of the most God-hating scientists to discover the fact that they seem to have universally missed something in their understandings of the universe. Perhaps their views are self-consistent, as an earthworm may be consistent in saying that the whole world is made of nothing but dirt, but they are incomplete. They consistently neglect a great portion of the man-beast they are so desperately trying to explain. It is terribly difficult, after all, to explain a thing that you have never properly understood. One could imagine trying to explain a camel without mentioning his hump or an elephant without mentioning his trunk. The explanation may be accurate and consistent, but few would defend it as complete, or even valuable.

The purely scientific view of man, quite simply, does not understand man. It may have an explanation as to why he has hands, but not why he should choose to use his hands to produce works of art rather than hunt or forage. It tells us why we have hair on our heads, but not why we should choose to shave our heads in solidarity with an illness or to join a monastary... it doesn’t—it simply can’t—tell us these things because it is likely to cause madness, like describing a rainbow to a man born blind.

Real hope cannot be found in science. This is not real evidence for God, of course, but nevertheless one should at the very least stop and consider what sort of hope or meaning they are looking for. If hope is the same thing as increased knowledge, then science may hold some very limited hope—but it is a hope that will fail the very moment one looks out into the abyss and recognizes just how little has actually become known by science. It is like the man who spends his life attempting to comprehend eternity, only to grow old and realize that he is no closer than he was when he began. As Chesterton said, “The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

Real hope is found in embracing the eternal rather than trying to comprehend it. It is found in first understanding creation and then studying it; with much of science it is, tragically, the other way around.

The Myth of Pure Reason

The Literature of the Heretics, pt. 5

“Reason has built the modern world. It is a precious but also a fragile thing, which can be corroded by apparently harmless irrationality. We must favor verifiable evidence over private feeling. Otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth.” – Richard Dawkins

“Past and present religious atrocities have occurred not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational.” – Christopher Hitchens

Our (biological) inability to be entirely rational prevents humans from achieving perfect peace with one another. It is this irrationality, surely a vestigial trait not (yet) weeded out by the process of evolution, that causes strife and chaos and, perhaps most importantly, blindly guides us toward religion.

But for the general tone of negativity, I can almost agree with that sentiment. We are, in fact, only partly rational; and our utter inability to act entirely according to reason is, indeed, a defining factor in who we are as humans. It is the thing that carries us toward religion; the thing that makes us quarrel and either agree or disagree. But my disagreement is in this: I strongly believe that our not-all-there rationality is perhaps the single most beautiful element of humanity. It is our most defining characteristic and the one we should be the most grateful for. It is not erroneous or vestigial—it is purposeful and beneficial.

As for the two quotations above, therefore, I partially agree with the latter, but disagree almost entirely with the former. Reason, no matter what Dawkins may believe, has hindered as much as it has helped in building the modern world; and those who have chosen to look beyond reason have brought us the invaluable spark that makes us human in the first place. As for Hitchens, I agree with his statement, but for the implication that our inability to reason fully is a hurdle over which we must jump. In fact, pure reason is perhaps the one thing that, when obtained, can actually steal the humanity from a human.

Pure reason is no more an evolutionary leap than would be growing a second appendix. To become creatures of pure reason we would become mere creatures; our great leap would actually prove a tremendous and tragic fall.

This is a significant truth missed almost entirely by the heretics, and only rarely considered by those of us to whom it should be the most important: reason is absolutely not the thing that makes us human. It is not the thing that turns a civilization into an advanced civilization, or a world into a modern world. The truth is exactly the opposite: what makes us human is that we are not saddled with the burden of pure reason.

The man of pure reason, by definition, thinks that all men must strive toward reason as the next step in his advancement, but they forget that it is only by transcending reason that we are human in the first place. It is not our scientific achievement that brings us beyond the apes, nor our understanding of mathematics, but our ability to see that reason is not a thing to be worshipped, but to be transcended.

Want to see a creature of pure reason? Observe an earthworm. Pure reason means nothing more than survival; it cannot, by definition, mean anything more than that. It means responding instinctively to stimuli and nothing more; the earthworm is hungry, so it eats dirt; it is full, so it excretes; it has an instinct to reproduce, so it finds a lady earthworm.

This is, of course, the sort of creature that Richard Dawkins takes great pains in proving man to be—a creature of pure instinct; exactly the sort of creature evolution has produced. Religion? It is a biological necessity. Love and charity? Genetic modifications evolved to create more stable colonies, like so many ants on a hill.

When I say, therefore, that stepping beyond reason is the thing that separates us from the animals, Dawkins and Hitchens might, in fact, agree; because to them we are no different. Dawkins makes this point while offering the evolutionary argument in favor of abortion-on-demand: “The humanness of an embryo’s cells cannot confer upon it any absolutely discontinuous moral status. It cannot, because of our evolutionary continuity with chimpanzees and, more distantly, with every species on the planet.” A human life, he therefore argues, cannot be differentiated from the life of any other creature. This is the danger (one of many) of a pure reason; it demands that we refuse to honor thoughts of human uniqueness; it bogs us down into an ethical mire necessitated by utter dependence on evolutionary explanations; it opens the door for social darwinism and every evil associated with it.

Those are the negative arguments; the arguments against pure reason. But the negative should never be the most important argument. The most important must always be the positive; the argument in favor of transcending reason. This is the most important argument, and it is merely this: man’s ability to glance, even if only partially, beyond the veil of reason, is the first step in the direction of worship. I have argued before—and I think that it is one of the most perfect arguments in favor of God if rightly understood—that man is a creature made to worship, and we are only enabled to do so because we are not dominated by the burden of pure reason. This is not a flaw, it is a magnificent element of perfectly executed design. If we were creatures of pure reason we would certainly be able to create shelters, but never architecture. We might draw pictograms, but we could never create art. We might write rational correspondence, but never literature. We might make use of tools, but we would never use those tools to satisfy our wholly irrational curiosity; we would never build particle accelerators or blast rockets into space.

Indeed—the very same irrationality that leads us to worship is the irrationality that makes us curious about our world; the irrationality that enables our species to become scientists in the first place is the drive that pagan scientists hope to root out and destroy. When Hitchens says that, “We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books...” he is only saying that he himself has not yet succumbed to pure reason. To sit in awe of the universe is to feel the throbbing, pulsing need to worship. To appreciate the artistic qualities of literature is to throw off the shackles of reason and exist, for at least a moment, as a transcendent being. Hitchens may openly deride the Christian’s “resistance of the rational,” but he is just as prone to this resistance as I am; he simply has not learned to enjoy it as I have.

One needn’t worry about those who would seek to destroy the imagination in favor of pure reason. I am confident that such a thing is impossible; it is chasing after the wind. Man can suppress himself all he likes, but he can never truly steal his own humanity.

One final note on this subject: Reason, it must be remembered, is not a bad thing. Reason is what keeps us alive while our ability to transcend reason makes life worth living. What makes us human is that we have transcended reason while not doing away with it altogether. And what makes Christians unique is that we, alone, seem to have understood this. As Chesterton explained, “The substance of all paganism is that it is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all... But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion.”

To the heretics, the ideal is a man of pure reason, which robs him of his humanity. To the pagan, the ideal is a man entirely divorced from reason; who lives only in the heights of heaven and never lets his feet down to earth. To the Christian, the ideal is a man to whom reason is a gift, but the ability to see beyond reason a far greater gift; a man who at once seeks rational truth about the world created for him and who falls to his knees in worship of He who created it.

The Misunderstood Word

The Literature of the Heretics, pt. 2

“To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.” – Richard Dawkins

“...just like the Old Testament, the “New” one is also a work of crude carpentry, hammered together long after its purported events, and full of improvised attempts to make things come out right.” –Christopher Hitchens

If Dawkins and Hitchens are to be believed—a presumption that goes without saying for many of my readers—the greatest, most powerful tool to wield against the rising tide of Biblical indoctrination is nothing more complex than the reading of the Bible. The greatest threat to Christianity, so they imply, is that the Bible is actually read. Nothing could be more detrimental to the faith than that it be made to actually experience these poorly “cobbled-together”, poorly planned (Dawkins says of the Gospels that, “(those) that made it into the official canon were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, out of larger sample of at least a dozen including the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus, Philip, Bartholomew and Mary Magdalene,” which tells me that he has both never read any of these “alternative” gospels and that he has never bothered to understand the complexity and drama of canonization) scriptures.

Indeed, surely by reading the scriptures one could not possibly miss the terrible truth discovered by Hitchens: “It would be hard to find an easier proof that religion is man-made. There is, first, the monarchical growling about respect and fear, accompanied by a stern reminder of omnipotence and limitless revenge, of the sort with which a Babylonian or Assyrian emperor might have ordered the scribes to begin a proclamation. There is then a sharp reminder to keep working and only to relax when the absolutist says so. A few crisp legalistic reminders follow, one of which is commonly misrendered because the original Hebrew actually says “thou shalt do no murder.’” While I, personally, have been unable to find the proof of a man-made religion in these rambling points, certainly, by simply picking up the Bible, one could not possibly miss it. Could they?      

To be fair, one of the tragedies of Christian history is that for some centuries the church did at least appear to agree with this sentiment, and kept the scriptures out of the hands of the lay parishioners out of fear that they did not have the appropriate aptitude to understand them. Perhaps, the state of education and literacy being what they were, there was some truth to this, but their extreme dogmatism about it leads one to seriously doubt their faith in the Word of God.

The truth that seemed to escape the early Catholic Church as well as the modern skeptic, however, is that this weapon is more prone to backfiring than a child’s slingshot (personal experience). I do agree with both Dawkins and Hitchens that there is a remarkable (and perhaps even mystifying) diversity to the scriptures—an almost unimaginable roster of authors of every background, a multitude of styles, written over a tremendously long span of time. And yet, no classic of literature or survey of history stands up as perfectly under repeated readings.

The Bible, in fact, seems to be only truly understood and appreciated under thorough investigation—the thorougher the better. Sure, we have all heard stories of the skeptic or the furious God-hater who, in a misguided effort to prove their hatred, took to the scriptures, only to find their faith (or, rather, lack of faith) shattered by sudden revelation. These stories exist (and they are not entirely uncommon), but I think that they prove a noteworthy and beautiful exception rather than the rule. I gladly accept these sudden conversions as works of miracle rather than logic.

But there are always miracles in the scriptures—some obvious and some hidden.

Here is one of the smaller, often missed miracles: Repeated readings of scripture yields the very opposite of doubt. Though logic might suggest that to look too closely at a single work of literature would inevitably make its flaws all the more glaring and its imperfections all the more noteworthy, the truth, at least in my experience (despite my background in literary criticism) and in the experience of countless others, is very much the opposite. Reading the Bible makes even the perceived “inaccuracies” melt away as the pieces of the larger narrative and the greater theology fall into place. Though the complexity of the book may, indeed, make a first reading (especially if unguided) somewhat disorienting and, in fact, somewhat strange, only a superficial examination of the scriptures or a severe prejudice could lead one to the conclusion that there is nothing remarkable about the continuity on display.    

Even a strong believer can be negatively stricken by skeptic who provides only lists of the Bible’s most “difficult” moments out of context (as both Hitchens and Dawkins do quite capably, effortlessly weaving their witty commentary with non-contextual passages of scriptures that seem to portray a vicious, selfish God). I readily admit that I cannot read the works of the skeptics without at least faint pangs of... doubt may be too strong a word, but it is something along those lines; maybe something more along the lines of disquiet. It is a feeling that, true to the intent, at first makes me want to recoil from scripture, but I know that this is the wrong reaction. Alas! It is only by looking into scripture—toward the Word of God—that I find the welcome cure.

There is a difference—and not a subtle difference—between the words of the Bible and the WORD of God. The skeptic may freely attack the former but is absolutely powerless over the latter. The first is a collection of letters forming words, words forming phrases, and phrases spelling out ideas, and as such, they may be taken, warped, misunderstood, and bastardized to the heart’s content. The words of the Bible is not the WORD of God that became flesh, that dwelt among us in Grace and Truth.

The WORD is not a mere collection of words. It has little to do with language; it is unaffected by arguments concerning grammar or syntax or morphology or any of the nonsense that I was forced to learn in college. The WORD is not a series of verses held fast by rote memorization and then repeated at Sunday School (though there is inestimable value to this practice, which I genuinely desire to pick up again myself). Knowing the words of the Bible is not knowing the WORD of God. One is tempted to be reminded of Satan himself, who quite ably used scripture to make his own evil point... but that argument seems out of place here—the example of Satan is not worthwhile when directed at those who pointedly do not believe in the existence of such a being. Far more applicable are the arguments of the heretics, who follow firmly in Satan’s footsteps, reading the words but entirely missing the WORD. It is precisely these of whom the Apostle Paul says: “For the WORD of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’”

I understand that this concept might not be understood by some, and to the skeptic it will seem like nothing more than a logical fallacy. I can only respond by saying that this is how one often sounds when describing a miracle. The fact is that the WORD is not always the thing that a person is looking for. As I said before, there are some who have been reading the words of the Bible in hatred, and yet have suddenly found themselves reading the inexplicable WORD of God. For others, it is only after the words are studied and pored over and held up to the light of scrutiny that it is suddenly transformed into something living and active and sharp—but it is no less a miracle.

But, setting aside that crucial distinction for a moment:

No matter how one looks at scripture, there is power to it. The vehemence with which Hitchens, Dawkins, and the others in their camp attack it is a testament to its strength as well as its continued effects on every facet of our society. This is why I cannot help but feel something when I force myself to read their attacks on the Bible. The truth is, it’s remarkably difficult to read any subjective account of scriptures (whether positive or negative) and not be touched with a pang of something or other—of revelation or anger, hope or doubt. It is impossible, that is, to stand unaffected by scripture, which says something in and of itself. Especially when taken out of context, or given a healthy dose of spin, there is potency to scripture not found in Shakespeare or Dante or Homer, and perhaps it is because it stands as something to be lived by rather than read. Thus we cringe when the Israelites are directed to administer punishment to seemingly harmless minor criminals; thus we are encouraged when told of a God who loves and pursues His chosen ones, even when turned against at every turn; thus we treasure being reminded of God’s faithfulness in providing for His people; thus we treasure the hope of salvation; thus in love we pursue those who are perishing. 

For this reason, I can’t simply ignore the attacks I see continually being made on the scriptures. I must have a response—but I must be careful that it is the right response. If I am touched by pangs of doubt I must respond by facing them head on. I can respond, as the creators of these arguments surely hope, by fleeing from the scripture, allowing the seeds to take root in a purposeful ignorance, willingly living with a deeply-rooted seed of doubt, or (perhaps worse yet), I can retreat to a selective reading of scripture, believing that my faith might be restored by simply acknowledge only those bits and pieces of neutered verse that make me feel good and are easily understood. Or I might, as Thomas Jefferson, quite literally take scissors to the Bible, trimming away those bits and pieces that I find difficult to digest, simply acknowledging that I have not yet learned to chew properly.

But I choose not to take these courses: I choose, instead, the course that feels far less natural; far less intuitive: I accept this subtle pang of doubt and take it into my study of the WORD. It is no accident—and certainly no self-delusion—that those most enthralled with God’s word; those most enamored by its beauty and its divine origins; are those who have most thoroughly familiarized themselves with its intricacies; who have not shied away from those pieces that seem difficult or counter-intuitive. The truly faithful are those who are the least surprised, the least shocked by those who would seek to pit scripture against scripture; who are never fearful of those who have only read the words of the Bible but never known or sought after the WORD of God.

The skeptics have focused the wrath of their reasoning—for they are far too reliant on the unreliable human mind—on an old, stale, unmoving tome of stories and poems—as stagnant in corporeality as Aristotle—and surely find it an odd thing that The Bible should assert itself to be living and active. They cannot understand how anything so ancient and unmoving could be considered as swift or sharp as a sword. They cannot understand that the Word is not a collection of chapters and verses, it is God choosing to speak through such human things as chapters and verses.

One cannot possible expect a humanist to understand that the Bible is a human thing—a collection of chapters and verses—but the WORD is God speaking through this same human thing. Yes, it may seem like a terrible logic trick, to say that there is something hidden and invisible in scripture that only the Christian can see (it is quite circular, isn’t it?), but all I can say is that this is how it appears to be. The Christian sees scripture differently than the humanist; and yet, that is the miracle of the incarnation—that is the mystery of it. Just as God injected Himself directly into human history, so also can He inject Himself into the stubbornness of the human soul. That is certainly one of His greatest miracles.

The Wars of Christmastime

Christmas for us in Christendom has become one thing, and in one sense even a simple thing. But like all the truths of that tradition, it is in another sense a very complex thing. Its unique note is the simultaneous striking of many notes; of humility, of gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and of drama. It is not only an occasion for the peacemakers any more than for the merry makers; there is something defiant in it also; something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle that has just been won. All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only bangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapor from the exultant, explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago. But the savor is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word “peace”. By the very nature of the story the rejoicings in the Bethlehem stable were rejoicings in a fortress or an outlaw’s den; properly understood it is not unduly flippant to say they were rejoicing in a dug-out. It is not only true that such a subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the enemies were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky. It is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a piercing through the rock and an entrance into an enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace.

G.K. Chesterton
“The Everlasting Man”

The Christmas story has long since ceased to appear revolutionary to most of us. So deeply has it become entrenched into every facet of our society that the celebration of Christmas has long lacked the qualities that allowed it to usher in a brand new world in the first place. It has rejected the revolutionary in favor of the redundant.

I fall into this trap just as quickly as the rest, but then I am reminded by wise words such as those above, and I am reminded of the true nature of Christmas. I am reminded that it is an uprising. A revolution. But it is certainly an odd sort of revolution, as it is one fought first by a child rather than an army. It is also a lengthy revolution—two millennia and counting. But strangest of all, it is a revolution whose end was already determined before it was ever initiated. It is a war whose battles we continue to fight—which we are supposed to continue to fight with every ounce of our being—even though it has already been won. I suppose there is some sort of beautiful irony in the fact that our inevitable victory is meant to encourage us to fight on with ever more boldness and vigor. Christmas marks both the beginning and the end of a great struggle in which even the most formidable powers of Earth are brought to their knees in humility; where a child can be born utterly unknown and unrecognized by the world, yet still strike so much fear into the heart of a ruling King that he believes it necessary to take the most drastic measures in order to devour the threat.

Herod must have seemed positively mad from any rational human standpoint to take so seriously the warnings of the Magi that he would take to slaughter infants, yet only with the benefit of hindsight may we look back and make the remarkable claim that despite his intolerably evil act; even in this despicable decision of an altogether vile man trying desperately to cling to his precious Earthly throne; Herod had been right to fear. And even more profound, we know that even in this cruel act Herod had still powerfully underestimated the power and influence of this baby who was being weaned in a lowly cave within his kingdom. He feared for his own power, but he could not have understood that the kingdom this child would establish was far greater than his own, and that he would usurp the throne not just of Israel’s king, but of every king and ruler in all of human history. The kingdom established by the Christ-child would be a kingdom whose soldiers, armed with love and literature rather than swords or spears, would prove far more effective in conquest than any human army, whether of the Babylonians, the Romans, or the Macedonians.

Even so, it seems that Herod, beneath all of his evil, may have understood the meaning of Christmas better than you or I. He could see more clearly the threat posed by the coming of Immanuel, and his actions demonstrated this perfectly.

The incarnation of God was nothing less than a call to arms; it was a call that demanded one to take up sides, either for or against. One kingdom facing off against another. That of Heaven against that of man. Herod chose his side, and he attempted to woo the visiting Magi into his plan, though with all the cunning of double-agents, they brought warning to the King’s enemy instead.

The world continues to fight against the child in the manger, of course, but it does so only in a sort of desperate last gasp—a futile effort to delay the inevitable. It is a war waged against the forces of God and heaven, who wait in patience (as we also are told to do) for the fulfillment of the Kingdom over which Christ is truly King—a kingdom that is all at once here and yet still to come.

It is because of the faith born on that first Christmas day that we fight on; it is because of Christ that we do not cease pressing forward in realization that the battle has been won; we do not shrug in complacency. We press on with ever greater confidence, resting in the warm assurance of our success. Our already victory allows us to endure every trial and every tribulation without fear, and it enables a boldness unknown to the world—a boldness that is of little worth if it is not leveraged to do great things. The man who truly understands Christmas is the man willing to give all in response to it. Just as Herod sacrificed his own humanity along with innocent children in a futile and evil attempt to put an early end to the threat, we also must come to understand the impact of the incarnation enough to embrace our humanity and to protect the humanity of others. If ever there was a season to understand the stark contrast between good and evil, it ought to be this. If ever there was a time to take seriously the desperate needs of our world, it ought to be this.  

Now, in these recent years, there is much that is being said of a “war on Christmas,” and it is with a heavy heart that I notice Christians beginning to cower in fear from the attacks on Christmas celebrations. Christians scream and shout of this great “injustice”—they run and tell their lawmakers in hopes of protecting their poor, fragile God and his holiday. They cower and hide from these dreadful heathens—dangerous non-believers who have come to so completely abhor the holiday that they positively bristle when they see signs that it is being celebrated in public; the same non-believers whose greatest fear is that some poor, weak-minded soul might be blindsided by the hidden, brainwashing messages of the season.

I don’t deny that all of this has been happening, and all the more publically with each passing year, but I feel somewhat alone in finding some encouragement in seeing that Christmas has come under attack. Why should I be anything but encouraged that the enemies of Christ appear to have taken their cue from Herod: they have finally begun to take Christ seriously enough to want to rid the world of him? Christ is his most potent when he is taken seriously, is he not? The message of Christianity is at its most dangerous when it is under attack, is it not?

I don’t deny the humanist his right to attempt to abolish Christmas—truly, if he has any desire to strengthen his own faith he has no choice but to do exactly that. Secularism absolutely cannot thrive in a world where Christmas is taken seriously. I cannot fault the opponent of God when he seeks to put an end to the singing of Christian carols in public schools, for the message of Christ is perhaps most easily understood by those who have not been corrupted by the false wisdom brought by age.

I don’t deny that Christmas is an open attack on secular values or humanist. What I do deny is the notion that Christmas is in any danger of disappearing as a result of the counter-attack, for Christians are no more likely to abandon the celebration of Christmas than Christ was in danger of being discovered by Herod’s minions. The same God whose incarnation we celebrate with this season will see to it that the season survives whatever onslaught the world may devise.

Christmas began under war-like conditions, and perhaps it is still engulfed in the same war after more than two thousand years. But only one side has any reason to be afraid of the outcome. Only one side ought to be shivering in their boots when they consider the vast consequences of the conflict. Christmas is a call to joy; it is a call to giving; it is a call to remembrance; but it is also a call to arms, and we would do best to remember that from time to time.