The Last Christian on Earth

by Os Guinness

  Take the current craze for “innovation” and “re-engineering” that is sweeping the Evangelicals. No self-respecting pastor today can afford not to be “innovative,” “risk-taking,” “edgy,” “out of the box,” and someone who constantly “pushes the envelope.” After all, as their brave new consultants tell them, “there are two kinds of churches—those that are changing and those that are going out of business.”

  Needless to say, both the maxim and the slogans come from the business world, where their results have been mixed, to say the least. Many a “re-engineered” business has in fact lost profitability (except to the take-over consultants and lawyers), and many an innovation has been disastrous. Nothing in recent years was more “innovative” than sub-prime mortgages, for example, yet the innovation turned out to be toxic and disastrous.

  We are making great headway with the Evangelicals. The methods of the B-School have replaced the methods of the Bible. Reliance on the computer is fast replacing reliance on the Holy Spirit. Development is a growing substitute for conversion. Modern personnel descriptions (dynamic, personable, efficient) are crowding out traditional categories, such as preacher or evangelist, and ignoring old-fashioned qualities, such as meekness or humility. Prayer letters are drowning under a deluge of slick appeals for money. “Results” and “measurable outcomes” have ousted growth in character and “fruit” as the yardstick of success, and the matrix of action is no longer worship and fellowship. Instead, a self-perpetuating series of congresses, consultations and committees is orbiting the Christian world, launched, serviced and commanded by a new elite of international consultants. These are the seasoned Christian “congressnauts”—at home in all the world except at home.

  Christians have always shown a curious inability to consider things from a long-term perspective. Most have been blind to the dynamics of a parachurch movement. How else could they fail to see the natural stages of its trajectory?

  Put simply, there is first a man or woman with a vision of something lacking in the wider Church. Next, there are people who share that vision, and gather around the pioneer to support his stand. Then, there is a movement, structured and organized to express that vision and thrust it on its way. Finally, after however many years, with the hallowed portrait of the founder smiling down on the boardroom of his or her successors, all there is left is a monument. In short, rationalization not only quenches the true Christian spirit, it helps turn the revolutionary into the routine, the insight into the institution. This trap is slower and less glamorous than the Midas touch of consumer religion, but just as deadly in the end.

  An important part of our game here is bluff. Leaders of parachurch ministries are well aware that to succeed in their task they must feed their contribution back into the local churches. Their job, they say, is to put themselves out of a job. And, of course, they are right. Nothing would arrest rationalization faster. But out of many thousands who pay lip service to this principle, only a handful actually follow it. Most parachurch ministries clutter the ground long after their days of usefulness are over.

  We bluff them by agreeing with them. We urge them to make “ser-vice” their motto and their theme song, knowing that service is addictive once it becomes the source of their identity (and income). Slowly they get hooked: At first they are needed, and they serve. Soon they both need to serve to be needed, and they need needs to serve. Before long, they become experts in service. And, because indispensable servants often become indistinguishable from masters, they finish as masters, not servants.10 In the end, they put the local churches out of a job, not themselves.

  You can see why we assign field agents only in the early stages. After a certain point the shift from ministry to movement to monument becomes automatic, and rationalization does its own work. Parachurch ministries start with service as their motto and end with it as their epitaph. We cannot have too many such movements. There are a few exceptions to this, but these are extremely rare.

  Throughout this section I have referred to reduplication. But don’t forget that copying itself has advanced light years. Therein lies a latter-day parable. Gone is the poor quality and slavish imitation of the carbon copy. In its place the modern copy is highly customized, pseudo-personal and deceptive. (Prayer letters, in some cases, are processed by machines that put the stamps on crookedly to give the appearance of a human touch.) This is the auspicious stage at which Christians have taken to cultural copying.

  This concludes my survey of the damage done by modernization to Christian institutions. The damage can be placed in two main categories: first, the general evacuation from the public sphere; second, the unenviable choice, either to follow the majority and accept the restriction to the private sphere or to side with the minority and attempt to re-enter the public sphere by reduplicating its structures and styles. The Christian plausibility crisis is deepening. There is nothing like two false alternatives for puzzling the mind and demoralizing the spirit.

  MEMORANDUM 8

  Damage to Enemy Ideas

  FROM: DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CENTRAL SECURITY COUNCIL

  TO: DIRECTOR DESIGNATE, LOS ANGELES BUREAU

  CLASSIFICATION: ULTRA SECRET

  President Ford was once reported to have said, “Whenever I can I always watch the Detroit Tigers on radio.” Faux pas apart, radio would be a tame way to tune in to the Electronic Church for the first time. I wish I could have seen your first reactions to some of the more exotic species of Ecclesia Electronica. As you say, even The Harvard Lampoon in its prime could not have scripted some of that stuff. Truth here is indeed stranger than fiction. Even satire must humbly bow to reality. The last time I visited your new post I watched one of their talk shows while changing for dinner. The customary parade of celebrities was passing across the screen, quick-tongued as ever, each one endorsing the Christian gospel with all the sincerity of a toothpaste commercial.

  The mood suddenly changed, however, when an African-American singer sang an old spiritual in a way that threatened to inject reality into the proceedings. I must have actually stopped dressing for a moment, instinctively alerted to something that might be serious. I need not have worried. The show’s hostess clapped her dainty, bejeweled hands, rolled her eyes heavenward and cooed: “Fantastic, brother! Fantastic! Christianity is so fantastic, who cares whether or not it’s true!”

  These little inanities signify nothing, you say. Perhaps not if judged by your academic criteria. But forget for a moment your fastidious preoccupation with intellectual things and what qualifies as proven knowledge. We are dealing with people where they are, and where most people are, what passes for knowledge is all that matters. Besides, in a day when common religion and cultured religion have parted company, the average talk-show host has immeasurably more influence than the average theologian.

  Empty-headed religion is hardly new or unique to the Christian faith. (As one EST—Erhard Seminar Training—graduate said once, “I don’t care how much of this is crap. It changed my life.”1) But what is new in the talk-show-hostess’s remark is the degree to which the Christian faith has lost its intrinsic value and taken on an almost purely instrumental value. It is prized for what it does rather than what it is. No longer does it work because it’s true; it’s not even true because it works. It works and that’s all there is to it.

  Such faith is little better than magic, the fine art of manipulating God. I heard a guest on a Christian radio program asked whether he felt there was a lesson to be learned from the life of Eric Liddell in the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire. “Certainly,” he replied. “Blessed are the pure in consciousness for they shall win.”

  These are excellent illustrations of what modernization has done, not only to Christian institutions but also to Christian ideas. I would not, of course, deny that the major damage to Christian ideas has come from other ideas. This is manifestly obvious, and I do not need to dwell on it to a counter-apologist like yourself. Dismissals such as those of Marx and Nietzsche, counter-explanation
s such as Freud’s and frontal attacks such as those you have worked on have devastated the Christian faith. To the educated and the “couth,” what is left of its former intellectual integrity is as shattered and dazed as the survivor of a nuclear blast.

  Having said that, most Christians are untouched, since they live outside the range of an intellectual strike. They have seen the results of such strikes, so they warily avoid entering the danger zone of thinking and debate. This means that there is always a risk for us. Once the fallout has lessened, popular religion may supply the grass roots faith that arms a new movement of resistance.

  This is where we have promoted modernization to form the perfect complement to skepticism. Christian ideas have been devastated by other ideas, thanks to skepticism. At the same time, secularizations, privatization and pluralization have provided an atmosphere designed to intensify the problem, deepening the damage caused by intellectual skepticism and extending it into areas where skepticism alone would never reach. Thus, in the age of video games, Middle-town-wherever will always be closer to Mars than Athens to Jerusalem.

  There are three main areas where you can see the impact of modernization on Christian ideas. As with the impact on Christian institutions, our objective in each case is to widen the gap between Christian claims and consequences, spiritual rhetoric and social reality, so that the Christian faith appears neither credible nor plausible. Once this is achieved, we create the situation where, for those who put stock in argument, skepticism leads to the conclusion that the Christian faith is not true; while for those who do not, secularization means that it does not seem true anyway.

  Loss of Certainty

  The first main point of damage is that Christian ideas have lost their former certainty. Under the impact of the modern world, there has been a definite melting down of the assurance of faith. Secularization makes the Christian faith seem less real, privatization makes it seem merely a private preference, and pluralization makes it seem just one among many. We are now reaching the point where the content of faith bears an uncanny resemblance to its context. Christian certainty is being diminished and distorted in the process.

  Faith has always been pivotal for Christians (as it is not, for example, to Jews who stress right living or Buddhists who stress right-mindedness), so the traditional sense of the certainty of faith has been a key to their survival and their victories—their armor plating against doubt, their steel will in adversity or persecution, their trump card in evangelism, their Archimedean lever with which to move the world.

  At the same time, Christian certainty has always been multidimensional. It was never purely intellectual nor purely spiritual, but a many-stranded combination of spiritual, intellectual, social and emotional threads woven together to form a tough, anchoring assurance.

  This multi-stranded character of certainty was its strength. If one or more threads snapped, the others could be counted on to hold the strain until repairs were complete. But given enough carelessness, this many-sidedness could be turned into weakness, since often people were not sure which strand had gone and which needed repair.

  Today’s casual attitudes about truth and thinking are a tremendous advantage. The vague foreboding that something somewhere has given way is usually quickly dispelled with, “Never mind. The rest will hold.” The result has been a climate of ignorance and neglect in which we have seen to it that the vital strands of faith have gone for good, and those that remain are too weak to stand any real test.

  I am not suggesting that certainty and assurance have disappeared altogether, although you might think so to listen to some of the Young Guns of the Emergent movement. Their talk is peppered with professed candor about doubts, or (more respectably) rationalized by notions such as “humility,” “ambiguity,” “nuance” or the “confession of triumphalism” (or “ethnocentrism,” “cognitive imperialism” or “generational blindness”). All such notions serve as a protective theological solution to mask the deepening erosion of convictions once as fresh-cut as Gothic carvings.

  In most places, however, certainty has not so much collapsed as changed. Much of the certainty that remains is either a subjective certainty (rooted in subjective experience rather than in objective facts) or a sectarian certainty (rooted in membership in a tight-knit group and lasting only as long as the membership). This, of course, is a fatal change from the traditional Christian certainty of faith.

  You can observe this collapse or change at various points. One is where Christians refer to their own faith. In the talk of many Christian liberals and revisionists, certainty is as elusive as the Loch Ness monster. Occasional sightings are reported, but no confirmation is ever possible. Dogma is now dubious and doubt dogmatic. Ambiguity covers everything like a Scottish mist, and in the end a suspicion arises naturally in the minds of others, if not their own: As with Nessie, so perhaps with God: if faith is that ambiguous and that elusive, is there really anything there at all?

  Many Christian conservatives, on the other hand, exhibit the kind of certainty that has changed rather than collapsed. They sound as certain as before, but the source of certainty has shifted. With some, the new source is faith in faith itself. Listen to their positive mental attitudes and their possibility thinking. Such faith needs neither facts nor God, only itself. “I’m such an optimist,” boasts one such motivational salesman, “I’d go after Moby Dick in a rowboat and take the tartar sauce with me.”2 A sure recipe for selling seminars and books, perhaps, though not quite what the writer of Hebrews 11 had in mind. Assertiveness has stolen the show from conviction.

  With other conservatives, the new source of certainty is faith in feeling and experience. Listen to their songs and testimonies, and you will hear how knowledge words have given way to belief words, which in turn are giving way to feeling words. The faith that remains is beginning to sound like something bordering on an adrenal condition. Its certainty is little better than a ‘‘god of the gut,” no deeper than its latest experience, no firmer than its current fellowship, and no stronger than the findings of the latest opinion poll. (Though, of course, if we are to take a current Christian record company seriously, “firm believers” are no longer to be measured by their theology but by their thighs.)

  Yet another place to observe the erosion of certainty is in the changing way Christians identify themselves. Not long ago, traditional denominations were glacier-like in their massive historical “givenness.” Now they are melting into fast-flowing rivers of choice. Obligations are turning into options; traditions are breaking up and becoming matters of taste. And as all this happens, ways of identification are changing too. For a Swede to be Lutheran, for example, was once synonymous with being Swedish, as it was for a Spaniard to be Catholic. Today, “I am a Lutheran” (or Anglican or Quaker) melts into “I’m part of the Lutheran tradition,” which melts further and begins to evaporate into “We go to the church around the corner, which happens to be Lutheran.”

  This shift, by itself, is neither here nor there to us. But notice what it represents. Christians were, once, as obstinately attached to their denominational distinctives as to their fundamental convictions. Now they are as casual about the latter as the former. Far more than ecumenical motives are at work. These only serve to divert attention from the important process of social mixing and doctrinal leveling through which spiritual content comes to reflect social context. The glacial mass of traditional orthodoxy has been caught in the great thaw and is now easily siphoned off to fill the shallow hot tubs of contemporary religious experience. Human selection, rather than divine election, is likely to be the ground of Christian certainty today. Modern believers may not be “chosen,” but at least they can feel they have chosen well.

  A final place for you to observe the loss of certainty is in the confusion of theological authorities and ethical applications aggravated by pluralism. As the disarray spreads, authority is dissolving into ambiguity and its central question, Who says? is being replaced by the common answer cum-anxiety,
Who knows?

  The trick here is to raise questions that recede in infinite regress into the mists of doubt. Is there really a biblical message, or is the Bible only a library of contradictory views? If there were such a message, whose interpretation would be right, and who is to say? Even if an interpretation could be agreed on, whose application of it would be the true one? And so on, and so on, with an infinite regress. In the postmodern jargon, all issues of knowledge and truth are finally “undecidable.” Or as one Christian said with weary resignation, “We are all agnostics now.”

  Put differently, the question “Who knows?” can be answered equally by saying “no one” or “anyone.” The result is a melee of uncertainty and diversity that borders on chaos. Traditional boundaries between insiders and outsiders, orthodox and heretical, believers and unbelievers are vanishing before their eyes. The rules of the game are unclear and both sides seem confused. (Are “the lost” really “saved,” or are “the saved” merely lost?) Once vital links are systematically being broken (the so-called “binding address” of the authority of belief over behavior, for example, is kept alive not by Christians, but by the sects).

  Mother God? The deity of Jesus a myth? Practicing homosexual ministers? Christian atheism? You raise it. Someone will run with it. Almost anything passes for Christian belief these days, and almost anything is permitted as Christian behavior. Modern Christian discourse is punctuated only with question marks. Like Sam Goldwyn, it will give you “a definite maybe.” A clear answer would spoil everything.

  Loss of Comprehensiveness